Adult Life by John Russon;

Author:John Russon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Division of Labor

Economic activity is, of course, as old as human life, inasmuch as humans have always had to interact with others in appropriating aspects of the shared world to satisfy the material needs of their lives. Ibn Khaldûn’s Muqaddimah (1377), Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) and Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) study thoroughly and effectively the history of human economic practice and its role in forming the character of modern life. Perhaps the most important observation that each of these thinkers makes is that economic life is largely a collective affair, that is, it is societies that are the basic “agents” who grapple with the demands of economics, rather than individuals: individuals, that is, deal with their economic well-being by participating in an economic system, and that system is an integrated network of differentiated activities, shaped historically and distributed across society. We deal with our economic needs in a systematic way, and I am able to deal with my own economic needs only on the terms established for me (or others like me) by this system.

This notion that “we” deal with “our” economic needs is the basic sense of what Smith and Marx refer to as the “division of labor.” Coping with the world so as to meet the material demands of living has always been a collective affair: indeed, the very fact that we refer to “hunting and gathering societies” or “agricultural societies” points to the way in which the very form of life of a society is shaped by its collective mode of defining and addressing its economic needs. In hunting societies, such as the ancient whale-hunting society of the Thule Inuit or the more recent societies of the Plains Indians of North America, hunting and gathering are socially shared tasks producing the socially shared “wealth” of food and materials for clothing, tools, and so on, and, corresponding to the practical demands of carrying out such a life, these societies tend to be small and family-based, and, in hunting societies at least, there is typically a division of labor between those who hunt and those who care for domestic matters, a division that typically falls along gender lines. In pastoralist (“shepherding”) societies such as the Maasai (Ilmaasae) of East Africa or the ancient Hebrews in which the tasks and the fruits of herding are typically shared, the life of the society is typically based upon the demands of the herd, and these societies, too, thus tend to be small and family-based. More sophisticated agricultural societies, by collectively harnessing the powers of the earth, began to develop societies in which substantial accumulation of wealth first became a meaningful possibility (a possibility that, in turn, gave rise to the possibilities of trade and, later, the industrialization and finance that define modern economies). In these societies, a settled life is both possible and required, unlike hunting and gathering or pastoral societies, which tend to be nomadic,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.