found and blend together two classes of labour, which are striving after division and separation?”[1]
Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labour in society as a whole. Since, however, manufacture carries this social separation of branches of labour much further, and also, by its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his life, it is the first to afford the materials for, and to give a start to, industrial pathology.[2]
“To subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate him if he does not.… The subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people.”[3]
Co-operation based on division of labour, in other words, manufacture, commences as a spontaneous formation. So soon as it attains some consistence and extension, it becomes the recognised methodical and systematic form of capitalist production. History shows how the division of labour peculiar to manufacture, strictly so called, acquires the best adapted form at first by experience, as it were behind the backs of the actors, and then, like the guild handicrafts, strives to hold fast that form when once found, and here and there succeeds in keeping it for centuries. Any alteration in this form, except in trivial matters, is solely owing to a revolution in the instruments of labour. Modern manufacture wherever it arises—I do not here allude to modern industry based on machinery—either finds the disjecta membra poete ready to hand, and only wait-
- ↑ G. Garnier, vol. V. of his translation of A. Smith, pp. 4-5.
- ↑ Ramazzini, professor of practical medicine at Padua, published in 1713 his work “De morbis artificum,” which was translated into French 1781, reprinted in 1841 in the “Encyclopédie des Sciences Médicales. 7me Dis. Auteurs Classiques.” The period of Modern Mechanical Industry has, of course, very much enlarged his catalogue of labour’s diseases. See “Hygiène physique et morale de l’ouvrier dans les grandes villes en général et dans la ville de Lyon en particulier. Par le Dr. A. L. Fonterel, Paris, 1858,” and “Die Krankheiten, welche verschiednen Ständen, Altern und Geschlechtern eigenthümlieb sind. 6 Vols. Ulm, 1860,” and others. In 1854 the Society of Arts appointed a Commission of Inquiry into industrial pathology. The list of documents collected by this commission is to be seen in the catalogue of the “Twickenham Economic Museum.” Very important are the official “Reports on Public Health.” See also Ednard Reich, M.D. “Ueber die Entartung dei Menschen,” Erlangen, 1868.
- ↑ (D. Urquhart: Familiar Words. Lond., 1855, p. 119.) Hegel held very heretical views on division of labour. In his Rechtsphilosophie he says: “By well educated men we understand in the first instance, those who can do everything that others do.”
