CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY
_A Proposition for Educators_
BY
HELEN MAROT
1918
TO
CAROLINE PRATT
WHOSE APPRECIATION OF EDUCATIONAL FACTORS IN THE PLAY WORLD OF
CHILDREN, INTENSIFIED FOR THE AUTHOR THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GROWTH
PROCESSES IN INDUSTRIAL AND ADULT LIFE.
PREFACE
The Bureau of Educational Experiments is a group of men, and women who
are trying to face the modern problems of education in a scientific
spirit. They are conducting and helping others to conduct experiments
which hold promise of finding out more about children as well as how
to set up school environments which shall provide for the children's
growth. From these experiments they hope eventually may evolve a
laboratory school.
Among their surveys the past year, one by Helen Marot has resulted in
this timely and significant book. The experiment which is outlined at
the close seems to the Bureau to be of real moment,--one of which both
education and industry should take heed. They earnestly hope it may be
tried immediately. In that event, the Bureau hopes to work with Miss
Marot in bringing her experiment to completion.
THE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS, 16 West Eighth Street, New York
City.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EFFORT
II. ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY. THE AMERICAN WAY
III. ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY. THE GERMAN WAY
IV. EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRY AND ASSOCIATED ENTERPRISE
CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY
INTRODUCTION
A friend of mine in describing the Russian people as he observed them
in their present revolution said it was possible for them to accept
new ideas because they were uneducated; they did not, he said, labor
under the difficulty common among educated people of having to get rid
of old ideas before they took on new ones. I think what he had in mind
to say that it is difficult to accept new ideas when your mind is
filled with ideas which are institutional. The ideas which come out of
formal education, out of the schools, out of books, are ideas which
have been stamped as the true and important ones; many of them are,
as they have proved their worth in service. But as they represent
authority, they pass into a people's mind with the full weight of
an accepted fact. The schools, the colleges, and the books are
not responsible primarily for the fixed ideas; every established
institution contributes fixed ideas as well as fixed customs and rules
of action. The schools and colleges circulate and interpret them.
The movement for industrial education in the United States is an
illustration of this.
The ideas which we find there have not sprung from schools or colleges
but from industry. The institution of industry, rather than the
institution of education, dominates thought in industrial education
courses. It is the institution of industry as it has affected the life
of every man, woman and child, which has inhibited educational thought
in conjunction with schemes for industrial schools. No established
system of education or none proposed is more circumscribed by
institutionalized thought than the vocational and industrial school
movement.
Educators have opposed the desire of business to attach the schools
to the industrial enterprise. They have rightly opposed it because
industry under the influence of business prostitutes effort.
Nevertheless, hand in hand with industry, the schools must function;
unattached to the human hive they are denied participation in life.
Promoters of industrial education are hung up between this fact of
prostituted industry and their desire to establish the children's
connection with life. They have tried to meet opposing interests; they
have not recognized all the facts because the facts were conflicting,
and their minds as well as their interests, institutionally speaking,
were committed to both.
This was the impasse we had apparently reached when the war occurred;
it is where we still are. But ahead of us, sometime, the war will end
and we shall be called then to face a period of reconstruction. The
reconstruction will center around industry. The efficiency with which
a worker serves industry will be the test of his patriotic fervor, as
his service in the army is made the test during this time of war. All
institutions will be examined and called upon to reorganize in such
ways as will contribute to the enterprise of raising industrial
processes to the standard of greatest efficiency.
The standard of mechanical efficiency as it was set by Germany was one
of refined brutality. During the progress of the war, the significance
of that standard is being grafted into the consciousness of the common
people of those nations which have opposed Germany in arms. It is the
industrial efficiency of Germany, uninhibited by a sense of human
development that has made her victories possible. It is that
efficiency which has kept a large part of the world on the defensive
for over three and a half years. Germany's military strategy is, in
the main, her industrial strategy; it represents her efficiency in
turning technology to the account of an imperial purpose.
But those organizations of manufacturers and business politicians who
believe that the same schemes of efficiency will function in America
will call upon the people after the war, it is safe to predict, to
emulate the methods which have given Germany its untoward strength.
