Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849

by Various

The Division of Labour.—This is the first topic on which our author descants—the first of our economic laws in which he finds his contradictions—his two poles of good and evil. On the advantages of the division of labour, we have but to call to mind the earlier chapters of Adam Smith, wherein these are so truthfully and vividly described. Indeed, the least reflection is sufficient to show that, if each man undertook by his own labour to provide for all his wants, it would be impossible for society to advance beyond the very rudest form of existence. One man must be tailor, another shoemaker, another agriculturist, another artist; and these trades or occupations, to be brought to perfection, must again be subdivided into different departments of industry—and one man makes the coat, and another weaves the cloth, one man makes the shoe, and another dresses the leather. It is needless to say that these departments are again divided into an almost infinite number of separate occupations; till, at length, we find that a man employs his whole day in turning one thread over another, or in manufacturing the eighteenth part of a pin.

But now, no sooner does this division of employments obtain in society, than our pyramid begins to form. The man of manual labour rests still at the basis; he of superior skill, the artist, or the intellectual workman, rises permanently above him. The more minute this division of labour, the more simple and mechanical becomes the labour of the artisan; the education he receives from his employment becomes more and more limited; he is wanted for so little; he is esteemed, and, if other circumstances permit, remunerated accordingly.

"Although," says the celebrated economist, J. B. Say, "a man who performs one operation all his life comes to execute it better and more rapidly than any other man, yet at the same time he grows less capable of every other occupation, physical and moral; his other faculties are extinguished, and there results a degradation to the human being considered individually. It is a sad account to give of one's-self to have accomplished nothing but the eighteenth part of a pin.... In conclusion, it may be said that the separation of labours is a skilful employment of the force of man—that it increases prodigiously the products of society—but it destroys something of the capacity of the individual man."

That this inevitable division and subdivision of labour gives rise to, and renders permanent, the distinction of classes in a community, is clear enough. But we do not agree with M. Say, and other economists, in representing that minute subdivision of labour which accompanies a very advanced state of civilisation, as peculiarly injurious to the workman. That degradation of the artisan, which might ensue from the monotony and triviality of his employment, is counteracted by that variety of interests which spring up in a civilised community. This eighteenth part of a pin is not all that educates or engages his mind. He is not a solitary workman. His file and his wire are not his sole companions. He has the gossip of his neighbourhood, the politics of his parish, of his town, of his country—whatever fills the columns of a newspaper, or gives topic of conversation to a populous city—he has, at least, all this for intellectual food. The man of handicraft is educated by the city he lives in, not by his handicraft; and the humblest artisan feels the influence of that higher civilisation from which he seems at first to be entirely shut out. Hodge the countryman, who can sow, and plough, and reap; who understands hedging and ditching, and the management of sheep; who is accomplished in all agricultural labours, ought to be, if his daily avocations alone decided the matter, infinitely superior to the village cobbler, who travels only from the sole to the upper leather, and who squats stitching all day long. But the cobbler is generally the more knowing, and certainly the more talkative man. Hodge himself is the first to recognise it; for he listens to him at the ale-house, which sometimes brings them together, as to an oracle of wisdom.

Machinery.—The benefit derived from machinery needs no explanation. The more simple order of machines, or instruments—as the plough, the axe, and the spindle—have never been otherwise considered than as precious gifts to human industry; and the more complicated machines, which have been invented in modern times, have no sooner established themselves, so to speak, in society—have no sooner, at the expense of some temporary evils, secured themselves a quiet recognised position—than they, too, have been welcomed in the same character as signal aids to human industry. But while the machine has added immensely to the products of labour, it has done nothing to diminish the class of manual labours. It has done nothing, nor does it seem probable that it will ever effect anything, towards rendering that class less requisite or less numerous. On the contrary, it has always, hitherto, multiplied that class. The machine will not go of itself, will not manufacture itself, nor keep itself in repair. The human labourer becomes the slave of the machine. He created it for his service, and it serves him, but on condition only that he binds himself to a reciprocal bondage. You spin by a steam-engine, and some complicated system of reels and pulleys, but the human finger is not spared—the human volition is still wanted. To manufacture this machine, to tend it, to govern it—in short, to use it—far more manual labour is called into requisition than ever turned the simple spinning-wheel, or teased the flax from the distaff. You have more garments woven, but the better clad are not exactly those who weave them. The machine has called into existence, for its own service, an immense population, ill fed and ill clothed. Our pyramid is extending at the basis: as it rises higher it is growing broader.

