The feudal estate, or manor, was an industrial whole, self-dependent, and having few essential ties binding it to the outside world. The barons and their retainers, lords, thanes, and freemen, enjoyed a certain rude plenty, some of the richer barons enjoying a considerable amount of luxury and splendor. The villein and his sons tilled the soil, reaped the harvests, felled trees for fuel, built the houses, raised the necessary domestic animals, and killed the wild animals; his wife and daughters spun the flax, carded the wool, made the homespun clothing, brewed the mead, and gathered the grapes which they made into wine. There was little real dependence upon the outside world except for articles of luxury.
Such was the basic economic institution of feudalism. But alongside of the feudal estate with its serf labor, there were the free laborers, no longer regarding labor as shameful and degrading. These free laborers were the handicraftsmen and free peasants, the former soon organizing themselves into guilds. There was a specialization of labor, but, as yet, little division. Each man worked at a particular craft and exchanged his individual products. The free craftsman would exchange his product with the free peasant, and sometimes his trade extended to the feudal manor. The guild was at once his master and protector; rigid in its rules, strict in its surveillance of its members, it was strong and effective as a protector against the impositions and invasions of feudal barons and their retainers. Division of labor first appears in its simplest form, the association of independent individual workers for mutual advantage, sharing their products upon a basis of equality. This simple coöperation involved no fundamental, revolutionary change in society. That came later with the development of the workshop system, and the division of labor upon a definite, predetermined plan. Men specialized now in the making of parts of things; no man could say of a finished product, "This is mine, for I made it." Production had become a social function.
VII
At first, in its simple beginnings, the coöperation of many producers in one great workshop did not involve any general or far-reaching changes in the system of exchange. But as the new methods spread, and it became the custom for one or two wealthy individuals to provide the workshop and necessary tools and materials for production, the product of the combined laborers being appropriated in its entirety by the owners of the agencies of production, who paid the workers a money wage representing less than the actual value of their product, and based upon the cost of their subsistence, the whole economic system was once more revolutionized. The custom of working for wages, hitherto rare and exceptional, became general and customary; individual production for use, either directly or through the medium of personal exchange, was superseded by social production for private profit. The wholesale exchange of social products for private gain took the place of the personal exchange of commodities. The difference between the total cost of the production of commodities, including the wages of the producers, and their exchange value—determined at this stage by the cost of producing similar commodities by individual labor—constituted the share of the capitalist, his profit, and the objective of his investment.
The new system did not spring up spontaneously and full-fledged. Like feudalism, it was a growth, a development of existing forms. And just as chattel slavery lingered on after the rise of the feudal régime, so the old methods of individual production and direct exchange of commodities for personal use lingered on in places and isolated industries long after the rise of the system of wage-paid labor and production for profit. But the old methods of production and exchange gradually became rare and almost obsolete. In accordance with the stern economic law that Marx afterward developed so clearly, the man whose methods of production, including his tools, are less efficient and economical than those of his fellows, thereby making his labor more expensive, must either adapt himself to the new conditions or fall in the struggle which ensues. The triumph of the new system of capitalist production, with its far greater efficiency arising from associated production upon a plan of specialized division of labor, was, therefore, but a question of time. The class of wage-workers thus gradually increased in numbers; as men found that they were unable to compete with the new methods, they accepted the inevitable and adapted themselves to the new conditions. The industrial revolution which established capitalism was, like the great revolutions which ushered in preceding social epochs, the product of man's tools.
FOOTNOTES:
[60] Edward Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley, page 1.
[61] Socialism and Modern Science, by Enrico Ferri, page 96.