While it is these methods which have made much hated Germany a menace
to the world and while the menace is felt by our own people, the
significance of the methods is but vaguely realized. It is probable
that after the war it will be said that it was not the German
methods which were objectionable, but that it was their use in an
international policy. Before the time for reconstruction comes, I hope
we shall discover how intrinsically false those methods are; and how
untrue to the growth process is the sort of efficiency Germany
has developed. I hope also that we shall realise that a policy of
paternalism has no place in the institutional life of our own country.
Before the war these German methods bore the character of high
success, and they had a large following in this country. There are
indeed many thousands of men and women in the United States, who,
while giving all they most care for, for the prosecution of the war
against Germany still support industrial and political policies and
dogmas which are in spirit essentially Prussian. The professional
Reformer here in America is not even yet fully conscious that German
paternalism (a phase of German efficiency) is the token of an enslaved
people.
The German educational system as much if not more than its other
imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German
brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in Germany of its
technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country
has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this
perfection in the early years of school training. Parents contribute
their children freely to an educational system which fits them into an
industrial institution which has an imperial destiny to fulfill. Each
person's place in the life of the nation is made for him during his
early years, like a predestined fact.
American business men before the war appreciated the educational
system which made people over into workers without will or purpose of
their own. But the situation was embarrassing as these business men
were not in a position to insist that the schools, supported by the
people, should prepare the children to serve industry for the sake of
the state, while industry was pursued solely for private interest.
Their embarrassment, however, will be less acute under the conditions
of industrial reconstruction which will follow the war. Then as
patriots, under the necessity of competing with Germany industrially,
they will feel free to urge that the German scheme of industrial
education, possibly under another name, be extended here and adopted
as a national policy. In other words as Germany has evolved its
methods of attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have
played the leading part in the attainment, the German system of
industrial education, private business may argue, should be given for
patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United States. If the German
system were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could
deliver wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed
in their industrial activity than they are now. It was in Germany a
comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children
into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen
explains, the psychology of the German people was still feudal
when the modern system of industry, with its own characteristic
enslavement, was imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people
unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of
the political philosophy which developed along with modern technology
in both England and America.[A]
[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen.--Imperial Germany and the Industrial
Revolution.]
First, then, it is not certain that the system of German industrial
education would succeed; and, second, if it did succeed it is not the
sort of education that America wants.
America wants industrial efficiency, it must have efficient workers if
it holds its place among nations, and American people will prove their
efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capable of using the
heritage which industrial evolution has given the world. But what
shall we use this efficiency for? For the sake of the heritage? For
the sake of business? For the sake of Empire?
Business knows very clearly why it wants it, but as a rule most of us
are not clearly conscious that we need, for the sake of our expansive
existence, to be industrially efficient. We are not even conscious
that industry is the great field for adventure and growth, because we
use that field not for the creative but for the exploitive purpose.
It is the present duty of American educators to realize these two
points: that industry is the great field for adventure and growth;
that as it is used now the opportunities for growth are inhibited
in the only field where productive experience can be a common one.
Shortly it will be the mission, of educators to show that by opening
up the field for creative purpose, fervor for industrial enterprise
and good workmanship may be realized; that only as the content of
industry in its administration as well as in the technique of its
processes is opened up for experiment and first-hand experience,
will a universal impulse for work be awakened. It is for educators,
together with engineers and architects, to demonstrate to the world
that while the idea of service to a political state may have the power
to accomplish large results, all productive force is artificially
sustained which is not dependent on men's desire to do creative work.
A state as we have seen, may invoke the idea of service. It might
represent the productive interests of a community if those interests
sprang from the expansive experience of a people in their creative
adventures.
In the reconstructive period educators may have their opportunity to
extend the concept that the creative process is the educative process,
or as Professor Dewey states it, the educative process is the process
of growth. The reconstruction period will be a time of formative
thought; institutions will be attacked and on the defensive; and out
of the great need of the nations there may come change. Educators will
find their opportunity as they discover conditions under which the
great enterprise of industry may be educational and as they repudiate
or oppose institutions which exclude educational factors.
