The German Ideology/Section 16/Chapter III 42
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[edit] 2. Organisation of Labour
“The organisation of labour concerns only such work as can be done for us be others, such as cattle-slaughtering, ploughing, etc.; other work remains egoistical because, for example, no one can compose your music for you, complete the sketches for your paintings, etc. No one can do Raphael’s works for him. These are works of a unique individual which only this unique person is capable of producing, whereas the former work deserves to be called human” (on page 356 this is made identical with “generally useful”), “since peculiarity is of little consequence here and almost every person can be trained to do it” (p.
“It is always expedient for us to come to an agreement about human labour, in order that it should not claim all our time and effort, as is the case under competition,.... For whom, however, should time be gained? For what purpose does a human being need more time than is required to restore his exhausted labour-power? To this communism gives no reply. For what purpose? In order to enjoy himself as the unique, having done his share as a human being” (pp. 356, 357).
“Through work I can fulfil the official duties of a president, minister, etc.; these posts require only a general education, namely, the education that is generally accessible.... Although, however, anyone could occupy these posts, it is only the unique power of the individual, peculiar to him alone, that gives them, as it were, life and significance. For performing his duties not as an ordinary man would do, but by exerting the power of his uniqueness, he does not get paid, if lie is paid only as an official or minister. If he has acted to your satisfaction, and you wish for your benefit to retain this power of the unique person, which is worthy of gratitude, then you ought to pay him not simply as a man who performs a merely human task. but as one who accomplishes something unique” (pp. 362, 363),
“If you are in a position to afford joy to thousands of people, then thousands will remunerate you for it; for it is in your power not to do it and therefore they have to pay you for the fact that you do it” (p. 351).
“One cannot establish any general rate of payment forms, uniqueness, as can be done for work I perform as a man. Only for the latter can a tariff be fixed. Therefore you may fix a general tariff for human work, but do not deprive your uniqueness, of what is due to it” (p. 363).
As an example of the organisation of labour in the union, the public bakeries already mentioned are cited on page 365. Under the conditions of vandal parcellation presupposed above, these public institutions must be a real miracle.
First of all human labour must be organised and thereby shortened so that Brother Straubinger,[111] having finished his work early, can “enjoy himself as the unique” (p. 357), but on page 363 the “enjoyment” of the unique one ‘s reduced to his extra earnings.
On page 363 it is stated that the vital activity of the unique person does not have to take place subsequently to human labour; the latter can be performed as unique labour, and in that case it requires an additional wage. Otherwise the unique one, who is interested not in his uniqueness but in a higher wage, could shelve his uniqueness and to spite society be satisfied with acting as an ordinary person, at the same time playing a trick on himself.
According to page 356, human labour coincides with generally useful labour, but according to pages 351 and 363 unique labour shows its worth by being paid for additionally as generally useful or, at least, useful to many people.
Thus, the organisation of labour in the union consists in the separation of human labour from unique labour, in the establishment of a tariff for the former and in haggling for an additional wage for the latter. This addition is again twofold, one part being for the unique performance of human labour and the other for the unique performance of unique labour. The resulting bookkeeping is the more complicated because what was unique labour yesterday (e.g., spinning cotton thread No. 200) becomes human labour today, and because the unique performance of human labour requires a continual moucharderie [spying] upon oneself in one’s own interest and universal moucharderie in the public interest. Hence this whole great organisational plan amounts to a wholly petty-bourgeois appropriation of the law of supply and demand, which exists at present and has been expounded by ail economists. The law which determines the price of those types of labour that Sancho declares unique (e.g., that of a dancer, a prominent physician or lawyer), he could have found already explained by Adam Smith, and a tariff fixed for it by the American Cooper. Modern economists explain on the basis of this law the high payment for what they call travail improductif and the low wages of the agricultural day-labourer, and in general all inequalities in wages. Thus, with God’s help, we have again arrived at competition, but a competition which has so much come down in the world that Sancho can propose a fixed rate, the establishment of wages by law, as was the case of old in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
It deserves mention also that the idea which Sancho puts forward here is also to be found as something completely new in the Herr Messiah — Dr. Georg Kuhlmann of Holstein.
What Sancho here calls human labour is, apart from his bureaucratic fantasies, the same thing as is usually meant by machine labour, labour which, as industry develops, devolves more and more on machines. True, because of ‘the above-described organisation of landownership, machines are an impossibility in the “union” and therefore the corvée peasants in agreement with themselves prefer to reach an agreement with one another about this work. As regards “presidents” and “ministers”, Sancho — this poor localised being, as Owen puts it — forms his opinion only by his immediate environment.
Here, as always, Sancho is again unlucky with his practical examples. He thinks that “no one can compose your music for you, complete the sketches for your paintings. No one can do Raphael’s works for him”. Sancho could surely have known, however, that it was not Mozart himself, but someone else who composed the greater part of Mozart’s Requiem and finished it, [112] and that Raphael himself “completed” only an insignificant part of his own frescoes.
He imagines that the so-called organisers of labour[113] wanted to organise the entire activity of each individual, and yet it is precisely they who distinguish between directly productive labour, which has to be organised, and labour which is not directly productive. In regard to the latter, however, it was not their view, as Sancho imagines, that each should do the work of Raphael, but that anyone in ‘ whom there is a potential Raphael should be able to develop without hindrance. Sancho imagines that Raphael produced his pictures independently of the division of labour that existed in Rome at the time. ff he were to compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice. Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour in his locality, and, finally, by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality had intercourse. Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it.
In proclaiming the uniqueness of work in science and art, Stirner adopts a position far inferior to that of the bourgeoisie. At the present time it has already been found necessary to organise this “unique” activity. Horace Vernet would not have had time to paint even a tenth of his pictures if he regarded them as works which “only this unique person is capable of producing”. In Paris, the great demand for vaudevilles and novels brought about the organisation of work for their production; this organisation at any rate yields something better than its “unique” competitors in Germany. In astronomy, people like Arago, Herschel, Encke and Bessel considered it necessary to organise joint observations and only after that obtained some moderately good results. In historical science, it is absolutely impossible for the “unique” to achieve anything at all, and :in this field, too, the French long ago surpassed all other nations thanks to organisation of labour. Incidentally, it is self-evident that all these organisations based on modern division of labour still lead to extremely limited results, and they represent a step forward only compared with the previous narrow isolation.
Moreover, it must be specially emphasised that Sancho confuses the organisation of labour with communism and is even surprised that “communism” gives him no reply to his doubts about this organisation. just like a Gascon village lad is surprised that Arago cannot tell him on which star God Almighty has built his throne.
The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of division of labour. Even if in certain social conditions, everyone were an excellent painter, that would by no means exclude the possibility of each of them being also an original painter, so that here too the difference between “human” and “unique” labour amounts to sheer nonsense. In any case, with a communist organisation of society. there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from division of labour, and also the subordination of the individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc.; the very name amply expresses the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on division of labour. In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.
Sancho’s organisation of labour shows clearly how much all these philosophical knights of “substance” content themselves with mere phrases. The subordination of “substance” to the “subject” about which they all talk so grandiloquently, the reduction of “substance” which governs the “subject” to a mere “accident” of this subject, is revealed to be mere “empty talk”. Hence they wisely refrain from examining division of labour, material production and material intercourse, which in fact make individuals subordinate to definite relations and modes of activity. For them it is in general only a matter of finding new phrases for ‘Interpreting the existing world-phrases which are the more certain to consist only of comical boasting, the more these people imagine they have risen above the world and the more they put themselves in opposition to it. Sancho is a lamentable example of this
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