This, his labor , gives him his rudimentary sense of personality. The laborer's physical and mental faculties are developed by the fact that he makes a whole chair, a whole table, a piece of armor, or a whole shoe. With the development of the stage of manufacture, however, there begins the division of labor, and here instead of making one object, man begins to produce fragments of an object. In the process of production , there begins stultification, distortion, and ossification of his physical and intellectual faculties. With the productive process of heavy industry, this stultification is pushed to its ultimate limit.
Man becomes merely an appendage to a machine.
He no longer uses the instruments of production. As Marx repeats on page after page, the instruments of production use him. Hegel, who had caught hold of this, was completely baffled by it and, seeing no way out, took refuge in idealism. Marx, using the Hegelian method and remaining in the productive process itself, discovered and elaborated one of the most profound truths of social and political psychology. In the very degradation of the workers he saw the basis of their emancipation.