since it makes him concentrate his efforts on detail at the expense of the sacrifice of a world of forces and capacities. … The individual himself becomes subdivided, he is transformed into the automatic tool of the division of labor" (Marx). This tool in many cases finds its perfection in the literal crippling of the worker, body and soul. The machinery of the greater industry degrades the workingman from a machine to being the mere appendage of a machine. "From the lifelong specialization of looking after a machine there comes the lifelong specialization of serving a part of a machine. The abuse of machinery transforms the worker from childhood into a portion of a part of a machine" (Marx). And not only the workingman but the classes which indirectly or directly plunder the workingman are also themselves involved in the division of labor and become the slaves of their own tools. The spiritually-barren bourgeois is the slave of his own capital and his own profit-getting, the jurist is dominated by his ossified notions of justice which rule him as a self-contained force; the "refined classes" are dominated by 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
