place would be taken by the next best workman without any disturbance in the organisation of the workshop; but the master of even the earliest period of capitalism was from the beginning unimportant as a workman (even when he worked, as he often did at first), but all-important as a director of work. “Simple co-operation,” says Marx, “is always the prevailing form, in those branches of production in which capital acts on a large scale,and division of labour and machinery play but a subordinate part.” This sentence leads to the next development of capitalism, that of the division of labour, and this brings us to the system of manufacture, as the word is generally 244 understood; though it has a final development, that of machinery and the factory. This period of the division of labour, more or less pure, extends from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, when it was brought to perfection; but it must be understood that these systems overlapped one another considerably.
The division-of-labour or manufacturing system starts under two conditions.
The first is where the employer collects into one workshop workmen of various crafts, the results of whose labours are combined into one article, as, for example, a carriage-maker’s, in which wheelwright, coachbuilder, upholsterer, painter, etc., work each at his own occupation, and their products are combined into the one article, a finished carriage.
The other is the system in which the employer collects his workmen under one roof, and employs the whole of them as one machine in the simultaneous production of one article which has to go through various processes, these processes being apportioned to various parts of the workman-machine. This system affords a distinct example of evolution by means 245 of survival of the fittest; sudden increase of production seems to have been called for, and the work accordingly had to be reorganised by being apportioned to different workmen in order to save