CHAPTER XXXI
DIVISION of labour is the law of all that exists, and so it must exist in human societies. Very likely that is so, but the question still remains: Is the division of labour now existing in human societies quite the division which should exist? For if a certain division of labour appears to men unreasonable and unjust, no science can prove to them that what they consider unreasonable and unjust ought to prevail.
Theological theory proved that power is ordained by God and very likely it is so, but the question remained: Whose power is from God-Catherine’s or Pugachev’s?1 And no finesse of theology has been able to solve that doubt.
The philosophy of the Spirit showed the State to be a form of the development of personality, but the question remained: Should the State of a Nero or Genghis Khan be considered a form of the development of personality? And no transcendental words could solve that problem.
The same applies to the science of the scientists.
Division of labour is a condition of the life of organisms and of human societies; but what are we to consider an organic division of labour in human societies? However much science may study the division of labour among the cells of the tapeworm, such observations will fail to induce a man to consider a division of labour just which his reason and conscience repudiate.
However convincing may be the proofs of the division of labour among the cells of the organisms we investigate, man, as long as he is not deprived of reason, will still say that no one ought to have to weave cotton cloth all his life long, and that such an employment is not a division of labour but an oppression of men.
Spencer and others say there are whole populations of weavers and that therefore the weaver’s activity is an organic division of labour-but in saying this they are in fact saying precisely what the theologians said.
There is a power and therefore it is from God no matter what it may be like. There are weavers, so such is the proper division of labour. It would be all right to say so if the power and the population of weavers had resulted of themselves, but we know that they do not come of themselves but that we produced them. So we have to know whether we
1 Catherine II (the Great) of Russia reigned from 1761 to 1796. Pugachev was leader of a very serious peasant revolt from 1773 to 1775; he captured several towns and overran several provinces.-A. M.
produced that power by God’s will or by our own, and whether we made these weavers by an organic law or by something else?
Men live and support themselves by agriculture as is proper for all men: one man puts up a forge and mends his plough, and his neighbour comes and asks him to mend his and promises to pay him with work or with money. A third and a fourth come and among these people there is a division of labour: a blacksmith is set up. Another man teaches his children well and his neighbour brings his children to him and asks him to teach them-a teacher has been set up. But both the smith and the teacher became and remain such because they were asked, and they remain such only so long as they are asked to be smith or teacher. But should it happen that many smiths or teachers appear or that their work is not wanted, they would, as common sense demands and as always happens where there are no causes infringing the proper division of labour-at once give up those occupations and return to agriculture.
People who act so are guided by their reason and their conscience, and therefore we, men endowed with reason and conscience, declare such division of labour to be proper. But if it happened that blacksmiths were able to compel others to work for them and continued to make horseshoes when these were not wanted, and that teachers taught when there was no one to teach, it would be plain to every new-comer endowed with reason and conscience that this was not a division but an exploitation of other men’s labour, for such activity would infringe the only standard by which a fair division of labour can be known-a demand made for such labour by others, and a voluntary offer of remuneration for it. And yet it is just such an exploitation that the scientists’ science calls ‘the division of labour’.
People make things that others do not think of asking for, and demand to be fed for doing so and say that this is proper because it is a division of labour.
What constitutes the chief public evil the people suffer from-not in our country alone-is the Government, the innumerable quantity of officials; and the cause of the economic distress of our time is what the English call over-production: the making of a quantity of goods no one wants or knows what to do with, and all this results from the strange conception people have of the division of labour.
It would be strange to find a shoemaker who considered that people were bound to feed him because he unceasingly made boots that had long since ceased to be wanted by anyone; but what are we to say of those occupied with Government, the Church, science, and art, who produce nothing palpable or useful to the people, and whose goods find no demand, but who yet (pleading the division of labour) boldly demand to be well fed and well dressed?
There may be wizards whose activity meets a demand and to whom cakes and ale are’ given, but it is difficult to imagine that there can be wizards whose witchery nobody wants but who yet boldly demand to be well fed for their performances.
Yet that is just what is happening in our world among those employed in Government, and in the Church, and on science and art.
And all this results from a false understanding of the division of labour, defined not by man’s conscience but by the investigations that are announced with such unanimity by the men of science.
A division of labour always has existed and does exist, but it is only justified when man’s conscience and reason decide what it should be, and not when man merely observes that it does exist. And the conscience and reason of all men decide this question very simply, indubitably, and unanimously.
They decide that the division of labour is fair only when a man’s special activity is so needed by others that they, asking him to serve them, willingly offer him support in return for what he does for them.
But when a man can live on the backs of others from childhood till he is thirty, promising when he has finished his education to do something useful, that no one asks him to do, and when from the age of thirty till death he can go on living in the same way, still promising to do something no one asks him to do, this cannot be, and in our society is not, a division of labour, but simply a seizure by the strong of the fruits of the labour of others: ‘it is the very robbery theologians used to speak of as a ‘divine dispensation’, and philosophers afterwards declared to be ‘a necessary form of life’, and the scientists’ science now calls ‘the organic division of labour’.
The whole significance of the reigning science lies simply in that.
It has now become the granter of diplomas for idleness, for it alone in its sanctuaries examines and decides what is a parasitic and what an organic activity in the social organism-as if every man cannot recognize that much more truly and quickly by consulting his reason and conscience.
And as formerly for the priesthood and afterwards for the government, there could be no doubt as to who were the people others most needed, so now to the scientists’ science it seems there can be no doubt that its activity is unquestionably organic: they, the scientists and artists, are the most precious brain-cells of the organism. But God be with them! Let them reign, eat and drink well, and live idly, as the priests and the sophists of old lived and reigned, if only they did not, like those priests and sophists, pervert people.
Since men, rational beings, existed they have discriminated between good and evil and have made use of the distinctions those who went before them had made in this respect. They have striven against evil, sought the true and best path, and slowly but steadily advanced along it. And, obstructing that path, various deceptions have always been set in their way in order to show that this should not be done, but that men should go on living as of old. The terrible old deceptions of the Church arose, with fearful struggles and labour men gradually freed themselves from these, but before they were completely free there arose a new-State-philosophic-fraud to replace the old one. Men broke through that also. And now a new and yet worse fraud has grown up obstructing man’s path: the scientific fraud.
This new fraud is just like the old ones: its essence lies in substituting something external for the use of our own reason and conscience and that of our predecessors: in the Church teaching this external thing was revelation, in the scientific teaching
