On the Division of Labour (1859)

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This is the draft of one of the lectures on political economy which Marx delivered to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London from the autumn of 1859, after the publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This draft has something in common with the section on the division of labour in the original text of Chapter II of Marx’s book (see present edition, Vol. 30).

The German Workers’ Educational Society in London was founded in 1840 by German worker refugees, members of the League of the Just. After the founding of the Communist League in 1847 representatives of its local communities played the leading role in the Society, which had branches in various working-class districts in London. In 1847 and 1849-50 Marx and Engels took an active part in the Society’s work, but in September 1850 they temporarily withdrew because the Willich-Schapper sectarian-adventurist group had increased its influence in the Society. In the late 1850s, when Marx’s followers (Georg Eccarius, Friedrich Lessner, Karl Schapper, who had rejected his sectarian views, and others) prevailed again, Marx and Engels resumed their activities in the Educational Society, which existed up to 1918, when it was closed by the British Government.

...forming a [socijal whole. My labour thus appears as an independent part of all social labour. The various kinds of labour represent various parts of social labour, and taken together all appear thus as the division of labour, and through exchange they constitute a whole^ mutually supplementary parts, links in a system of social labour....

In this division of labour which is manifested in exchange of the various kinds of useful labour, two things are to be distinguished.

First: What here relates the various kinds of labour to one another is their variety, and not their sameness, their manifoldness, and not their unity. The division of social labour is an aggregate of manifold kinds of labour, which are mutually supplementary precisely through their difference, their variety.

The shoemaker wants to exchange the bootmaking labour contained in boots for bread, tea, sugar, coal, meat, clothes, a hat, etc., that is, for the baker’s labour, the labour of the tea-grower, the labour of the sugar-refiner, the labour of the butcher, the labour of the tailor, the labour of the hat-maker, and so on. He exchanges his labour for that of the others because the kinds of labour performed by the others are different from his, and therefore satisfy needs which his own labour does not satisfy; they are realised in means of subsistence in which his own labour is not realised. If the others’ labour were of the same kind as his own, he would not need it, and would not exchange his labour for theirs. Hence, the kinds of labour are exchanged for one another, insofar as they are useful labour, because they are different from one another, to the extent that they differ from one another and belong to different systems of human needs.

Second: If I myself performed all the kinds of labour which I need in order to live, consequently produced all my means of subsistence myself, then I would not need the labour of others and would not exchange my kinds of labour for those of others, who would likewise themselves perform all the kinds of labour necessary for their sustenance. If I not only made boots, but also baked my own bread, brewed my own beer, grew my own wheat, wove my own garments, I would not have to exchange my bootmaking labour for baker’s, beer-brewer’s, peasant’s, weaver’s labour.

My labour is one-sided; but it satisfies a social need, the need of other members of society. I could not perform exclusively this one-sided labour if I did not know that other members of society perform other necessary kinds of labour and thereby complement mine. Labour for the satisfaction of a social need is thus exclusive labour of separate definite individuals who make it their profession.