The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts 9780231894586

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THE I N D U S T R I A L

DISCIPLINE

AND T H E G O V E R N M E N T A L ARTS

H A P P Y IS T H A T

PEOPLE, AND

PROUD M A Y T H E Y

WHO CAN ENLARGE T H E I R FRANCHISES AND THEIR

POLITICAL

FORMS

WITHOUT

BE,

PERFECT

BLOODSHED

OR

T H R E A T OF V I O L E N C E , T H E LONG D E B A T E OF R E A S O N R E S U L T I N G I N T H E GLAD CONSENT OF A L L . FRANCIS AMASA W A L K E R , POLITICAL

ECONOMY,

c^s 1888

THE

INDUSTRIAL DISCIPLINE AND T H E

GOVERNMENTAL ARTS BY

REXFORD PROFESSOR COLUMBIA

NEW

Y O R K

COLUMBIA

G. OF

TUGWELL ECONOMICS

UNIVERSITY

M • CM • XXXIII

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

COPYRIGHT I 9 3 3 COLUMBIA U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

PUBLISHED MAY 9, 1933 REPRINTED MAY \~j, I 9 3 3

P R I N T E D IN T H E U N I T E D STATES OF

AMERICA

WAVERLY PRESS, INC., BALTIMORE,

MD.

CONTENTS A NOTE IN BEGINNING, I I. AN INDUSTRIALIZED SOCIETY, 9 II. T H E CHANGING M A N N E R OF W O R K , 3 5 I I I . AIDS TO N E W WAYS OF W O R K , 6 5 IV. T H E R U L E

OF E M P L O Y M E N T , 8 9

V. T H E S T R U C T U R E S OF I N D U S T R Y ,

II7

VI. SHIFTING CONFLICTS IN INDUSTRIAL OPERATION, VII. T H E PROCESSES OF T H E M A R K E T , VIII.

167

GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY, 1 8 7 A NOTE IN CONCLUSION, 2 2 1 INDEX,

23I

I39

A N O T E IN B E G I N N I N G

as a whole, are always given credit for being bright and active. Observers frequently say, however, that our activity would count for more, that both qualitatively and quantitatively the results would be better, if we had a clearer idea of what it is all about. They make the admission of our qualities, but they have this reservation. There is something in our air which is the enemy of leisurely ways; but this stimulating force seems to extend infrequently to asking ourselves disturbing questions, Great things will come of our activity, no doubt, in the end. But perhaps there is this need to examine more closely the quality of work and to ask more insistently what it is we get for product. We live in a world whose experiences might be incomparably rich; but half the values are lost because we do not know what experience means. This is true alike of our work and of our goods. The use of enervating goods or the overuse of others goes a long way to spoil consuming lives which might be wealthy; and our work is made a dreadful ordeal through not asking obvious questions about its possible betterment and forcing changes in practical directions. The sources of our values are made sterile by a lack of philosophy. In Russia, on a recent occasion, I was made to feel very humble as an American. A peasant was considering, in his serene and ruminative way, the answer I had just made to a question of his. I t had to do with tractors and automobiles on American farms, and I had not succeeded in restraining the impulse to point out, teacher-like, that, with different technical practices, his land might be made to buy such things for him. H e chewed at the notion, gazing about at the thousands of acres of communal pasturage »IERICANS,

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and rye-land to be seen from the slope on which we stood. The dun thatches of the village lay over across a stream; the hard northern sunlight slanted on the green and rust of August farm country. His wife and five sons worked in the field next. "Yes," he said, "we work hard—and long. We get little for it. But my father did it, and his father. It has always been so." And it was obvious that he had in mind the abstract goodness of this continuity, that he intended to voice an utter consent to the established rhythms of existence. I suppose there are all sorts of sophisticated arguments to show the fallacy involved in this. And yet I suddenly had a sense of settled and fruitfully rooted relationships, of emotions deeply embedded in the working routine, of a long consecration to custom. And I thought his withdrawal was justified—that he had cause to suspect we were bearing doubtful gifts. N o t but that he will succumb, when the time comes, as we Americans have, and as other Russians have, but that there will be losses, which we too infrequently consider, to be charged over against the gains; and there will be a time, such as we are now in, when the old will have disappeared and the new will be dust in expectant mouths. For the loyalty to work will not change; the need of faith in custom will remain; the wish for rootedness will ache. But there will be nothing to trust, to cling to, and nothing with religion in it. The workers will be disestablished; suffered to remain on good behavior, but subjected to another autocracy than that of nature, with whom at least a tolerable bargain had been struck. A few years ago, in a little book called Product and Climax, Patten centered on two weaknesses in our industrial institutions which seemed to him vital. At the beginning there is a memorable description of a town which it was his habit to visit periodically. I t was a smallish New England textile center, in which there could be seen, reduced

