Part 25

“Ah, but,” you will reply, “if the riveter only worked a little while he could not earn enough to live on.”

Here is where our economic fallacies come in. The man with the machine can turn out as many rivets in an hour as the man working by hand could in a day. Therefore his hour’s work is equal to what was a day’s work. That is the value of machinery. It gives more wealth for less effort, the maximum product with the minimum expense of nerve force and of time. Every step of our elaborate mechanical specialisation should have relieved the worker of more and more hours of labour and set that much time and strength free for other use.

The infinite multiplication of wealth by machinery meets its own problem of overspecialisation. Here are a hundred men, making cloth alone on a hundred hand looms, and earning thereby a dollar a day each—one hundred dollars. Here are these hundred men organised, specialised; ten of them run machine looms, turning out cloth tenfold, equal to a thousand dollars a day. Other ten, specialised, run the mill and its business; twenty of them with machines earning ten times what the hundred did, or forty of them working half a day each, or eighty of them working quarter of a day.

The earning power of the man plus the machine is so enormously multiplied that he is richly able to take the needed rest and variety of exercise which will enable him to do his wearing work without injury, and at the same time give society the benefit of the extreme specialisation.

“But—but,” cries the offended reader, “the man does not own the machine! he did own the loom. It takes capital to run a mill, and capital has to be paid!”

The question of property rights comes in later, in Chapter XV. This is all a question of men, of human beings, and how they best work together, doing the most for Society with the least injury to themselves. This chapter is not taking up the question of capital nor of property, but simply seeking to show that specialisation, as such, need not injure the worker, because the very nature of specialisation is to reduce man’s work. Why we have also made it reduce man’s pay is not so easily explained. That the greatest multiplier of wealth should impoverish the producer surely indicates some defect in our methods.

Specialisation perfects and multiplies production, and reduces effort. This inevitably increases wealth and leisure. If the wealth and leisure are monopolised in one quarter and the contributory specialist is sacrificed in the process, it does not prove the specialisation to be wrong, but the distribution of result; and that we will take up in the chapter on Distribution. Meanwhile the law of specialisation goes on and gives us social servants more and more exquisitely adapted to some one function. With normal economic conditions they would take full share in the resultant social gain, and be quite free to combat the possible ill effects of their position.

The shortening of hours allows of another quite simple and natural effect. Where work is so broad and general as to require a whole man’s whole working time, as of the teacher, artist, or large manager in any industry, it is thereby so interesting that a man can give his whole time to it without belittling effects. (“Whole working time” need not be more than four to six hours, even at our stage of mechanical evolution.)

Where work is so narrow and fractional as not to interest a man for his whole time, it is therefore so specialised that he need not give his whole time to it.

The simple turning of a crank for an hour wearies the brain equal to larger effort, but does not forbid that brain some other labour. If the specialty is one of exquisite subtlety of particular skill, as with those girls in the Treasury who test banknotes by touch, no other labour should be entered upon which would tend to blur or weaken that skill, only rest and recreation.

A properly educated human creature, in full touch with the whole great working world, can support his or her own concentrated effort by virtue of conscious connection with the whole, can see the ship in the rivet. Well nourished socially, keenly alive to our gain, our progress, and to the relative value of his own department of service and his own share in it, not looking at the work as his, done for his pay, but as ours and done for our benefit, the normal human being can not only sustain extreme specialisation, but glory in it.

Our especial cruelty in this regard is that we condemn to exhausting hours of extreme specialisation the very people least fitted to bear it, the ill-nourished physically and socially, the uneducated, the dull and dark of mind. Or, conversely, we deprive our extremely specialised social servants of exactly those things by which alone they can sustain the demands of that service.

A man with widespread, active social consciousness, in full contact and exchange with all parts of the great body to which he belongs, will not suffer from its concentrated and exclusive service, but will take glad part in forming an “all-round” Society.

One would think that specialisation in labour ought to have forced upon every observer long ages since the fact that human work is something done for others. The shepherd and fisherman, first stage above savagery, may live upon the fruit of their labours; and so, in part, may the farmer, first stage of really civilised growth. They exchange the surplus, but they do directly consume part of what passes through their hands.

But the specialised workman, whether he carry a spade or a hod, swing an axe or hold a lever, is so obviously doing it for thousands of unknown other people that his position under the ego concept becomes miraculously difficult. He holds it, though, and, what is perhaps even more miraculous, so do we! So does the general consumer, whose life is maintained by the service of thousands of fellow beings,—who is housed by them, clothed by them, carried by them, guarded by them, taught by them,—still have the incredible face to maintain that these people who keep him alive are working for themselves!

Harder than steel must be the cell walls of the brain that can live in such complex social relation as ours to-day and maintain that he or anyone else “takes care of himself.” The error dates back in essence to the ego concept; but it becomes a thousand-fold more erroneous when first the machine, and then the use of “natural forces” applied to machinery, made possible our vast increase in specialisation.

