Such a further division has no doubt been an element of the process; but it is an explanation which itself requires explaining.

Even in Adam Smith's time two other factors were at work, which have ever since been growing in magnitude and importance; and the secret of modern production lies, we shall find, in these.

I call them two, but fundamentally there is only one, for that which is most obvious, and of which I shall speak first, is explainable only as the direct result of the second.

This, the most obvious factor, is the modern development of machinery.

The other is the growing application of exceptional mental powers, not to the _manual labour of the men by whom these powers are possessed_, but to the _process of directing and co-ordinating the divided labours of others_.
Now, as to machinery, Marx and his followers, as we have seen, maintain that it represents nothing but the average labour of the past; and so long as it exists only in its smaller and simpler forms, the devising and constructing of which are not referable to any faculties which we are able to distinguish from those of the average labourer, we have further seen that the theory of Marx holds good.