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to little, patterns with a wide significance. Work was unmotivated, he concluded, as work. Neglect of the possibilities in it had made it so. To engage in it was to sell one's birthright. Looms, spindles, wheels; dust, noise, darkness—and for what payment? He was led to examine the climaxes of consumption to discover, if he could, whether the pay was adequate for a sacrifice so great. The answer seemed to him obvious, then, as he looked about the cheap-Jack town which had overlaid the old, solid New England village. There was blaring upon the street of a summer evening; there were glaring lights; there was noise and motion. But there were no values which a free people would have recognized; there was no beauty which was not a travesty of taste; there were no satisfactions beyond the ones in which degradation lay wholly exposed. It was —and it is—cheap bribery. Its acceptance is softened only by accustomedness. Time is helping very little. The growth of our surplus multiplies the bribes but does not change their character. Industry itself is rolling forward of its own weight. As its trends develop and reveal themselves, we bring our social forms and our individual customs slowly into alignment with the conditions which it sets. There are some changes in the kinds of work; there are others in the kinds of product. We now accept these passively as workers and as consumers. But it is surely thinkable that under the right pressures and controls both might be shaped toward the provision of a normally climactic life. Submission cannot make a workers' world. T h a t , if we are to have it, must be won through a long, arduous, carefully planned, well disciplined effort of construction; and American workers have hardly begun to think of that, much less to move actually into the strategic situations of control. Trade unionism has been, traditionally, with us a submissive doctrine, one which accepts the domination of the business

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man and the incentive of profit-making. It has asked nothing but larger bribes for greater degradation. There are signs of change; but they are few and scattered. N o one can see as yet the sources of regenerative life. N o t only when one is abroad do such doubts assail the mind; they are not to be escaped at home. Patten is not the only American thinker who has doubted the quality of our culture; our literature and our philosophy are almost wholly doubts. We have our successes; but the business men are mistaken if they expect only praise for what achievement they can record. The unkind and the disillusioned are beginning to do more than doubt; they accuse. They inquire whether we have not paid too much for all we have got; whether, indeed, the job has been well done which has been so highly paid. Later on I illustrate a point by reference to the creative work of children in a kindergarten. Most of us have seen or heard of the new education. But what becomes of the admirable and universally acknowledged theory when childhood days are over? Have we seriously thought of making a world in which educated and free men and women can function as they have learned to do in modern schools? Does anyone imagine for an instant that such education and our customary factory work belong in the same world together? Perhaps in time one will eat the other up. Meanwhile it is strange to think of their existing side by side. The kind of work we do is not the kind which thinking about work could ever have invented or even have allowed to persist. It shows, in fact, that we never yet have thought very much about it. Yet it is here. T o an extent, it is what we have to go on with. But the going-on must take place; creating a worker's world will not involve a return to any system which ever before existed. The beginning of thought concerning values, which can hardly as yet be said to have begun among American

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workers, will, when it does begin in earnest, give us something new and very different. I believe, myself, that we are within a stone's throw of the end of labor—as labor, not as willing and cooperative activity. We know how to make machines do nearly everything. Only defective social mechanisms prevent the consummation of the trend toward the abolition of employment. I t is not strange that this should not have developed rapidly; it requires intricate and difficult human manipulation. Moreover, most of us prefer to think about immediate problems; and we have a shrewd distrust of those who set themselves up as social scientists. T h e democratizing of social science is no less necessary than the democratizing of industry. After we have gone some distance in this direction the solemn pretensions to expertness among our single-hearted profitmakers are likely to impose on fewer of us. W i t h the business man's monopoly broken, the way will lie open for reconstructive action. Meantime one can at least enter a protest. He can also describe, as he sees them, the forces and currents of the present, which must be taken account of in any case—no matter what it is we want to do. H e may even be allowed, perhaps, to speculate, on somewhat slender evidence, concerning the contours of the future.

CHAPTER

I

AN I N D U S T R I A L I Z E D

SOCIETY

e-+S

I . ASSOCIATION FOR DOING

1. THE ART OF GROUP MANAGEMENT

c+s

C-K9

3- THE PROCESS OF MECHANIZATION 4 . SOCIALIZED INDUSTRY OR INDUSTRIALIZED SOCIETY

T

HE fluidity of change in society has always been the despair of theorists. They are driven to try for definition, for classifying and naming, for seizing on what is significant. And no material could be less amenable to this than are the functioning groups of mankind. The reason is, obviously, that they do function, and that the literary process is too slow—not to say inaccurate—ever to capture a strictly contemporary cross section, much less to prophesy future groupings or activities. It is because of these difficulties and because we have a genuine desire for self-knowledge that we have been driven to some rather doubtful extremes from time to time. These extremes lie at either end of an imaginary arc of procedure. One is represented by the use of very nearly undiluted intuition, though it may be salted here and there by a fact or two. The other is best known as the "quantitative method," because it believes only in measured units and refuses to talk about things which cannot be defined in this way. To a disinterested or moderate person who had judged these alternate procedures by their results, each might seem to need something from the other. The intuitive method is legitimately open only to genius and is usually suspect because the arrival at conclusions cannot make its antecedents known. There is always a certain desire to persuade less agile minds, also, which leads to a kind of specious logic of induction. Sooner or later the hollowness of this is detected; and the conclusion—which may be valuable—is thrown out with the antecedent reasoning. The quantitative method, on the other hand, is apt to cling so desperately to the known and measurable that what is necessary to be done in a going world is not

