THE VESTED INTERESTS & THE NATURE OF PEACE. Thorstein Veblen
for the ordinary occupations of the common man even apart from any employment in the greater mechanical industries. It is especially the latter-day system of transport and communication as it works out under the new order highly mechanical and exactingly scheduled for time, rate and place -- that so controls and standardises the ordinary life of the common man on mechanical lines.
The training enforced by this mechanical standardisation, therefore, is of much the same order throughout the community as it is within the mechanical industries proper, and it drives to the same outcome, -- submergence of the personal equation. So that the workday information and the reasoning by use of which all men carry on their daily life under the new order is of the same general character as that information and reasoning which guides the mechanical engineers; and the unremitting habituation to its scope and method, its principles of knowledge and belief, leads headlong to a mechanistic conception of things, ways, means, ends, and values, whether it is called by that name or not. The resulting frame of mind is often spoken of as
Materialism. This impersonal character of workday habituation is particularly to be counted on to take decisive effect wherever the latter-day scheme of mechanical standardisation takes effect with all that wide sweep and massive drift with which it now dominates the larger centers of population.
Since the modern era began, the state of the industrial arts has been undergoing a change of type. Such as the followers of
Mendel would call a "mutation." And in the course of this mutation the workman and his part in the conduct of industry have suffered as great a dislocation as any of the other factors involved. But it is also to be admitted that the typical owner-employer of the earlier modern time, such as he stood in the mind's eye of the eighteenth-century doctrinaires, -- this traditional owner-employer has also come through the period of the mutation in a scarcely better state of preservation. At the period of this stabilisation of principles in the eighteenth century, he could still truthfully be spoken of as a "master," a foreman of the shop, and he was then still invested with a large reminiscence of the master-craftsman, as known in the time of the craft-gilds. He stood forth in the eighteenth-century argument on the Natural Order of things as the wise and workmanlike designer and guide of his workmen's handiwork, and he was then still presumed to be living in workday contact and communion with them and to deal with them on an equitable footing of personal interest.
Such a characterisation of the capitalist-employer who was doing business at the time of the Industrial Revolution may seem over-drawn; and there is no need of insisting on its precise accuracy as a description of eighteenth-century facts. But it should not be extremely difficult to show that substantially such a figure of an employer-owner was had in mind by those who then argued the questions of wages and employment and laid down the lines on which the employment of labor would be expected to arrange itself under the untroubled system of natural liberty.
But what is more to the point is that which is beyond question.
In practical fact, almost as fully as in the speculations of the doctrinaires, the employer of labor in the staple industries of that time was, in his own person, commonly also the owner of the establishment in which his hired workmen were employed; and also -- again in passable accord with the facts -- he was presumed personally to come to terms with his workmen about wages and conditions of work. Employment was considered to be a relation of man to man. That much is explicit in the writings which bear the date-mark of this modern Liberal point of view; and the same assumption has continued to stand over as a self-sufficient premise among the defenders of the free competitive system in industry, for three or four generations after that period.
But the course of events has gone its own way, and about that time -- somewhere along in the middle half of the eighteenth century -- that type of employer began to be displaced in those staple industries which have since then set the pace and made the outcome for wages and conditions of work. So soon as the machine industry began to make headway, the industrial plant increased in size, and the number of workmen employed in each establishment grew continually larger; until in the course of time the large scale of organisation in industry has put any relation of man to man out of the question between employers and workmen in the leading industries. Indeed, it is not unusual to find that in an industrial plant of a large or middling size, a factory, mill, works, mine, shipyard or railway of the ordinary sort, very few of the workmen would be able, under oath, to identify their owner. At the same time, and owing to the same requirements of large-scale and mechanical organisation, the ownership of the works has also progressively been changing character; so that today, in the large and leading industries, the place of the personal employer-owner is taken by a composite business concern which represents a combination of owners, no one of whom is individually responsible for the concern's transactions. So true is this, that even where the ownership of a given industrial establishment still vests wholly or mainly in a single person, it has commonly been found expedient to throw the ownership into the corporate form, with limited liability.
The personal employer-owner has virtually disappeared from the great industries. His place is now filled by a list of corporation securities and a staff of corporation officials and employees who exercise a limited discretion. The personal note is no longer to be had in the wage relation, except in those backward, obscure and subsidiary industries in which the mechanical reorganisation of the new order has not taken effect.
So, even that contractual arrangement which defines the workman's relation to the establishment in which he is employed, and to the anonymous corporate ownership by which he is employed, now takes the shape of a statistical reckoning, in which virtually no trace of the relation of man to man is to be found. Yet the principles of the modern point of view governing this contractual relation, in current law and custom, are drawn on the assumption that wages and conditions of work are arranged for by free bargaining between man and man on a footing of personal understanding and equal opportunity.
That the facts of the New Order have in this way departed from the ground on which the constituent principles of the modern point of view are based, and on which therefore the votaries of the established system take their stand, -- this state of things can not be charged to anyone's personal account and made a subject of recrimination. In fact, it is not a case for personal discretion and responsibility in detail, but rather for concerted action looking to some practicable working arrangement.
The personal equation is no longer a material factor in the situation. Ownership, too, has been caught in the net of the New
Order and has been depersonalised to a degree beyond what would have been conceivable a hundred years ago, especially so far as it has to do with the use of material resources and man power in the greater industries. Ownership has been "denatured" by the course of events; so that it no longer carries its earlier duties and responsibilities. It used to be true that personally responsible discretion in all details was the chief and abiding power conferred by ownership; but wherever it has to do with the machine industry and large-scale organisation, ownership now has virtually lost this essential part of its ordinary functions. It has taken the shape of an absentee ownership of anonymous corporate capital, and in the ordinary management of this corporate capital the greater proportion of the owners have no voice.
This impersonal corporate capital, which is taking the place of the personal employer-owner of earlier times, is the outcome of a mutation of the scheme of things in business enterprise, scarcely less profound than the change which has overtaken the material equipment in the shift from handicraft methods to the machine technology. In practical fact today, corporate capital is the capitalised earning capacity of the corporation considered as a going business concern; and the ownership of this capital therefore foots up to a claim on the earnings of the corporation.
Corporate capital of this kind is impersonal in more than one sense: it may be transferred piecemeal from one owner to another without visibly affecting the management or the rating of the concern whose securities change hands in this way; and the personal identity of the owner of any given block of this capital need not be known even to the concern itself, to its administrative officers, or to those persons whose daily work and needs are bound up with the daily transactions of the concern.
For most purposes and as regards the greater proportion of the investors who in this way own the corporation's