These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology, the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no class or condition of men in the modern community—with the possible exception of politicians and the clergy—can conceivably contribute less to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to production being managed for private gain, it happens that these investors are not only not given to the increase and diffusion of technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in retarding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail. Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.
Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations de
signed to supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts, and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the market.
The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing of private ownership in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage—refusal to let production go on except it affords them an unearned income—the expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic establishments.
This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with privation and
insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered. How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame of mind of that unblest mass of the population who will have opportunity to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.
At the risk of what may seem an excessively wide digression, there is something further to be said of the capitalistic sabotage spoken of above. The word has by usage come to have an altogether ungraceful air of disapproval. Yet it signifies nothing more vicious than a deliberate obstruction or retardation of industry, usually by legitimate means, for the sake of some personal or partisan advantage. This morally colorless meaning is all that is intended in its use here. It is extremely common in all industry that is designed to supply merchantable goods for the market. It is, in fact, the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all expedients in business enterprise that has to do with supplying the market, being always present in the businessman's necessary calculations; being not only a usual and convenient recourse but quite indispensable as an habitual measure of business sagacity. So that no personal blame can attach to its employment by any given businessman or business concern. It is only when measures
of this nature are resorted to by employees, to gain some end of their own, that such conduct becomes (technically) reprehensible.
Any businesslike management of industry is carried on for gain, which is to be got only on condition of meeting the terms of the market. The price system under which industrial business is carried on will not tolerate production in excess of the market demand, or without due regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust its operations, by due acceleration, retardation or stoppage, to the market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry; which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management, and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.