The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production

by J. A. Hobson

§ 13. It is hardly too much to say that the whole of social progress depends upon the substitution of qualitative for quantitative methods of consumption. In so far as individuals apply their growing ability to consume in order to demand increased quantities of the same articles they consumed before, or flash variety of fashionable goods in no wise adjusted to individual need or taste, they extend the dominion of machinery. In so far as they develop individual taste, delicacy rather than quantity of satisfaction, they give wider scope to work which embodies conscious human skill and deserves the name of art.

But there is another bearing of this point of equal significance. Political economists have a dismal formula called the Law of Diminishing Returns, which casts a dark shadow upon industrial progress as it is commonly conceived. The more food and clothing, fuel, and other material goods we require, the further we have to go for the material, and the harder it is to get: we must plough inferior lands yielding smaller crops, we must sink deeper shafts for our coal and iron. As our population grows ever larger, and this larger number wants more and more pieces of the earth to feed its machines and to turn out the increased quantity of goods, the drain upon natural resources is constantly increasing. The material world is limited; in time Nature will become exhausted, and, long before this happens, the quantity of human labour required to raise the increased supply of raw material in the teeth of the Law of Diminishing Returns will far exceed the economies attending large-scale machine-production.

This danger will also be found to result entirely from the quantitative estimate of human wealth and human life.

Confining our view for the moment to that branch of production which is engaged in providing food, to which the Law of Diminishing Returns is held to apply with special rigour, we can see without difficulty how, by a progressive differentiation of consumption, we can mitigate or even utterly defeat the operation of this law. If the inhabitants of a country persist in maintaining a single narrow standard of diet, and use the whole of their land for growing wheat and raising sheep, not merely do they waste all other fine productive qualities belonging to certain portions of the cultivated or uncultivated soil, but every increase in their narrow consumption drives them to worse soil, obliges them to put more labour into a quarter of wheat or a sheep, and increases the proportion of their aggregate product which goes as rent.[292] If, on the other hand, a community cultivates a varied consumption and seeks to utilise each portion of its soil for whatever form of food it can grow best, instead of grading its land exclusively according to its wheat or sheep-raising capacity, it is able to defeat the "niggardliness of nature" which asserts itself when the community insists upon a continual extension of the same demands. For land which may be very bad for wheat-growing or grazing, which may even be "below the margin of cultivation" for these purposes, may be well adapted for producing other commodities. A large variety of alternative uses will enable us to get the largest net amount of utilities out of Nature, and a community which, in lieu of an extension of demand for the same commodities, asserts its civilisation in the education of new demands and a greater complexity in the standard of its comfort, may draw from the land an indefinite increase of wealth without putting forth more labour or paying higher rent. It is simply one more example of the economy attainable by division of labour and specialisation of function.

§ 14. What applies to food will equally apply to the use of the earth for providing the raw material of all other forms of material wealth. A people with growing variety of consumption is ever finding new and more profitable uses for slighted or neglected capacities of nature. The social progress of nations must be chiefly determined by the amount of their intelligent flexibility of consumption. Mere variety of consumption in itself is not sufficient to secure progress. There must be a progressive recognition of the true relations, between the products which can be most economically raised upon each portion of the soil, and the wholesome needs of mankind seeking the full harmonious development of their faculties in their given physical environment. A progressive cultivation of taste for a variety of strong drinks, though it might provide an increased number of alternative uses for the soil, and might enhance the aggregate market-values of the wealth produced, would not, it is generally held, make for social progress. That nation which, in its intelligent attainment of a higher standard of life, is able to thoroughly assimilate and harmonise the largest variety of those products for which their soil and climate are best adapted, will be foremost in industrial progress and in the other arts of civilisation which spring out of it.

The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns. So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, i.e. artistic, goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we shall be likewise free.

§ 15. So far the consideration of reformed qualitative consumption has been confined to material goods. But a people moving along the line of progress, seeking ever a more highly qualitative life, will demand that a larger proportion of their energy shall be given to the production and consumption of intellectual goods.

This world likewise is at present largely under the dominion of Machinery and a Law of Diminishing Returns. By making of our intellectual life a mere accumulation of knowledge, piling fact upon fact, reading book upon book, adding science to science, striving to cover as much intellectual ground as possible, we become mere worshippers of quantity. It is not unnatural that our commercial life should breed such an intellectual consumption, and that the English and American nations in particular, who have beyond others developed machine-production and the quantitative genius for commerce, should exhibit the same taste in their pursuit after knowledge. Pace, size, number, cost, are ever on their lips. To visit every European capital in a fortnight, see acres of pictures, cathedrals, ruined castles, collect out of books or travel the largest mass of unassorted and undigested information, is the object of such portion of the commercial life as can be spared from the more serious occupations of life, piling up bale after bale of cotton goods and eating dinner after dinner of the same inharmoniously ordered victuals.

Our schools and colleges are engaged in turning out year by year immense quantities of common intellectual goods. Our magazines, books, and lectures are chiefly machine-products adjusted to the average reader or hearer, and are reckoned successful if they can drive a large number of individuals to profess the same feelings and opinions and adopt the same party or creed, with the view of enabling them to consume a large number of copies of the same intellectual commodities which can be turned out by intellectual machinery, instead of undergoing the effort of thinking and feeling for themselves. This danger, connected with the rapid spread of printed matter, is a grave one. Happily there are visible here also counteracting influences, forces that tend to individualise intellectual consumption and thus to stimulate the higher arts of intellectual production. In a progressive community it will be more fully recognised that it is not sufficient to induce people to give more time and attention to intellectual consumption; they must demand intellectual goods vitally adjusted to their individual needs.

§ 16. To the increased regard for quality of life we must likewise look to escape the moral maladies which arise from competition. For what is the cause of anti-social competition? It is the limitation of quantity. Two dogs are after one bone. Two persons wish to consume one commodity at the same time. Now, even in material goods, the more qualitative consumption becomes, and the more insistent each individual is upon the satisfaction of his peculiar tastes, the smaller will be the probability that two persons will collide in their desires, and struggle for the possession of the self-same commodity. Even in art-objects which are still bounded by matter, among genuine lovers of art the individuality of each stands out in mitigation of the antagonism of competition, for no two will have precisely the same tastes or estimates, or will seek with equal avidity the same embodiments of art. As we rise to purely intellectual or moral enjoyments, competition gives way to generous rivalry in co-operation. In the pursuit of knowledge or goodness the rivalry is no longer antagonism—what one gains another does not lose. One man's success is not another's failure. On the contrary, the enrichment of one is the enrichment of all. Both in the production and the consumption of the highest goods of Science, Art, and Virtue, social, not anti-social, motives are the chief stimulus. In the highest forms of consumption, the practice of the noblest arts of life, the enjoyment of the finest intellectual and spiritual goods, there is no purely selfish consumption. For though the highest individuality is then attained, the enjoyment of one individual requires the enjoyment of others. The attainment of the highest reaches of knowledge is impossible for the individual without the constant and increasing aid of other minds and the inspiring "spirit of the age"; the enjoyment of such knowledge is in an even wider communication. The practice and enjoyment of the arts of goodness are necessarily social, because the good life can only be lived in a good society. Spinoza has summed up the truth in saying—"The highest good is common to all, and all may equally enjoy it." So it appears that the highest goods are essentially at once individual and social, pointing once more the attainment of the higher synthesis in which the antagonism of the "one" and the "all," which shows itself in the lower planes of competing effort and enjoyment, disappears.