It is for educators to realize first of all that there can be no
social progress while there is antagonism between growth in wealth
(which is industry) and growth in individuals (which is education);
that the fundamental antagonisms which are apparent in the current
arrangement are not between industry and education but between
education and business. They must know that as business regulates and
controls industry for ulterior purposes, that is for other purposes
than production of goods, it thwarts the development of individual
lives and the evolution of society; that it values a worker not for
his potential productivity but for his immediate contribution to the
annual stock dividend; or if, as in Germany where his productive
potentiality is valued in terms of longer time, it is for the imperial
intention of the state and not for the growth of the individual or the
progress of civilisation.
CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY
CHAPTER I
PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EFFORT
As a human experience, the act of creating, the process of fabricating
wealth, has been at different times as worthy of celebration as the
possession of it. Before business enterprise and machine production
discredited handwork, art for art's sake, work for the love of work,
were conceivable human emotions. But to-day, a Cezanne who paints
pictures and leaves them in the field to perish is considered by the
general run of people, in communities inured to modern industrial
enterprise, as being not quite right in his head. Their estimate is
of course more or less true. But such valuations are made without the
help of creative inspiration, although the functioning of a product
has its creative significance. The creative significance of a product
in use, as well as an appreciation of the act of creating, would
be evident if modern production of wealth, under the influence of
business enterprise and machine technology, had not fairly well
extinguished the appreciation and the joy of creative experience in
countries where people have fallen under its influence so completely
as in our own.
It is usual in economic considerations to credit the period of
craftsmanship as a time in the evolution of wealth production that was
rich in creative effort and opportunity for the individual worker.
The craftsmanship period is valued in retrospect for its educative
influence. There was opportunity then as there is not now for the
worker to gain the valuable experience of initiating an idea and
carrying the production of an article to its completion for use and
sale in the market; there was the opportunity then also as there is
not now, for the worker to gain a high degree of technique and a
valuation of his workmanship. It is characteristic of workmanship that
its primary consideration is serviceability or utility. The creative
impulse and the creative effort may or may not express workmanship
or take it into account. Workmanship in its consideration of
serviceability oftentimes arrives at beauty and classic production,
when creative impulse without the spirit of workmanship fails. The
craftsmanship period deserves rank, but the high rank which is given
it is due in part to its historical relation to the factory era which
followed and crushed it. While craftsmanship represented expansive
development in workmanship, it is not generally recognized that
the Guild organization of the crafts developed modern business
enterprise.[A] Business is concerned wholly with utility, and not like
workmanship, with standards of production, except as those standards
contain an increment of value in profits to the owners of wealth. It
was during the Guild period that business came to value workmanship
because it contained that increment. In spite of business interest,
however, the standard of workmanship was set by skilled craftsmen, and
their standards represented in a marked degree the market value of the
goods produced by them.
[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen; Instinct of Workmanship, pp. 211-212.]
While the exploitation of the skill of the workman in the interest of
the owners of raw materials and manufactured goods, had its depressing
and corrupting influence on creative effort, the creative impulse
found a stimulus in the respect a community still paid the skill and
ability of the worker. It was not until machine standards superseded
craft standards and discredited them that the processes of production,
the acts of fabrication, lost their standards of workmanship and their
educational value for the worker. The discredits were psychological
and economic; they revolutionized the intellectual and moral concepts
of men in relation to their work and the production of wealth.
As machine production superseded craftsmanship the basis of fixing
the price of an article shifted from values fixed by the standards of
workers to standards of machines, Professor Veblen says to standards
of salesmen. It is along these lines that mechanical science applied
to the production of wealth, has eliminated the personality of the
workers. A worker is no longer reflected in goods on sale; his
personality has passed into the machine which has met the requirements
of mass production.
The logical development of factory organisation has been the complete
coördination of all factors which are auxiliary to mechanical power
and devices. The most important auxiliary factor is human labor. A
worker is a perfected factory attachment as he surrenders himself to
the time and the rhythm of the machine and its functioning; as he
supplements without loss whatever human faculties the machine lacks,
whatever imperfection hampers the machine in the satisfaction of its
needs. If it lacks eyes, he sees for it; he walks for it, if it is
without legs; and he pulls, drags, lifts, if it needs arms. All of
these things are done by the factory worker at the pace set by the
machine and under its direction and command. A worker's indulgence in
his personal desires or impulses hinders the machine and lowers his
attachment value.
