A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical PrinciplesClapperton, Jane Hume
Philosophy
A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical Principles
Clapperton, Jane Hume
Ethics, Evolutionary; Social evolution
We may confidently assert that as large industries approach to the stage
of absorption into monopolies of federated groups of wealthy
capitalists, the more general and widespread grows dissatisfaction and
resentment on the part of the dispossessed smaller capitalists who have
been beaten out of the field.
Now, the trend of movement to-day, through the whole fields of
production and distribution, is from business on a small scale to
business on a large scale, and the formation of limited companies,
rings, trusts, etc. By purchasing raw material in greater quantities an
immense saving is effected, and the same occurs in the advertising of
goods and in organizing numerous workers instead of a few. These savings
make it possible to lower the price of the finished commodity to the
public. Hence the change from smaller to larger commercial enterprises
is favourable to public interests up to a certain point. But the moment
monopoly point is reached, the position straightway becomes reversed.
Henceforward the public have no protection from a sudden raising of
prices, for, the competitive check having been withdrawn, monopolists
dominate their respective fields of production and distribution, and the
individually selfish forces alone hold sway.
This tendency, then, to larger and larger industrial organization, with
its wasteful warfare and other attendant evils, implies a certain
advance. It indicates competition working out to its last expression and
final breakdown. It points to the supersession of the individualistic
industrial system by a collectivist industrial system requiring
democratic state-ownership of land and the means of production and
distribution of all commodities.
In process of civilizing man has made himself acquainted with many laws
of nature, and has learnt so to handle matter as to direct its forces
into channels carrying benefit to himself. He has thus become the
controller of natural forces in as far as they lie within reach of his
mental comprehension and physical activities. It is by this method, and
no other, that our advance along the line of material civilization has
been accomplished, and all further extension of the comforts and
amenities of economic and social life is certain to be obtained through
persistence in this available and satisfactory course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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