Part 15
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.
Most interesting experiments in psychology are being made to-day, proving this, even in some immediate result of a strong mental impression in unconscious bodily motion; as shown in studies among school children. As the brain develops it has increasing capacity to receive impressions, to retain and to arrange impressions; but nevertheless sometime that mass of impressions must come out in commensurate action, else disease ensues. The human brain, socially developed, and socially stimulated, has great power of expression; that expression is in work, and work is in Production and Distribution. The productivity of the human race, even with its past and present checks and perversions, is the wonder of the ages. Guaranteed the swift and easy satisfaction of those “wants” our economists build so much on, the steady increase of impressed energy has resulted in as steady an increase of expressed energy, necessarily.
Man receives stimulus from a thousand sources. Since we made mental impressions permanent and exchangeable “in book form,” knowledge and emotion bottled, preserved, and distributed broadcast; there is practically no limit to human stimuli; and, since with this increasing stimulus we have steadily reduced the difficulties of execution, our real problem is, how to provide right outlets for the productive energy of humanity. This normal increase of power and execution we have managed to check, however, quite materially. We have gravely interfered with the natural distribution of stimulus up to the present time; but now our rapid multiplication of free school and free library, with similar tendencies in other educational and recreative lines, is producing its natural result in increased energy.
Even with what stimulus was open to us, our production should have been very great; but we have interfered with that also, in more ways than one. The principal obstacle here is the basic error of the Want theory. Holding that man works only to satisfy desire,—_i. e._, produces merely to consume,—we prostitute our share of the social energy to a factitious personal advantage; and try to govern the productive processes of society by the dictates of self-interest. Here you have a factory in which a hundred men turn out ten hundred pairs of shoes a day. What for? Why, for the feet of ten hundred people, of course—to shoe the world. “Not so,” they protest. “We are making these shoes for ourselves.” “But you cannot wear ten pairs of shoes a day, my man!” “No, but I only do this work for the pay—and I can easily consume the pay for ten pair of shoes a day.”
This poor man never understands his position as a social functionary with all its honour and pleasure. The Ego concept and the Want theory becloud his mind. Even his personal pride in his personal work has lowered since the machine made his work collective, and his mind failed to keep pace with the machine, and make his joy and pride collective too. His pleasure is only in what he gets back from society in return for his labours, and he gets very little. As part of this same ancient misconception of what work is, we find the incredibly multiplied machinery of production “owned” by individuals; and manipulated by them under the same befogging ideas that lead the workman to “limit his output.”
Never were any of the gross and childish superstitions of remotest savagery more injurious—or more ridiculous—than these rudimentary errors under which our economic development so blindly labours. We have our alleged “overproduction” on the one hand—though a full supply of the good things of life is obtained by scarce one-tenth of the population of the world; and we have the ensuing and even more colossal absurdity of the restricted output—whether of the man who stints his day’s labour, or the group of financiers who “corner” some social product, and say how much the world shall have.
These muddy follies of our common mind—for if we did not all, or nearly all, believe in these principles of action, we would not for a moment allow such economic treason and misrule—together with allied fallacies of a similar nature, most seriously interfere with production. Nevertheless, as the laws of nature are somewhat stronger than our evanescent misconceptions, we do see the tremendous increase in our productivity; and, in favoured instances, its grandeur and delight. As good an expression of this feeling as I know in literature is in George Eliot’s poem of “Stradivarius.”
Here is a man, developing an extremely specialised line of production, and clear of brain enough to see the joy and dignity of it.
“Antonio Stradivari has an eye That winces at false work and loves the true, With hand and arm that play upon the tool, As willingly as any singing bird Sets him to sing his morning roundelay Because he likes to sing and likes the song.”
