100 lines
5.9 KiB
Plaintext
100 lines
5.9 KiB
Plaintext
DIVISION OF LABOR
|
|
|
|
Di-vi-sion of la-bor n. 1. the breakdown into specific, circumscribed
|
|
tasks for maximum efficiency of output which constitutes manufacture;
|
|
cardinal aspect of production. 2. the fragmenting or reduction of human
|
|
activity into separated toil that is the practical root of alienation;
|
|
that basic specialization which makes civilization appear and develop.
|
|
|
|
The relative wholeness of pre-civilized life was first and foremost an
|
|
absence of the narrowing, confining separation of people into
|
|
differentiated roles and functions. The foundation of our shrinkage of
|
|
experience and powerlessness in the face of the reign of expertise, felt
|
|
so acutely today, is the division of labor. It is hardly accidental that
|
|
key ideologues of civilization have striven mightily to valorize it. In
|
|
Plato's "Republic", for example, we are instructed that the origin of
|
|
the state lies in that "natural" inequality of humanity that is embodied
|
|
in the division of labor. Durkheim celebrated a fractionated, unequal
|
|
world by divining that the touchstone of "human solidarity," its
|
|
essential moral value is-you guessed it. Before him, according to Franz
|
|
Borkenau, it was a great increase in division of labor occurring around
|
|
1600 that introduced the abstract category of work, which may be said to
|
|
underlie, in turn, the whole modern, Cartesian notion that our bodily
|
|
existence is merely an object of our (abstract) consciousness.
|
|
|
|
In the first sentence of "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), Adam Smith
|
|
foresaw the essence of industrialism by determining that division of
|
|
labor represents a qualitative increase in productivity. Twenty years
|
|
later Schiller recognized that division of labor was producing a society
|
|
in which its members were unable to develop their humanity. Marx could
|
|
see both sides: "as a result of division of labor," the worker is
|
|
"reduced to the condition of a machine." But decisive was Marx's worship
|
|
of the fullness of production as essential to human liberation. The
|
|
immiseration of humanity along the road of capital's development he saw
|
|
as a necessary evil.
|
|
|
|
Marxism cannot escape the determining imprint of this decision in favor
|
|
of division of labor, and its major voices certainly reflect this
|
|
acceptance. Lukacs, for instance, chose to ignore it, seeing only the
|
|
"reifying effects of the dominant commodity form" in his attention to
|
|
the problem of proletarian consciousness. E.P. Thompson realized that
|
|
with the factory system, "the character-structure of the rebellious
|
|
pre-industrial labourer or artisan was violently recast into that of the
|
|
submissive individual worker." But he devoted amazingly little attention
|
|
to division of labor, the central mechanism by which this transformation
|
|
was achieved. Marcuse tried to conceptualize a civilization without
|
|
repression, while amply demonstrating the incompatibility of the two. In
|
|
bowing to the "naturalness" inherent in division of labor, he judged
|
|
that the "rational exercise of authority" and the "advancement of the
|
|
whole" depend upon it-while a few pages later (in Eros and Civilization)
|
|
granting that one's "labor becomes the more alien the more specialized
|
|
the division of labor becomes."
|
|
|
|
Ellul understood how "the sharp knife of specialization has passed like
|
|
a razor into the living flesh," how division of labor causes the
|
|
ignorance of a "closed universe" cutting off the subject from others and
|
|
from nature. Similarly did Horkheimer sum up the debilitation: "thus,
|
|
for all their activity individuals are becoming more passive; for all
|
|
their power over nature they are becoming more powerless in relation to
|
|
society and themselves." Along these lines, Foucault emphasized
|
|
productivity as the fundamental contemporary repression.
|
|
|
|
But recent Marxian thought continues in the trap of having, ultimately,
|
|
to elevate division of labor for the sake of technological progress.
|
|
Braverman's in many ways excellent Labor and Monopoly Capital explores
|
|
the degradation of work, but sees it as mainly a problem of loss of
|
|
"will and ambition to wrest control of production from capitalist
|
|
hands." And Schwabbe's Psychosocial Consequences of Natural and
|
|
Alienated Labor is dedicated to the ending of all domination in
|
|
production and projects a self-management of production. The reason,
|
|
obviously, that he ignores division of labor is that it is inherent in
|
|
production; he does not see that it is nonsense to speak of liberation
|
|
and production in the same breath.
|
|
|
|
The tendency of division of labor has always been the forced labor of
|
|
the interchangeable cog in an increasingly autonomous,
|
|
impervious-to-desire apparatus. The barbarism of modern times is still
|
|
the enslavement to technology, that is to say, to division of labor.
|
|
"Specialization," wrote Giedion, "goes on without respite," and today
|
|
more than ever can we see and feel the barren, de-eroticized world it
|
|
has brought us to. Robinson Jeffers decided, "I don't think industrial
|
|
civilization is worth the distortion of human nature, and the meanness
|
|
and loss of contact with the earth, that it entails.
|
|
|
|
Meanwhile, the continuing myths of the "neutrality" and "inevitability"
|
|
of technological development are crucial to fitting everyone to the yoke
|
|
of division of labor. Those who oppose domination while defending its
|
|
core principle are the perpetuators of our captivity. Consider Guattari,
|
|
that radical post-structuralist, who finds that desire and dreams are
|
|
quite possible "even in a society with highly developed industry and
|
|
highly developed public information services, etc." Our advanced French
|
|
opponent of alienation scoffs at the naive who detect the "essential
|
|
wickedness of industrial societies," but does offer the prescription
|
|
that "the whole attitude of specialists needs questioning." Not the
|
|
existence of specialists, of course, merely their "attitudes."
|
|
|
|
To the question, "How much division of labor should we jettison?"
|
|
returns, I believe, the answer, "How much wholeness for ourselves and
|
|
the planet do we want?"
|
|
|