We will pass over the logical value of these syllogisms, which Kant would call paralogisms, and consider them as they are.
Here is their substance:
The division of labor reduces the worker to a degrading function; to this degrading function corresponds a depraved mind; with the depravity of the mind goes a constant reduction of wages. And, in order to prove that this reduction of wages is adapted to a depraved mind, M. Proudhon says, to absolve his own conscience, that it is the universal conscience which wills it thus. Is the soul of M. Proudhon counted in the universal conscience?
Machinery is, for M. Proudhon, "the logical antithesis of the division of labor," and, in support of his dialectic he begins by transforming machinery into a factory.
After having supposed the modern factory in order to have poverty flow from the division of labor, M. Proudhon supposes poverty engendered by the division of labor in order to arrive at the factory, and to be able to represent it as the dialectic negation of this poverty. After having stricken the worker morally by a degrading function, and physically by the meagreness of his wages, after having put the worker in a position of dependence upon the overseer and reduced his work to the mere manual task of a laborer, he betakes himself again to the factory and to the machines in order to degrade the worker by "giving him a master," and he finishes his humiliation by causing him to be "reduced from the rank of an artisan to that of a mere laborer." What beautiful dialectic! And yet if he would only stick to that! But no, he must have a new history of the division of labor, no longer in order to derive contradictions therefrom, but in order to reconstruct the factory after his own
