The Deskilling of Labour and the Factory System: Ure and Babbage

Abstract

The Ricardian Socialists had been fascinated by the mechanical inventions spawned by the industrial revolution and which were reported daily in the contemporary press and discussed at the meetings of the Mechanics’ Institutes. But neither they nor Smith before them had grasped the true significance of the introduction of machinery in the context of capitalist relations of production. Their definition of the division of labour remained tied to forms of work organisation based primarily on manufacture rather than factory production: their analyses presumed, that is, that mechanisation and the division of labour consisted largely of the technical rationalisation of manual operations, rather than a fundamental restructuring of patterns of work and the differentiation of skills as part of capitalist strategies for control and regulation of the labour process.138 A more adequate conceptualisation of the division of labour in the machine-based factories of early industrial capitalism emerges in the writings of Andrew Ure (1778–1857) and Charles Babbage (1792–1871).