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touched by its conclusions. For we are continually forced to decisions and actions in m a t t e r s which involve numerous immeasurables. I t is w h a t help we can get in formulating policy t h a t we w a n t . Ordinarily we m u s t trust a good deal to the j u d g m e n t of the gifted and the experienced, whether or not a monograph in substantiation can be adduced. B u t we are also asking more and more t h a t the basis of decision shall be made clear in q u a n t i t a t i v e terms. A demand has in this way been created for numerous facts which we have hitherto neglected to gather and test. Our social information is constantly being enlarged, which makes possible better policy. B u t , at best, there is always a considerable area in which action must go on and in which we are ignor a n t of material which ought to enter into j u d g m e n t . T h e field of industry in which we are most ignorant is t h a t which has to do with the interrelations of functioning groups. We have m a d e considerable progress in the analysis of each step in the productive process taken by itself; b u t we are far from fully informed on the frontier. This is a place where i m p o r t a n t consequences flow from whatever decisions are taken; b u t it remains almost wholly within the control of those who act by intuition. We have liked to fancy t h a t our business men act to f u r t h e r a self-interest which also favors the rest of us. We have somewhat easily assumed t h a t this self-interest would be an enlightened one. I t m a y be the reverse. And we have likewise assumed certain benefits to the rest of us which m a y or m a y not accrue. I t is u n f o r t u n a t e t h a t we have so few q u a n t i t a t i v e evidences one way or the other: a fog of controversy now blankets an area where we desperately need to know something. I t seems inevitable, almost, t h a t m a n y of these questions of policy should remain unanswered by q u a n t i t a t i v e intimations of w h a t is best to be done. For the stuff which

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is dealt with here is the fluid stuff of social life. I t moves in every dimension, never resting. The influences which impinge upon it cannot be forecast, because they flow from an unguessed quantity of possible combinations. Results seem disproportionate to what we judge to be causes; influences suddenly loom large from nowhere, like thunderclouds in an August sky. Activity clusters about this, that, or the other function, creating for the time a more or less definite grouping which we think we can define, only to have it suddenly fade for unsuspected causes. Yet certain clusters of activity do persist. We always do have to provide ourselves with goods and we always do use them. And the ways of functioning for these ends are roughly describable, though they may be very difficult to reduce to measured reference. Certain individuals spend part of their time together making shoes; certain others live in the same neighborhood; certain persons cooperate in a factory or an office; certain others work a freight train up and down its tracks. Yet what is a social group? No one has ever said acceptably what it is. Is it a group of people having a like interest in some result? Is it people with a common problem to work out? Is it people who believe or think alike about something? Is it people who live, work, or amuse themselves together? The reader may take his choice among these or other alternatives. All of them have been suggested as a basis for definition. 1. Association for doing If we analyzed this concept of "group" far enough, we should probably have to stop talking about it altogether, since it would have lost all coherent meaning. We should perhaps be driven to saying that a group is a number of individuals who are acting together, doing something in common. Perhaps it can only be defined as a number of individuals behaving together. But think of the varieties

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of behavior of distinctly different kinds which each of us exhibits in a normal day. In each of a dozen or twenty w a y s we act with others. D o we " b e l o n g " to each of these groups ? D o we belong to those who buy at the stores from which we buy, who ride or walk as we do in some fashion from place to place, who play games or find amusement alongside us? Certainly we feel no great common interest with the strange theatergoer beside us, or with the other customers served by the milkman who serves us. A n d we cannot be counted on to respond very actively to appeals to such common interests as these. I t is mostly as an intellectual construct, apparently, that groups can be said to exist at all. Y e t there are times when these ordinarily casual associations come alive as though charged suddenly with emotional content. We are enraged, along with other consumers, at a high rate for electricity or a high price for bread; we willingly strike with fellow workmen against some employer's action; we join actively in war against a foreign nation, risking our lives for something which we never knew existed until a week or two before—a sense of patriotism. Is it true, then, that an association of people becomes a group only when a common action is willingly and cooperatively undertaken? This, at least at present, is the best attempt we can make at definition. Definition in this w a y makes the task of the social theorist more real, but also more difficult. F o r the purpose of defining is to simplify so that what is essential m a y be grasped. Apparently the activity of human beings cannot be approached primarily from its group side. Anatomy and continuity belong to the individual; no group has them. A n individual has a history which begins and ends somewhere; he has a set of nerves and bones and muscles which are real. B y comparison, any group is evanescent, unreal, poor material for analysis. What-

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ever is done on this globe is done by individuals acting each separately but joining effort here, there, or elsewhere with other individuals. One may be alive to the fact that he is joining with others, as when he plays a game; he may not be sensible of it, as when he buys the goods he consumes. When he and the others joined with him appreciate these mutual relations and interests, there is more coherence in the action which results. The appreciation of mutuality is something which belongs to the individual, even though it may result in group action or be subject to common stimulation. This is highly important, but we tend to forget it—important because it means that each individual has to give something to the association in order to create of it a group which functions. If he withholds it, coherent action is impossible. No adequate theory of group control has ever been worked out; but there are many examples which might be studied with profit. Those who have most success at controlling are those who appeal most to the common responses of individuals; and this leads, curiously enough, to the frequent eliciting of group action by appealing to individual interest. We will each of us get further, the demagogue says, in effect, if we all act together. It was some perception of these things which lay behind the nineteenth-century notion of universal free competition leading to universal good, each man's self-interest persuading him to cooperate with others. The grasping of this notion that groups are what they do, that group action is most easily induced by showing that there exists in it an individual reward for each of us, was a sound intellectual feat. I t was not so sound a one which jumped from this to the conclusion that the results of free group action would always be the best results obtainable. Demagogues will be demagogues, and they will not infrequently lead groups astray. It is a talent they

