Community, Cooperation, and the Division of Labor

A famous passage from the first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations:

Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! how much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen-grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing those different conveniencies; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and cooperation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. 

In the next chapter, Smith writes that unlike the other animals, man "stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons."

We are dependent creatures. We depend on the labors of others. In a commercial society, everything we own is  the product of the unknowing cooperation of thousands of people across the world. Trade and self-interest unite their efforts to produce the most mundane of our possessions.

This image of the unifying, cooperative power of commerce is often celebrated by classical liberals. Riffing off Smith, the libertarian economist Leonard Read writes an autobiography of a pencil. Milton Friedman made the essay famous in his "Free to Choose" TV program. As he puts it: "There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil." Human communities of different religions, languages, and races are unknowingly cooperating to manufacture everything we own. Self-interest and the price system produce this cooperation, not genuine affection or benevolence.

Karl Marx detests this vision of social life. Quoting Carlyle, he laments that the only bond to connect modern bourgeois citizens is the "cash nexus," the bond of private interest. Far from free cooperation or community, the division of labor and exchange produce a condition of alienation and unfreedom. From The German Ideology:

The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.

Friedman, Read, and Smith celebrate the coordination of market activity as a form of emancipation. It is a miracle that the price system can induce such cooperation. It is liberating to depend not on the will of a master, but on the involuntary cooperation of anonymous, toiling thousands. To Marx, the experience of "I, Pencil" is not one of relief, but of misery. What could be more tormenting than the thought that our actions are dictated not by rational, intentional, decision, but by the amorphous movements of grand market forces? What Smith et al. have described is "a completely illusory community," a mask for brute, class warfare. True community, Marx explains, isn't involuntary cooperation, but deliberate, collective, rational decision:

The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with the others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. ... The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.

In illusory community, social life is experienced as accidental. Basic life for the proletariat is determined not by an act of will (be it from a feudal master or a collective decision), but by the apparently exogenous laws of supply and demand: "the condition of their existence, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence governing modern society, have become something accidental, something over which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over which no social organisation can give them control."

I like this contrast between two concepts of community. There is "illusory community" held together by involuntary, self-interested economic cooperation. And then there is "real community" built on collective, deliberate decision.

Here's Engels in his Principles of Communism (an early draft of the Manifesto) outlining again the real community of human association communism offers:

Above all, [the new social order] will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.

The powerful Smithian rejoinder is that even democratic political decisions will not be experienced as authentically collective choices, but as yet another imposition by an alien force, the state. Marx agrees on that charge with respect to all existing states. That is core to his rejection of the language of politics itself--the political state will always be alienating. But the hallmark of a free, communist society will be the reality as well as the feeling that the fundamental questions of our common life are truly decided on together: "All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers." and later: "Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when it is controlled by all."