Now regard the third kingdom, artificial, implanted with mechanical beasts, that contains civilization. Life in this environment is economic. Its characteristic behaviour is a progressive differentiation of labour. Tasks are divided and subdivided until, at length, there are countless separate groups of people, each one performing a singular function to which it is trained and tending to become unable to perform any other. The subdivisions are beyond enumeration. They multiply so fast that the book of the census cannot keep up with them.
The shoe-industry, for example, does not consist in shoemakers. You might search it in vain for a shoemaker—that is, one who should know how to raise a pair of shoes from flat leather. In the shoe factory the material passes through a train of machines. Each machine is minded by an operative who performs one little specialized part of the work in endless repetition. The product is shoes by thousands of gross.
But who determines what kinds of shoe and how many shoes shall be made? What becomes of them when they are made? Who knows they can be sold? What if they are not saleable?
If you address these questions to one of the operatives minding a machine you will find him dumb. He knows only his own function.
It is very complicated. There are two industries here. One is the shoe-industry; the other is the shoe-machine industry. One could not exist without the other, yet they are separate and very unlike. The shoe-industry itself, that has dispensed with shoemakers, will have a finance department, an economic department, a buying department, a department of production science, a style and designing department, a chemical department, a department of distribution, a sales department, an advertizing department, and others we do not think of. It is all about shoes. These are all shoe people. They agglomerate in shoe towns. They think shoes. The world is a foot. The more it can be shod the better. They live by shoes.
But to do this they must be able to exchange shoes for the things they want. Shoes, therefore, must have a relation of value to every other thing in the economic world. It follows that, in order to have this exchange-value, shoes must have also a relation of quantity to all other things. If for any reason the production of shoes becomes suddenly abnormal that exchange-value is lost. It is like one kind of tissue growing wild in the organism. Shoes are necessary; but an excessive quantity cannot be absorbed by the economic body. There will be in that case a morbid pathology in the shoe-industry, unemployment in the shoe town, despair among the shoe people, many of whom have never learned to do anything else. Left to themselves, without shoes to make, they might even starve.
It may be in the same way a soap town, a textile town, a garment town, an iron town, a motor town like Detroit, a rubber-tire town like Akron, a furniture town like Grand Rapids. It may be all of these—that is to say, industry as a whole, increasing its output at an abnormal rate. As you project the thought you begin to see, first, the vital importance of rhythm, equilibrium, tension, in the realm of industry, and then the inverse meaning of a sudden competitive increase in the machine-power of the world.
Ask the Italians what it means. They are an old people coming to it with a fresh mind. The conversation that follows took place in February, 1925. Talking are, on one side, the Italian Minister of Finance, and on the other, a visiting journalist:
“The industrial idea is new in Italy. It is since the War. You had a clean slate. You could have done anything you had the imagination to do. First you might have made a scientific survey of Italy’s latent genius and resources, and then you might have thought of producing goods that should be uniquely Italian and therefore non-competitive. But what have you done? You have gone in for the great staples of world commerce, such as cotton and woollen textiles, artificial silk, and motor-cars. Don’t you see that in doing this you take on the competition of Great Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, the United States?”
“Yes, we see that.”