Division of Labor and Co-Operativism

The Division of Labor that Smith proposes is no mere association of artisans. It presupposes a concept of organization that transcends each of them and their aggregation, and, as conducing to a national good, cannot be reduced to a mere conjunction of private enterprises.  It's ancestor is, thus, Plato's open Division of Labor of the Republic, rather than Aristotle's closed household of the Politics.  Accordingly, 'Political Economy' is a more appropriate classification for it than either 'Micro-Economics', which unequivocally signifies private enterprise, or 'Macro-Economics', which does so equivocally.  Now, because a Division of Labor is constituted by working together, it can be characterized as 'Co-Operative', the literal meaning of which tends to get obscured in common parlance, especially with the eliminarion of the hyphen, e. g. "Cooperating with the police investigation" hardly signifies becoming one of the investigators. Also commonly obscured, e. g. in the familiar phrase "owned and operated", is that 'operate' entails ownership of its object, the resulting disjunction of which, of course, being the breeding ground of exploitation of the 'operators' by the Capitalist 'owners'. Conversely, the combination of a repudiation of Division of Labor and the abolition of Private Property reduces Co-Operativism to Communism.  The result, as has been previously discussed, is a Socialism the aim of which is the universalization of leisure, rather than of creative activity.