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possess, not a science—merely a knack for persuading people to act in common in the only w a y the demagogues w a n t them to act. T h e usual demagogue is, indeed, not ordinarily one who is gifted in other w a y s ; he is not usually w h a t would be called a reflective person; he is not infrequently most interested in feathering his own nest or exhibiting his own ego, and neither of these characteristics makes him a desirable leader. Groups are, one might say, associated b y circumstance; they are given life, however, b y the arts of leadership. Circumstance, as the word is used in this sense, hides a multitude of convergent forces, it is true; but we cannot be more accurate than this in most cases. Indeed we do not know that a group is a group until it comes alive and acts. If a social action happens, we j u d g e that there existed a group to act. I t is the only w a y we have of knowing, since circumstantial association frequently turns out to have been merely an agglomeration of individuals and not something which can be made to act. i.

The art oj group

management

Throughout the history of industry, the arts of demagoguery applied here and there have persuaded one and another association to act in common ways. B u t a comprehensive view of what has happened leads to the conclusion that not only active and willing cooperation for common ends takes place, but that also forced and unwilling cooperation m a y be set in motion. Fear m a y be substituted for hope. Indeed industry, as contrasted with most other kinds of group endeavor, seems to have leaned more heavily on fear than on any other motive. Apparently there m a y be degrees in the manifestation of group action; there is such a phenomenon as morale. A n d if experience goes for anything, one would certainly j u d g e that it is an inferior, grudging, dead-alive sort of cooperation which is elicited by f e a r — t h e fear of losing a j o b , of a reduction of

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wages, of poverty in old age. But the motive which is appealed to does not change the end sought; whether we are persuaded to produce, still, through a set of fears, or whether there are held out to us a set of hopes, only makes a difference in the efficiency in operation of the group; it does not make the result of the cooperation more or less desirable. This brings us to see that the variety of arts used in group management evidently requires that we should distinguish between the motivation of a group to act for a common end and the securing that the end shall be a desirable one. The importance of this is not at once apparent; it becomes so only when we question whether the whole art of demagoguery cannot be moved to a different plane. Is it possible that, instead of appealing to sets of emotions of an immediate and piecemeal sort, the problem of motivation might be resolved by fixing in each individual mind a rationale of ends to be tried for, and of the means available? For if this cannot be done, it seems very little use to hope that group action will ever become coherent and cooperative in a larger, a genuinely social, sense; and that we may escape from the dangers inherent in the muddy perceptions of the ballyhoo artists who now assume to manage most of our life outside the economic sphere, and of self-protecting penny-shavers who often operate within that sphere. Can we conceive a rationale toward which we might work, confident that each of us will be justly served as we work for the whole, and can we thus sink our minor hopes and fears, our petty differences, in a conquest grand enough to kindle the feeblest imagination among us all? This obviously rhetorical question comes nearest to being answered by a realistic interpreting of contemporary arrangements. Under our characteristic conventions we appear to prefer just that which it seems impossible that we should prefer. Yet perhaps that is because of a curable sickness. When one thinks of

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the march of education, of the rising standards of life, of the increase of leisure, he must wonder whether they can continue to persist among such a people as must result from the contemporary low arts of quackish persuasion and the even lower forms of brutal pressure. Will submission continue, and how long? People have been submitting to persuasion and producing goods under a system which had, as its central philosophical tenet, a determination that each group should be free to function. This doctrine originated abroad, but found a congenial atmosphere here; and we have gone further and have been, on the whole, more orthodox than any other people. Because we have gone further, it has been argued that our orthodoxy is responsible. Persons in high places have said so and have acted as though they believed it. I t is the belief of some others that a full list of the causes for American progress would not include this clinging to orthodoxy as a factor—that this has been and is, rather, a serious hindrance. However this may be, we have clung to orthodoxy. It is one of the rules we live by that we should not work to plan, that we should compel no group to act. As to compulsion or false persuasion within the group, that is another thing. We may use pressure or persuasion of any sort with individuals to get them to acting in common, but we must not do this with groups to compel or persuade a higher cooperation for a national purpose. It may seem strange, but that is how it is. Since we have no way of keeping a balance among the groups which function in our economy, there are created many problems. A constant disharmony of purpose is apparent and, what is almost as bad, a constant contest of strength among them. And the result of possessing no agreed rationale, from which control might emerge to create harmony and to balance strength, is that there is a constant titanic struggle. It is not a struggle about what

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our purpose is to be, for we are not to have one; nor about whether we shall achieve harmony among groups, for we are to remain in conflict. I t is all about who is to boss the whole business and to get all the profit. You may say that whoever is boss and gets the profit will have as his first task the reduction of the whole machine to harmony, balance, cooperation, and as his next, the creation of morale by defining the giant task we are all working at. But there you would be mistaken, for the theory is that the single industrial purpose of the government shall be to prevent this monopolization and to keep economic affairs in a continual state of conflict. You may think you see through t h a t ; no government can be strong enough to prevent a group which can subdue its rivals from achieving harmony and establishing morale if it wants to, you may say. And you would be right. We have the choice between a supertrust outside our political forms (which may swamp the State in the backwash of its progress) and an assimilation to the State of the going system. They cannot exist together and separately. Or so I believe. But it is nothing so remote as this which we are concerned with here, though we shall later explore the first steps necessary to genuine social domination of business; we are immediately interested in certain phenomena associated with our present intergroup activity. I t is interesting to see how efficient, within themselves, associations of producers have become, and how ineffective they appear to be in intergroup relations. Serious investigations would, it might be expected, show all degrees of efficiency within groups; it might even be discovered that the highest efficiency is attained by those groups whose individuals are appealed to for cooperation on the highest grounds, and that our most apparent failures are those whose appeals are lowest. But on the whole it would be no great trouble to substantiate the statement that Amer-

