marginal shifting will suffice." Illustrate. Under what general conditions is the quotation particularly applicable? 71. Explain what is meant: "Production is today a social, not an individual, process." "Competition is an organizing force-a method of organization." "Society is today in unrest because of violation of reciprocity." tion of society is effected." "In our co-operative society price is the organizing force." 72. It has been stated that the conception of our society as one of individual exchange co-operation throws light upon such expressions as "all labor is noble," "every calling is sacred," "there is little use in trying to distinguish between sacred and secular callings." Comment. 73. "The whole machinery of buying and selling is simply a convenient means of combining effectively the various factors in production, and of assigning the appropriate shares of the product to those who have claims upon it." Explain. B. The Co-operation of Our Society See 4. The System of Individual Exchange Co-operation. 85. THE GREAT CO-OPERATION Απ In a simpler state of things we may suppose that the woman worker spins and weaves her own cloth, and say, without serious inaccuracy, that her real income is what she produces. Employed in a mill, the spinner cannot take her income in yarn, for she cannot use the yarn; nor can the weaver take her income in cloth, for she could use only a fraction of the cloth. But neither yarn nor cloth can be said accurately to be the product of these two. They are the product of all those persons and things that have finally found issue in the yarn and cloth, and both spinner's and weaver's contributions are but an insignificant fraction of the whole. Yarn and cloth are, indeed, the product into which their labour visibly enters; but the labour of the machine-maker who makes nothing else than spinning and weaving machinery, and of the miner who digs the coals which supply the power, enters just as visibly and directly into the making of yarn. Adapted by permission from William Smart, The Distribution of Income, pp. 109-10. (Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1899.) If, again, we look beyond factory industry to such offices as that of a policeman, soldier, judge, and ask how their service is to be assessed and divided out among those to whom it is rendered, we find that all we can say is that the total of goods-the total income-is produced by all the workers acting together, but that to assign any particular share to any individual or class according to its product is impossible. The mill girl no more "produces" yarn than she "grows" potatoes. She co-operates with the machine-maker and the coalminer, and all those whose exertions are necessary to the turning out of yarn and cloth; but she co-operates just as truly with the ploughman, the policeman, the clergyman, and the musician. If one makes cloth for all and another preaches sermons for all, the one co-operates with the other in the producing of the sermons and the other cooperates in the "producing" of cloth. BI Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or daylabourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation exceeds all computation. The woolen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the product of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen. To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the 'From Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, chap. i. builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the bricklayer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the millwright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing those different conveniences; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages. 86. THE INDIRECT METHOD OF SATISFYING WANTS1 Every man has certain purposes, impulses, and desires. They may be of a merely instinctive and elementary nature, or they may be deliberate and far-reaching; they may be self-regarding or social; I Adapted by permission from P. H. Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy, pp. 165-68. (Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1910.) they may be spiritual or material; but whatever they are, it is impossible for him to give effect to them by his own unaided action upon the forces and substances of nature. No man, standing naked upon the face of the earth, can feed, clothe, or house his body, or secure an entrance for his mind into the regions of intellectual, imaginative, and emotional enjoyment; nor (suppose he has altruistic impulses) can he, thus unaided, minister to like needs or develop like possibilities in others. Neither can he accomplish these things by the direct application of his own faculties supported by all the material supplies and instruments he possesses or can possess; nor yet, except under very special circumstances, simply by enlisting the co-operation directly inspired by sympathy with him or with his purposes. But by direct and indirect processes of exchange, by the social alchemy of which money is the symbol, the things I have and the things I can are transmuted into the things I want and the things I would. By these processes I can convert my acquaintance with the nature of different kinds of wood, and my skill in handling certain tools, or my knowledge of the higher mathematics, or my capacity for firing men's imaginations, or for chastening or stimulating their religious emotions, into food and clothing, into books and pictures, into the rapid transport of my own person through distant lands, into dinners for hungry children, into May festivities for listless villagers, into the collation of Syriac manuscripts, or into any of the thousand other things that I want to have, to experience, or to get done; and all this independently of any interest in these desires of mine, or any knowledge of them, on the part of very many of the persons who assist me to accomplish them. Why, then, do they co-operate with me at all? Not primarily, or not solely, because they are interested in my purposes, but because they have certain purposes of their own; and just as I find that I can only secure the accomplishment of my purposes by securing their co-operation, so they find that they can only accomplish theirs by securing the co-operation of yet others, and they find that I am in a position, directly or indirectly, to place this co-operation at their disposal. A vast range, therefore, of our relations with others enters into a system of mutual adjustment by which we further each other's purposes simply as an indirect way of furthering our own. All such relations may be fitly called "economic." The range of activity they cover is "business." If one man possesses wheat in such quantities that he finds it well to exchange some of it for potatoes, and another for like reasons is glad to change potatoes for wheat, this is not generally the result of any miscalculation, and not necessarily the result of any original and inevitable diversity of opportunities or faculties. It was deliberately contemplated and planned from the beginning, because the one man believed that the most economical way for him to increase his stock of potatoes was to grow wheat, and vice versa. By the system of "economic relations," then, I understand that system which enables me to throw in at some point of the circle of exchange the powers and possessions I directly command and draw out other possessions and the command of other powers whether at the same point or at some other. Lastly, "economic forces" or "the economic force" may suitably be used to indicate the resultant pressure of all the conditions, material and psychological, that urge men to enter into economic relations with each other. By economic forces I shall mean anything and everything which tends to bring men into economic relations. Thus, the invention of machinery which tends to increase division of labour, the concentration of the industrial population, improved means of transport and communication, the credit system, the general demand for elementary and technical education, and, in a word, the whole structure, organization, and movement of society, is perpetually opening and closing opportunities for combination and for the mutual furtherance of each other's purposes by men of differing faculty, opportunity, and desire. And these conditions determine how far and in what way the general desire of every man to accomplish his own purposes, whatever they may be, shall become an economic force, urging him to enter into relations with other men, with a view to the more effective accomplishment of his own purposes. Whether I pursue my purposes directly through the application of my own resources and capacities to their accomplishment, or indirectly by entering into an economic relation with other men, applying my resources directly to the accomplishment of their purposes and only indirectly to the accomplishment of my own, in either case my motives are identical. 87. UNREST BECAUSE OF VIOLATION OF RECIPROCITY' The fundamental assumption upon which civilized society rests is that each member of society is doing something to make the general conditions of life easier for society as a whole. If there were no such I Taken by permission from A. W. Small, “Private Business a Public Trust," American Journal of Sociology, I (1895-96), 283-89. |