ed all former
intellectual and bodily capacities. This annexation of man grew in
proportion as the division of labor developed and reached its
culmination in manufacture. Manufacture distributes production into
its separate operations, makes one of these operations the function of
the individual worker, and imprisons the worker for his whole life to
a given function and to a given tool. "It forces the workingman to
become an abnormality, 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 from six hundred to three thousand each, distributed over
the country. Each group has an enormous house in the midst of its
territory and the housekeeping is done in common. Fourier occasionally
speaks