I am a skeptical capitalist. As a skeptic, I feel compelled to doubt everything I believe in an unending process of self-questioning in order to understand myself and my situation more fully. Today I am questioning “specialization”—an extreme of Adam Smith’s division of labor. My specific question is this: does specialization tend towards monopolies?

As technology progresses through the brute approach of experimental science, technology becomes more and more complex. The means of production for cutting-edge technology become more and more expensive, though the products often become cheaper. The ever-increasing expense of the means of production which is fueled by “progress” results in an incredible entry barrier for upstart companies. The buy-in cost to the game is too high for new competition to enter into the game, so the result is at least a gradual trend towards monopolies.

Specialization is as much an outgrowth of the division of labor as advertising is an outgrowth of capitalism. Specialization puts the means of production out of the specialist’s hands. The more people become specialists, the fewer own businesses and the less claim to a company’s products they can make. This alienation of labor is not just the loss of a sense of participation, but an actual loss of power. A specialist—and there are always more in your field—earns wages determined exclusively by her employer. The more specialized our knowledge becomes, the less say we have in how much we make. This does not mean specialists can’t make money! In fact, being a specialist in a field with only a handful of specialists could mean you’d make a fortune, but as soon as more specialists arrive, your salary is put in jeopardy.

White collar work is not wage-slavery, but the means of labor continue to be consolidated into the hands of an exclusive few who do very little of the real producing. Businessmen are interested in “passive income” which is an oxymoron. Human effort is always needed to provide products, and labor is a limited resource. As workers become more and more specialized, it is more and more likely that a computer will come to replace them. When humans become mechanical, it only makes sense we’ll be replaced by machines.

Specialization fuels the theft of the means of labor by making specialists unable to do anything but work mechanically somewhere else. If you are replaced by a machine, you still only have the skills to work as a machine somewhere else. The entry barrier to markets today prevents new companies from acquiring the necessary means of labor to compete with established companies. Of course, technology can create other markets even as it dehumanizes old ones. For example, the internet and open source software have created new creative outlets and a new equal footing for virtual businesses. But businesses producing actual products (as opposed to virtual services) remain the same, consolidating all the while.

Specialists are never generals! Generals command companies, specialists follow them. What is needed is a general education which gets broader and broader over time, not the mechanistic education in which childlike curiosity and openness is narrowed, trampled, and punished in the classroom. What was once called “creativity” is now called Attention Deficit Disorder. What was once called “shyness” is called Asperger’s Syndrome. And we have medicines for all. As Czeslaw Milosz says, “Once a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed.” There’s a cure for every artist. Ritalin is a specialist drug designed to make students focus exclusively on the subject matter in front of them. This is one of the most insidious schemes to specialize all students. There is no place for the artist or the generalist! You cannot go fishing in the morning, paint during the afternoon, and philosophize at dusk. Capitalism has no real tolerance for generalists. Capitalism grudgingly tolerates specialized artists, but an education designed at opening up possibilities is not the goal of our current education system—quite the contrary! Aptitude tests are being given earlier and earlier, students are being profiled, lined up and marched out as if out of a factory… only to work in other factories!

Specialization increases efficiency, but not effectiveness. Specialization increases speed, but doesn’t change the benefit of the product. Efficiency only changes profits, not quality. Rather than increasing quality, companies are much more likely to increase efficiency and lower prices in order to maintain a monopoly. Quality improvement is a difficult and expensive process—often the last choice. It also requires generalists who can think of ways of improving a product, not merely a specialist who only knows how a single aspect of a product operates.

Divide and conquer? The division of labor results in divided laborers. Divided laborers results in conquered laborers.

What’s the solution to the problem of specialization? Generalization? If so, how is that to be obtained? Is it a problem of education? How are we to reform education so that specialized careers are not the only goal? These are questions that need to be explored, and ones I don’t have the answers to. Participate! Let us know your thoughts.

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