This division of the workers into eyes, arms, fingers, legs, the
plucking out of some one of his faculties and discarding the rest
of the man as valueless, has seemed to be an organic requirement of
machine evolution. So commendable the scheme has been to business
enterprise that this division of labor has been carried from the
machine shop and the factory to the scientific laboratories where
experiment and discovery in new processes of technology are developed,
and where, it is popularly supposed, a high order of intelligence is
required. The organization of technological laboratories, like the
organization of construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is
based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory
for its solution. The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen
are isolated as they work out their assigned tasks without specific
knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked.
Small technological laboratories are still in existence where
the general problem in hand is presented as a whole to the whole
engineering staff, and is left to them as a group for independent and
associated experimentation. But even in such cases the technological
content does not necessarily supply the impulse to solve the problem
or secure a free and voluntary participation in its solution. Those
who are interested in its solution are inspired by its economic value
for them. In all technological laboratories, either where the problem
is broken up and its parts distributed among the employees of the
laboratory, or where it is given to them as a whole for solution, it
is given not as a sequence in the creative purpose of the individuals
who are at work on it, nor is its final solution necessarily
determined by its use and wont in a community. Problems brought to
the laboratory are tainted with the motive of industry which is not
creative, but exploitive.
The tenure of each man employed in production is finally determined
not by any creative interest of his own or of his employer but by
whether in the last analysis, he conforms better than another man to
the exigencies of profits. If profits and creative purpose happen to
be one and the same thing, his place in an industrial establishment
has some bearing on his intrinsic worth. Under such circumstances his
interest in the creative purpose of the establishment would have a
foundation, and he himself could value better than he otherwise would
his own part in the enterprise.
The economic organization of modern society though built on the
common people's productive energy has discounted their _creative
potentiality_. We hold to the theory that men are equal in their
opportunity to capture and own wealth; that their ability in that
respect is proof of their ability to create it; a proof of their
inherent capacity. It is a proof, as a matter of fact, of their
ability to compete in the general scheme of capture; their ability to
exploit wealth successfully. While the prevailing economic _theory_ of
production takes for granted men's creative _potentiality_ there is no
provision in our industrial institution for the common run of men to
_function_ creatively. There is no attempt in the general scheme for
trueing-up or estimating the creative ability of workers. In the
market, where the value of goods is determined, a machine tender has a
better chance than a craftsman. The popular belief is that the ability
of workers has native limitations, that these limitations are absolute
and that they are fixed at or before birth. This belief is a tenet
among those who hold positions of industrial mastery. Managers
of industry for instance who control a situation and create an
environment, demand that those who serve them meet the requirements
which they have fixed. They do not recognize that industrial ability
depends largely on the opportunity which an individual has had to make
adjustments to his surroundings and on his opportunity to master them
through experiment. A factory employee is required to do a piece of
work; and he does it, not because he is interested in the process or
the object, but because his employer wants it done.
In Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic countries, where people have fallen most
completely under the influence of machine production and business
enterprise, and where they have lost by the way their conception
of their creative potentiality, work is universally conceived as
something which people endure for the sake of being "paid off." Being
paid off, it seems abundantly clear, is the only reason a sane man can
have for working. After he is paid off the assumption is his pleasure
will begin. A popular idea of play is the absence of work, the
consumption of wealth, being entertained. Being entertained indeed
is as near as most adult men in these countries come to play. Their
Sundays and holidays are depressing occasions, shadowed by a forlorn
expectancy of something which never comes off.
The capacity of the French people for enjoying their holidays is much
the same as their capacity for enjoying their work. This, no doubt, is
a matter of native habituation. But however they came by it, it has
had its part in determining the industrial conditions of France. The
love of the people for making things has resisted in a remarkable way
the domination of machine industry and modern factory organization.
