The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts

by Thorstein Veblen

The manner in which increasing technological mastery has led over from the savage plan of free workmanship to the barbarian system of industry under pecuniary control is perhaps a hazardous topic of speculation; but the known facts of primitive culture appear to admit at least a few general propositions of a broad and provisional character. It seems reasonably safe to say that the archaic savage plan of free workmanship will commonly have persisted through the palæolithic period of technology, and indeed somewhat beyond the transition to the neolithic. This is fairly borne out by the contemporary evidence from savage cultures. In the prehistory of the north-European culture there is also reason to assume that the beginnings of a pecuniary control fall in the early half of the neolithic period.[97] There seems to be no sharply definable point in the technological advance that can be said of itself to bring on this revolutionary change in the institutions governing economic life. It appears to be loosely correlated with technological improvement, so that it sets in when a sufficient ground for it is afforded by the state of the industrial arts, but what constitutes a sufficient ground can apparently not be stated in terms of the industrial arts alone. Among the early consequences of an advance in technology beyond the state of the industrial arts schematically indicated above, and coinciding roughly with the palæolithic stage, is on the one hand an appreciable resort to “indirect methods of production”, involving a systematic cultivation of the soil, domestication of plants and animals; or an appreciable equipment of industrial appliances, such as will in either case require a deliberate expenditure of labour and will give the holders of the equipment something more than a momentary advantage in the quest of a livelihood. On the other hand it leads also to an accumulation of wealth beyond the current necessaries of subsistence and beyond that slight parcel of personal effects that have no value to anyone but their savage bearer.

Hereby the technological basis for a pecuniary control of industry is given, in that the “roundabout process of production” yields an income above the subsistence of the workmen engaged in it, and the material equipment of appliances (crops, fruit-trees, live stock, mechanical contrivances) binds this roundabout process of industry to a more or less determinate place and routine, such as to make surveillance and control possible. So far as the workman under the new phase of technology is dependent for his living on the apparatus and the orderly sequence of the “roundabout process” his work may be controlled and the surplus yielded by his industry may be turned to account; it becomes worth while to own the material means of industry, and ownership of the material means in such a situation carries with it the usufruct of the community’s immaterial equipment of technological proficiency.

The substantial fact upon which the strategy of ownership converges is this usufruct of the industrial arts, and the tangible items of property to which the claims of ownership come to attach will accordingly vary from time to time, according as the state of the industrial arts will best afford an effectual exploitation of this usufruct through the tenure of one or another of the material items requisite to the pursuit of industry. The chief subject of ownership may accordingly be the cultivated trees, as in some of the South Sea islands; or the tillable land, as happens in many of the agricultural communities; or fish weirs and their location, as on some of the salmon streams of the American north-west coast; or domestic animals, as is typical of the pastoral culture; or it may be the persons of the workmen, as happens under divers circumstances both in pastoral and in agricultural communities; or, with an advance in technology of such a nature as to place the mechanical appliances of industry in a peculiarly advantageous position for engrossing the roundabout processes of production, as in the latterday machine industry, these mechanical appliances may become the typical category of industrial wealth and so come to be accounted “productive goods” in some eminent sense.

