As a result of the division of labor in manufacture, the worker is confronted with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production whose property, whose slave, he has become. This process begins in simple cooperation, in which the capitalist, as against the individual workers, represents the unity and the will of the associated working organism. It goes further still in manufacture, which cripples the workers by making them into detail workers. It is completed in large-scale industry, which detaches science from labor, making of science an independent force of production and pressing it into the service of capital. In manufacture the enrichment of the collective worker, and therefore of capital, in the matter of social productivity, is dependent upon the impoverishment of the workers in the matter of their individual powers of production.
Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition.
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. As a matter of fact, in the middle of the eighteenth century there were some manufacturers who preferred to employ semi-imbeciles to carry on certain simple operations which were trade secrets. . . . In the manufacturing period a reduction of the amount of labor time necessary for the production of commodities soon became a deliberate principle of operation. Here and there during this period machines came into use, especially for certain simple preliminary processes capable of being performed upon a large scale and needing a great expenditure of energy. . . . The Roman Empire handed down the elementary form of machinery in the shape of the water mill.