The French work shop, averaging six persons, is as characteristic
of France as the huge factory organization with the most modern
mechanical equipment is characteristic of American industry. As the
workers in these shops participate more intimately in the fabrication
of goods they come more nearly to a real participation in productive
enterprise. This close contact with the actual processes of production
gives the workers a sense of power. A sense of their relation to the
processes and their ability to control them engenders courage. Indeed
it is the absence of fear, rather than the absence of work, that
determines the capacity of men for play.
It was not accidental that the movement of the French workers for
emancipation emphasized a desire for control of industry. The
syndicalism of France has expressed the workers' interest in
production as the labor movements of other countries have laid stress
exclusively on its economic value to them. The syndicalists' theory
takes for granted the readiness of workers to assume responsibility
for production, while the trade unionists of England, Germany and the
United States ask for a voice in determining not their productive but
their financial relation to it.
It is the habit of these other peoples to credit the lack of interest
in work to physical hardships which the wage system has imposed. But
the wage system from the point of view of material welfare has borne
no less heavily on the French than on other workers. It is also
difficult to prove that the physical hardships of modern methods of
production are greater than the hardships of earlier methods. The
truth is that neither hardships nor exploitation of labor are new
factors; they have both, through long centuries, repressed in varying
degree the inspirational and intellectual interest of workers in
productive effort. It is not the economic burdens which followed the
introduction of machinery and the division of labor that distinguish
these new factors in industry, but the discredit which they throw
around man's labor power. They have carried the discredit of labor
in its social position further than it had been carried, but this
is merely a by-product of the discredit they cast on the skill and
intellectual power which is latent in the working class. In this
connection the significant truth for civilization is that while
exploitation of labor and physical hardships induce the antagonism
between labor and capital, modern factory organization destroys
creative desire and individual initiative as it excludes the workers
from participation in creative experience.
The new discoveries in inorganic power and their application to
industrial enterprise are possibly more far reaching in their effect
on the adjustment and relationships of men than they have been at any
other time in the last century and a half. Whatever the world owes
to these discoveries and their applications it cannot afford to lose
sight of a fact of great social significance, which is, that people
have accepted mechanical achievements, not as labor saving devices but
as substitutes for human initiative and effort. They have not, indeed,
saved labor to the advantage of labor itself, and they have
inhibited interest in production. Outside of business enterprise and
diplomacy--the political extension of business--mechanical devices
have lost the surprise reaction and resentment which they originally
set up. As a competitor with human labor they have established
themselves as its fit survivor. The prophesy of Theophrastus Such
seems to have been already fulfilled, and any new machine added to
those already in power in the Parliament of Machines can scarcely add
to the worker's sense of his own impotency. The business valuations
which were evolved out of craftsmanship and which were further
developed under the influence of the technology of the last century
and a half, emphasized the value of material force, and repressed
spiritual evaluations, such as the creative impulse in human beings.
Modern industrial institutions are developed by an exclusive
cultivation of people's needs and the desire to possess. They are
developed independently, as we have seen, of any need or desire to
create. The desire to possess is responsible for the production of a
mass of goods unprecedented and inconceivable a century and a half
ago. The actual production of all of these goods is unrelated to
the motive of men's participation in their production; the actual
production in relation to the motive is an incident. The sole reason
for the participation in the productive effort is not the desire for
creative experience or the satisfaction of the creative impulse; it
is not an interest in supplying the needs of a community or in the
enrichment of life; it is to acquire out of the store of goods all
that can be acquired for personal possession or consumption. There is
no more fundamental need than the need to consume; but for the common
run of men as a motive in the creation of wealth, it is shorn of
adventure, of imagination and of joy.
The ownership of many things, which mass production has made possible,
the intensive cultivation of the desire to own, has added another
element to the corruption of workmanship and the depreciation of its
value. Access to a mass of goods made cheap by machinery has had its
contributing influence in the people's depreciation of their own
creative efforts. As people become inured to machine standards, they
lose their sense of art values along with their joy in creative
effort, their self regard as working men and their personal equation
in industrial life.