That one man must give his life to the art of weaving did not so narrow his mental area, or so cut him off from appreciation of other branches of human work, as this later development where a man wears out two sets of oak planks in one spot, standing still all his life, making nails! It seems “a far cry” from the fractional construction of nails to the social consciousness, and yet, in the true order of industrial development, it brings it nearer. The more extreme the specialisation the more extreme the interdependence, and that universal interdependence is the condition which calls for, and which develops, social consciousness.

In the true order—but that order has been grievously interfered with by our own mistakes. Acting under the ego concept, and the system of competition which rests upon it, the increasing specialisation which is so normal a condition of social growth has been made to carry increasing evil consequences to the specialised worker. A just and rational position on the part of Society! As fast as its members specialise in compliance with the demands of social benefit, so fast does the benefited society stunt and degrade its benefactors!

That there has been improvement in the rank and file of society is not denied, but it is due to our partial and grudging distribution of the social good along normal lines of public provision, such as free schools and libraries, and not to our idiotic ideas of individual work and pay.

Where there is no such public provision our economic concepts act to crush and degrade the worker. That increasing specialisation with its mechanical adjuncts, which should make it possible for a man to discharge his social obligations in an hour and then be free to contribute to progress by larger growth, we have taken advantage of to compel an amount and grade of labour alike ruinous to the individual in his immediate sacrifice and to the society composed of such sacrificed individuals. Men dying of thirst have been known to bite madly into their own flesh and suck the blood, but for a prosperous, growing society, rich, powerful, safe, intelligent, to make a steady diet of its own meat, is unreasonable.

“The social sacrifice” is a very real and noble thing. It sometimes requires the lives of some of its members to preserve the life of the whole body. This sacrifice is always cheerfully made in war. It also requires the surrender of individual freedom of action to that complex interaction and unswerving duty which makes up the social service. But this sacrifice is more than compensated by the advantages given the individual in the life of the whole. A member of a big, complex society has not only a far better and happier personal life than his freely individual savage ancestor, but he has also share in the large, glorious, common life of that society.

That is, he should have these things. As it is—owing to our antediluvian errors—he has to make the sacrifice, and in return he is reduced to an individual life far less gratifying than that of a healthy savage, yet knows no more of the splendid social consciousness belonging to his position than if he were that savage still.

There is one feature in social specialisation so prominent and so important as to call for more detailed explanation. This is the relation of what we call “unskilled labour” to social evolution. Our ideas of justice in payment, of the necessary “cheapness” of certain low grades of work, our patient tenderness or impatient contempt for this immense class of humanity, rest on the assumption that human beings are widely unequal in ability; that most of them are of this low and cheap order, and that social progress lies in the advance of superior individuals, assisted in a humble way by the inferior.

For these we must “furnish employment” of a simple character suited to their powers, and pay them with a modesty equal to their other limitations. Because there are so many of them, their competition for the humble tasks allotted keeps the price of unskilled labour very low indeed. Through organisation they have forced the price up a little, but most of us consider this as unjustifiable in strict economic law.

If it is shown that low wages for low labour keeps that labour always low, and indeed makes it lower; that out of the impoverished environment we inevitably breed defectives and degenerates, diseases and crimes; and that farther, because a hard and unfavourable environment promotes fecundity, therefore this low rate of wages tends to increase the birth rate of the lowest people, thus making a vicious circle of social stagnation and deterioration—if these things are proved to us, we say it cannot be helped—it is a condition of human nature. These inferior people are the bulk of humanity; they cannot do high-grade labour; it would not be fair to pay the plentiful “cheap labour” as much as the scarce and therefore more expensive kind, so there you are! As a way of escape from this position “the brotherhood of man” tries to uplift the lowly, but the majority do not accept this brotherhood theory. Or they say, “Brother or not, these are such hopelessly inferior brothers that we will not consent to any levelling which would reduce us to their grade, and they cannot be raised to ours.”

Now here is the true position. “Unskilled labour” is a product of social evolution. Among savages there is no unskilled labour. Each man must be skilled in several lines to keep himself alive. In his pre-social condition of individualism, his life depending immediately upon his own exertions, he necessarily develops skill in his essential activities. No heavy-eyed, slow-witted, hod-carrying grade of efficiency could maintain itself in a status of individual savagery. The “man with the hoe” comes later—much later. He is produced, developed, maintained, by a highly differentiated society. The nobleman evolves the serf—they are parts of one fighting organisation. The mill-owner and his “hands” are part of one working organisation.

The individual savage is swift, alert, vigorous, sentinelled by the keenest of senses, served by prompt and varied abilities of many sorts. But his action, though more perfect, is on a lower grade in industrial evolution. He would not be capable, though under never so dreaded penalties, of working, his life long, in one fractional line of social service.

The more society develops the more widely differentiated become its labours. In its differentiation there comes to be an immense proportion of very simple things to do; simple because they are tiny parts of something extremely complex. The savage’s life is anything but “simple.” His elaborate and exciting monologue requires of him the whole gamut of individual capacity in constant shock and change. But in the peace and power of a great civilisation, in the organic spread of social functions, there are more and more kinds of labour which are so infinitely simplified that a dolt can do them.