Key Arguments

• In divided labor, the “subject of the laboring process” is “a collective labor force,” whose “inexhaustibility” corresponds to “the deathlessness of the species.”
• The ends are reproduction of subsistence or exhaustion of labor power, but neither is final at the collective level; the serious limit is consumption capacity, which “remains bound to the individual.”
• Modern, ‘socialized’ society dissolves stable property “into money to spend and consume,” reckoning wealth by “earning and spending power.”
• On a national scale, society treats “all use objects as though they were consumer goods,” aligning with production where “the industrial revolution has replaced all workmanship with labor,” making things “labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed.”

Source Quotes

(The formation of a labor collective where the laborers are socially organized in accordance with this principle of common and divisible labor power is the very opposite of the various workmen’s organizations, from the old guilds and corporations to certain types of modern trade unions, whose members are bound together by the skills and specializations that distinguish them from others.) Since none of the activities into which the process is divided has an end in itself, their “natural” end is exactly the same as in the case of “undivided” labor: either the simple reproduction of the means of subsistence, that is, the capacity for consumption of the laborers, or the exhaustion of human labor power. Neither of these two limitations, however, is final; exhaustion is part of the individual’s, not of the collective’s, life process, and the subject of the laboring process under the conditions of division of labor is a collective labor force, not individual labor power. The inexhaustibility of this labor force corresponds exactly to the deathlessness of the species, whose life process as a whole is also not interrupted by the individual births and deaths of its members.

Neither of these two limitations, however, is final; exhaustion is part of the individual’s, not of the collective’s, life process, and the subject of the laboring process under the conditions of division of labor is a collective labor force, not individual labor power. The inexhaustibility of this labor force corresponds exactly to the deathlessness of the species, whose life process as a whole is also not interrupted by the individual births and deaths of its members. More serious, it seems, is the limitation imposed by the capacity to consume, which remains bound to the individual even when a collective labor force has replaced individual labor power.

The inexhaustibility of this labor force corresponds exactly to the deathlessness of the species, whose life process as a whole is also not interrupted by the individual births and deaths of its members. More serious, it seems, is the limitation imposed by the capacity to consume, which remains bound to the individual even when a collective labor force has replaced individual labor power. The progress of accumulation of wealth may be limitless in a “socialized mankind” which has rid itself of the limitations of individual property and overcome the limitation of individual appropriation by dissolving all stable wealth, the possession of “heaped up” and “stored away” things, into money to spend and consume.

More serious, it seems, is the limitation imposed by the capacity to consume, which remains bound to the individual even when a collective labor force has replaced individual labor power. The progress of accumulation of wealth may be limitless in a “socialized mankind” which has rid itself of the limitations of individual property and overcome the limitation of individual appropriation by dissolving all stable wealth, the possession of “heaped up” and “stored away” things, into money to spend and consume. We already live in a society where wealth is reckoned in terms of earning and spending power, which are only modifications of the twofold metabolism of the human body.

The progress of accumulation of wealth may be limitless in a “socialized mankind” which has rid itself of the limitations of individual property and overcome the limitation of individual appropriation by dissolving all stable wealth, the possession of “heaped up” and “stored away” things, into money to spend and consume. We already live in a society where wealth is reckoned in terms of earning and spending power, which are only modifications of the twofold metabolism of the human body. The problem therefore is how to attune individual consumption to an unlimited accumulation of wealth.

There, the solution seems to be simple enough. It consists in treating all use objects as though they were consumer goods, so that a chair or a table is now consumed as rapidly as a dress and a dress used up almost as quickly as food. This mode of intercourse with the things of the world, moreover, is perfectly adequate to the way they are produced.

This mode of intercourse with the things of the world, moreover, is perfectly adequate to the way they are produced. The industrial revolution has replaced all workmanship with labor, and the result has been that the things of the modern world have become labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used. Just as tools and instruments, though originating from work, were always employed in labor processes as well, so the division of labor, entirely appropriate and

Key Concepts

• the subject of the laboring process under the conditions of division of labor is a collective labor force,
• The inexhaustibility of this labor force corresponds exactly to the deathlessness of the species,
• the limitation imposed by the capacity to consume, which remains bound to the individual
• dissolving all stable wealth, the possession of “heaped up” and “stored away” things, into money to spend and consume.
• We already live in a society where wealth is reckoned in terms of earning and spending power,
• treating all use objects as though they were consumer goods,
• The industrial revolution has replaced all workmanship with labor, and the result has been that the things of the modern world have become labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed

Context

16 THE INSTRUMENTS OF WORK AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR: Dynamics and limits of collective labor; the consumerist transformation of use objects under industrial production.