Division of labour

In Plato's Republic, the origin of the state lies in the natural inequality of humanity, which is embodied in the division of labour:

Well then, how will our state supply these needs? It will need a farmer, a builder, and a weaver, and also, I think, a shoemaker and one or two others to provide for our bodily needs. So that the minimum state would consist of four or five men....

— Republic (Penguin Classics ed.), p. 103

Silvermintz (2010) noted that "Historians of economic thought credit Plato, primarily on account of arguments advanced in his Republic, as an early proponent of the division of labour."[2] Notwithstanding this, Silvermintz argues that "While Plato recognises both the economic and political benefits of the division of labour, he ultimately critiques this form of economic arrangement insofar as it hinders the individual from ordering his own soul by cultivating acquisitive motives over prudence and reason."[2]

Xenophon, in the 4th century BC, makes a passing reference to division of labour in his Cyropaedia (a.k.a. Education of Cyrus).

Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way, food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns, the same man makes couches, doors, ploughs and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still, he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts. Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialised task will do it best.[3]

A simile used by Augustine of Hippo shows that the division of labour was practised and understood in late Imperial Rome. In a brief passage of his The City of God, Augustine seems to be aware of the role of different social layers in the production of goods, like household (familiae), corporations (collegia) and the state.[4]

…like workmen in the street of the silversmiths, where one vessel, in order that it may go out perfect, passes through the hands of many, when it might have been finished by one perfect workman. But the only reason why the combined skill of many workmen was thought necessary, was, that it is better that each part of an art should be learned by a special workman, which can be done speedily and easily, than that they should all be compelled to be perfect in one art throughout all its parts, which they could only attain slowly and with difficulty.

— The City of God (tr. Marcus Dods), VII.4

The division of labour was discussed by multiple medieval Persian scholars. They considered the division of labour between members of a household, between members of society and between nations. For Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and al-Ghazali the division of labour was necessary and useful. The similarity of the examples provided by these scholars with those provided by Adam Smith (such as al-Ghazali's needle factory and Tusi's claim that exchange, and by extension the division of labour, are the consequences of the human reasoning capability and that no animals have been observed to exchange one bone for another) led some scholars to conjecture that Smith was influenced by the medieval Persian scholarship.[5]

Sir William Petty

Petty - Economic Writings, 1899

Sir William Petty was the first modern writer to take note of the division of labour, showing its has worth in existence and usefulness in Dutch shipyards. Classically, the workers in a shipyard would build ships as units, finishing one before starting another. But the Dutch had it organised with several teams each doing the same tasks for successive ships. People with a particular task to do must have discovered new methods that were only later observed and justified by writers on political economy.

Petty also applied the principle to his survey of Ireland. His breakthrough was to divide up the work so that large parts of it could be done by people with no extensive training.

Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville

Bernard de Mandeville discussed the matter in the second volume of The Fable of the Bees (1714). This elaborates many matters raised by the original poem about a 'Grumbling Hive'. He says:

But if one will wholly apply himself to the making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another provides Food, a third builds Huts, a fourth makes Garments, and a fifth Utensils, they not only become useful to one another, but the Callings and Employments themselves will in the same Number of Years receive much greater Improvements, than if all had been promiscuously followed by every one of the Five.

When every individual person labors apart, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employed in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any particular art; and as his force and success are not at all times equal, the least failure in either of these particulars must be attended with inevitable ruin and misery. Society provides a remedy for these three inconveniences. By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employment, our ability increases: And by mutual succour we are less exposed to fortune and accidents. 'Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous.

- David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

Facsimile of the first page of du Monceau's introduction to Art de l'Épinglier, with "division de ce travail" highlighted

In his introduction to The Art of the Pin-Maker (Art de l'Épinglier, 1761),[6] Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau writes about the "division of this work":[6]

There is nobody who isn't surprised of the small price of pins; but we shall be even more surprised, when we know how many different operations, most of them very delicate, are mandatory to make a good pin. We are going to go through these operations in a few words to stimulate the curiosity to know their detail; this enumeration will supply as many articles which will make the division of this work.… The first operation is to have brass go through the drawing plate to calibrate it.…

By "division of this work," du Monceau is referring to the subdivisions of the text describing the various trades involved in the pin making activity; this can also be described as a division of labour.

Adam Smith portrait

In the first sentence of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith foresaw the essence of industrialism by determining that division of labour represents a substantial increase in productivity. Like du Monceau, his example was the making of pins.

