Karl Marx on Division of labor

“As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.”

“The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the manifestation of life as the alienation of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species-being. As for the essence of the division of labour – and of course the division of labour had to be conceived as a major driving force in the production of wealth as soon as labour was recognised as the essence of private property – i.e., as for the estranged and alienated form of human activity as an activity of the species – the political economists are very vague and self-contradictory about it.”