§1.Since industry is a great cooperative process for the mutual aid of members of society, it is well that the fact should be held in the consciousness and will of individuals as clearly as possible.For this conscious realisation of the meaning of industry will have a helpful influence on their intelligence and feelings.
Now there are general related tendencies in modern industry which are powerful obstacles to this realisation of the social meaning of industry.
The first is the growing subdivision of labour with the related expansion of markets.When a man made a watch or a pair of shoes and sold them to a neighbour, or known customer, his work had for him a distinct human significance.
For, making the whole of a thing, he realised its nature and utility, while, seeing the man who wore his watch or shoes, he realised the human value of his work.Now he performs one of some ninety processes which go to make many watches, or he trims the heels of innumerable shoes.The other processes he cannot do, and does not accurately know how they are done.His separate contribution has no clear utility, and yet it solely occupies his attention.
Not only does he thus lose grasp of the meaning of his work, but he has no opportunity of realising its consumptive utility.For he cannot know or care anything about the unknown person in some distant part of the world who shall wear the boots or watch be helped to make.The social sympathy of cooperative industry is thus atrophied by the conditions of his work.
Division of labour, in its first intent, thus divides each worker into a section of a producer, and separates each set of producers from the consumers of their products.
Though, therefore, this division of labour is in itself a finer mode of cooperation, it is not realised as such by those who are subjected to it.
§2.The second dehumanising and derationalising influence is the stress which the operations of modern industry lay on competition between trade and trade, business and business, worker and worker.No graver injury has been inflicted on the mind of man, in the name of science, than the prepotence which the early science of Political Economy assigned to the competitive and combative aspects of industrial life.To represent commerce between individuals and nations as a 'competitive system', mainly dependent for its successful operation upon the absorption of each man in seeking his own gain, and in getting the better of others in his trade, was an error of the first magnitude.Nor was this error sufficiently corrected by the qualifying theory that from this pursuit by each of his separate gains the greatest good for all would somehow emerge.For, by laying the stress upon the competitive aspect of industry, this teaching stied the growth of intellectual and moral sympathy between the various human centres of the industrial system, and impaired the sense of human solidarity which, apart from its spiritual value, is the mainspring of efficient economic organisation.The presentation of industry as competition with attendant cooperation, instead of as cooperation with attendant competition, has greatly contributed to the popular misunderstanding of commerce, alike upon its domestic and its international scales.1Competition, if defended as a socially useful method of industry, must, like division of labour, be proved to contribute to cooperative ends.The general underlying assumption, that it will do so, we have seen to be false.
Equally unjustified have been the accounts of actual industry which assume the general prevalence of free competition.At all times the area and liberty of effective competition between business and business, worker and worker, have been limited, and tend in recent times to closer limitation.
But if division of labour and competition, apart from a realisation of their cooperative values, are dehumanising and antisocial, so likewise is the growing anonymity of modern business.'Compagnie Anonyme' is the significant French name for a Joint Stock Company with its unknown shareholders.
But this depersonalising process is everywhere inseparable from the magnitude and intricacy of modern businesses and modern markets.The capital belonging to a crowd of persons, who are strangers to one another, is massed into an effective productive aggregate, and is set to cooperate with masses of labour power whose owners are divorced from all direct contact, either with the owners of the tools and material, or with the purchasers of the product.An effective comradeship among large numbers of workers, distributed over diverse processes and often severed widely in their places of work, is also difficult to maintain.A great modern business is in its structure less effectively human than was the small workshop which it displaced.
One effect of this weaker humanity of the business, especially in the relations between capital and labour, employer and employee, has been to shift the sentimental attachment of the worker from his business to his trade-union.
He is less a member of a business firm, serving some directly productive function, than a member of a labour-group extending over the area of a local or even a national trade.