Unlike Plato, Smith famously argued that the difference between a street porter and a philosopher was as much a consequence of the division of labour as its cause. Therefore, while for Plato the level of specialisation determined by the division of labour was externally determined, for Smith it was the dynamic engine of economic progress. However, in a further chapter of the same book, Smith criticised the division of labour, saying that it makes man "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become" and that it can lead to "the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people.…unless the government takes some pains to prevent it."[7] The contradiction has led to some debate over Smith's opinion of the division of labour.[8] Alexis de Tocqueville agreed with Smith: "Nothing tends to materialize man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labor."[9] Adam Ferguson shared similar views to Smith, though was generally more negative.[10]

The specialization and concentration of the workers on their single subtasks often leads to greater skill and greater productivity on their particular subtasks than would be achieved by the same number of workers each carrying out the original broad task, in part due to increased quality of production, but more importantly because of increased efficiency of production, leading to a higher nominal output of units produced per time unit.[11] Smith uses the example of a production capability of an individual pin maker compared to a manufacturing business that employed 10 men:[12]

One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.

Smith saw the importance of matching skills with equipment—usually in the context of an organisation. For example, pin makers were organised with one making the head, another the body, each using different equipment. Similarly, he emphasised a large number of skills, used in cooperation and with suitable equipment, were required to build a ship.

In the modern economic discussion, the term human capital would be used. Smith's insight suggests that the huge increases in productivity obtainable from technology or technological progress are possible because human and physical capital are matched, usually in an organisation. See also a short discussion of Adam Smith's theory in the context of business processes. Babbage wrote a seminal work "On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures" analysing perhaps for the first time the division of labour in factories.[13]

Kant

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant notes the value of the division of labour:[14]

All crafts, trades and arts have profited from the division of labour; for when each worker sticks to one particular kind of work that needs to be handled differently from all the others, he can do it better and more easily than when one person does everything. Where work is not thus differentiated and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, the crafts remain at an utterly primitive level.

Part of a series on
Marxism
Theoretical works Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 The German Ideology Wage Labour and Capital The Communist Manifesto The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Das Kapital Critique of the Gotha Programme Dialectics of Nature Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism The State and Revolution History and Class Consciousness On Contradiction Prison Notebooks Dialectic of Enlightenment The Wretched of the Earth Guerrilla Warfare Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Women, Race and Class Empire
Philosophy Dialectical materialism Philosophy of nature
Critique of political economy Capital (accumulation) Crisis theory Commodity Concrete and abstract labor Factors of production Falling profit-rate tendency Means of production Mode of production Asiatic Capitalist Socialist Productive forces Scientific socialism Surplus product Socially necessary labour time Value-form Wage labour
Sociology Alienation Base and superstructure Bourgeoisie Class Class consciousness Class struggle Classless society Commodity fetishism Communist society Critique of political economy Cultural hegemony Democracy Dictatorship of the proletariat Exploitation False consciousness Human nature Ideology Immiseration Imperialism Lumpenproletariat Metabolic rift Proletariat Private property Relations of production Reification State theory Working class
History Philosophy in the Soviet Union Primitive accumulation Proletarian revolution World revolution Theory of historical trajectory
Aspects Aesthetics Archaeology Criminology Cultural analysis Cultural Studies Ethics Film theory Geography Historiography Literary criticism Marxism and religion Sociology Philosophy
Orthodox variants Analytical Black Classical Feminist Hegelian Humanist Instrumental Leninism Trotskyism Maoism Neo Open Post Structural Western Marxism–Leninism Anti-revisionism Marxism–Leninism–Maoism Gonzalo Thought Socialism with Chinese characteristics Titoism
Left communist variants Bordigism Communization Council communism De Leonism
Libertarian variants Autonomism Situationism
Other variants Austromarxism Eurocommunism Neo-Gramscianism Neue Marx-Lektüre Revisionist
People Marx Engels Morris Lafargue Kautsky Plekhanov Du Bois Connolly Lenin Luxemburg Liebknecht Kollontai Bogdanov Stalin Trotsky Grossman Zinoviev Bloch Lukács Korsch Bukharin Ho Serge Gramsci Galiev Pashukanis Benjamin Mao Mariátegui Horkheimer Dutt Brecht Marcuse Bordiga Fromm Lefebvre James Adorno Padmore Sartre Deutscher Beauvoir Nkrumah Sweezy Emmanuel Hill Bettelheim Draper Jones Hobsbawm Althusser Hinton Williams Freire Mandel Sivanandan Miliband Cabral Thompson Bauman Fanon Kosik Berger Castro Guevara Heller Guattari Mészáros O'Connor Wallerstein Mies Tronti Debord Amin Hall Nairn Parenti Negri Jameson Dussel Harvey Laclau Poulantzas Vattimo Badiou Harnecker Altvater Anderson Löwy Vogel Sison Easthope Rancière Berman Przeworski Cohen Therborn Ahmad Losurdo Ture Postone Rodney Spivak Newton Sakai Wood Federici Wolff Balibar Eagleton Hartsock Rowbotham Mouffe Geras Brenner Davis Cleaver Bishop Haraway Panitch Clarke Jessop Davis Wright Fraser Holloway Screpanti Tamás Hampton Cano Žižek Berardi Sankara Hennessy McDonnell Douzinas Roediger Foster West Ghandy Marcos Tarasov Prashad Kelley Dean Linera Fisher Li Coulthard Malm Seymour Toscano Bhattacharya Moufawad-Paul Srnicek Horvat Hamza Saito
Journals Antipode Capital & Class Capitalism Nature Socialism Constellations Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory Historical Materialism Mediations Monthly Review New Left Review Race & Class Rethinking Marxism Science & Society Socialism and Democracy Socialist Register
Related topics 21st-century communist theorists Anarchism Anarcho-communism Creative destruction Conflict theory Critical theory Criticism of Marxism Communism Communalism Economic determinism Historical determinism History of communism Left-wing politics Marxian economics New Left Old Left Municipalism Political ecology Radical democracy Social democracy Socialism Authoritarian Democratic Libertarian Market Reformist Revolutionary Utopian Soviet democracy Left-wing populism Universal class Vulgar Marxism Economism Worker cooperative Workers' council
Outline  Communism portal  Philosophy portal  Socialism portal

