"If every family produced all that it consumed, society could keep going even if no exchange of any sort took place... Although it is not fundamental, exchange is indispensable in our advanced state of society... The division of labor is a skilful application of the powers of man; it increases society's production -- its power and its pleasures -- but it robs the individual, reduces the capacity of each person taken individually. Production cannot take place without exchange."
[Smith, I, pp.76-7] Thus J.-B. Say.
"The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical capacity for work. Those which spring from the condition of society consist of the capacity to divide labor and to distribute different tasks among the different people... and the power to exchange mutual services and the products which constitute these means... The motive which induces a man to give his services to another is self-interest -- he demands a recompense for the services rendered. The right of exclusive private property is indispensable to the establishment of exchange among men."
"Exchange and division of labor mutually condition each other."
[ Theorie des richesses sociales, suivie d'une bibliographie de l'economie politique, Paris, 1829, Vol. I, p.25f] Thus Skarbek.
Mill presents developed exchange, trade, as a consequence of the division of labor. "... the agency of man can be traced to very ****** elements. He can, in fact, do nothing more than produce motion. He can move things towards one another; and he can separate them from one another; the properties of matter perform all the rest....
"In the employment of labor and machinery, it is often found that the effects can be increased by skilful distribution, by separating all those operations which have any tendency to impede one another, by bringing together all those operations which can be made in any way to aid one another. As men in general cannot perform many different operations with the same quickness and dexterity with which they can, by practice, learn to perform a few, it is always an advantage to limit as much as possible the number of operations imposed upon each. For dividing labor, and distributing the power of men and machinery, to the greatest advantage, it is in most cases necessary to operate upon large scale; in other words, to produce the commodities in great masses. It is this advantage which gives existence to the great manufactories; a few of which, placed in the most convenient situations, sometimes supply not one country, but many countries, with as much as they desire of the commodity produced."
[ James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, London, 1821, pp.5-9 ] Thus Mill.
But all the modern political economists agree that division of labor and volume of production, division of labor and accumulation of capital, are mutually determining, and that only liberated private property, left to itself, is capable of producing the most effective and comprehensive division of labor.
Adam Smith's argument can be summed up as follows: the division of labor gives labor an infinite capacity to produce. It has its basis in the propensity to exchange and barter, a specifically human propensity which is probably not fortuitous but determined by the use of reason and of language. The motive of those engaged in exchange is not humanity but egoism. The diversity of human talents is more the effect than the cause of the division of labor -- i.e., of exchange. Moreover, it is only on account of the latter that this diversity is useful. The particular qualities of the different races within a species of animal are by nature more marked than the difference between human aptitudes and activities.
