Division of Labour
Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are very much the proponents of division of labour as a state of mind which leaves society clueless and powerless whwn faced with intrinsic problems on how to face life in general. The worker is left to his own devices but is completely under the control of those who command him through this division of labour which renders him also inhumane and without any hope to move ahead in life. It was actually the fate of the working class in the days of Marx and even in Engels time.
Marx is very much a proponent of the inhumanity of division of labour which remains one of the most important points of his teaching and critique. He is against the ordering of the day due to the fact that life cannot be pre ordained and also there is no sense to be had in what is eventually explained as a full and varied life for the worker. This is more often the issue to be brought about when division of labour is mentioned (Desfour-Eccles, Applerouth, 2001).
The authors argue that division of labour keeps many people out of the social strata and this also means that certain issues are not tackled accordingly. Marx and Engels are both authors who profoundly examine the problem of the division of labour and this means that labour cannot be compartmentalized or even classified accordingly. Still all this may seem to be quite a blank issue when all is taken into account and division of labour is demonstrated to be detrimental to the human being as a whole. The argument which Marx propounds in particular is extremely productive in this sense. (Desfour-Eccles, 2001).
Division of labour is always an issue with any sociologist and it is no clearer a fact than with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. With Marx, the division of labour remains an important issue regarding alienation as he argues that this means that a person who has a fixed job remains completely alienated from the others surrounding him/her. This obviously means that the person cannot have any form of independence and cannot take any decision outside his sphere of influence. This also means that the division of labour becomes an important issue for the actual alienation of everyone in work.
Engels describes the division of labour in ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in England’ and how these impinge on the life of the working class who are consistently downtrodden and left to rot in their residential hovels which are horribly sub standard. This means that they can never aspire to be anything as they are always faced with the perils of their terrible day job and the mundane existence as they waste away without any sort of food or nutrition. This meant also that the English working class were mired into this sorry existence as division of labour continued to be the order of the day.
