lie in its complexity, or its delicate mechanical accuracy, but may be
traced straight to the door of our existing economic fallacies and
errors; to the overwork and underpay and general evil conditions based
on those errors.
Approach the blissful savage making his own canoe and hire him at a
minimum wage to make canoes for you all day and every day for the weary
years of a short, worn-out life; the fact that he made a whole thing
would not suffice to make him happy or develop that so desirable
globularity. If the riveter took the same interest in his steamer that
the savage did in his canoe, and worked no longer at his riveting than
the savage at his cutting and sewing, his fractional production of an
enormous common engine for common good would give him more pleasure than
the savage’s unitary production of a tiny private engine for private
good.
The natural conditions of social specialisation are these: In proportion
to the degree of specialisation the time of work should be shortened and
the interest of the worker extended.
It does not hurt the human mind—a strong, healthy, well-developed
mind—to make rivets for a little while.
“Ah, but,” you will reply, “if the riveter only worked a little while he
could not earn enough to live on.”
Here is where our economic fallacies come in. The man with the machine
can turn out as many rivets in an hour as the man working by hand could
in a day. Therefore his hour’s work is equal to what was a day’s work.
That is the value of machinery. It gives more wealth for less effort,
the maximum product with the minimum expense of nerve force and of time.
Every step of our elaborate mechanical specialisation should have
relieved the worker of more and more hours of labour and set that much
time and strength free for other use.
The infinite multiplication of wealth by machinery meets its own problem
of overspecialisation. Here are a hundred men, making cloth alone on a
hundred hand looms, and earning thereby a dollar a day each—one hundred
dollars. Here are these hundred men organised, specialised; ten of them
run machine looms, turning out cloth tenfold, equal to a thousand
dollars a day. Other ten, specialised, run the mill and its business;
twenty of them with machines earning ten times what the hundred did, or
forty of them working half a day each, or eighty of them working quarter
of a day.
The earning power of the man plus the machine is so enormously
multiplied that he is richly able to take the needed rest and variety of
exercise which will enable him to do his wearing work without injury,
and at the same time give society the benefit of the extreme
specialisation.
“But—but,” cries the offended reader, “the man does not own the machine!
he did own the loom. It takes capital to run a mill, and capital has to
be paid!”
The question of property rights comes in later, in Chapter XV. This is
all a question of men, of human beings, and how they best work together,
doing the most for Society with the least injury to themselves. This
chapter is not taking up the question of capital nor of property, but
simply seeking to show that specialisation, as such, need not injure the
worker, because the very nature of specialisation is to reduce man’s
work. Why we have also made it reduce man’s pay is not so easily
explained. That the greatest multiplier of wealth should impoverish the
producer surely indicates some defect in our methods.
Specialisation perfects and multiplies production, and reduces effort.
This inevitably increases wealth and leisure. If the wealth and leisure
are monopolised in one quarter and the contributory specialist is
sacrificed in the process, it does not prove the specialisation to be
wrong, but the distribution of result; and that we will take up in the
chapter on Distribution. Meanwhile the law of specialisation goes on and
gives us social servants more and more exquisitely adapted to some one
function. With normal economic conditions they would take full share in
the resultant social gain, and be quite free to combat the possible ill
effects of their position.
The shortening of hours allows of another quite simple and natural
effect. Where work is so broad and general as to require a whole man’s
whole working time, as of the teacher, artist, or large manager in any
industry, it is thereby so interesting that a man can give his whole
time to it without belittling effects. (“Whole working time” need not be
more than four to six hours, even at our stage of mechanical evolution.)
Where work is so narrow and fractional as not to interest a man for his
whole time, it is therefore so specialised that he need not give his
whole time to it.
The simple turning of a crank for an hour wearies the brain equal to
larger effort, but does not forbid that brain some other labour. If the
specialty is one of exquisite subtlety of particular skill, as with
those girls in the Treasury who test banknotes by touch, no other labour
should be entered upon which would tend to blur or weaken that skill,
only rest and recreation.
A properly educated human creature, in full touch with the whole great
working world, can support his or her own concentrated effort by virtue
of conscious connection with the whole, can see the ship in the rivet.
Well nourished socially, keenly alive to our gain, our progress, and to
the relative value of his own department of service and his own share in
it, not looking at the work as his, done for his pay, but as ours and
done for our benefit, the normal human being can not only sustain
extreme specialisation, but glory in it.
Our especial cruelty in this regard is that we condemn to exhausting
hours of extreme specialisation the very people least fitted to bear it,
the ill-nourished physically and socially, the uneducated, the dull and
dark of mind. Or, conversely, we deprive our extremely specialised
social servants of exactly those things by which alone they can sustain
the demands of that service.