The institutional change by which a pecuniary regulation of industry comes into effect may take one form or another, but its outcome has commonly been some form of ownership of tangible goods. Particularly has that been the outcome in the course of development that has led on to those great pecuniary cultures of which Occidental civilisation is the most perfect example. But just in what form the move will be made, if at all, from free workmanship to pecuniary industry and ownership, is in good part a question of what the material situation of the community will permit. In some instances the circumstances have apparently not permitted the move to be made at all. The Eskimo culture is perhaps an extreme case of this kind. The state of the industrial arts among them has apparently gone appreciably beyond the technological juncture indicated above as critical in this respect. It involves a considerable specialisation and accumulation of appliances, such as boats, sleds, dogs, harness, various special forms of nets, harpoons and spears, and an elaborate line of minor apparatus necessary to the day’s work and embodying a minutely standardised technique. At the same time these articles of use, together with their household and personal effects, represent something appreciable in the way of portable wealth. Yet in their economic (pecuniary and industrial), domestic, social, or religious institutions the Eskimo have substantially not gone beyond the point of customary regulation commonly associated with the simpler, hand-to-mouth state of the industrial arts typical of the palæolithic savage culture. And this archaic Eskimo culture, with its highly elaborated technology, is apparently of untold antiquity; it is even believed by competent students of antiquity to have stood over without serious advance or decline since European palæolithic times—a period of not less than ten thousand years.[98] The causes conditioning this “backward” type of culture among the Eskimo, coupled with a relatively advanced and extremely complete technological system, are presumed to lie in their material surroundings; which on the one hand do not permit a congestion of people within a small area or enable the organisation and control of a compact community of any considerable size; while on the other hand they exact a large degree of co-operation and common interest, on pain of extreme hardship if not of extinction.

More perplexing at first sight is the case of such sedentary agricultural communities as the Pueblo Indians, who have also not advanced very materially beyond the simpler cultural scheme of savage life, and have not taken seriously to a system of property and a pecuniary control of industry, in spite of their having achieved a very considerable advance in the industrial arts, particularly in agriculture, such as would appear to entitle them to something “higher” than that state of peaceable, non-coercive social organisation, in which they were found on their first contact with civilised men, with maternal descent and mother-goddesses, and without much property rights, accumulated wealth or pecuniary distinction of classes. Again an explanation is probably to be sought in special circumstances of environment, perhaps re-enforced by peculiarities of the racial endowment; though the latter point seems doubtful, since both linguistically and anthropometrically the Pueblos are found to belong to two or three distinct stocks, at the same time that their culture is notably uniform throughout the Pueblo region, both on the technological and on the institutional side. The peculiar material circumstances that appear to have conditioned the Pueblo culture are (a) a habitat which favours agricultural settlement only at isolated and widely separated spots, (b) sites for habitation (on detached mesas or on other difficult hills or in isolated valleys or canyons) easily secured against aggression from without and not affording notable differential advantages or admitting segregation of the population within the pueblo, (c) the absence of beasts of burden, such as have enabled the inhabitants of analogous regions of the old world effectually to cover long distances and make raiding a lucrative, or at least an attractive enterprise.

These, and other peculiar instances of what may perhaps be called cultural retardation, indicate by way of exception what may have been the ruling causes that have governed in the advance to a higher culture under more ordinary circumstances,—by “ordinary” being intended such circumstances as have apparently led to a different and, it would be held, a more normal result in the old world, and particularly in the region of the Western civilisation.

In the ordinary course, it should seem, such an advance in the industrial arts as will result in an accumulation of wealth, a considerable and efficient industrial equipment, or in a systematic and permanent cultivation of the soil or an extensive breeding of herds or flocks, will also bring on ownership and property rights bearing on these valuable goods, or on the workmen, or on the land employed in their production. What has seemed the most natural and obvious beginnings of property rights, in the view of those economists who have taken an interest in the matter, is the storing up of valuables by such of the ancient workmen as were enabled, by efficiency, diligence or fortuitous gains, to produce somewhat more than their current consumption. There are difficulties, though perhaps not insuperable, in the way of such a genesis of property rights and pecuniary differentiation within any given community. The temper of the people bred in the ways of the simpler plan of hand-to-mouth and common interest does not readily bend itself to such an institutional innovation, even though the self-regarding impulses of particular members of the community may set in such a direction as would give the alleged result.[99]

