HKB
in which production has developed naturally, to which class that of to-day belongs, the producers do not master the means of production but the means of production dominate the producers.
In such a society every new leverage of production is converted into a new means of subduing the producers beneath the means of production. This was the cause of that instrument of production, the mightiest up to the time of the introduction of the greater industry, the division of labor. The first great division of labor, the separation of the city and country, doomed the inhabitants of the rural districts to a thousand years of stupidity and the people of the towns to be the slaves of their own handiwork. It denied the chance of intellectual development to the one and of physical development to the other. If the peasant had his land and the town dweller his handiwork, it is just as true to say that the land had the peasant and the handiwork the townsman. As far as there was a division of labor there was also a division of man. The rise of one single fact slaughtered all former intellectual and bodily capacities. This annexation of man grew in proportion as the division of labor developed and reached its culmination in manufacture. Manufacture distributes production into its separate operations, makes one of these operations the function of the individual worker, and imprisons the worker for his whole life to a given function and to a given tool. "It forces the workingman to become an abnormality, since it makes him concentrate his efforts on detail at the expense of the sacrifice of a world of forces and capacities.... The individual himself becomes subdivided, he is transformed into the automatic tool of the division of labor" (Marx). This tool in many cases finds its perfection in the literal crippling of the worker, body and soul. The machinery of the greater industry degrades the workingman from a machine to being the mere appendage of a machine. "From the lifelong specialization of looking after a machine there comes the lifelong specialization of serving a part of a machine. The abuse of machinery transforms the worker from childhood into a portion of a part of a machine" (Marx). And not only the workingman but the classes which indirectly or directly plunder the workingman are also themselves involved in the division of labor and become the slaves of their own tools. The spiritually-barren bourgeois is the slave of his own capital and his own profit-getting, the jurist is dominated by his ossified notions of justice which rule him as a self-contained force; the "refined classes" are dominated by the local limitations and prejudices, by their own physical and spiritual astigmatism, by their specialised education and their lifelong bondage to this specialty, even though the specialty be doing nothing.