What can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot?
Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin: “What can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest celerity, and…”
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Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
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gutenberg.orgEditor's note · Context
Kropotkin illustrates the limitations of a worker's creativity when confined to repetitive tasks without broader knowledge.
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At Oyonnax, a small town on the Ain, we have a big centre for the fabrication of combs, an industry more than 200 years old, which took a new development since the last war through the invention of celluloid.
But the monopoly of industrial production could not remain with England for ever.
To every house a garden is attached, and none of the misery of big cities is to be seen.
And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India.

