Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906: Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and LiteratureVarious
General
Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906: Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature
Various
Anarchism -- Periodicals
It may be objected that nevertheless there is a class of men who belong
to none of the above three divisions. When young they have been manual
workers, and some of them continue to be; but, owing to some happy
circumstances, they have succeeded in acquiring some scientific
knowledge, and thus they have combined science with handicraft. Surely
there are such men; happily enough there is a nucleus of men who have
escaped the so-much-advocated specialization of labor, and it is
precisely to them that industry owes its chief recent inventions. But in
old Europe at least, they are the exceptions; they are the
irregulars--the Cossacks who have broken the ranks and pierced the
screens so carefully erected between the classes. And they are so few,
in comparison with the ever-growing requirements of industry--and of
science as well, as I am about to prove--that all over the world we hear
complaint about the scarcity of precisely such men.
What is the meaning, in fact, of the outcry for technical education
which has been raised at one and the same time in England, in France, in
Germany, in the States, and in Russia, if it does not express a general
dissatisfaction with the present division into scientists, scientific
engineers, and workers? Listen to those who know industry, and you will
see that the substance of their complaint is this: "The worker whose
task has been specialized by the permanent division of labor has lost
the intellectual interest in his labor, and it is especially so in the
great industries: he has lost his inventive powers. Formerly, he
invented very much. Manual workers--not men of science nor trained
engineers--have invented, or brought to perfection, the prime motors and
all that mass of machinery which has revolutionized industry for the
last hundred years. But since the great factory has been enthroned, the
worker, depressed by the monotony of his work, invents no more. What can
a weaver invent who merely supervises four looms, without knowing
anything either about their complicated movements or how the machines
grew to be what they are? What can a man invent who is condemned for
life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest
celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot?
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