There are other and more natural ways of reaching the same results, ways more consonant with that archaic scheme of usages on which the new institution of property is to be grafted. (a) In the known cultures of this simpler plan there are usually, or at least frequently, present a class of magicians (shamans, medicine men, angekut), an inchoate priestly class, who get their living in part “by their wits,” half parasitically, by some sort of tithe levied on their fellow members for supernatural ministrations and exploits of faith that are worth as much as they will bring.[100] As the industrial efficiency of the community increases with the technological gain, and an increasing disposable output is at hand, it should naturally follow, human nature being what it is, that the services of the priests or magicians should suffer an advance in value and so enable the priests to lay something by, to acquire a special claim to certain parcels of land or cultivated trees or crops or first-fruits or labour to be performed by their parishioners. There is no limit to the value of such ministrations except the limit of tolerance, “what the traffic will bear.” And much may be done in this way, which is in close touch with the accustomed ways of life among known savages and lower barbarians. To the extent to which such a move is successful it will alter the economic situation of the community by making the lay members, in so far, subject to the priestly class, and will gather wealth and power in the hands of the priests; so introducing a relation of master and servant, together with class differences in wealth, the practice of exclusive ownership, and pecuniary obligations. (b) With an accumulation of wealth, whether in portable form or in the form of plantations and tillage, there comes the inducement to aggression, predation, by whatever name it may be known. Such aggression is an easy matter in the common run of lower cultures, since relations are habitually strained between these savage and barbarian communities. There is commonly a state of estrangement between them amounting to constructive feud, though the feud is apt to lie dormant under a modus vivendi so long as there is no adequate inducement to open hostilities, in the way of booty. Given a sufficiently wealthy enemy who is sufficiently ill prepared for hostilities to afford a fighting chance of taking over this wealth by way of booty or tribute, with no obvious chance of due reprisals, and the opening of hostilities will commonly arrange itself. The communities mutually concerned so pass from the more or less precarious peaceful customs and animus common to the indigent lower cultures, to a more or less habitual attitude of predatory exploit. With the advent of warfare comes the war chief, into whose hands authority and pecuniary emoluments gather somewhat in proportion as warlike exploits and ideals become habitual in the community.[101] More or less of loot falls into the hands of the victors in any raid. The loot may be goods, cattle if any, or men, women and children; any or all of which may become (private) property and be accumulated in sufficient mass to make a difference between rich and poor. Captives may fall into some form of servitude, and in an agricultural community may easily become the chief item of wealth. At the same time an entire community may be reduced to servitude, so falling into the possession of an absentee owner (master), or under resident masters coming in from the victorious enemy.

In any or all of these ways the institution of ownership is likely to arise so soon as there is provocation for it, and in all cases it is a consequence of an appreciable advance in the industrial arts. Yet in a number of recorded cases a sufficient advance in technology does not appear to have been followed by so prompt an introduction of ownership, at least not in the fully developed form, as the surface facts would seem to have called for. Custom in the lower cultures is extremely tenacious, and what might seem an excessive allowance of time appears to be needed for so radical an innovation in the habitual scheme of things as is involved in the installation of rights of ownership. There are cases of a fairly advanced barbarian culture, with sufficiently coercive government control, an authoritative priesthood, and well-marked class distinctions which hold good both in economic and social relations, and yet where the line of demarcation between ownership and mastery is not drawn in any unambiguous fashion—where it is perhaps as accurate a statement as the case permits, to say that this distinction has not yet been made, and so would, if applied, mark a difference that does not yet exist.[102]

So long as overt predatory conditions continue to rule the case,—e. g., so long as the community in question continues, in a sense, under martial law, “in a state of seige,” where the holders of the economic advantage hold it on a tenure of prowess or by way of delegated power and prerogative from a superior of warlike antecedents and dynastic right,—so long the rights of ownership are not likely to be well differentiated from those of mastery. Much the same characterisation of such a state of things is conveyed in the current phrase that “the rights of person and property are not secure.” The very wide prevalence in the barbarian cultures of some such state of things argues that the genesis of property rights is likely to have been something of this kind in the common run, though it does not in other cases preclude a different and more peaceable development out of workmanlike or priestly economies.