Craft is an occupation that requires manual skills and knowledge to produce certain physical goods. In Western Europe, in medieval and early modern times, crafts were organized into craft guilds, association of artisans which, over a particular territory, had monopoly and controlled prices, quality, numbers of apprentices, etc., in specific craft or trade. Craft apprenticeship was a practice in guilds where a master craftsman would agree to take in a trainee, make a legally binding agreement of ‘indenture’ with him, and train him for a specific duration of time so the trainee could become an experienced craftsman himself.

Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), explores the historical downfall of crafts and trades. He argues that a massive decrease in the skills and knowledge of manual workers in the sphere of industrial production happened in the twentieth century. Such a reduction in the skills and knowledge of workers is not the product of chance but of the systematic action of the capitalists to weaken the organized labor movement. The main method by which the deskilling of workers was achieved was by the application of principles of Taylorism, or scientific management. The basic principles of Taylorism are the separation of the work process from the skills of workers, the separation of ideas from execution, and that all mental work should be removed from the plant and concentrated in the planning department, in order to use the knowledge monopoly to control every step of the work process. Craftsmen had great theoretical and technical knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries, while the application of Taylorism separated skill and knowledge, so the worker stopped being a craftsman, and became a living tool of the machine.

References:

Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974);

Engels. The Principles of Communism (2019, in German 1847).

    -     The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (2010, in German 1884);

Gumplowitz. Outlines of Sociology (2020, in German 1885).

Marx. Capital Vol. 1, 2, & 3: The Only Complete and Unabridged Edition in One Volume (2020, in German 1867, 1885, 1894).