Scienza forza produttiva al servizio del capitale

“The knowledge, the judgment, and the will, which, though in ever so small a degree, are practised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman, in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in the exercise of his personal cunning – these faculties are now required only for the workshop as a whole. Intelligence in production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them (A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 281). It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, as the property of another, and as a ruling power. This separation begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital. In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers. “Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may…be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men” (A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 280). As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of 18th century preferred, for certain  operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons (J.D. Tuckett, “A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Population’, Lond. 1846)” [Karl Marx, Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 1912]