The social division of labor is the separation of society into different spheres of work, and on a broader social level, the separation of society into social/economic classes. The initial spontaneous division of labor was natural, based on biological sex, childbearing, and age groups, young and old.
In primitive society productive activity was based on a natural division of labor and simple cooperation. Simple cooperation involved community groups doing the same thing to accomplish a goal such as hunting large animals.
The second division of labor was the separation of handicraft from agriculture.
Handicraft, manufacture and industry are names for different qualitative states of productive forces, each with its own corresponding division of labor.
The rise of manufacture displaced handicraft and its corresponding social organization of labor. Manufacture, a new division of labor, divided production into separate tasks, each carried out under one roof by separate workers.
The industrial revolution, the factory system, socialized production and industrial cooperation changed society forever. Capitalism created the society of wage-laborers based on exchange, the buying and selling of each other’s commodities. Socialized production was the foundation of industrial capitalism and industrial socialism.
With the invention of the microchip, computers, robotics and the digital revolution the industrial form of society was uprooted, and a new robotic division of labor developed. Robotics destroys the old forms of division of labor and makes a new society both possible and inevitable.
(See, Manufacture, Surplus products.)”
Excerpt From: Darryl Mitchell. “Marxist Glossary Mini Edition 3.0.” iBooks.
Marxist Glossary Mini Edition 3.0 can be purchased at Lulu.com