A man with widespread, active social consciousness, in full contact and
exchange with all parts of the great body to which he belongs, will not
suffer from its concentrated and exclusive service, but will take glad
part in forming an “all-round” Society.
One would think that specialisation in labour ought to have forced upon
every observer long ages since the fact that human work is something
done for others. The shepherd and fisherman, first stage above savagery,
may live upon the fruit of their labours; and so, in part, may the
farmer, first stage of really civilised growth. They exchange the
surplus, but they do directly consume part of what passes through their
hands.
But the specialised workman, whether he carry a spade or a hod, swing an
axe or hold a lever, is so obviously doing it for thousands of unknown
other people that his position under the ego concept becomes
miraculously difficult. He holds it, though, and, what is perhaps even
more miraculous, so do we! So does the general consumer, whose life is
maintained by the service of thousands of fellow beings,—who is housed
by them, clothed by them, carried by them, guarded by them, taught by
them,—still have the incredible face to maintain that these people who
keep him alive are working for themselves!
Harder than steel must be the cell walls of the brain that can live in
such complex social relation as ours to-day and maintain that he or
anyone else “takes care of himself.” The error dates back in essence to
the ego concept; but it becomes a thousand-fold more erroneous when
first the machine, and then the use of “natural forces” applied to
machinery, made possible our vast increase in specialisation.
That one man must give his life to the art of weaving did not so narrow
his mental area, or so cut him off from appreciation of other branches
of human work, as this later development where a man wears out two sets
of oak planks in one spot, standing still all his life, making nails! It
seems “a far cry” from the fractional construction of nails to the
social consciousness, and yet, in the true order of industrial
development, it brings it nearer. The more extreme the specialisation
the more extreme the interdependence, and that universal interdependence
is the condition which calls for, and which develops, social
consciousness.
In the true order—but that order has been grievously interfered with by
our own mistakes. Acting under the ego concept, and the system of
competition which rests upon it, the increasing specialisation which is
so normal a condition of social growth has been made to carry increasing
evil consequences to the specialised worker. A just and rational
position on the part of Society! As fast as its members specialise in
compliance with the demands of social benefit, so fast does the
benefited society stunt and degrade its benefactors!
That there has been improvement in the rank and file of society is not
denied, but it is due to our partial and grudging distribution of the
social good along normal lines of public provision, such as free schools
and libraries, and not to our idiotic ideas of individual work and pay.
Where there is no such public provision our economic concepts act to
crush and degrade the worker. That increasing specialisation with its
mechanical adjuncts, which should make it possible for a man to
discharge his social obligations in an hour and then be free to
contribute to progress by larger growth, we have taken advantage of to
compel an amount and grade of labour alike ruinous to the individual in
his immediate sacrifice and to the society composed of such sacrificed
individuals. Men dying of thirst have been known to bite madly into
their own flesh and suck the blood, but for a prosperous, growing
society, rich, powerful, safe, intelligent, to make a steady diet of its
own meat, is unreasonable.
“The social sacrifice” is a very real and noble thing. It sometimes
requires the lives of some of its members to preserve the life of the
whole body. This sacrifice is always cheerfully made in war. It also
requires the surrender of individual freedom of action to that complex
interaction and unswerving duty which makes up the social service. But
this sacrifice is more than compensated by the advantages given the
individual in the life of the whole. A member of a big, complex society
has not only a far better and happier personal life than his freely
individual savage ancestor, but he has also share in the large,
glorious, common life of that society.
That is, he should have these things. As it is—owing to our antediluvian
errors—he has to make the sacrifice, and in return he is reduced to an
individual life far less gratifying than that of a healthy savage, yet
knows no more of the splendid social consciousness belonging to his
position than if he were that savage still.
There is one feature in social specialisation so prominent and so
important as to call for more detailed explanation. This is the relation
of what we call “unskilled labour” to social evolution. Our ideas of
justice in payment, of the necessary “cheapness” of certain low grades
of work, our patient tenderness or impatient contempt for this immense
class of humanity, rest on the assumption that human beings are widely
unequal in ability; that most of them are of this low and cheap order,
and that social progress lies in the advance of superior individuals,
assisted in a humble way by the inferior.
For these we must “furnish employment” of a simple character suited to
their powers, and pay them with a modesty equal to their other
limitations. Because there are so many of them, their competition for
the humble tasks allotted keeps the price of unskilled labour very low
indeed. Through organisation they have forced the price up a little, but
most of us consider this as unjustifiable in strict economic law.
