THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 145
fashion. To arrive at this end he has to forget all that he has just said about this division.
Labor is organised, and divided, variously, according to the instruments which it manipulates. The wind- mill supposes a division of labor quite other than that of the steam mill. To begin by the division of labor in general in order to arrive at a specific instrument of pro- duction, machinery, is therefore to fly in the face of history.
Machinery is no more an economic category than is the ox which draws the plough. Machinery is only a pro- ductive force. The modern workshop, which is based on the application of machinery, is a social relation of pro- duction, an economic category.
Let us see now how these things pass in the brilliant imagination of M. Proudhon.
“In society the incessant apparition of machinery is the antithesis, the inverse formula, of labor; it is the protest of industrial genius against fragmentary and homicidal labor. What, in effect, is a machine? A means of reuniting different particles of labor, which division had separated. Every machine might be defined as a summary of many operations..... Therefore, through the machine, there would be the restoration of the worker..... Machinery standing in political economy in contradiction to the division of labor, represents the synthesis, opposing, in the human mind, the analysis.... The division only separates the different parts of labor, leaving each to the speciality most agreeable to him: The factory groups the workers, according to the relation of each part to the whole .... it introduces the principle of authority into labor..... But that is not all: The machine or the factory, after having degraded the work- man by giving him a master, finishes his humiliation by