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ica displays the greatest productive efficiency ever shown anywhere. T h e most puzzling phenomenon associated with this efficiency is that it has not made us wealthier than we are. For we are far indeed from the abolition of poverty, unemployment, overwork, industrial accidents, and illness, and from provision for security for our infants and our aged. Apparently there is friction somewhere, and friction in this social sense means the annulling of effort. We allow some groups to work hard at the business of destroying or making ineffective the equally hard work of others. E a c h of two groups may be admirably efficient. Their efficiencies may cancel out if they work against each other. Besides, we have a vast network of hard-working organizations which have grown up about secondary functions in industry: consumer-persuading organizations, for instance, and those devoted to specialization in fiscal services. In a very real sense these are secondary to the main business of production and consumption; but by growing over and around the places where social coordination is effected, they have created for themselves functions which are not only facilitative but directive. In the offices of financiers in New York many of the really momentous decisions of our time are taken. This could not possibly be true if we believed in plan and purpose; but we do not, and our disbelief furnishes the opportunity for the usurpation by unofficial agencies of the planning power which belongs to the public. B u t even by the people who decide affairs in ways which must affect our economic life widely and vitally, the pretense is maintained that this is not true. Bankers say of themselves that they are merely bankers and that they are nothing more. What is the consequence of this ? Power without responsibility is one way of answering. Economic activity directed to antisocial ends is another. A set of irresponsible, possibly badly trained, and

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certainly self-interested, people half manage and half neglect affairs of whose consequences they have no adequate conception, but from which they have no hesitation in draining the last penny of profit. In last analysis this is what we prefer to an officially recognized social control. And why? Because we fear a number of bogeys: such as red tape and a certain lack of flexibility and freedom. I t has often been pointed out, but with no effect, that a big railway system or any other large business exhibits these same traits, and in exaggerated form, because the incentive which comes from working for the public is lacking. We simply and unaccountably prefer to have our economic life managed by shortsighted and frequently self-interested leaders who by profession are interested in profit-making. And we resist with all the means at our disposal any attempt to curtail their power or to enlarge the public services of control. There results a system of economic affairs in which a highly developed technique of production, which might be turned to the uses of making work and life creative and beautiful, is hampered and restricted. Social philosophers who have not troubled to analyze the source of our difficulties but who only see that, currently, work is a burden and that poverty persists, are apt to condemn the machine and its serial application and to lay our cultural deficiencies to its domination. It is, however, possible to suggest that this arises from a confusion of consequences with causes; and that the machine could, if we found ways to let it, give us something very different. I t is a mistake, if we take this revised view, to talk about the incubus of productive technique. For this is the possible source of freedom. What we need, rather, is a direction of individual and group functions which shall subject each to a larger purpose and give each a sense of unity in a wider functioning. What holds us back from this is not the tech-

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nique of industry but the persistent obsolescence of business forms. For definition nothing less than a national view will be effective. N o t even that would do for any other nation than our own—with the possible exception of Russia—for no other represents a political area within which the necessary resources exist. In this we are fortunate. N o t that we are or can be, in any absolute sense, independent, but that taken together with our weaker neighbors to the south, who furnish access to the tropics, we come very near to independence. 3. The process of mechanization Some hypothesis concerning the nature of industry is necessary to any generalization about men's relations to i t — a n d not only an hypothetical view of the existing institution but also one which includes its logic, its course of flow. We need to develop a sense of what is becoming typical. T h e conditions for the formation of this needed hypothetical view or sense of direction seem all to be present; but they are seldom assembled. The causes of controversy here lie partly in the kind of philosophical approach we make to the problem and partly in the nature of our interests. T o understand them we should have to explore intellectual history and to possess a genetic view of the institutions which create interests. The methodological lag is as important as the institutional lag; they are jointly responsible for much of our present confusion. W e conspicuously lack the mental qualities necessary for looking facts in the face. We are dominated by a conceptual analysis which stands in contrast to the instrumental projection we need. We are so determined in our search for causes and for sequential relations—a preoccupation which is owed to the procedures of natural science—that it seems to us an inferior kind of effort, scarcely respectable, certainly not scholarly or scientific, to seize on

