DIVISION OF LABOR

By its composition, the household makes up a kind of petite economy. In response to the technical scale and diversity of production, it is even expandable to a degree: the combination of nuclear elements in some form of extended family seems to make its debut as the social organization of an economic complexity. But more important than its size, familial control of production rests on another aspect of its composition. The family contains within itself the division of labor dominant in the society as a whole. A family—it is from the beginning and at the minimum a man and wife, an adult male and an adult female. Hence, from its inception a family combines the two essential social elements of production. Division of labor by sex is not the only economic specialization known to primitive societies. But it is the dominant form, transcending all other specialization in this sense: that the normal activities of any adult man, taken in conjunction with the normal activities of an adult woman, practically exhaust the customary works of society. Therefore marriage, among other things, establishes a generalized economic group constituted to pro­duce the local conception of livelihood.

THE PRIMITIVE RELATION BETWEEN MAN AND TOOL

Here is a second correlation, equally elementary: between the domes­tic mode, atomized and small scale, and a technology of similar di­mensions. The basic apparatus can usually be handled by household groups; much of it can be wielded autonomously by individuals. Other technological limitations are likewise consistent with the supremacy of the domestic economy: implements are homespun, thus—as most skills—simple enough to be widely available; productive processes are unitary rather than decomposed by an elaborate division of labor, so that the same interested party can carry through the whole procedure from the extraction of the raw material to the fabrication of the finished good.

But a technology is not comprehended by its physical properties alone. In use, tools are brought into specific relationships with their users. On the largest view, this relationship and not the tool itself is the determinate historic quality of a technology. No purely physical difference between the traps of certain spiders and those of certain (human) hunters, or between the bee's hive and the Bantu's, is histori­cally as meaningful as the difference in the instrument-user relation. The tools themselves are not different in principle, or even in efficien­cy. Anthropologists are only satisfied by the extratechnological obser­vation that in invention and use the human instrument expresses "conscious ingenuity" (symboling), the insect's tool, inherited phy­siology ("instinct")—"what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagina­tion before he erects it in reality" (Marx, 1967a, vol. 1, p. 178). Tools, even good tools, are prehuman. The great evolutionary divide is in the relationship: tool-organism.

The human capacities once achieved, ingenuity in turn loses its differentiating power. The world's most primitive peoples—judged as such on the plane of overall cultural complexity—create unparalled technical masterpieces. Dismantled and shipped to New York or London, Bushman traps lie now gathering dust in the basements of a hundred museums, powerless even to instruct because no one can figure out how to put them back together again. On a very broad view of cultural evolution, technical developments have accumulated not so much in ingenuity as along a different axis of the man-tool relation­ship. It is a question of the distribution of energy, skill, and intelli­gence between the two. In the primitive relation of man to tool, the balance of these is in favor of man; with the inception of a "machine age" the balance swings definitively in favor of the tool.²⁷

27. Of course a great deal of knowledge is required for the development and mainte­nance of modem machinery; the above sentence confines itself to the relation of man and tool in the process of production.

The primitive relation between man and tool is a condition of the domestic mode of production. Typically, the instrument is an artificial extension of the person, not simply designed for individual use, but as an attachment that increases the body's mechanical advantage (for example, a bow-drill or a spear thrower), or performs final operations (for example, cutting, digging) for which the body is not naturally well equipped. The tool thus delivers human energy and skill more than energy and skill of its own. But the latest technology would invert this relationship between man and tool. It becomes debatable which is the tool:

The share of the operative workman in the machine industry is (typically) that of an attendant, an assistant, whose duty it is to keep pace with the machine process and to help out with workmanlike manipulation at points where the machine process engaged is incomplete. His work supplements the machine process, rather than makes use of it. On the contrary the machine process makes use of the workman (Veblen, 1914, pp. 306-7)".28

28. Marx's appreciation of the machine revolution, earlier of course than Veblen's, is very close to the latter in wording: "Along with the tool, the skill of the workman in handling it passes over to the machine. ... In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In [prefactory] manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage. . . . Every kind of capitalist prod­uction, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman" (1967a, vol 1., pp. 420-23). For Marx, it should be noted, the critical turning point in the man-tool relation was not the substitution of nonhuman power, but the attachment of tools to a transmission and motor-mechanism; the last might still be human but the workman had effectively been alienated from the instruments of labor, the skill of handling them now passing over to the machine. This is the indicative criterion of the machine and the real beginning of the industrial revolution.

The theoretical value placed by modern evolutionary anthropology on technology as such is historically contingent. Man is now depend­ent on machines, and the evolutionary future of culture seems to hinge on the progress of this hardware. At the same time, prehistory is by and large a record of instruments—as a well-known archaeologist is reputed to have said, "the people, they're dead." These banal truths I think help explain the analytical privilege often conceded to primi­tive technology, perhaps as mistaken however as it is entrenched for its exaggeration of the importance of tool over skill, and correlatively for its perception of the progress of man from ape to ancient empire as a series of petty industrial revolutions initiated by the development of new tools or new energy sources. For the greater part of human history, labor has been more significant than tools, the intelligent efforts of the producer more decisive than his simple equipment. The entire history of labor until very recently has been a history of skilled labor. Only an industrial system could survive on the proportion of unskilled workers as now exists; in a similar case, the paleolithic perishes. And the principal primitive "revolutions," notably the neol­ithic domestication of food resources, were pure triumphs of human technique: new ways of relating to the existing energy sources (plants and animals) rather than new tools or new sources (see Chapter 1). The hardware of subsistence production may very well decline in the passage from the paleolithic to the neolithic—even as the output goes up. What is the Melanesian's digging stick to the sealing gear of an Alaskan Eskimo? Up to the time of the true industrial revolution, the product of human labor probably increased much more in return to the worker's skill than to the perfection of his tools.

A discussion of the importance of human techniques is not as tangen­tial as it might seem to this analysis of the DMP. It helps underwrite a major theoretical suggestion: that in the archaic societies, social-political pressure must often present itself the most feasible strategy of economic development. People are the most malleable as well as the most important side of the primitive man-tool relationship. Take into consideration, besides, the ethnographic testimony of underex-ploitation: that resources are often not fully turned to account, but between the actual production and the possibility there remains con­siderable room for maneuver. The great challenge lies in the intensifi­cation of labor: getting people to work more, or more people to work. That is to say, the society's economic destiny is played out in its relations of production, especially the political pressures that can be mounted on the household economy.

But an intensification of labor will have to take a dialectical course, because many properties of the DMP make it refractory at once to the exercise of political power and the enlargement of production. Of first importance is the contentment of the household economy with its own self-appointed objective: livelihood. The DMP is intrinsically an anti-surplus system.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 992