Creative Impulse in Industry | Page 6

is the absence of
fear, rather than the absence of work, that determines the capacity of
men for play.
It was not accidental that the movement of the French workers for
emancipation emphasized a desire for control of industry. The
syndicalism of France has expressed the workers' interest in production
as the labor movements of 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