The industrial side of the process has had similar influence toward
union. Free craftsmen in the towns found mutual support in guilds, when
as yet the farm laborer or villein had to get on as best he could
unaided. The factory system itself has been largely organized from
above down. It has very largely assumed that the higher command needs
no advice or ideas from below. Hours of labor, shop conditions, wages,
have largely been fixed by "orders," just as governments once ruled by
decrees. But as dominance in government has led men to unite against
the new power and then has yielded to the more complete coöperation of
participation, so in industry the factory system has given rise to the
labor movement. As for the prospects of fuller coöperation, this may be
said already to have displaced the older autocratic system within the
managing group, and the war is giving an increased impetus to extension
of the process.
Exchange of goods and services is indeed a threefold coöperation: it
meets wants which the parties cannot themselves satisfy or cannot well
satisfy; it awakens new wants; it calls new inventions and new forces
into play. It thus not only satisfies man's existing nature, but
enlarges his capacity for enjoyment and his active powers. It makes not
only for comfort, but for progress.
IV
If trade and industry, however, embody so fully the principle of
coöperation, how does it come about that they have on the whole had a
rather low reputation, not only among the class groups founded on
militarism, but among philosophers and moralists? Why do we find the
present calamities of war charged to economic causes? Perhaps the
answer to these questions will point the path along which better
coöperation may be expected.
There is, from the outset, one defect in the coöperation between buyer
and seller, employer and laborer. The coöperation is largely
unintended. Each is primarily thinking of his own advantage, rather
than that of the other, or of the social whole; he is seeking it in
terms of money, which as a material object must be in the pocket of one
party or of the other, and is not, like friendship or beauty, sharable.
Mutual benefit is the result of exchange--it need not be the motive.
This benefit comes about as if it were arranged by an invisible hand,
said Adam Smith. Indeed, it was long held that if one of the bargainers
gained, the other must lose. And when under modern conditions labor is
considered as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest market
by an impersonal corporate employer, there is a strong presumption
against the coöperative attitude on either side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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