If it is shown that low wages for low labour keeps that labour always
low, and indeed makes it lower; that out of the impoverished environment
we inevitably breed defectives and degenerates, diseases and crimes; and
that farther, because a hard and unfavourable environment promotes
fecundity, therefore this low rate of wages tends to increase the birth
rate of the lowest people, thus making a vicious circle of social
stagnation and deterioration—if these things are proved to us, we say it
cannot be helped—it is a condition of human nature. These inferior
people are the bulk of humanity; they cannot do high-grade labour; it
would not be fair to pay the plentiful “cheap labour” as much as the
scarce and therefore more expensive kind, so there you are! As a way of
escape from this position “the brotherhood of man” tries to uplift the
lowly, but the majority do not accept this brotherhood theory. Or they
say, “Brother or not, these are such hopelessly inferior brothers that
we will not consent to any levelling which would reduce us to their
grade, and they cannot be raised to ours.”
Now here is the true position. “Unskilled labour” is a product of social
evolution. Among savages there is no unskilled labour. Each man must be
skilled in several lines to keep himself alive. In his pre-social
condition of individualism, his life depending immediately upon his own
exertions, he necessarily develops skill in his essential activities. No
heavy-eyed, slow-witted, hod-carrying grade of efficiency could maintain
itself in a status of individual savagery. The “man with the hoe” comes
later—much later. He is produced, developed, maintained, by a highly
differentiated society. The nobleman evolves the serf—they are parts of
one fighting organisation. The mill-owner and his “hands” are part of
one working organisation.
The individual savage is swift, alert, vigorous, sentinelled by the
keenest of senses, served by prompt and varied abilities of many sorts.
But his action, though more perfect, is on a lower grade in industrial
evolution. He would not be capable, though under never so dreaded
penalties, of working, his life long, in one fractional line of social
service.
The more society develops the more widely differentiated become its
labours. In its differentiation there comes to be an immense proportion
of very simple things to do; simple because they are tiny parts of
something extremely complex. The savage’s life is anything but “simple.”
His elaborate and exciting monologue requires of him the whole gamut of
individual capacity in constant shock and change. But in the peace and
power of a great civilisation, in the organic spread of social
functions, there are more and more kinds of labour which are so
infinitely simplified that a dolt can do them.
It does not follow that a dolt must do them! It does not follow that we
should hunt out all our inferior persons to do these unelevating things,
and so remain inferior. It does not follow that we should keep the
inferior person so long at his unelevating task as to further lower his
inferiority; that we should pay him so little as to prevent any
development from outside advantages; or that, worst of all, we should so
condemn his children to their subminimum share of his “minimum wage” as
to make them lower yet.
In our ignorance of the nature of society, and the nature of work; in
our cheerful blindness to the lessons of history; with our poor choked
and twisted brains, so crammed with the follies of our ancestors, and so
weakened by what we have called education that they cannot _think_; we
have taken for granted that society had to have about so much “unskilled
labour” to provide for, and could only provide for it by “furnishing
employment” suited to its powers.
If we can once recognise the facts in the case, we will change our
behaviour fast enough. Observe the line of social growth. Here is a
nascent society of a vague group of savages, feebly held together by the
pressure of a common danger; feebly drawn together by the attraction of
a common need. So held and drawn the same forces which grouped the cells
and started the growth of physical organisms worked upon them, and they
began to differentiate in function.
Follow one line of work, such as the clothing of society. The individual
savage took a skin off another animal and put it on himself; that was
the beginning. It required in him, and in his squaw, the highly exciting
and agreeable exercise of the rudiments of many trades. He hunted,
fought, killed, and skinned the beast. She tanned and dressed, cut and
sewed, with elaborate decoration. All very interesting.
Now comes the evolution of that industry on inevitable lines. First, the
division of trades; one hunted, another tanned, another sewed, and so
on. Then, as society increased, as skill increased, as productivity
increased, as commerce increased, we find these trades increasing in
importance, in bulk, and in complexity; until now we have one garment
going through a thousand hands between the wool or cotton fibre, and the
wearer of the dress.
In this process, a perfectly healthy social process, the fractional
details of the work become extremely small and simple, and our
mechanical ingenuity has made them smaller and simpler yet; till no more
skill or judgment is required than a factory child or poor dull sweated
“garment worker” can apply.
In these familiar facts see the real principle involved. Social progress
has so differentiated labour as to make infinitely short, easy, and
simple to a thousand co-workers what was once long, difficult, and
complicated for one. These beneficently simple processes make possible
the use of “unskilled labour”; make it possible for society to maintain
in its service individual working capacity lower than that of a savage,
lower almost than the beast.
But here is our great error. Unskilled labour does _not_ require the
unskilled labourer. Unskilled labour can be performed equally well by
skilled labourers of the highest sort, as mere play, as rest from these
more exacting functions. In proportion to its simplicity and ease, its
extreme mechanical perfection of adjustment, is, or should be, the
saving of time involved.