Marx argued that increasing the specialisation may also lead to workers with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. He described the process as alienation: workers become more and more specialised and work becomes repetitive, eventually leading to complete alienation from the process of production. The worker then becomes "depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine."[15]

Additionally, Marx argued that the division of labour creates less-skilled workers. As the work becomes more specialised, less training is needed for each specific job, and the workforce, overall, is less skilled than if one worker did one job entirely.[16]

Among Marx's theoretical contributions is his sharp distinction between the economic and the social division of labour.[17] That is, some forms of labour co-operation are purely due to "technical necessity", but others are a result of a "social control" function related to a class and status hierarchy. If these two divisions are conflated, it might appear as though the existing division of labour is technically inevitable and immutable, rather than (in good part) socially constructed and influenced by power relationships. He also argues that in a communist society, the division of labour is transcended, meaning that balanced human development occurs where people fully express their nature in the variety of creative work that they do.[18]

Henry David Thoreau criticised the division of labour in Walden (1854), on the basis that it removes people from a sense of connectedness with society and with the world at large, including nature. He claimed that the average man in a civilised society is less wealthy, in practice than one in "savage" society. The answer he gave was that self-sufficiency was enough to cover one's basic needs.[19]

Thoreau's friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, criticised the division of labour in his "The American Scholar" speech: a widely informed, holistic citizenry is vital for the spiritual and physical health of the country.[19]

In his seminal work, The Division of Labor in Society, Émile Durkheim[20] observes that the division of labour appears in all societies and positively correlates with societal advancement because it increases as a society progresses.

Durkheim arrived at the same conclusion regarding the positive effects of the division of labour as his theoretical predecessor, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith observes the division of labour results in "a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour."[21] While they shared this belief, Durkheim believed the division of labour applied to all "biological organisms generally," while Smith believed this law applied "only to human societies."[22] This difference may result from the influence of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species on Durkheim's writings.[22] For example, Durkheim observed an apparent relationship between "the functional specialisation of the parts of an organism" and "the extent of that organism's evolutionary development," which he believed "extended the scope of the division of labour so as to make its origins contemporaneous with the origins of life itself…implying that its conditions must be found in the essential properties of all organised matter."[22]

Since Durkheim's division of labour applied to all organisms, he considered it a "natural law" and worked to determine whether it should be embraced or resisted by first analysing its functions.[22] Durkheim hypothesised that the division of labour fosters social solidarity, yielding "a wholly moral phenomenon" that ensures "mutual relationships" among individuals.[23]

Émile Durkheim

As social solidarity cannot be directly quantified, Durkheim indirectly studies solidarity by "classify[ing] the different types of law to find...the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it."[23] Durkheim categorises:[24]

• criminal laws and their respective punishments as promoting mechanical solidarity, a sense of unity resulting from individuals engaging in similar work who hold shared backgrounds, traditions, and values; and
• civil laws as promoting organic solidarity, a society in which individuals engage in different kinds of work that benefit society and other individuals.

