James Heartfield wrote:
> I said that the factory offers up a technical division of labour that is rationally planned. As per Engels: 'In the midst of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production.' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
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> You quote Marx to the effect that the division of labour must stunt human development - and so it must. But since the desire to free men from the constraints of nature imposed necessity is not the same thing as the fact, there will be a division of labour under socialism - until such time that mechanisation frees us entirely from the need to work.
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> To try to organise a society in which there was no division of labour - until that science fiction future of total automation arrives, that is - would be to sentence the greater part of the human race to death by starvation.
"Division of labour" in the sense of "distributing social labour in definite proportions" among the different instrumental activities that constitute "the realm of natural necessity" isn't what's meant by "division of labour" in the passages I quoted.
The latter refers to the specialization of individuals to specific kinds of activity. It's this that Marx claims is a barrier to full individual development and that "vanishes" in a "communist organisation of society."
Such an organisation makes possible and requires the full "development of the individual," "he most complete development of man."
This is the "the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."
As Marx implicitly points out in Capital, this too is an appropriation of Hegel, in this case of Hegel's idea of "educated men."
"Hegel held very heretical views on division of labour. In his “Rechtsphilosophie” he says: “By well educated men we understand in the first instance, those who can do everything that others do.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm#n51
It's self-evident that instrumental activity (the activity that defines what Marx calls "the realm of natural necessity") will always be necessary and that it must always be divided among different activities. What isn't self-evident is that these activities will be carried out by "educated men" - "fully developed individuals" - "who can do everything that others do."
Ted