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probabilities in the future and advise action with relation to conditions they impose. We think we cannot see ahead until the exploration of causes is complete. We therefore cannot act. For causes require a long time to appear. The best minds we have among us are stopped from usefulness, required to explore the past endlessly, bound to the wheel of causation. The liberty of scholarship is limited by conventional method, not, as is sometimes suggested, by sinister pressures from outside. I t is because there is so little imaginative feeling for implication in the academic mind t h a t it remains so relatively useless in the crises of statesmanship. I t is true also, however, that we are not free in other ways. Interests hold us tightly true to their requirements. The generations of men are short, but they are long enough to make us conservative concerning what we value, and protective in our attitudes toward the institutions we have learned to love. This too is quite irrelevant to the process of projection, the divination of a strain of tough, continued force which we must seize and use if it is not to destroy our civilization. T h a t is what we must learn to love and to protect as an interest. The rest must be sloughed off. The reforms we need most are of these sorts which lie in our thinking and our loving. All the others will be added unto us if that should happen; and they will not be if that does not happen. No good can come of ancestor worship. I t is like historic homesickness of other kinds—it tunes the affections to a half-imaginary past and persuades us toward return. We cannot ever go back, of course; but neither can we, apparently, find a cure for nostalgic reference. Perhaps the only chance for cure is the substitution of preoccupation with the future for all this contemplative leaning above the past. And the approach to this lies through a clearer apprehension of what the future may be like. I t will be as easy for daydreaming to concern itself

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with a bright mechanical world as with a vaguely ruralistic one. T h e affections of men and women might conceivably reach forward rather than backward. B u t not until it has been admitted rather generally that gray steel, geometric design, concrete masses, and all the other characteristic features of machinedom are worth pushing to their ultimate possibilities. T h e real trouble now is that so many of us do not want this kind of thing; it happens to us instead of through us; we are resentful and discontented. And so we fail to seize on the possibilities of the movement—which will continue anyhow—and shape them to an imagined pattern. We have no pattern, so we do no shaping. I t is because of living in this half-world of the recollection which, as we ought to be thoroughly aware, is by now beyond possibility, that the sharp anticipation of detail in the landscape of the future—which we badly need for the encouragement of those most afflicted with homesickness—is lacking. There is not room for both past and future in the affections of most of us, apparently; and we are required to make something of a choice. T h e first step toward giving the future competitive equality with the past would necessarily consist, it seems to me, in such an analysis of the present as would expose the futility of any hope for return to the past. I t is salutary simply to understand that, even now, living at all for the present population of the world is conditioned on a complexity of relations which we have been at pains to perfect over some five hundred years. H a l f the people in the world would starve or die of exposure within a month of the breakdown of our systems of transport and communication, and these are only secondary features of the productive process. N o , we shall not go back to manorial life or even to homestead life as Americans in other generations understood it. There are no doubts in m y own mind: we shall go forward

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into a future in which delicate adjustments are multiplied, in which switchboards will control operations, in which no labor will be done except of experiment and repair. The rhythm of affairs will become—is becoming—mechanical rather than human. I t is interesting to note the corollary of this, also, which is that the human contribution of mechanical effort is the least efficient sort: that is to say, as we are in the habit of doing, mechanical effort is a burden to men. Yet they have always done it. The sensation of physical fatigue, of the strain of lifting, pulling, pushing, and striking things, of the sting of sweat in the eyes—these are among the oldest of men's experiences. Never, for any instant of all the countless years of subjection to the discipline of labor, however, have they been reconciled to this fate. Men have always been aware of the degradation involved in any work they had to do— though they often did a great deal rather cheerfully when there was no compulsion. And human ingenuity has never ceased from worrying at the problem. Whenever it is possible to look back through history and contemplate the steadiness of our progress toward some such end as we approach in the abolition of work, many contemporary theories are called in question. One of them —which has most point here—has to do with the role of aspiration in the progress of mankind. It seems almost as though something so persistent, so common to all of us, ultimately is able to overcome whatever obstacles it must meet on its way to its chosen end. The strangest aspect, however, of such a development is that it was never anticipated, the end itself was never clearly held out as incentive. Only in the most obscure sense can it be said that what came about was worked for. Perhaps it cannot be said at all. Certainly the journey has been sufficiently discontinuous, has often enough been subject to a chance which might have given it anywhere a different orienta-

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tion, so that only by the most violent rationalization could it ever be said that the race had any end in view when its earliest members pried away a stone or a log and thus discovered what was afterward—long afterward, when the system of relationships was worked out—given the name "lever." Those early inventors were merely forcing that something which they, exclusively among the animals, possessed, to serve them in particular exigencies. What is to come after is seldom anticipated in these crises of invention. The end which is immediate must be included in that which is distant, or that which is distant will never be reached. Is such a thing as release from labor merely the sum of many million separate efforts for release? Or is it the result of a long struggle, however obscure and difficult, toward that end? I know of no question which interests me so much as this one; but I see no hope of finding any answer to it. I t may be that what we need is not so much a specific solution as the answer to a less difficult problem: have we gone sufficiently far on the road toward some of these (temporary) ends so that we dare try to use them as incentives, thus circumventing one of nature's apparent dicta—that we must achieve large ends through irrelevant purposes? It is my guess that when an old ancestor of mine pried up a stone, built a fire, added one and one, he had no sense of having contributed a brick to a growing edifice of human possessions, nor even any sense of having made life better for a theoretical me, strong as our sense of continuity undoubtedly is. He had no gratification, I am sure, in feeling that he had enriched posterity. I t may be that he sat down and thought hard, or that he manipulated materials, and tried things in different ways: he perhaps remembered that not so long ago he had gone hungry or been frightened or had to endure a long and painful spell of labor and that something might be thought of to mitigate the immediate

