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?"