Where the motive of individuals who engage in industry is the desire
to possess, the rational method of gaining possession is not by the
arduous way of work but of capture. The scheme of capture is a scheme
whereby you may get something for (doing) nothing; nothing as nearly
as possible in the way of fabrication of goods; something for the
manipulation of men; something for the development of technology and
mechanical science; and high regard for the manipulation of money.
"Doing nothing" does not mean that manual workers, managers of
productive enterprises, speculators in the natural resources of wealth
production and manufactured goods, as well as financiers, are not busy
people, or that their activity does not result in accomplishment. They
are indeed _the_ busy people and their accomplishment is the world's
wealth. Nevertheless the intention of all and the spirit of the scheme
is to do as near nothing as possible in exchange for the highest
return. _The whole industrial arrangement is carried on without
the force of productive intention; it is carried forward against a
disinclination to produce_.
I have said that industry was shorn of adventure for the common
man. Adventure in industrial enterprise is the business man's great
monopoly. His impetus is not due to his desire to create wealth but to
exploit it, and he secures its creation by "paying men off." Commonly
he is peevishly expectant that those he pays off will have a creative
intention toward the work he pays them to do, although in the scheme
of industry which he supports the opportunity provided for such
intention is negligible. An efficiency engineer estimated that there
is a loss in wealth of some fifty per cent, due to the inability of
the business man to appraise the creative possibilities in industry.
When exploitation of wealth is referred to, those who own it are
generally meant. But exploitation of wealth is the intention of
the worker as well as of the business man. To get, as I have said,
something for (doing) nothing is the dominating _motif_ in the
industrial world. It is supposed to reflect the self-interest of
individuals, to reflect, that is, their economic needs.
This motive of circumscribed self-interest during an era of political
and industrial expansion has been adopted by philosophers as the guide
as well as a clue to conduct; it was hailed by them as a sufficient
and complete motivation for wealth creation; they used it as a basis
of a theory for race progress resting solely on the efforts of men to
satisfy their material needs through their ability to capture goods.
This motive together with the possibilities which machine production
opened up for wealth exploitation, gave birth to the dismal science of
Political Economy; it suggested the materialistic interpretation
of history, and brought to earth utopian schemes of brotherhood.
Political science is dismal because it is an interpretation of
dismal institutions. It may be ungenerous to speak slightingly
of institutions which have yielded such great wealth, which have
transformed inert matter into productive power and brought in
consequence the whole world into acquaintanceship and rivalry. It
would be ungenerous if it were not for a fact which has become
poignant, that the exploitation of wealth and undigested relationships
are to-day the outstanding menace to civilization.
The present world conflict has made it clear that relationships cannot
remain undigested; that they are not in their nature passive. They are
either integrating in their force or disintegrating. Socialism has
undertaken for two generations to prove that exploitation, carries
with it its own seeds of destruction. The position of the socialists
is passing out of theory and propaganda through the hands of
diplomatists, into statutes. Both the socialists and their successors
would eradicate exploitation by repressing it. The socialists would
repress it by shifting ownership of wealth from individuals to the
state, while the diplomatists, through the same agency, would regulate
those who own it.
It is an historical fact as well as a psychological one that you do
not get rid of traits or institutions except as you replace them with
something of positive service, or greater competitive value. The
institution of capitalism exists not because of its predatory
character, but because in spite of its exploitation it _promotes_
industry, and labor and other industrial technicians do not. As our
industrial institutions have grown out of a predatory concept instead
of a creative one, as capture has been rewarded rather than work, as
the possessive desire has been stimulated and the creative desire
has been sacrificed, as employers of men and owners of machines have
engaged in production because of their interest not in the process or
in the use of the product, but in the reward, as wage workers have
hired out for the day's work or continued during their adult life in
their trade without interest in its development, because like their
employers they wanted the highest cash return, wealth exploitation
has come to be synonymous in the minds of men with wealth creation. A
creative concept which could survive and inhibit the predatory concept
must rest on such elements of creative force as are now absent from
our industrial institution.
