The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine ProductionHobson, J. A. (John Atkinson)
History
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production
Hobson, J. A. (John Atkinson)
Capitalism; Industries -- History; Machinery in the workplace
This will be generally admitted. But there are those who will still
object that production just as much limits and determines consumption
as consumption does production, and who appear to hold that any
increase in present saving, and the consequent increase of amount of
plant and stock, has an economic power to force a corresponding rise
of future consumption which shall justify the saving. This they urge
in the teeth of the fact that in a normal state of industry in
machine-using countries there exists more machinery and more labour
than can find employment, and that only for a brief time in each
decennial period can the whole productive power of modern machinery be
fully used, notwithstanding the increasing blood-letting to which
superfluous saving is exposed by the machinations of bogus companies,
in which the "saving" done by the dupes is balanced by the "spending"
of the sharps. Ignoring the fact that the alleged power of increased
saving to stimulate increased consumption is not operative, they still
maintain that there cannot be too much "saving," because the tendency
of modern industry is to make production more and more "roundabout" in
its methods, and thus to provide scope for an ever-increasing quantity
of forms of capital.
Under modern machinery we see a constant increase in the number of
direct and subordinate processes connected with the forwarding of any
class of commodities to its completion. A larger proportion of the
productive labour and capital is employed, not upon the direct
horizontal line, but upon the perpendicular lines which represent the
making of subsidiary machinery. More and more saving may be stored up
in the shape of machines to make machines, and machines to make these
machines, and thus the period at which the "saving" shall fructify in
consumption may be indefinitely extended.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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