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situation. B u t the prospect t h a t sometime this invention of his might be added to a thousand others and so create a new kind of world in which men were freed from labor— all this was no p a r t of his intention. H e probably would have said, if the suggestion had been m a d e , t h a t such an eventuality would be a very bad thing. For all the time t h a t men seem to have been using their ingenuity to bring about the end of labor, they have clung fast to the ethic t h a t he who labors longest and hardest is the best m a n among us. Now t h a t we have come to the point of wondering whether we are not far enough along toward our goal so t h a t its promise can be held out as incentive, this ethic begins to be bothersome. Is he wicked who does not labor? Even if he cannot find employment, shall we say? In which case, does the wickedness belong to him who is denied or to him who denies? T h e ethical situation m a y become bothersome a little l a t e r : how bothersome is perhaps measured by the continual reiteration of the virtue in making work, which can be heard everywhere. T h e difficulty here is t h a t we are afraid the idle will m a k e trouble—and they will if we keep on telling them t h a t idleness is wicked while we are making it inevitable. T h e n , too, there is a certain playful restlessness in men which ought not to be stopped from expression in a variety of a m a t e u r activities which are not contemplated in our plans for the unemployed—when we can be said to have any. Are the prospects clear enough by now to be held out as an invitation? This would involve reconsideration of incentives throughout our system, of course. Business men, who presumably are expected to organize for making goods, we pay in profits. We allow them to perform their social function, m a k e their contribution to welfare, in an offhand way as a by-product of their own interesting affair, which is profit-making. Similarly with all others in

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the c o m m u n i t y . T h e service we need from them is never expected to carry its own incentive. I t is a l w a y s expected to happen because, in pursuing other aims, the individual somehow c a n n o t a v o i d doing w h a t as a society we need to h a v e him do. In a world organized universally on this basis, as to incentive, it is perhaps hopelessly Utopian to expect more forthrightness in a n y other related matter. Is it too m u c h to ask t h a t we should seize on the prospect of final release from labor and p u t it, for a time, at the center of our t h i n k i n g ; that we should not be ashamed to desire it and to scheme for bringing it about? Such a suggestion implies great changes in a t t i t u d e , perhaps too great. Y e t I h a v e ventured to think that we m a y be r e a d y for the testing of this rather grand hypothesis. W h a t follows here consists largely of the s t a t e m e n t of this hypothesis, together with some exploration of its corollaries and implications. T h e r e is no testing here: that is not a literary process. T h e r e is, however, some argum e n t intended to demonstrate a sufficient preliminary plausibility to j u s t i f y a changed procedure. W e are all of us accustomed to say glibly t h a t this has become a " m e c h a n i z e d " world, b y which we mean something derogatory. O u r objection is not that machines do so m u c h of our w o r k for us, b u t t h a t they establish a routine, provide a scene, w h i c h w e do not like. T h i s has a l w a y s seemed to me a peculiarly shortsighted view of things. I t is the machine w h i c h has provided us w i t h the means for escape from the routines of mediaevalism w h i c h , by all accounts, approached the intolerable for all b u t a v e r y few of the nobility. O f course, those whose complaints are loudest are those w h o also possess some leisure and w h o therefore can develop tastes and discriminations. M e n w h o are busier are not so critical of their surroundings; and, especially, those w h o themselves w o r k among machines h a v e little complaint to make. T o this there is an excep-

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tion of which more will be said later: the person who tends machines is in terrible circumstances, but this is because he is in reality substituting for one of them and therefore is treated inhumanly. It is, then, my hypothesis that industry will continue to become more "mechanized," to use a threadbare term which will want refining later, and that this process of mechanization is something given in the years ahead of us. The industrial discipline will therefore consist in learning the lessons of adaptation to it. I t will be a condition of existence, as light is, or the seasons, or the waves of the sea. A great deal has been written about the adventure of going to sea, its perils, and the implacability of the natural forces which are sometimes let loose there. But no one complains about the waves and wishes we might go back to a waveless past. Quite another tack is taken. Ships are designed which are all the time more indifferent to the disturbing motions underneath their hulls. We must do something like this in handling the process of mechanization. Our present adaptation to it is no more intelligent than going to sea on a raft. And our customary deprecation is not unlike wishing oneself off the raft and ashore after the oars have been lost. There is a nettle here which we must grasp whether we like it or not. We must understand that the human links in industry are the weak ones—so long as they are depended on to do mechanical tasks. The substitution of men for machines is bad for men and bad, also, for the other machines. This is because man is a machine of a different sort from those which we expect to do our work for us. Compared with them the human organism has conspicuous weaknesses: it tires, it suffers boredom, it is inaccurate, and so on. It has also its conspicuous superiorities: it can think, it can do many different things, it possesses delicate sensory adjustments, it has a manipulating and con-

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triving faculty; and other machines lack all of these. These very differences ought to define the contrasting functions of the two. They are good for very different tasks. And if either is asked to do the job which more naturally belongs to the other, everything goes wrong as it might be expected to do. Man can, in other words, plan and arrange materials and can bring to bear natural forces which will set them in motion and keep them going; but he cannot be depended on to furnish the motion or any part of it which is regularly required. N o one, I think, will deny this statement. Yet if it is true, the daily lives of most of us are certainly arranged insanely. For most of us are still engaged in doing exactly the tasks from which our inventions should have freed us. And it is far from easy to say why. It is not because we want to that so many of us do this kind of work—in spite of our moralistic professions. It is not even because we want others to do it. I t is rather because we are mentally and morally unequal to the job of organizing it out of existence. This is not a job of mechanical invention nor one of physical arrangement. The problem has escaped these limits long since. Without a society which has accepted the implications of mechanization and so arranged itself as to take advantage of its possibilities, little further can be done. The continuous process, serialization, functional analysis, and so on, are terms which belong now to factory management. They must be extended out from the factory into the field of social management. Otherwise we shall remain as we are now, half free and half slave, an intolerable and unnatural arrest of development. The logic of the process we are in requires that we go on to a complete escape from routine. As men, we belong in the galleries and offices around the engine-pits. The tragedy of unfulfilled logic is that many of us are still down in the pits moving the pistons and wheels. We are accepting the

