The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production

by J. A. Hobson

To suppose that the reduction of all machine-industry to public routine services, when it becomes possible, will imply a net diminution in the scope of individual self-expression, rests upon the patent fallacy of assigning certain fixed and finite limits to human interest and activity, so that any encroachment from the side of routine lessens the absolute scope of human spontaneity and interest. If, as there is reason to believe, human desires and the activities which are engaged in satisfying them are boundless, the assumption that an increase in the absolute amount of state-control or routine-work implies a diminution of the field for individual enterprise is groundless. The underlying motive, which alone can explain and justify each step in progressive socialism, is the attainment of a net economy of individual effort, which, when it is released from exercise upon a lower plane of competition, may be devoted to exercise upon a higher. If the result of extending social control over industry were merely to bring about a common level of material comfort, attended by spiritual and intellectual torpor and contentment, the movement might be natural and necessary, but could hardly be termed progress.

But such a view is based upon a denial of the axiom that the satisfaction of one want breeds another want. Experience does not teach the decay but the metamorphosis of individuality. Under socialised industry progress in the industrial arts would be slower and would absorb a smaller proportion of individual interest, in order that progress in the finer intellectual and moral arts might be faster, and might engage a larger share of life. To future generations of more highly evolved humanity the peculiar barbarism of our age will consist in the fact that the major part of its intelligence, enterprise, genius, has been devoted to the perfection of the arts of material production through mechanical means. If it is desirable that more of this individual energy should be engaged in the production of higher forms of wealth by competition upon higher planes, this can only be achieved by the process of reducing to routine the lower functions. Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality. Industrial progress would undoubtedly be slower under state-control, because the very object of such control is to divert a larger proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations in order to apply them in producing higher forms of wealth. It is not, however, right to assume that progress in the industrial arts would cease under state-industry; such progress would be slower, and would itself partake of a routine character—a slow, continuous adjustment of the mechanism of production and distribution to the slowly-changing needs of the community.

§ 10. A most important misunderstanding of the line of industrial development arises from a conviction that all production of wealth embodied in matter tends to pass under the dominion of machinery, that an increasing number of workers in the future will become machine-tenders, and that the state-control of machine-industry would bring the vast majority of individuals into the condition of official machine-workers. This, however, is by no means a reasonable forecast. In competitive machine-industry, although it is to the interest of the individual business to "save" as much labour as possible, the play of competition causes to be made and worked a much larger quantity of machinery than is enough to maintain the current rate of consumption, and thus keeps in the ranks of manufacture a much larger quantity of labour than is socially necessary. Yet in a typical manufacturing country like England statistics show that the proportion of the working population engaged in machine manufactures is not increasing. If, then, by the gradual elimination of competition in the machine-industries, the quantity of machine-work were kept down to the social requirements of the community's consumption, the proportion of machine-workers would be less than it is, assuming the demand for machine-made goods continued the same.

But what, it may be said, will become of the increasing proportion of the workers not required by machinery? will they go to swell indefinitely the ranks of distributors? Will the number of merchants, jobbers, speculators, shopkeepers, agents: middlemen of various sorts, grow without limit? Assuming that the work of distribution were left to competitive enterprise, and that the quantity and quality of consumption remained the same as now, this result would seem necessarily to follow. The labour saved in manufacture would pass, as it does now, to intensify the competition of the distributive trades and to subdivide into needlessly small fragments the necessary but limited amount of distributive work. But these assumptions are not necessarily correct. If, as seems likely, the increased intensity of competition forced the growth of strong monopolies in certain departments of distribution, the anti-social power thus bestowed upon individuals would necessitate the extension of state-control to them also. The work of distribution would thus pass into routine-industry administered by the public for the public interest. Thus the area of socialised industry would extend until it absorbed one after another all industries possessing the machine-character and capable of administration by routine. It might thus appear that, after all, the forebodings of the individualist would be verified, the work of life would be reduced to a dull monotonous mechanism grinding out under bureaucratic sway an even quantity of material comforts for a community absorbed in the satisfaction of its orderly behaviour.

This goal seems inevitable if we assume that no change takes place in the quantity and quality of the consumption of the community, that individual consumers save or try to save the same proportion of their incomes as now, and apply the portion that they spend to the purchase of increased quantities of ever-cheapening machine-made goods.