Our best known instances of normal or nearly normal production are found in art and science. Here you have a product which the world recognises as its own—not that of the individual maker. “He has given to the world” such and such a picture, or statue; discovery in science or composition in music; to this world-service we give some, though an imperfect, honour; and we pity and even blame the man who “prostitutes his art” to the level of “the pot-boiler.” Art is world-service, truly, but so is manufacture or commerce. A man should no more prostitute his “trade” than his “art.” It is as base to make a “pot-boiler” of your day’s work as of a book or a picture. No soldier is more actually “serving his country” in his occasional fighting, than is the workman in his continual working. One’s country sometimes has to be “saved” in sudden emergency, at considerable cost of immediate exertion and sacrifice; but one’s country has to be kept alive all the time, at considerable cost of unceasing labour and some sacrifice too. Our patriotism, which rushes madly forward to “save the country” when it is in visible danger, and, having saved it, proceeds to exploit it for personal advantage all the rest of the time, is on a par with love for one’s family, which would risk life to “save” it, from flood, or fire, or injurious attack, and then mercilessly cheat it, starve it, keep it cold and dirty and ignorant and sick and vicious—when not “in danger.” The danger to our country from our general neglect and misuse, and our frequent positive injury, is far greater than that of occasional war. We need a patriotism that will operate all the time.
The human worker, whether a captain of industry or in the ranks, who puts his personal safety and advantage before that of his country is exactly the same traitor and coward that the officer or private in the army would be who did the same thing. He does not know it, we do not know it, therefore no odium attaches to these public offenders. But the mischief they do is apparent in every branch of our economic processes.
We have seen that human production is checked in amount by our lack of knowledge. It is injured in kind from the same cause. Normal production has an evolution of its own. Follow the development of any one trade, and you will see as natural a growth as in a physical organ, marred of course by our errors, but there under all. Take the building trades as an example. At the beginning we find primitive man enlarging a cave somewhat, or, lacking that retreat, putting up some shelter of boughs to screen him from the wind and rain, or spreading a hide for the same purpose. The act, repeated, develops skill, and the mind, dwelling over and over on the same problem, develops too, and sees better ways of accomplishment. The shelter of hide becomes the teepee or wigwam, and, cloth superseding leather, the tent in all its forms; but its growth is limited by mechanical conditions. The shelter of boughs is more open to improvement; and evolves slowly into hut, cabin, house. The materials used depending on the environment, the Eskimo builds of ice, the Chaldean of clay, and, slowly, by proof of superiority, stone was used wherever found. The principle of specialisation acting steadily upon this widening current of functional ability, we have now that group of allied trades required to construct for modern man the material form in which he lives and works—without which he cannot live and work.
A genealogical tree could be made, showing just where each branch diverged, the workers in wood, clay, and stone dividing early; the gradual appearance of the system of pipes and conduits which vitalise a house; the development of windows in all forms, of doors and their particular line of improvement, of interior finish, from daubed mud to artistic decoration; and so on and so on, until we have now the house which stands knit to the city by waste pipe, water pipe, gas pipe, and electric wire; a house which represents the slow fruition of a thousand centuries, the contributed intelligence and skill of a million men. The evolution of this “social form” is as natural and orderly as the evolution of any physical form. To the men through whom it grew the whole course should have been a pleasure and a pride, and in large measure it has been, in spite of all our misbeliefs.
To feel within one’s self the tendency toward a certain line of production, to “learn the trade,” _i. e._, submit the brain to the accumulated stimulus of that line of production—to feel the racial skill begin to flow through one’s fingers—to do the thing well—better—best!—and then, still unsatisfied, to relieve the pressure by new invention of ways even better than the best—that is the _natural_ sensation of the producer. Against this have operated at every step the weight and darkness of our leaden lies. The child is not so watched and trained as to develop the fine sense of special “calling” which shows the best path in life. Only the extreme case, the boy who _would_ be a sailor, or a mechanic, or whatever he was meant to be, has the advantage of being where he belongs in the world’s work. But the average boy, with no special aptitude or pleasure in his trade, is put to work under the dominant idea, drilled in from infancy, that he is to work only because he has to—he has to in order to get the pay. The whole outlook of his position is lost. He has his head in a bag. All he sees is the week’s wage, and the work is merely to be gotten through in order to get the wage.
We have known all along that this was a wrong attitude, and have tried to inculcate upon the worker a sense of “the nobility of labour,” of “duty to his employer,” of the “common interest of capital and labour.”
It does not ennoble the labourer to enlarge his selfishness to the size of his employer’s. The employer is in exactly the same boat. He has no more sense of what his work is for than the “hand” has. He too is looking only at his wages,—salary, income, profits, rent,—looking only at what he is _to get_ from society, instead of what he is to do for it. The common interest of employer and employee, which is merely an interest in their common income, does not lift the cloud from labour. No interest is large enough to satisfy the human mind, except the social interest; the thrilling glory of working with and for the whole world at the trade you love best, and can do best.
