Key Arguments

• Inside the workshop, the capitalist exercises undisputed authority and planning
• Outside the workshop, there is no authority other than competition and the 'war of all against all'
• These two extremes—despotism and anarchy—mutually condition each other

Source Quotes

It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory. If, in the society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition each other, we find, on the contrary, in those earlier forms of society in which the separation of trades has been spontaneously developed, then crystallized, and finally made permanent by law, on the one hand, a specimen of the organization of the labour of society in accordance with an approved and authoritative plan, and, on the other, the entire exclusion of division of labour in the workshop or, at the least, its development on a minute scale, sporadically and accidentally. Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, for example, some of which continue to exist to this day, are based on the possession of the land in common, on the blending of agricul ture and handicrafts and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves as a fixed plan and basis for action whenever a new community is started.

The planned and regulated a priori system on which the division of labour is implemented within the workshop becomes, in the division of labour within society, an a posteriori necessity imposed by nature, controlling the unregulated caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the fluctuations of the barometer of market prices. Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who are merely the members of a total mechanism which belongs to him. The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the ‘war of all against all’ more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species.

Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who are merely the members of a total mechanism which belongs to him. The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the ‘war of all against all’ more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species. The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining ‘genius’ of the individual capitalist.

Key Concepts

• anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition each other
• undisputed authority of the capitalist over men
• acknowledge no authority other than that of competition
• war of all against all

Context

Contrasting the rigid organization of the manufacturing process with the unregulated nature of the market economy.