But are we justified in considering it necessary, or even probable, that consumption will in amount and character remain unchanged? In proportion as the large industries pass into the condition of monopolies, whether under private or public control, the area of safe and profitable-investment for the average "saving" man will be more restricted. Thus some of the useless "saving" which takes the shape of excessive plant, machinery, and other forms of capital will be prevented. In other words, the quantity of consumption will increase, and this increase will give fuller employment to the machinery of production and? to the labour engaged in working it and in distributing the increased product. If, however, increased consumption merely took the form of consuming increased quantities of the same material goods as before, the gain would be limited to the rise of material comfort of the poorer classes, and this gain might be set off by the congested and torpor-breeding luxury of the better-to-do. A mere increase in quantity of consumption would do nothing to avert the drifting of industry into a bureaucratic mechanism.

§ 11. It is to improved quality and character of consumption that we can alone look for a guarantee of social progress. Allusion has been already made to the class of artistic and intellectual work which cannot be undertaken by machinery. It must never be forgotten that art is the true antithesis of machinery. The essence of art in this wide sense is the application of individual spontaneous human effort. Each art-product is the repository of individual thought, feeling, effort, each machine-product is not. The "art" in machine-work has been exhausted in the single supreme effort of planning the machine; the more perfect the machine the smaller the proportion of individual skill or art embodied in the machine-product The spirit of machinery, its vast rapid power of multiplying quantities of material goods of the same pattern, has so over-awed the industrial world that the craze for quantitative consumption has seized possession of many whose taste and education might have enabled them to offer resistance. Thus, not only our bread and our boots are made by machinery, but many of the very things we misname "art-products." Now a just indictment of this excessive encroachment of machinery is not based upon the belief, right or wrong, that machinery cannot produce things in themselves as fit or beautiful as art. The true inadequacy of machine-products for human purposes arises from the fact that machine-products are exactly similar to one another, whereas consumers are not. So long as consumers consent to sink their individuality, to consume articles of precisely the same shape, size, colour, material, to assimilate their consumption to one another, machinery will supply them. But since no two individuals are precisely similar in physical, intellectual, or moral nature, so the real needs of no two will be the same, even in the satisfaction of ordinary material wants. As the dominance of machinery over the workers tends to the destruction of individuality in work, obliging different workers to do the same work in the same way with a premium upon the mere capacity of rapid repetition, in the same way it tends to crush the individuality of consumers by imposing a common character upon their consumption. The progressive utilisation of machinery depends upon the continuance of this indiscriminate consumption, and the willingness of consumers to employ every increase of income in demanding larger and larger quantities of goods of the same pattern and character. Once suppose that consumers refuse to conform to a common standard, and insist more and more upon a consumption adjusted to their individual needs and tastes, and likewise strive to follow and to satisfy the changing phases of their individual taste, such individuality in consumption must impose a corresponding individuality in production, and machinery will be dethroned from industry. Let us take the example of the clothing trade. Provided the wearing public will consent to wear clothes conforming to certain common patterns and shapes which are only approximate "fits," machinery can be used to make these clothes; but if every person required his own taste to be consulted, and insisted upon an exactitude of fit and a conformity to his own special ideas of comfort, the work could no longer be done by machinery, and would require the skill of an "artist." It is precisely upon this issue that the conflict of machine versus hand-labour is still fought out. The most highly-finished articles in the clothing, and boot trades are still hand-made; the best golf-clubs, fishing-rods, cricket bats, embody a large amount of high manual skill, though articles of fair average make are turned out chiefly by machinery in large quantities. These hand-made goods are produced for a small portion of the consuming public, whose education and refinement of taste induces them to prefer spending their money upon a smaller quantity of commodities adjusted in character to their individual needs, than upon a larger quantity of common commodities.

