The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other EssaysVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
Veblen, Thorstein
Economics; Science
So soon as the capitalist regime, in this sense, comes in, it ceases to
be true that the owner of the industrial equipment (or the controller of
it) in any given case is or may be the producer of it, in any naive
sense of "production." He is under the necessity of acquiring its
ownership or control by some other expedient than that of industrially
productive work. The pursuit of industry requires an accumulation of
wealth, and, barring force, fraud, and inheritance, the method of
acquiring such an accumulation of wealth is necessarily some form of
bargaining; that is to say, some form of business enterprise. Wealth is
accumulated, within the industrial field, from the gains of business;
that is to say, from the gains of advantageous bargaining.[7] Taking the
situation by and large, looking to the body of business enterprise as a
whole, the advantageous bargaining from which gains accrue and from
which, therefore, accumulations of capital are derived, is necessarily,
in the last analysis, a bargaining between those who own (or control)
industrial wealth and those whose work turns this wealth to account in
productive industry. This bargaining for hire--commonly a wage
agreement--is conducted under the rule of free contract, and is
concluded according to the play of demand and supply, as has been well
set forth by many writers.
On this technological view of capital, as here spoken for,
the relations between the two parties to the bargain, the
capitalist-employer and the working class, stand as follows. More or
less rigorously, the technological situation enforces a certain scale
and method in the various lines of industry.[8] The industry can, in
effect, be carried on only by recourse to the technologically requisite
scale and method, and this requires a material equipment of a certain
(large) magnitude; while material equipment of this required magnitude
is held exclusively by the capitalist-employer, and is _de facto_ beyond
the reach of the common man.
A corresponding body of immaterial equipment--knowledge and practice of
ways and means--is likewise requisite, under the rule of the same
technological exigencies. This immaterial equipment is in part
drawn on in the making of the material equipment held by the
capitalist-employers, in part in the use to be made of this material
equipment in the further processes of industry. This body of immaterial
equipment so drawn on in any line of industry is, relatively, still
larger, being, on any exhaustive analysis, virtually the whole body of
industrial experience accumulated by the community up to date. A free
draft on this common stock of technological wisdom must be had both in
the construction and in the subsequent use of the material equipment;
although no one person can master, or himself employ, more than an
inconsiderable fraction of the immaterial equipment so drawn on for the
installation or operation of any given block of the material equipment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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