Splitting production into specialized tasks performed by different workers.
Adam Smith’s pin factory is the classical illustration: one worker drawing wire, another straightening, another cutting, another pointing, another grinding. 20 operations, 20 workers. Output per person explodes compared to a single craftsman making pins from start to finish.
Marx distinguishes two forms:
- Division of labor in society: different trades, industries, professions. Mediated by exchange of commodities. Exists in all societies.
- Division of labor in manufacture: within a single workshop, under one capitalist. The worker is assigned to one fragment of the total process. Specific to the capitalist mode of production.
The division within the workshop enables productivity gains but also produces the “Theilarbeiter” (detail worker), whose entire body becomes an organ of one operation. This is the beginning of deskilling. In its further development through machinery, it leads to the worker as appendage to the machine and the separation of mental and manual labor.
The concept also applies outside political economy: biological division of labor in organisms, neural specialization, etc.
See Major evolutionary transitions in individuality.
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