Here is a world, all shod, at the expense of a large amount of
individual labour, every man making his own shoes. Here is a world, all
shod, at far less expense of labour, when the shoemaker gives his
specialised skill to the business. Here is the world, all shod, at
infinitely less expense of labour; when the shoe manufactory, with
specialised labour and machinery, produces a thousand-fold more swiftly
and easily; and a developed commerce distributes around the world. Now,
if the shoes of the world are made socially, with a thousandth part the
time and labour required to make them individually, how does it happen
that the makers of shoes are working harder and longer than ever? Save
indeed as the trades-union, in ceaseless and costly combat, has in some
degree shortened the time and raised the wages.
It is because of our familiar group of delusions in economics. It is
because we so wholly fail to see the organic nature of the process, and
what is really the line of social advantage in it. We see the heavy,
awkward, dirty, ignorant men digging in our streets, and say, “Poor
fellows! Such as they can do no other work! Stern nature has made them
inferior, and it is fortunate for them that there is this plain, simple
work, which they are able to do.”
What we do not see is that the plain, simple work is part of a highly
complex social process. Your nimble savage has no ditch to dig; no road
to build; no sewer to clean. This is social service; not of the lowest,
but of the highest. The more advanced the society, the more simplified
the minute subdivisions of its great and complex processes. Your nimble
savage does not have to do one thing, one fraction of a fraction of a
thing, for twelve hours a day—or ten—or even eight. If he did—if we
did—we who look over the fence at the rude gnomes who labour in the
trenches in our vivisected city to-day—we should become as they.
Unskilled labour is high social service, and social sacrifice. It is not
so interesting and developing to the individual as the activities of
savagery, but it is more essential to the country’s good, to the power
and peace of the world. This noble service could be rendered without its
present awful penalty. I do not speak of its low wages, but of its heavy
punishment.
Here is work done for the service of humanity; not for any low and
primitive service either, but to maintain our highest social grade of
development. This work, subtle, elaborate, important, only simple in its
extreme subdivision, we have chosen in our ignorance to consider “low.”
The people who do it we first compelled by force; we now compel on pain
of starvation; they are “low” too, and cannot help themselves.
When we understand the real grades of labour, we shall see this to be of
the highest, and as such, to have its limits and dangers. Such highly
specialised work cannot be followed for long hours, that is a cruel
injury; and never needs to be followed for long hours, because the very
law of its development is the saving of time and energy. Society, as a
whole, loses the major part of the advantage of its specialised
development, by ruthlessly degrading and defrauding the very functionary
through whom that development is attained.
XII: PRODUCTION
_Summary_
_Work is production and distribution. Joy of production. Transmission
again. Pleasure in expression more than impression. Social stimulus.
Arrested distribution. Increase in production. Shoes. Collective pride.
“Owned” machinery. Effect of false concepts. George Eliot’s
“Stradivarius.” Art recognised as world-service. The “Pot-boiler.”
“Saving” and “serving” one’s country. Traitor and coward. Line of
evolution in a productive industry. Effect of errors. “Duty to
employer,” etc. Payment not the right incentive. Reactive effect of
production. “Greeking.” Effect of great work on society. Physical
heredity, social heredity and transmission. Bicycle. Benefit of making,
of using. We “exhaust the soil” of humanity by denying it right use of
its product. Want theory. Degraded press. Object of production. False
production. Individual is society—feels and represents it. Social
consciousness mistaken for self-consciousness. “Self-expression” and
social service. “The songs of a people.” Position of the artist.
Expression is also transmission. “Poor Jones!” Art a social function.
Depravity in highly specialised function. The presumptuous eye. Art for
humanity’s sake._
XII
PRODUCTION
Work is in two main lines, Production and Distribution; to make
something, or to hand it about, is human industry.
To create is an intense satisfaction; to combine elements and produce
new results, whether it be a bridge, a basket, or a loaf of bread—to
make is in itself a joy. But so is it a joy to give something to
somebody, whether at first-hand, or in a combination with many; to
spread, to disseminate, to feel the current of human good flow through
you; both functions are happy.
The universe is an everlasting production, force taking form, energy
embodied, disembodied, re-embodied—this is the game of living. Our
little mid-station of consciousness feels the pressure of natural forces
on both sides, pushing in through the sensory nerves; pushing out
through the motor nerves. Owing to our early mistake about the superior
pleasure of impression, and our perverse insistence that expression is
only a guarded outlay of limited force, by which to secure desired
impressions, we have never understood the nature of human production.
The pleasure of right impression is not to be denied. Every sensory
nerve should have its proper stimulus. And man, with his immense
collective sensorium, with his highly developed personal sensations, due
to social evolution, and his power of feeling with and for other people,
has enormous capacity for the reception of pleasure. But what is all
this pleasurable stimulus for? The brain is not merely a reservoir for
stored sensation. A sensation is a certain amount of energy going into
the human battery. Once in, it must be discharged in commensurate
activity.