The workman should have such education as shall give him for a background the full knowledge of social evolution; and the special place of his own trade in that evolution. He should know just where it first appeared, how it grew, and why, the importance of its place to-day—and here there would, no doubt, be warm differences of opinion, debates and competition. The payment for his service should no more be the point of ambition with the workman, than with the pen-man, paint-man, or rifleman. The producer is entitled to feel the full power and pride of production; and, in spite of our errors, this power and pride is felt by the well-placed workman, whose life is better than his belief—as human life always is.
One of the most important features of this great social function is the reactive effect on the functionary. The maker is inexorably modified by the thing made. If the thing made develops along normal lines, the maker develops with it. If it does not—if it is checked or perverted in its growth, so is the worker. Working is humanity’s growing. In the act of working the individual is modified, and by the work accomplished humanity is modified. Also the accomplished work remains, like coral, the record of the height of those who did it.
In the case of those who do not work, who consume copiously, and produce nothing, they have no chance of normal development, add no step to human progress. See in conspicuous instance the Grecian marbles and literature. Those who gave the work were themselves developed by doing it; the society which received the work was developed by using it; and by the work as it remains to us, we know and judge Greece. But the possession of these works does not make us Greeks. To be able to do them was to be Greek. Many causes combined to make the Greek; and the Greek blossomed into that kind of work—he was, so to speak, merely Greeking in the doing of it. We have the result as we have fossil bones. From it we may learn what the Greek was, but not how to make him.
A person, or a race, is something, owing to antecedent conditions. Then they _do_ something by virtue of being what they are, as an apple tree bears apples. (“By their fruits ye shall know them.”)
The thing done does have some reactive effect, however—else we should have no power to modify each other, and this is one of humanity’s chief advantages. The modifying effect of the work accomplished is indeed large, it is no wonder we so long to create the things whereby we can thus progressively serve each other. See, for instance, the endless effect upon society of such work as Plato’s, Angelo’s, Stevenson’s, Edison’s; all work counts in both ways; in the doing it affects the doer; when done it affects the user.
But it is more blessed to give than to receive. In animals the modification of species is effected only in the direct line of heredity. A change of condition modifies his action—the change in action modifies him—and the modification is transmitted in his single line. But there is no means of widening the effect—it has to be filtered down through direct heredity. With man, in his organic connection, there is a race modification through our transmission of energy in work, which multiplies his progress million-fold. Some local change of condition modifies the action of one person, the change in action modifies him, and the modification is transmitted in his single line. Thus far we are even with the animals. Then we pass them; man’s action is work; it is not mere putting something in his mouth; it is making something. And the thing made holds and transmits his energy, passing it on forever to all who use it, making the growth of one the growth of all.
One man, or some few men, make a steam engine. They personally are by so much developed as makers, and their children after them. That is so much gain. But if we had waited for our inventors to modify the race through physical heredity, we should be still in the Bronze Age. The engine, being made, becomes part of the social structure, and proceeds to modify the society it serves.
The bicycle is perhaps a better instance. The effect of the making is not materially different from the effect of making watches. But the thing made has modified society by the reactive effects of its use. It has modified the dress, the activity, and so the physique and character of women, to their great improvement. It has modified roads—to the great material benefit of the regions affected. It has modified inn-keeping, livery-stabling, tailoring, the relative distance of residence—the effects of the bicycle on society are great, even upon the most superficial survey. But this is no reason why the maker of bicycles should be a better man than the maker of chronometers, or that either of them should be paid more than the maker of pianos, or less than the maker of poems.
The first effect of work, its result, return, or payment, is to the maker in the quality and quantity of his effort. No one can measure his pay or deny it. The second is to the user in the fulness of his use. This, alas! can be measured and denied, and has been, to our racial injury. No tyranny was ever able to prevent the steady development of man through the work he did. If he laboured faithfully and generously, he grew in the outputting of his strength, and his growth ultimately overthrew the tyranny. But tyranny of various sorts has withheld from the workers the reactive benefits of using the product of their work; and so hindered race development.