Invisible Hands

Via John Gruber, here is a striking series of photographs of workers in toy factories in China. I wish I had seen them yesterday, because this morning I did a midterm review in my social theory course and, in quick succession, students asked me about Smith’s idea of the invisible hand and about Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. Smith argued that the specialization encouraged by a market system not only liberated people from material want but also freed them from having to spend all their time being “butcher, baker and brewer” for themselves. The two effects were intimately related. He used the example of a day-laborer’s wool coat, cataloguing some of the hundreds of people who directly or indirectly contributed to its manufacture and sale. “The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production …” One implication of Smith’s view is that we won’t much enhance our personal freedom by trying for material self-sufficiency, or by learning how to do everything for ourselves. Rather, the sort of freedom we want is something that flows from becoming deeply enmeshed in and dependent upon an ever larger and more specialized system of production and exchange of commodities for money. Without it, we would spend all of our time trying to feed and clothe ourselves, with indifferent results. The market frees you from a vast amount of tedious work by allowing you to buy the results of the much more specialized labor of others and granting you huge opportunity benefits in the process—the benefits that flow from not having to do all the other things necessary for survival.