Marx starts with a carriage. Wheelwrights, harness-makers, tailors, locksmiths, upholsterers, glaziers, painters and gilders once worked as independent craftsmen. Now one capitalist gathers them into one building. At first they only work into one another's hands, but each man is busy with carriages alone, and he slowly loses the skill to practise his whole old trade. What he keeps is a narrow motion, done better than before. The second route runs the other way. A capitalist hires a crowd of papermakers, type-makers or needlemakers, each of whom makes the whole article. Then a bigger order has to be filled in a fixed time, so the job is cut into pieces and every man is given one, all done at the same moment. A needlemaker in Nuremberg did perhaps twenty operations one after another. In England twenty needlemakers stand side by side, each doing one, and each of those is cut up again. Both routes end in the same place: a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings. Since every step must still be done by hand, skill stays the base, and that is why each man is tied for life to one fragment, with his labour-power turned into the organ of it.
Take the man at the bench. A worker who repeats one simple act all his life turns his whole body into the tool for it. He does it faster than the craftsman who changes tasks, because the gaps in that craftsman's day, spent moving from one place or tool to another, close up. The small tricks the detail worker learns are kept and handed down among the generations working together. Marx sets beside him the weaver of Dakka, whose muslins have never been surpassed. That weaver works alone, to a customer's order, on a loom of rough branches and bars in the open air, and his skill comes down from father to son. So manufacture does not invent skill. It takes the division of trades it finds in society and drives it to an extreme inside the workshop. Tools change as well. Once the jobs are separated, each needs its own implement, and Birmingham alone makes 500 kinds of hammer, some of them for different steps of one process. Marx adds that this builds one condition for machinery, which is a combination of simple tools.
Marx then sorts manufacture into two kinds. In the first, parts made separately are fitted together, and his example is the watch. It was once the work of one Nuremberg craftsman. Now a crowd of mainspring makers, dial makers, case makers, screw makers and gilders make it, and the last man puts the pieces together and hands over a going watch. Whether they share a shop is chance. Around Vaud and Neufchâtel they work as separate craftsmen, while Geneva has large watch workshops under one capitalist. Even there the dial, the springs and the case are seldom made on the premises, because scattering the work saves the capitalist the cost of workshops. The second kind is the finished form. A wire for needles passes through the hands of 72, sometimes 92, different workers. The steps that once followed one another in time now happen side by side in space, so more needles come out in the same hours. Each worker also depends on the next, so no one may spend more than the time his step needs. That pace stops being the result of competition and becomes a technical law of the shop. Steps take unequal time, so the numbers must fit. In type-making, four founders and two breakers serve one rubber, since the founder casts 2,000 type an hour, the breaker breaks up 4,000 and the rubber polishes 8,000. In a glass house, five men at each furnace mouth, the bottlemaker, blower, gatherer, putter-up and taker-in, form a group called 'the hole', and the whole body is paralysed if one member is missing.