It is almost axiomatic to say that a system of wealth production which
cultivated creative effort would yield more in general terms of
life as well as in terms of goods, than a system like our own which
exploits creative power. It is obvious that the disintegrating
tendency in our system is due to the fact that production is dependent
for its motive force on the desire to possess. It is also obvious that
a rational system of industry which sought to give that desire among
all men full opportunity for satisfaction would also undertake to
cultivate the creative impulse for the sake of increasing creative
effort The result would be an increase in production. As logical
as this observation may be, it is not so obvious how such a social
transformation as this implies, may be effected.
Every advance in wealth creation which has become an institutional
part of an economic system has been impelled and sustained by the
material interests of people who at the time held the strategic
position in the community. The world has progressed, or retrogressed,
as the most powerful interests at any time adjusted the institutions
and customs governing wealth production to their own advantage. As
the controlling interests in our present scheme are the business
interests, it is the business man, not the workman, who directs
industry and determines its policy as well as the general policy of
the nation in which it operates. It is to the advantage of private
business run for private gain, to control creative effort for the
purpose of appropriating the product, and to inhibit free creative
expression as an uncontrollable factor in the enterprise of
exploitation.
The appalling and wanton sacrifice of life which are incident to the
evolution of machinery and the division of labor seem to demand at
times their elimination. In weariness we are urged to retrace our
steps and go back to craftsmanship and the Guilds. But it is idle to
talk about going back or eliminating institutionalized features of
society. We cannot go back, we have not the ability to discard this or
that part of our environment except as we make it over. The result of
this making over might be vitalized by methods which had belonged
to earlier periods, but neither the methods nor the periods, we can
safely say, will live again. Neither our own nor future generations
will escape the influence of modern technology. It will play its part.
It may be a part which will lead away from some of the destructive
influences which developed in the era of craftsmanship and which
dominate the present. But a society too enfeebled to use its own
experience will not have the power to use the experience of another
people or of another time. It is beside the point to look to some
other experience or scheme of life and choose that because it seems
good, unless the choice is based on a people's present fitness to
adapt that other experience or other scheme of life to their own
experience. The proposition to revert to an earlier period suggests
nothing more than the repetition of an experience out of which the
present state of affairs has evolved.
Nor is there ground for the hope that in time institutions and
relationships will be regulated on principles of altruism. It is not
apparent indeed that such regulations would yield even the present
allowance of happiness incident to our own immature method of
capturing what wealth we can without relation to social factors. As
unfortunate as we are in pursuit of that blind method, it is safe to
predict that the world would be a madder place than it is to-day if
every one devoted himself to doing what he believed was for the good
of everybody else.
The hope of social revolutionists that private business would
overreach itself and defeat its own purpose, grew out of the
expectation that its tribute exactions would draw the subjects of
capital together in a common defensive movement; that the movement on
account of its numbers would overturn business and that in place of
private management democratic control would be instituted. Some
such outcome, sooner or later, seems inevitable if civilization is
scheduled to advance. The labor union movement, unlike the political
socialist revolutionary movement, undertakes in its operation to
supply labor with a certain working content, which the administrative
scheme of industry has excluded from the experience of its workers.
But this content is not sufficient to stimulate the imagination of the
trade unionists with the thought that the world of industry is the
field of creative adventure. Their conception born of experience is
not so flattering. It would be a brave man who would undertake to
convince the twentieth century adult wage earner, involved in modern
methods of machine production, that his poverty is less in his
possession of wealth than in his growth and in his creative
opportunity.
The industrial changes which the labor movement proposes to make are
on the side of a better distribution of goods. A better distribution
would have a dynamic significance in wealth production, if the
actual increase which labor secured in wages and leisure were a real
increase. But exploiting capital provides for such exigencies as high
wages by increasing the price of products, thus reducing the wage
earners' purchasing power to the former level. High wages fail to
disturb the relative portion of capital and labor even more than they
fail to affect the purchasing power of the worker.
It is often suggested that if the state assumed control of industry
the blight of business could be removed. But in the transfer we would
not necessarily gain opportunity to enjoy the adventure which industry
holds out. Industry as a creative experience, it is safe to predict,
would be as rare a personal experience and as foreign an influence
in social existence under state management as it is under business
management. The state would curb the amount of wealth exploitation
possibly, but would not alter the universal attitude toward wealth
production, which is to take as much and give as little as one can get
off with.
