Nature's Evil

But Smith realised that the division of labour is characteristic more of industry than of agriculture. The carpenter rarely does the work of a locksmith, but on a farm the ploughman is also a shepherd, a builder and a coach driver. This is why, explained Smith, agriculture is not subject to such improvement as industry. For Smith, this is a gigantic difference. Labour without specialisation is unproductive, neglectful, lazy. Switching from one sort of work to another, ‘a man commonly saunters a little … When he first begins the new work … his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for sometime he rather trifles than applies to good purpose.’ 10 This ‘sauntering’ is the secret of the low productivity of the peasant. Only with the division of labour does the worker leap from the vicious circle of rural idleness on to the straight line of improvement. Specialisation is the high road to progress. But the ‘country workman’ (this was Smith’s term for a peasant) remains immune to specialisation. ‘The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures,’ wrote Smith. ‘It is impossible to separate so entirely the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer as the trade of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith.’ The result is that the peasant is always idle, careless, distracted, sauntering. But why doesn’t his work submit to the law of productivity?

The seasonal character of agricultural work is one explanation. Different tasks have to be done at different times of year. As the seasons change, one and the same person works now at sowing, now at cattle herding, now at sheep shearing, now at harvesting. ‘It is impossible that one man should be constantly employed in any one of them,’ writes Smith. This is the main, albeit annoying ‘reason why the improvement of the productive powers of labour in this art does not always keep pace with their improvement in manufactures.’ More generally, the reason for the non-division of peasant labour is nature’s indifference to men’s desires: people extract from nature just those few parts that meet their needs, but they are still subject to all other whims of nature. People need pins or bread, not spring or autumn. Making pins in a workshop, they can forget about the seasons, but, working in the fields, they have to respect them.

Not every reader shared Smith’s enthusiasm for the division of labour. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘When an artisan is engaged constantly and uniquely in the manufacture of one thing, … each day he becomes more skilful and less industrious, and one can say that the man in him is degraded as the worker is perfected. What should one expect from a man who has used twenty years of his life in making pinheads?’ 11 For Smith, the division of labour was the source of progress, for Tocqueville, a degradation. With his overwhelming interest in labour, Marx believed that its division dehumanises the worker. But, for all practical purposes, Marx was rather ambivalent. Division of labour is crucial for capitalist development but leads to alienation, the source of evil. In the future, men would overcome the division of labour ‘to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.’ 12 But Marx was hardly recommending a return to what he called ‘the idiocy of rural life’.

Both Smith and Marx were able to make valuable – if sometimes dubious – generalisations from an important truth: division cannot be applied to peasant labour. Moreover, it is also inapplicable to many other activities connected with the extraction of raw materials – grain and wool, fish and ore, silk and coal. The division of labour increases as commodities move through the processing system: it is at a minimum in the first stages of the extraction of raw materials and at a maximum in the final stages of the production of goods. In Smith’s example we have already seen this difference: the shepherd watches his flock and shears his sheep while also turning his hand to gardening, driving a coach and many other things. But the sheep’s wool is processed by a social machine which already consists of dozens of separate trades.

Nevertheless, many sorts of specialised work did develop in the villages. Millers and smiths led their own distinct lives. Whether tanners and cobblers followed their trade for one day or six days of the week depended solely on the demand for their services. But they probably all had an orchard and a vegetable patch and houses that needed upkeep. Swedish peasants also worked as miners, English farm labourers as spinners, Russian peasants as road builders, Norwegian peasants as fishermen; and everywhere where cities were being built, peasants worked on building sites.