HKB
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.
The Utopists were thoroughly aware of the effects of the division of labor, of the effect on the one hand of crippling the worker and on the other of crippling the work, the unavoidable result of the lifelong, monotonous repetition of one and the same act. The rise of the antagonism between town and country was regarded by Fourier as well as Owen as the beginning of the rise of the old division of labor. According to both of them the population should be divided into groups of from six hundred to three thousand each, distributed over the country. Each group has an enormous house in the midst of its territory and the housekeeping is done in common. Fourier occasionally speaks of towns but these only consist of four or five of the big communal houses in close proximity to each other. By both of them the work of society is divided into agriculture and industry. According to Fourier, handwork and machine manufacture were both included in the latter while Owen made the great industry play the most important part, and the steam engine and machinery performed the work of the community. But both in agriculture and manufacture the two writers named gave the greatest possible variety of occupation to individuals, and accordingly the education of the young provided for the most universal technical training. Both of them think that there will be a universal development of the human race as a result of a universal practical participation in practical work, and that work will recover its old attractiveness, which has been lost as a result of the division of labor, by virtue of this variety and the shortening of the time expended upon it.
Just as far as society obtains the domination of the social means of production in order to organize them socially it abolishes the existing servitude of man to his own means of production. Society cannot be free without every member of society being free. The old methods of production must be completely revolutionized and the old form of the division of labor must be done away with above all. In its place an organization of production will have to be made in which, on the one hand, no single individual will be able to shift his share in productive labor, in providing the essentials of human existence, upon another, and on the other hand productive labor instead of being a means of slavery will be a means towards human freedom, in that it offers an opportunity to everyone to develop his full powers, physical and intellectual, in every direction and to exercise them so that it makes a pleasure out of a burden.
This is no longer at the present time a phantasy, a pious wish. Owing to the present development of the powers of production, production has proceeded far enough, provided that society endows itself with the possession of the social forces and abolishes the checks and impediments, as well as the waste of products and productive forces, which springs from the capitalistic methods, to make a general reduction of labor time, to an amount, small as compared with present day ideas.