John Wesley Powell - On the division of labor

Out of Wallace Stegener's book: “Beyond the hundredth meridian”

John Wesley Powell, Ethnologist and Geologist, Instrumental to the mapping and opening of the American west, belongs to the the first american ecologists with a holistic all encompassing vision, had society heeded his recommendations we would have avoided the immense disasters of the dustbowl caused by the uncontrolled settling of the arid west.

He advocated planed land use according to ecological, sustainable and social considerations.

On division of labor he wrote in 1878 “From Savagery to Barbarism” :

“By the division of labor men have become interdependent, so that every man works for some other man. To the extent that cluster has progressed beyond the planed occupied by the brute, man has ceased to work directly to himself and come to work directly for others and indirectly for himself. He struggles directly to benefit other, that he may indirectly but ultimately benefit himself........

For the glasses which I wear, mines where worked in California, and railroads constructed across the continent to transport the products of those mines to the manufacturers in the east. For the bits of steel on the bow, mines where worked in Michigan, smelting works in Chicago..... Merchant houses and banking houses were rendered necessary. Many men where employed in producing and bringing that little instrument to me. As I sit in my library to read a book, I open the pages with a paper cutter, the ivory of which was obtained through the employment o a tribe of African elephant hunters. The paper on which my book is printed was made of the rags saved by the beggars of Italy..... If all of the men who have worked for me, directly and indirectly for the past ten years, and who are now scattered through the four quarters of the earth, where marshaled on the plain outside of the city, organized and equipped for war, I could march to the proudest capital of the world and the armies of Europe could not withstand me. I am the master of all the world. But during all my life I have worked for other men, and thus I am every man's servant; so are we all – servants to many masters and masters of many servants. It is thus that men are gradually becoming organized into the vast body-politic, every one striving to serve his fellow man and all working for the common welfare. Thus the enmity of man to man is appeased, and men live and labor for one another; individualism is transmuted into socialism, egoism into altruism, and man is lifted above the brute to an immeasurable height.........

A objective and early observation, which makes it obvious that today nobody is self-sufficient and can work for himself, a fact which is hidden by our misguided concept of labor as a commodity.