Although political socialism may be the economic sequel of private
capital there is no foundation for the belief that it will of itself
induce creative effort or stimulate creative impulse. The faith back
of the socialist movement that desirable attributes like the creative
impulse, which men potentially possess, will begin to operate
automatically and universally as soon as there is sufficient
leisure and food for general consumption, is blind and historically
unwarranted. The signs are that a socialist state would lean
exclusively on the consumption desire for production results, just as
the present system of business now does. Neither fat incomes nor large
leisure have furnished the world with its people of genius. In spite
of the inhibiting influence of exploitation, they have come, what
there are of them, out of intensive application to some matter
of moment. Possibly they would come, and more of them, from the
work-a-day world under socialism with the inhibiting influence of
organized exploitation removed, but more of them would not insure a
democracy in industry or elsewhere. Nothing insures that short of
a strong emotional impulse, a real intellectual interest in the
adventure of productive enterprise.
The creative desire is an incident or a sort of by-product of the
economics of socialism as it is of classical economics; neither
one nor the other depends on its cultivation. Either is capable of
achieving mass production, but neither insures a democratic control of
industry, neither provides for growth, for education in the productive
process. A democracy of industry requires a people's sustained
interest in the productive enterprise; their interest in the
development of technology, the development of markets, and the release
of man's productive energy.
It happens that in machine production and in the division of labor
there are emotional and intellectual possibilities which were
non-existent in the earlier and simpler methods of production. As
power latent in inorganic matter has been freed and applied to common
needs, an environment has been evolved, filled with situations
incomparably more dramatic than the provincial affairs of detached
people and communities. Although this technological subject matter,
rich in opportunities for associated adventure and infinite discovery,
is not a part of common experience, it exists, and if called out from
its isolation for purposes of common experimentation, it is fit matter
for making science a vital experience in the productive life of the
worker.
Industry under the direction of business will not open up the
adventure with its stimulating factors to its subservient labor force,
unless it happens that the present methods fail, in time, to carry
forward industrial enterprise on a profit-making basis; or unless
labor develops the power which springs from desire for creative
experience, to undertake the direction and control of industry.
The present is better than any time earlier in the history of
technology for the development of a concept of industry as a socially
creative enterprise. As craftsmanship extended and intensified an
interest in personal ownership, it magnified the value of possessions;
as it deepened the desire for protection of private property and
the strengthening of property laws against human laws, it was not
a _socializing_ force. While the craftsmanship period strengthened
personal claims on workmanship and interest in it, mechanical power
and division of labor have impersonated industry.[A] In the labyrinth
of mechanical processes and economic calculation it is not to-day
possible for a worker to think or speak of a product as his. He has no
basis for ownership claims in any article; even the price is arranged
between buyer and seller and he is not the seller. An article owes its
existence to an infinite number of persons and its place in the market
to as many more.
[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen--Instinct of Workmanship, Chapter V.]
A worker's claim to the product of his labor is merged in an infinity
of claims which makes the product more nearly the property of society
than of any one individual. And this merging of claims which has
resulted in the submerging of all wage workers, has set up the new
educational task of discovering the possibilities for creative
experience in associated enterprise.
While an article manufactured under business conditions is the product
of enforced association, we have in this condition the mechanics of
a real association. As it now stands, the association is one of
individuals, with the impulse for association and for creative effort
left out. The interests of some ninety workers associated together in
the making of a shoe are not common but antagonistic, except as they
are common in their antagonism to the owner of the shoe on which they
work. They hang together because they must; their parting is the best
part of a working day.
And yet the practice of dividing up the fabrication of an article
among the members of a group instead of confining the making of it
to one or two people, opens up the possibility of extensive social
intercourse, and has the power, we may discover, to sublimate the
inordinate desire for the intensive satisfaction of personal life.
Although the division of labor has given us a society which is
abortive in its functioning like a machine with half assembled parts,
it offers us the mechanics for interdependence and the opportunity to
work out a coördinated industrial life.