International division of labor – the substantive foundation of

IER

Division of labour is the specialization of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and like roles.

Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialization processes.

Trade and economic interdependence

The division of labour makes trade necessary and is the source of economic interdependence.

Division of labour is a process whereby the production process is broken down into a sequence of stages and workers are assigned to particular stage

David Hume talks about "partition of employments" in "A Treatise of Human Nature" (1739): When every individual person labours a-part, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employ’d in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any particular art;

and as his force and success are not at all times equal, the least failure in either of these particulars must be attended with inevitable ruin and misery.

Society provides a remedy for these three inconveniences. By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability in creases:

And by mutual succor we are less expos’d to fortune and accidents. ’Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous.

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau

•By "division of this work", Duhamel du Monceau is referring to the subdivisions of the text describing the various trades involved in the pin (булавка) making activity; this can also be described as "division of labor".

Adam Smith

• In the first sentence of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith foresaw the essence of industrialism by determining that division of labour represents a qualitative increase in productivity.

• The specialization and concentration of the workers on their single subtasks often leads to greater skill and greater productivity on their particular subtasks than would be achieved by the same number of workers each carrying out the original broad task.

• Smith saw the importance of matching skills with equipment - usually in the context of an organization. For example, pin makers were organized with one making the head, another the body, each using different equipment. Similarly he emphasised a large number of skills, used in cooperation and with suitable equipment, were required to build a ship.

Karl Marx• Increasing the specialization may also lead to workers with poorer overall

skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. This viewpoint was extended and refined by Karl Marx. He described the process as alienation: workers become more and more specialized and work becomes repetitive, eventually leading to complete alienation from the process of production. Marx wrote that "with this division of labour", the worker is "depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, First Manuscript, in T.B. Bottomore, Karl Marx Early Writings, C.A. Watts and Co. Ltd., London, 1963, p. 72).

Henry David Thoreau

• Thoreau criticized the division of labour in Walden (published in 1854), on the basis that it removes people from a sense of connectedness with society and with the world at large, including nature. He claimed that the average man in a civilized society is less wealthy, in practice, than one in a "savage" society. The answer he gave was that self-sufficiency was enough to cover one's basic needs.

Émile Durkheim

• Émile Durkheim wrote about a fractionated, unequal world by dividing it along the lines of "human solidarity", its essential moral value is division of labour. In 1893 he published "The Division of Labour in Society", his fundamental statement of the nature of human society and its social development. According to Franz Borkenau it was a great increase in division of labour occurring in the 1800s after the Industrial Revolution that introduced the abstract category of work, which may be said to underlie, in turn, the whole modern, Cartesian notion that our bodily existence is merely an object of our (abstract) consciousness.

Ludwig von Mises

• The main argument here is the economic gains accruing from the division of labour far outweigh the costs. It is argued that it is fully possible to achieve balanced human development within capitalism, and alienation is downplayed as more a romantic fiction.

Friedrich A. Hayek on the price system

• The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a 'division of labor' but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type