Division of Labor Essay -- essays research papers

Marx's View of the Division of Labor The Division of Labor is a subject which has intrigued social researchers for centuries. Prior to the coming of present day times, logicians and scholars worried about the ramifications of the thought. Plato saw as a definitive type of society a network where social capacities would be unbendingly isolated and kept up; society would be separated into positive useful gatherings: warriors, craftsmans, incompetent workers, rulers. St. Paul, in his first letter to the congregation at Corinth, ventured to such an extreme as to depict the widespread Church regarding a body: there are hands, feet, eyes, and all are under the head, Christ. Any individual who plans to manage the investigation of society must think about the subject of the division of work. Karl Marx was no exemption. Marx was in excess of a minor financial specialist. He was a social researcher in the full importance of the expression. The core of his framework depended on the possibility of human creation. Humanity, Marx attested, is an absolutely independent animal categories - being, and as such man is the sole maker of the world wherein he gets himself. A man can't be characterized separated from his work: "As people express their life, so they are. What they are, thusly, corresponds with their creation, both with what they produce and with how they produce."1 The very certainty that man normally composes creation is the thing that recognizes him from the collective of animals, as indicated by Marx. The idea of creation was a sort of scholarly "Archimedean point" for Marx. Each circle of human life must be deciphered regarding this single thought: "Religion, family, state, law, science, craftsmanship, and so forth., are just specific methods of cre ation, and fall under its general law."2 Given this absolute dependence on the idea of human work, it is very reasonable why the division of work assumed such a significant job in the general Marxian structure. Property versus Work Marx had a dream of an ideal human culture. In this sense, Martin Buber was completely right in remembering a section for Marx in his Paths in Utopia. Marx had confidence in the presence of a general public which went before recorded mankind's history. In this world, men encountered no feeling of estrangement in light of the fact that there was no distanced creation. By one way or another (and here Marx was rarely clear) men fell into examples of distanced creation, and fr... ...of Revolution (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1968), p. 112. 7 German Ideology, pp. 44-45. 8 Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), in Marx-Engels Selected Works, II, p. 24. This is one of only a handful hardly any spots in which Marx introduced some image of the post-Revolutionary world. 9 Ibid. 10 Ludwig Yon Mises, Socialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, [1922] 1951), p. 164. 11 Maurice Cornforth, Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 327. 12 German Ideology, p. 84. 13 Murray N. Rothbard, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Left and Right, 1 (1965), p. 8. 14 "On the Jewish Question," (1843-44), in T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 34-40. 15 G. D. H. Cole, The Meaning of Marxism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, [1948] 1964), p. 249. 16 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), cited by F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 119. 17 Mises, Socialism, pp. 60-62. Republished with authorization from The Freeman, a distribution of The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., January 1969, Vol. 19, No. 1.