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terrible routine we have devised for machines—different and infinitely harder to bear than any we should have been willing to contemplate if machines had not been expected to do it. If the escape from this and the completion of the development require changes anywhere, or require the sacrifice of privileges, we must prepare to meet the conditions. 4. Socialized industry or industrialized

society

In spite of that disconcerting fluidity which creates so many difficulties for social theorists who prefer cross-section examination and static analysis, when we are driven to acceptance there are discoverable ways of understanding social functions. Activity, for the time being, clusters about this, that, or the other interest. Functions and interests rise and decline in importance, attracting to themselves larger or smaller numbers of adherents. Such groups throw up leaders and discover among themselves inventors; they command loyalty and engage enthusiasms. T h u s equipped, well or badly as the case m a y be, they take on organization, devise internal controls, and seek to affect other clusters of activity outside themselves in their own interest. T h e handling of these relations is of great importance to society; the system of relationships is, in fact, society. I t is here that controls have to be exerted if social direction is to be influenced. I t appears to be relatively easier to stimulate the growth of groups than to liquidate them when their usefulness has passed. For this reason we are always tormented by their survival beyond an actually functioning stage. The development of modern techniques of paper-work, communication, and concentration of population have enlarged the numbers of social groups and have given them new powers of interference in the social life. I t sometimes appears that most of our modern activity consists

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in this organizing and reorganizing process, together with the conciliation of conflicting aims. Certainly much more ingenuity is devoted to these affairs than to those which hold possibilities for all alike. Numerous illustrations are possible to demonstrate the t r u t h of this, but none is more telling than t h a t of industry. T h e business of producing something requires the formation of a group-—a much larger one than formerly; it requires a good deal of inventive and arranging effort; it requires a minimum, at least, of leadership and loyalty; and about all this there is comparatively little trouble, though it possesses its own peculiar problems as we shall presently see. I t is when other groups, going about their business, are encountered t h a t the great difficulties arise. And so far we have been unable to come to any satisfactory method for inducing all producing groups to operate in conformance with the aims which are common to all of them. This is undoubtedly because the elements of group cohesion have not yet extended themselves so far. And here is the most promising area for new invention and for real leadership. Before invention and leadership can find their opportunity here, however, one of our controlling conventions will have to come into general suspicion. T h e genius of American life is difficult to define in any concise way; it has been called "individualistic" by a good m a n y observers, b u t this is evidently no more than an approximation of w h a t is meant. Perhaps one has to be American to understand the special implications of t h a t term as applied to us. I t has something to do with a rigorous rejection of interference with individual aims. B u t it extends also to a similar rejection of control exerted over a n y group through which the individual m a y happen to function. And it is here t h a t it creates problems, because it is here t h a t conflicts become so serious as to need a kind of conciliation which does not arise spontaneously.

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Conciliation is not only necessary for the groups in conflict; it is also necessary for the smooth operation of social machinery. Government may or may not be a thing which represents this social interest; it is clear, however, that it ought to be. And when the dominant individuals of conflicting groups appeal to our fetish for noninterference as a protection against interference in what they consider to be private quarrels, they are asking something which society cannot so well afford to grant as it could when such quarrels really involved only two persons rather than many. This is merely to say that individuals pursuing their own interests have enlarged themselves into groups and in doing so have created a situation in which noninterference is no longer a possibility for society—or, in the long run, for themselves. The appeal to laissez faire in industry, for instance, has come to be a mere partisan request for leave to engage in a street brawl which interferes with the legitimate pursuits of everyone else. It becomes more and more clear that these freedoms have to be restricted. The association of individuals in groups has had its most successful outcome in industry. Activities clustering about the producing of goods have discovered efficient techniques for joining effort in complementary ways. They have also been more liable to conflict. But in no other area, either, is there more jeopardy to the public interest from private quarreling. I t is this public interest in conciliation which has led to a new conception of the duties of government with respect to industry. For if there is to be a free flow of commodities and services, conflicts must be eased and ways discovered for the freeing of technical possibilities. They must not be wasted in sterile bickerings for private or group advantage. The wastage of technique which is apparent in many phases of competition is no longer tolerated with our old complacency.

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There are earnest efforts afoot to find a kind of organization for all industry which will stand in sharp contrast with competition and will enable industry to fulfill its obvious function more smoothly and directly than is possible in a régime of organized conflict. T o this matter I shall return after exploration in other fields which must come first.

CHAPTER

II

T H E C H A N G I N G M A N N E R OF W O R K

I . W H A T IS T Y P I C A L 1. D I V I S I O N

AND

3- SPECIALIZATION 4.

I N MODERN WORK

SPECIALIZATION AND

MACHINES WHICH ARE

FREE

COMPETITION

EVERYWHERE

SERIES

^