Money—Capital.—We class these together because they are intimately connected. Capital is not money, but there would have been little accumulation of capital but for the use of money.

The youthful student of political economy meets with no chapter in his books of science so amusing, and so thoroughly convincing, as that which shows him the utility of money, and the reasons which have led almost all nations to prefer the precious metals for their instruments of exchange. Without some such instrument, what is to be done? A man has made a hat, and wants a pound of butter. He cannot divide his hat: what would be half a hat? Besides, the man who has the butter does not want the hat. But the precious metals come in marvellously to his aid. They are divisible into the smallest portions; they are durable, will not spoil by keeping; they are of steady value, and will not much depreciate: if the man of butter does not want them, he can always find somebody that does; no fear but that they will easily pass from hand to hand, as each one wishes to barter them for whatever he may want.

It is generally said, that it is the steadiness of their value that constituted one chief reason for the selection of gold and silver for the purposes of money. This is undoubtedly true; but it is also true (and we do not remember to have heard this previously remarked) that the use of the precious metals for money has tended to preserve and perpetuate that steadiness of value. Had gold and silver remained as simple articles of merchandise, they would probably have suffered considerable fluctuations in their value from the caprice of fashion and the altered taste of society. In themselves, they were chiefly articles of luxury; the employment of them for money made them objects of indispensable utility.

Money there must be. Yet mark how its introduction tends to destroy equality, to favour accumulation, to raise the hill and sink the valley. If men bartered article against article, they would generally barter in order to consume. But when one of them barters for gold, he can lay it by; he can postpone at his pleasure the period of consumption; he can postpone it for the benefit of his issue. The piece of gold was bought originally with the sweat of his brow; who shall say that a year, ten years, fifty years hence, he may not traffic it again for the sweat of the brow? The pieces of gold accumulate, his children possess them, and now a generation appears on the face of the earth who have not toiled, who do not toil all their lives, who are sustained in virtue of the labours of their ancestor. Their fathers saved, and they enjoy; or they employ a part of the accumulation in the purchase of the labour of others, by which means their riches still further increase. The pyramid rises. But the descendants of those fathers who had consumed the product of their labour, they bring no postponed claim into the market. These are they who must sell their labour. They must work for the children of those who had saved. Our pyramid broadens at the base. This perpetual value given to money has enabled the man of one generation to tax all ensuing generations with the support of his offspring. Hence much good; for hence the leisure that permits the cultivation of the mind, that fosters art, and refinement, and reflection: we have to notice here only how inevitably it builds the pyramid.

And now two classes are formed, distinct and far asunder—the capitalist, and he who works for wages. Comes the social reformer, and he would restore the equality between them. But how? We will fuse, says one, the two classes together: they shall carry on their manufacture in a joint partnership: all shall be partners—all shall be workmen. But even M. Prudhon will tell us that, if the profits of the great capitalist were divided equally amongst all the artisans he employs, each one would find his gains increased by a very little; and it is morally certain that profits equal to those he had obtained would never accrue from a partnership of many hundreds of workmen. The wealth of the country would, therefore, be put in jeopardy, and all the course of its industry and property deranged, for no end whatever. At all events, exclaims another, we will reduce the inequality which we cannot expunge, and put down the enormous and tyrannical capitalist: we will have a law limiting the fortune of each individual to so many hundreds or thousands; or, if we allow a man to earn and appropriate unlimited wealth, we will take care that it shall be dispersed at his death,—not even to his son shall he be permitted to bequeath more than a certain sum. But all schemes of this kind can tend only to equalise the fortunes of the first class—those who employ labour; they do not affect, in the least, the condition of the second class—the employed. These will not obtain better wages from smaller capitalists than from larger. A third—it is M. Prudhon himself—will have a new law of value established, and a new law of property. It is labour only that shall give title to property, and the exchangeable value of every article shall be regulated according to the labour it may be said to contain: propositions, however, which do not help us in the least degree, for capital is itself the produce of labour; its claims, therefore, are legitimate; and the very problem given is to arbitrate between the claims of capital and labour.