Creative Impulse in Industry | Page 9

labor union movement, unlike the political socialist
revolutionary movement, undertakes in its operation to supply labor
with a certain working content, which the administrative scheme of
industry has excluded from the experience of its workers. But this
content is not sufficient to stimulate the imagination of the trade
unionists with the thought that the world of industry is the field of
creative adventure. Their conception born of experience is not so
flattering. It would be a brave man who would undertake to convince

the twentieth century adult wage earner, involved in modern methods
of machine production, that his poverty is less in his possession of
wealth than in his growth and in his creative opportunity.
The industrial changes which the labor movement proposes to make are
on the side of a better distribution of goods. A better distribution would
have a dynamic significance in wealth production, if the actual increase
which labor secured in wages and leisure were a real increase. But
exploiting capital provides for such exigencies as high wages by
increasing the price of products, thus reducing the wage earners'
purchasing power to the former level. High wages fail to disturb the
relative portion of capital and labor even more than they fail to affect
the purchasing power of the worker.
It is often suggested that if the state assumed control of industry the
blight of business could be removed. But in the transfer we would not
necessarily gain opportunity to enjoy the adventure which industry
holds out. Industry as a creative experience, it is safe to predict, would
be as rare a personal experience and as foreign an influence in social
existence under state management as it is under business management.
The state would curb the amount of wealth exploitation possibly, but
would not alter the universal attitude toward wealth production, which
is to take as much and give as little as one can get off with.
Although political socialism may be the economic sequel of private
capital there is no foundation for the belief that it will of itself induce
creative effort or stimulate creative impulse. The faith back of the
socialist movement that desirable attributes like the creative impulse,
which men potentially possess, will begin to operate automatically and
universally as soon as there is sufficient leisure and food for general
consumption, is blind and historically unwarranted. The signs are that a
socialist state would lean exclusively on the consumption desire for
production results, just as the present system of business now does.
Neither fat incomes nor large leisure have furnished the world with its
people of genius. In spite of the inhibiting influence of exploitation,
they have come, what there are of them, out of intensive application to
some matter of moment. Possibly they would come, and more of them,

from the work-a-day world under socialism with the inhibiting
influence of organized exploitation removed, but more of them would
not insure a democracy in industry or elsewhere. Nothing insures that
short of a strong emotional impulse, a real intellectual interest in the
adventure of productive enterprise.
The creative desire is an incident or a sort of by-product of the
economics of socialism as it is of classical economics; neither one nor
the other depends on its cultivation. Either is capable of achieving mass
production, but neither insures a democratic control of industry, neither
provides for growth, for education in the productive process. A
democracy of industry requires a people's sustained interest in the
productive enterprise; their interest in the development of technology,
the development of markets, and the release of man's productive
energy.
It happens that in machine production and in the division of labor there
are emotional and intellectual possibilities which were non-existent in
the earlier and simpler methods of production. As power latent in
inorganic matter has been freed and applied to common needs, an
environment has been evolved, filled with situations incomparably
more dramatic than the provincial affairs of detached people and
communities. Although this technological subject matter, rich in
opportunities for associated adventure and infinite discovery, is not a
part of common experience, it exists, and if called out from its isolation
for purposes of common experimentation, it is fit matter for making
science a vital experience in the productive life of the worker.
Industry under the direction of business will not open up the adventure
with its stimulating factors to its subservient labor force, unless it
happens that the present methods fail, in time, to carry forward
industrial enterprise on a profit-making basis; or unless labor develops
the power which springs from desire for creative experience, to
undertake the direction and control of industry.
The present is better than any time earlier in the history of technology
for the development of a concept of industry as a socially creative
enterprise. As