Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Coal and ore were available nearby; some mines around Glasgow already had more than a hundred workers, and they would have a great future. But Smith wrote that the mining business was a lottery. Looking at the fluctuations in silver prices in Europe, he compared them to the prices for grain. In every stage of development, the price of grain is the measure of labour. The price of silver, on the other hand, is not connected with labour; it is unpredictable and therefore not truly relevant. Whether new mines opened or old ones closed, civilisation would neither improve nor deteriorate. Spanish wealth, based on precious metals, was not productive, wrote Smith. Spain remained as poor as Poland, although the former had income from American mines while the latter did not. He didn’t mince his words when he denied any significance to overseas treasure which belonged to another empire and was not subject to the labour theory of value. As the philosophers of the Enlightenment focused on the vices of the Catholic world, so Smith demolished Spanish ideas about wealth. ‘The most abundant mines … could add little to the wealth of the world,’ he said. 7

Undivided labour

For many centuries, almost every human lived on subsistence farming. While economic growth and long-distance trade were developing in the coastal enclaves of the Atlantic civilisation, the silent majority of subsistence farmers remained separate from them. Describing this long-standing coexistence, the historian Fernand Braudel wrote: ‘Thus we have two universes, two ways of life foreign to each other, yet whose respective wholes explain one another.’ All this changed when the things extracted or made by the peasant, the fisherman, the miner turned into tradable goods. Expanding capitalism was ‘gradually creating the world in which we live, and, at that early date, prefiguring our world.’ 8

First, a peasant came to the market in the nearest town to sell eggs or a chicken, so that he could pay his rent or buy an iron tip for his plough. He could earn extra doing odd jobs, and he might end up as a chimney sweep. But he could also become a trader, selling goods made by other people. Our peasant could perform these tasks sequentially – for example, he could plough in spring, weave baskets in summer, and trade in winter. Then, however, came the time of specialisation: those who concentrated not just on a one-and-only trade but on a one-and-only operation within this trade were more competitive. Adam Smith says that the experienced country blacksmith could produce a hundred nails in a day, but a trained youth who has done nothing in his life except make nails could produce 2,300 in a day. One person could probably make a couple of pins in a day, but, thanks to the division of labour, ten people could make 48,000 pins in a day. The division of labour led to the adoption of machines which could carry out simple and repetitive operations quicker than people. The simplest woollen coat ‘is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser.’ 9 Someone had to make shears, and Smith produces a new list of all the trades involved in that task. One should also add here the merchants, drivers and seamen – they deliver the products from one group of workers to another by water or overland. But then also the shipbuilders, sail-makers, carpenters and blacksmiths who make the carts, stables, vessels and carriages. ‘What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen!’ Moreover, this great machine of labour and supply would not work without a financial system – accounts, lines of credit and money. Markets and banks, courts of law and, finally, the goverment are all needed for this purpose. This whole elaborate system is built on the division of labour. In Smith’s version, the political economy constructed a chain from the coarse woollen coat right up to Parliament, with the lord chancellor sitting on the Woolsack – a ladder leading from the division of labour to the separation of powers.

But Smith realised that the division of labour is characteristic more of industry than of agriculture. The carpenter rarely does the work of a locksmith, but on a farm the ploughman is also a shepherd, a builder and a coach driver. This is why, explained Smith, agriculture is not subject to such improvement as industry. For Smith, this is a gigantic difference. Labour without specialisation is unproductive, neglectful, lazy. Switching from one sort of work to another, ‘a man commonly saunters a little … When he first begins the new work … his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for sometime he rather trifles than applies to good purpose.’ 10 This ‘sauntering’ is the secret of the low productivity of the peasant. Only with the division of labour does the worker leap from the vicious circle of rural idleness on to the straight line of improvement. Specialisation is the high road to progress. But the ‘country workman’ (this was Smith’s term for a peasant) remains immune to specialisation. ‘The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures,’ wrote Smith. ‘It is impossible to separate so entirely the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer as the trade of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith.’ The result is that the peasant is always idle, careless, distracted, sauntering. But why doesn’t his work submit to the law of productivity?