All this is absolutely opposed to our present system, but our present
system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore
vicious. I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the
failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the
factory system and advertising, but its concomitant, the segregation of
industries, is equally objectionable. To ship hogs 1,500 miles to be
slaughtered and packed in food form, and then ship this manufactured
product back to the source from which the raw material came; to feed a
great city with grain, potatoes and fruits coming from 1,000 to 3,000
miles away, and vegetables from a distance of several hundred miles,
while the farms within a radius of fifty miles are abandoned and barren;
to make all the shoes for the nation in one small area, to spin the wool
and cotton and weave the cloth in two or three others; to make the
greater part of the furniture in one state, the automobiles in a second
and the breakfast food in a third, is so preposterous a proposition that
it belongs in Gulliver's Travels, not in the annals of a supposedly
intelligent people. The only benefit is that which for a time accrued to
the railways, which carted raw materials and finished products back and
forth over thousands of miles of their lines, the costs of shipment and
reshipment being naturally added to the price to the consumer. The
penalties for this uneconomic procedure were borne by society at large,
not only in the increased costs but through the abnormal communities,
each with its tens of thousands of operatives all engaged in the same
work and generally drawn from foreign races (with the active
co-operation of the steamship lines), and the permanent dislocation of
the labour supply, together with the complete disruption of the social
synthesis.
With production for profit and segregation of industries has come an
almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour. Under a
right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified. The
dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as
possible each man should carry through one entire operation. This is of
course now, and always has been under any highly developed civilization,
impossible in practice, except along certain lines of art and
craftsmanship. The evils of the existing system can in a measure be done
away with the moment production for use is the recognized law, for it is
only in bulk-production that this intensive specialization can be made
to pay. Bulk-production there will always be until, and if, the world is
reorganized on the basis of an infinite number of self-contained social
units, but in the ideal community--and I am dealing now with ideals--it
would not exist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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