Durkheim believes that organic solidarity prevails in more advanced societies, while mechanical solidarity typifies less developed societies.[25] He explains that in societies with more mechanical solidarity, the diversity and division of labour is much less, so individuals have a similar worldview.[26] Similarly, Durkheim opines that in societies with more organic solidarity, the diversity of occupations is greater, and individuals depend on each other more, resulting in greater benefits to society as a whole.[26] Durkheim's work enabled social science to progress more efficiently "in…the understanding of human social behavior."[27]

Ludwig von Mises

Marx's theories, including his negative claims regarding the division of labour, have been criticised by the Austrian economists, notably Ludwig von Mises. The primary argument is that the economic gains accruing from the division of labour far outweigh the costs, thus developing on the thesis that division of labor leads to cost efficiencies. It is argued that it is fully possible to achieve balanced human development within capitalism and alienation is downplayed as mere romantic fiction.

According to Mises, the idea has led to the concept of mechanization in which a specific task is performed by a mechanical device, instead of an individual labourer. This method of production is significantly more effective in both yield and cost-effectiveness, and utilises the division of labour to the fullest extent possible. Mises saw the very idea of a task being performed by a specialised mechanical device as being the greatest achievement of division of labour.[28]

In "The Use of Knowledge in Society", Friedrich A. Hayek states:[29]

Friedrich Hayek portrait

The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it, not only a division of labour but also a coordinated utilisation of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilisation. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labour on which our civilisation is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilisation, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type.

Two styles of management that are seen in modern organisations are control and commitment:[36]

1. Control management, the style of the past, is based on the principles of job specialisation and the division of labour. This is the assembly-line style of job specialisation, where employees are given a very narrow set of tasks or one specific task.
2. Commitment division of labour, the style of the future, is oriented on including the employee and building a level of internal commitment towards accomplishing tasks. Tasks include more responsibility and are coordinated based on expertise rather than a formal position.

Job specialisation is advantageous in developing employee expertise in a field and boosting organisational production. However, disadvantages of job specialisation included limited employee skill, dependence on entire department fluency, and employee discontent with repetitive tasks.[36]

It is widely accepted among economists and social theorists that the division of labour is, to a great extent, inevitable within capitalist societies, simply because no one can do all tasks at once. Labour hierarchy is a very common feature of the modern capitalist workplace structure, and the way these hierarchies are structured can be influenced by a variety of different factors, including:[36]

• Size: as organisations increase in size, there is a correlation in the rise of the division of labour.
• Cost: cost limits small organisations from dividing their labour responsibilities.
• Development of new technology: technological developments have led to a decrease in the amount of job specialisation in organisations as new technology makes it easier for fewer employees to accomplish a variety of tasks and still enhance production. New technology has also been helpful in the flow of information between departments helping to reduce the feeling of department isolation.

It is often argued that the most equitable principle in allocating people within hierarchies is that of true (or proven) competency or ability. This concept of meritocracy could be read as an explanation or as a justification of why a division of labour is the way it is.[37]

This claim, however, is often disputed by various sources, particularly:

• Marxists[38] claim hierarchy is created to support the power structures in capitalist societies which maintain the capitalist class as the owner of the labour of workers, in order to exploit it. Anarchists[39] often add to this analysis by defending that the presence of coercive hierarchy in any form is contrary to the values of liberty and equality.
• Anti-imperialists see the globalised labour hierarchy between first world and third world countries necessitated by companies (through unequal exchange) that create a labor aristocracy by exploiting the poverty of workers in the developing world, where wages are much lower. These increased profits enable these companies to pay higher wages and taxes in the developed world (which fund welfare in first world countries), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and not inclined to revolution.[40] This concept is further explored in dependency theory, notably by Samir Amin[31] and Zak Cope.[30]