Creative Impulse in Industry | Page 6

other countries have laid stress exclusively on its economic value to them. The syndicalists' theory takes for granted the readiness of workers to assume responsibility for production, while the trade unionists of England, Germany and the United States ask for a voice in determining not their productive but their financial relation to it.
It is the habit of these other peoples to credit the lack of interest in work to physical hardships which the wage system has imposed. But the wage system from the point of view of material welfare has borne no less heavily on the French than on other workers. It is also difficult to prove that the physical hardships of modern methods of production are greater than the hardships of earlier methods. The truth is that neither hardships nor exploitation of labor are new factors; they have both, through long centuries, repressed in varying degree the inspirational and intellectual interest of workers in productive effort. It is not the economic burdens which followed the introduction of machinery and the division of labor that distinguish these new factors in industry, but the discredit which they throw around man's labor power. They have carried the discredit of labor in its social position further than it had been carried, but this is merely a by-product of the discredit they cast on the skill and intellectual power which is latent in the working class. In this connection the significant truth for civilization is that while exploitation of labor and physical hardships induce the antagonism between labor and capital, modern factory organization destroys creative desire and individual initiative as it excludes the workers from participation in creative experience.
The new discoveries in inorganic power and their application to industrial enterprise are possibly more far reaching in their effect on the adjustment and relationships of men than they have been at any other time in the last century and a half. Whatever the world owes to these discoveries and their applications it cannot afford to lose sight of a fact of great social significance, which is, that people have accepted mechanical achievements, not as labor saving devices but as substitutes for human initiative and effort. They have not, indeed, saved labor to the advantage of labor itself, and they have inhibited interest in production. Outside of business enterprise and diplomacy--the political extension of business--mechanical devices have lost the surprise reaction and resentment which they originally set up. As a competitor with human labor they have established themselves as its fit survivor. The prophesy of Theophrastus Such seems to have been already fulfilled, and any new machine added to those already in power in the Parliament of Machines can scarcely add to the worker's sense of his own impotency. The business valuations which were evolved out of craftsmanship and which were further developed under the influence of the technology of the last century and a half, emphasized the value of material force, and repressed spiritual evaluations, such as the creative impulse in human beings.
Modern industrial institutions are developed by an exclusive cultivation of people's needs and the desire to possess. They are developed independently, as we have seen, of any need or desire to create. The desire to possess is responsible for the production of a mass of goods unprecedented and inconceivable a century and a half ago. The actual production of all of these goods is unrelated to the motive of men's participation in their production; the actual production in relation to the motive is an incident. The sole reason for the participation in the productive effort is not the desire for creative experience or the satisfaction of the creative impulse; it is not an interest in supplying the needs of a community or in the enrichment of life; it is to acquire out of the store of goods all that can be acquired for personal possession or consumption. There is no more fundamental need than the need to consume; but for the common run of men as a motive in the creation of wealth, it is shorn of adventure, of imagination and of joy.
The ownership of many things, which mass production has made possible, the intensive cultivation of the desire to own, has added another element to the corruption of workmanship and the depreciation of its value. Access to a mass of goods made cheap by machinery has had its contributing influence in the people's depreciation of their own creative efforts. As people become inured to machine standards, they lose their sense of art values along with their joy in creative effort, their self regard as working men and their personal equation in industrial life.
Where the motive of individuals who engage in industry is the desire to possess, the rational method of gaining possession is not by the arduous way of work but of