A Weird Radical Explanation for the Division of Labour

Chris Dillow writes a regular Blog called ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ that normally I find interesting and while I do not agree with every bit of it, he has established a reputation, at least with me, for good sense and he is worth reading. Recently, Chris changed his Blog’s slogan to: “an extremist, not a fanatic” from something he used before, which was slightly self-deprecating about being an awkward ‘oik’.

“What the £20 Note Doesn’t Say”

Today he writes on the new £20 bank note and Adam Smith, but I found it a trifle strange coming from an economist:

“The £20 note celebrates the division of labour. But there's something it doesn't say - that the division of labour originated not as a way of boosting productivity, but as a way of increasing capitalist control of the labour process.”

Comment
The exact process by which mid-18th century commercial tradesmen (the ‘manufacturers’ of Wealth of Nations’) were transmuted into scheming zombies working for ‘capitalist control of labour’ is unexplained. The concepts that would have to be involved in such high levels of class consciousness about the requirements of a ‘capitalist’ system, not yet named nor invented in mid-18th-century Scotland (the word itself was only invented in 1854) are wondrous to behold. The notion that fairly uneducated artisans formulated such ideas about their secret roles on behalf of an inanimate ‘system’ nobody else noted or wrote about before the 19th century, is far fetched, to say the least.

Chris quotes from Adam Smith’s example of the pin-factory in Wealth Of Nations:

‘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.’

To which Chris adds:

“But why should these operations be performed by distinct hands? In theory, a pin-maker could spend one-eighteenth of his time drawing out the wire, another eighteenth straightening it, and so on with the result that during a week, 18 men would make as many pins as 18 men doing the specialist tasks.”

Comment
As Mr McEnroe used to put it: ‘You can’t be serious’.

At say, a 10-hour working day (I’m keeping the arithmetic simple) that means the labourer (man or boy) would work for 33 minutes on each of the 18 operations to make a pin (changing activities with infinite velocity and being equally dexterous at each operation) and would have to produce 2,000 part pins per 33 minute working session to equal the output of 18 men working on a single part of the process each. There would have to be no ‘stumbling’ at all.

Assuming this could be done (having worked in factory processes, I have my doubts), why then wasn’t it done this way? Chris has the answer from what he calls ‘“In one of the greatest papers ever written (pdf)” (!!), written by Stephen A. Marglin, Harvard University, entitled: ‘‘What Do Bosses Do?: the origins and functions of hierarchy in capitalist production”, published in ‘The Review of Radical Political Economics’ (Vol 6 No 2 Summer 1974).

Well, it lives up to its ‘radical’ name, for Stephen Marglin writes:

“specialization was used by bosses as a way of dividing workers, and a way of ensuring that bosses had an essential function - that of coordinating the separate operations. Specialization, then, is a weapon in the class war, not a technical necessity.”

Now you know. As if 18 labourers changing their roles every 33 minutes would not require ‘co-ordination’! They would probably require more co-ordination if they were required to do all 18 operations to strict 33-minute time intervals.

So, previously unrecognised professional ‘proselytizers for capitalism’ travelled the entire western world finding artisans about to embark on adopting the division of labour, quietly spoke to them, and were so convincing that these hapless naïve idiots went against all of their instincts and re-organised their processes, not to increase labour productivity, but to engage in preparing the ground for ‘the class war’ on behalf of a class that did not yet exist and for a ‘war’ they would not live long enough to see.

Moreover, given that the division of labour commenced millennia beforehand in the ‘rude’ hunting mode of production and slowly and gradually spread across all modes of subsistence that followed, why on Earth did it necessarily lead to becoming prevalent as a ‘weapon’ in a ‘class war’? And why did nobody notice it?

Is there some hiden force at work, invisible to everybody else but authors in ‘The Review of Radical Political Economics’ that secretly is guiding selected people to do its bidding? Lost Legacy has written much on the myths of invisible body parts in the metaphor of the invisible hand, usually, we might note, secretly spreading the version of capitalism from the spokespeople of the Right-end of the spectrum. Now the left have joined in.

What’s common to both ends of the spectrum? A belief in secret, invisible, and seditious ‘forces’ that run the lives of billions of people, with absolutely no evidence, nor plausible speculations as to where these hidden forces come from, how they materialise or why they bother.

I think Chris ought to get out more, or look out of his window at least; the world ain’t like that – and never has been. Sad.