Assuming that industrial evolution places an increasing proportion of the consuming public in secure possession of the prime physical necessaries of life, it is surely possible that they too may come to value less highly a quantitative increase in consumption, and may develop individuality of tastes which require individual production for their satisfaction. In proportion as this happens, hand-work or art must play a more important part in these industries, and may be able to repel the further encroachments of machinery, or even to drive it out of some of the industrial territory it has annexed. But although the illustration of the present condition of the clothing trades serves to indicate the nature of the contest between machinery and art in the region of ordinary material consumption, it is not suggested that social progress will, or ought to, expel machinery from most of the industries it controls, or to prevent its application to industries which it has not yet reached. The luxury and foppish refinement of a small section of "fashionable" society, unnaturally relieved of the wholesome necessity of work, cannot be taken as an indication of the ways in which individuality or quality of consumption may or will assert itself, in a society where social progress is based upon equality of opportunity, and the power to consume has some just relation to ability and merit. It seems reasonable to expect that on the whole machinery will retain, and even strengthen and extend, its hold of those industries engaged in supplying the primitive needs of man—his food, clothing, shelter, and other animal comforts. In a genuinely progressive society the object will be so to order life as to secure, not merely the largest amount of individual freedom or self-expression, but the highest quality. If an undue amount of individuality be devoted to the production and consumption of food, clothing, etc., and the conscious, refined cultivation of these tastes, higher forms of individual expression in work and life will be neglected. The just economy of individuality will therefore relegate certain branches of production to machinery, in order that the energy saved by such routine-work may be set free for higher individual endeavour. The satisfaction of the primary animal wants—hunger, thirst, cold, etc.—are common to all; in these purely physical demands there is less qualitative difference in different men; as the needs are the same the consumption will be the same. The absence of wide individual differences of taste marks out the commodities for routine or machine-production. As individuals are nearest alike in their prime physical needs, so, as they gradually develop higher material wants, and, after these are satisfied, æsthetic, intellectual, moral wants, their individualism becomes more and more marked. It is therefore in the most highly developed, or, as they are sometimes called, the more "artificial" wants of man, that the diversity of individual nature shows itself most strongly, and demands a satisfaction peculiar to itself which only art can give. In a highly evolved society it is likely that many physical needs, and even some intellectual needs, will be common to all, and will engage little individual attention. These may be graded as routine wants, and may be satisfied by machine-made goods. As a society, safely ordered in the supply of ordinary physical comforts, continued to develop, a less and less diversity would show itself in the ordinary aspect of its material civilisation, because the individuality which once found expression there is raised to a higher plane of activity. The enrichment and enlargement of human life in such a society would undoubtedly manifest itself in a greater likeness between the individual members in the lower modes of life, but the extent of individual difference in the higher modes would be ever widening. The object of the levelling in the lower processes of life would be that higher individual differences might have opportunity to assert themselves. In a progressive society thus conceived, where socialisation and individuation grow inseparably related and reacting on one another, there is evidently no fixed limit to the progress of machinery. As each higher want is educated, some lower want will drop into the position of a routine-want, and will pass into the rightful province of machinery. But though a large proportion of material commodities would doubtless be made by machinery, it is not signified that art will be banished from what are commonly called the industrial arts. On the contrary, art may be in many ways the friend and co-operator of machinery, the latter furnishing a routine foundation for the display of individual taste and of individual satisfaction in the consumer. One of the most hopeful signs of the last few years is the growing intrusion of art into the machine-industries,—the employment of skilled designers and executants who shall tempt and educate the public eye with grace of form and harmony of colour. In pottery, textile wares, hardware, furniture, and many other industries, the beginnings of public taste are operating in demand for variety and ornament. May not this be the beginning of a cultivation of individual taste which shall graft a fine-art upon each machine-industry, apportioning to machinery that work which is hard, dull, dangerous, monotonous, and uneducative, while that which is pleasant, worthy, interesting, and educative is reserved for the human agent?

§ 12. Machinery is thus naturally adapted to the satisfaction of the routine wants of life under social control. The character of machine-production, as has been shown, is essentially collective. The maladies of present machine-industries are due to the fact that this collective character is inadequately recognised, and machinery, left to individual enterprise and competition, oppresses mankind and causes waste and commercial instability. In a word, the highest division of labour has not been yet attained, that which will apportion machinery to the collective supply of the routine needs of life, and art to the individual supply of the individual needs. In this way alone can society obtain the full use of the "labour-saving" character of machinery, minimising the amount of human exertion engaged in tending machinery and maximising the amount engaged in the free and interesting occupations. Engaged in satisfying the steady, constant needs of society under social regulation, machinery would no longer be subject to those fearful oscillations of demand which are liable unforeseen to plunge whole masses of workers into unemployment and poverty, and to waste an infinite amount of "saving." Where the fluctuations in consumption were confined to the region of individual taste, the changes of taste and growing variety of consumption would furnish the education of the artist, who will acquire skill and flexibility by freely following and directing the changing tastes of consumers.

In such a forecast it is of course useless to endeavour to predict how far art will continue to occupy itself with industry, or how far, set free by machinery, it will be absorbed in the creation of finer intellectual or spiritual products, or in what are now termed the fine arts. This must depend upon the nature of the harmonious development of human capacities of effort and enjoyment under conditions of individual freedom, and the interaction of the free development of individuals in a society founded upon an equality of the material means of life. The study of the qualitative development of consumption in modern society is only just beginning to be recognised as the true starting-point of economic science, for although many of the older economists did verbal homage to the importance of this branch of study, it has been reserved for recent thinkers to set about the work.[291]