On the historical limitations of our social consciousness: Part 1. The division of labour

The constant underlying theme that is at the basis of this project is the existence of impersonal forces which dominate and dictate the historical development of humanity. We have referred on certain occasions to this phenomenon as the historical law of social change. Throughout the commentaries published on The Progressive Optimist the reader can regularly find the argument that both the historical social changes that have occurred up till now, as well as those taking place today are essentially inevitable and irreversible. These are not consciously pre-planned developments, but they are rather taking place behind the backs of the members of the societies, and, consequently, there are aspects that can not be envisioned beforehand. As a result, our predecessors could not have imagined the way our current society would function, in the same manner as we today are not capable of envisioning the societies of the future.

This 3-part series of posts will focus upon the historically limited nature of our minds. Here we shall have a look at the various examples of historical changes as well as social phenomena which the preceding generations would not have been capable of imagining. At the same time, it is always worth keeping in mind that this incapacity equally applies to us when it comes to the potential future developments. To begin with, as it is the material world, namely the ahistorical growth and progress of our economic productivity, that drives the above mentioned historical law of social change, we shall start off with it. We have already noted some specific differences between technological and social change here, particularly in relation to the social opposition that it evokes. Therefore, throughout these three posts that aspect of the matter will be ignored.

We can commence with certain historical technological advances that have also been touched upon previously, namely in a commentary on the irrational fear of AI technology. For example, the containerisation of global shipping has been a revolutionary development which now completely dominates the logistics sector. And yet, the generations living during the 18th and 19th centuries, for instance, including the dockworkers themselves, could not have imagined the relative ease with which we would handle our trade nowadays. The same with the trains or long-distance trucks. Our ancestors from the 16th or 17th centuries, as an example, were incapable of envisioning the way we would be moving goods or persons by land in the 21st century. Needless to say, the former also had some technological features that would have been beyond imagination to the people of, let’s say, the Iron age.

Let’s move on from logistics to the question of production. Would the medieval artisan be capable of imagining the huge blast furnaces or iron smelters of the industrial period? Had they been capable of envisioning our current factories to produce glass or ceramics? Or the way our modern bottling and packaging assembly lines would run? And finally, how about our modern agriculture? Would the feudal peasants have been capable of imagining the methods utilised today? But then again, for the hunters and gatherers of early humanity the idea of agriculture itself would have been utterly mind-blowing.

Now, what has been enumerated so far concerns the rise of economic productivity. In simple terms, for example, how many hours of human labour is necessary to produce a given amount of agricultural produce? Or, how many hours of human labour to produce a ton of iron? Or to move a specific amount of goods from point A to point B. By the nature of things, the historically ever rising productivity in agriculture provided the necessary labour power - by releasing it from the land - to produce ever new products and services. Even if someone had magically given the technology to produce smartphones to 15th century society, for instance, their production would have hardly kicked off. Human hands during that historical period were mostly needed to work the land, with a relatively very limited non-agricultural production. If a peasant decided to leave his plot of land to work in a Samsung factory, someone else must have been capable of utilising that plot of land to produce enough food not just for himself, but for this new Samsung employee as well. However, the sufficient productivity in agriculture was not yet there.

Therefore, aside from the trains and the container ships, as well as from our modern iron smelters, due to the much lower levels of economic productivity the generations of the bygone ages could neither have envisaged the amount of different use-values that we would be enjoying at this point in history, namely in 2026. Nearly every household in the so-called developed world today has a car, bicycles for kids, refrigerators, TVs, multiple items of cosmetics, clothes, etc. No one in the 19th century, for instance, could have imagined a society where not having a smartphone, a fridge, or simply electricity at home would have been considered as signs of poverty. Add to that all the commercial aircrafts that we use collectively as a society when we fly on holidays or to see our friends and relatives. And what about the times when we use google maps - yet another use value not available to the previous generations, who could only have dreamt about satellites circling around our planet? So how does this material economic development proceed?

Let’s create an artificial and arbitrary example of a miniscule society, where there are only 4 individuals. At a very basic level of economic development they are all submerged into a largely self-sufficient and agriculture-based economic activity. Everyone is only capable of producing enough food just to subsist himself or herself. But after a certain period of economic development the productivity doubles, which means that now one individual can produce enough food for himself as well as for one additional person. As a consequence, there is an agreement that two of the four remain within the agricultural production, namely feeding their entire society, while the other two take up the novel production of furniture. Subsequently, at the next threshold of increasing productivity we can have solely one person working the land to feed all four of them. As a result, the 2nd person could now be producing all the necessary furniture, the 3rd person manufacturing bicycles on behalf of their society, while the 4th individual could be working on a system of communications and entertainment that all of them would be enjoying.

A few important aspects must be noted in relation to this abstract example of ours. Firstly, we have here the framework of the historical emergence of market relations. At the initial stage of their productivity those 4 individuals were largely isolated from one another. Each was solely dependent upon his or her soil, whereby their subsistence would have essentially only been threatened by natural elements, such as climate disasters, crop diseases, drop in the fertility of the land, etc. As we reach our second stage of economic development, we have initial specialisation with the resultant dependency upon the market. From this moment onwards there is the risk for each of the agricultural workers that the furniture producers would not buy from them, whereas the latter are equally both dependent upon the former purchasing their products. And this vulnerability only deepens with the subsequent jump in the productivity levels that results in an even greater division of labour. If we focus, for example, upon the 3rd individual within our abstract scenario, losing the market for the bicycles that he has come to produce would be catastrophic. In practical terms, an individual return to the previous stage of self-sufficient agricultural production - just in order not to die of hunger - is no longer a truly feasible option. And even if we assumed a theoretical possibility of doing that - by now a normal acceptable lifestyle has come to include not merely sufficient amounts of food, but also furniture, bicycles, as well as the participation in the system of communication and entertainment. Overall, such type of economic vulnerability would have been very alien to the self-sufficient peasant families, or any of the ancient peoples with little to no market relations. Hence, by extension, the nearly universal dependency upon the market for their survival and the correspondent economic vulnerability of the contemporary global working class would have also been unimaginable to the societies of the former historical epochs. It is not difficult to see the pain and difficulties that often arise for those workers who lose their professional jobs as a result of the bankruptcy of their employer or of the obsolescence of those particular economic tasks.

Secondly, of course, in the real world there is no agreement or social contract among the economic actors within these market relations. Rather, there is a sheer force of economic progress that has pushed these individuals into these relations with the pure chance being the method of distributing the resultant roles of economic activities. Yes, this division of labour has provided greater economic productivity, but it would be absurd to imagine that members of the society have consciously decided to share the different social labour tasks in the name of economic progress. The point is that from the moment one economic actor manages to embark upon a higher technological level of producing a certain use value, the rest of the society is forced to follow suit. And it just so happens that by the nature of things greater division of labour and specialisation meant greater economic productivity in comparison to the economy of self-sufficient individuals.

We shall conclude this 1st part with the following questions. Would medieval or, for instance, even the 17th-18th century societies have been able to conceive the levels of specialisation which humanity has achieved so far? Would they have been capable of imagining an economic reality where quite a few individuals would be making their living in front of computer screens, whether it’s the IT, various apps, videogames, film industry, administration of websites, and so on? And would they have been able to envision a future where such a small part of the population working in agriculture would suffice to feed the entire planet? A future with such an immense variety of different professions, economic sectors, and lifestyles? Clearly not, therefore it is also beyond our possibilities today to establish precisely how our further technological innovations will shape the material economic landscape, be it AI or 3D printing.

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