HOW INDUSTRY COULD GIVE RISE TO AN ARISTOCRACY
I HAVE shown how democracy encourages the development of industry and increases the number of industrial workers without limit. We shall now look at the roundabout way in which industry might well in turn lead men back to aristocracy.
It has been found that when a worker spends every day working on the same detail of a product, the finished article is produced more easily, more quickly, and more economically.
It has also been found that the larger the scale of an industrial enterprise, with abundant capital and abundant credit, the cheaper its products.
These truths have been dimly recognized for a long time, but in recent years they have been conclusively proven. They are already being applied to several very important industries, and less important industries are taking them up in their turn.
I see nothing in the world of politics that ought to concern lawmakers more than these two new axioms of industrial science.
When an artisan devotes himself constantly and exclusively to the fabrication of a single article, he eventually develops a remarkable dexterity in doing that job. But at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. Every day he becomes more skillful and less industrious, and we may say of him that the man is degraded as the workman is perfected.
What should we expect of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making pinheads? And to what can he henceforth apply that powerful human intellect that has often stirred the world, other than the search for the best way of making pinheads?
When a worker has spent a considerable portion of his life this way, his thought invariably revolves around the daily object of his labors. His body acquires certain fixed habits that it cannot shed. In a word, he belongs not to himself any longer but to the occupation he has chosen. It does not matter how much laws and mores have done to break down the barriers surrounding this man and to open up a thousand varied roads to fortune. An industrial theory more powerful than mores and laws has tied him to a trade and in many cases a location he cannot quit. It has assigned him a certain place in society, from which he cannot exit. In the midst of universal change, it has immobilized him.
As the principle of division of labor is more thoroughly applied, the worker becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The art progresses, the artisan regresses. Furthermore, as the scale of manufacturing and capital investment increases, products improve and become cheaper, and as people begin to realize this, very wealthy and very enlightened men move in to exploit industries that had previously been left to ignorant or hard-pressed artisans. These men are attracted by the magnitude of the effort required and the immensity of the results to be obtained.
Thus as industrial science steadily debases the class of workers, it raises the class of masters.
While the worker increasingly concentrates his intellect on the study of single details, the master daily surveys a much vaster range of things, and his mind expands as the worker’s contracts. Before long, the worker has no need of anything but physical strength without intelligence; the master needs science, and almost genius, in order to succeed. One comes more and more to resemble the administrator of a vast empire, and the other to resemble a brute.
In this respect, therefore, master and worker are not alike at all, and with each passing day they become increasingly different. They are joined only in the sense of being the two extreme links of a long chain. Each one occupies a place that is made for him, which he does not leave. One is in a state of constant, strict, and necessary dependence on the other and seems born to obey, as the other seems born to command.
What is this, if not aristocracy?
As conditions in the body of the nation move toward greater and greater equality, the need for manufactured objects spreads and increases in intensity, and the low cost that brings such objects within reach of modest fortunes becomes an increasingly important ingredient of success.
Every day, therefore, increasingly opulent and enlightened men devote their wealth and knowledge to industry and seek, by opening large plants with a strict division of labor, to satisfy the new desires that crop up on every side.
Thus, as the mass of the nation turns to democracy, the particular class that is concerned with industry becomes more aristocratic. Men appear to be increasingly similar in the one arena and increasingly different in the other, and the increase of inequality in the smaller society is proportionate to the decrease of inequality in the larger one.
So when one goes back to the source, what one finds is that aristocracy seems to emerge from the very midst of democracy as the result of a natural effort.
But this aristocracy does not resemble any of the ones that preceded it.
Note, first of all, that because it devotes itself solely to industry and to certain industrial occupations, it is an exception, a monster, in relation to the social state as a whole.
The small aristocratic societies that certain industries constitute within the vast democracies of today resemble the great aristocratic societies of old in that they comprise a small number of very opulent men and a very wretched multitude.
The poor have few ways of escaping their condition and becoming rich, but the rich are always becoming poor or quitting business with the profits they have amassed. Thus the elements of the poor class are almost fixed, but the elements of the rich class are not. To tell the truth, although there are rich people, the rich do not exist as a class, because rich people have no common spirit or objectives or traditions or hopes. Hence there are members but no body.
Not only are the rich not solidly united among themselves, but there is no genuine bond between the poor man and the rich man.
They are not fixed in place, side by side, in perpetuity. At any given moment, interest may bring them together or drive them apart. The workman is dependent on masters in general but not on any master in particular. The two men see each other at the factory but have nothing to do with each other anywhere else, and while they come into contact at one point, in all other respects they remain distant. The manufacturer asks nothing of the worker but his labor, and the worker expects nothing from the manufacturer but his wages. The former makes no promise to protect, the latter no promise to defend, and neither habit nor duty creates a permanent bond between them.
The aristocracy that is based on trade almost never settles amidst the industrial population that it directs. Its goal is not to govern that population but to use it.
An aristocracy so constituted cannot have much of a hold on the people it employs. Should it chance to gain such a hold for a moment, the people will soon escape its grasp. It does not know how to exert its will and cannot act.
The territorial aristocracy of centuries past was obliged by law, or believed itself to be obliged by mores, to aid its servants and assuage their miseries. But today’s manufacturing aristocracy, having impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in times of crisis and turns them over to public assistance to be fed. This is a natural consequence of what has been said thus far. Between the worker and the master, relations are frequent, but no true association exists.
All things considered, I believe that the manufacturing aristocracy that we see rising before our eyes is one of the harshest that has ever existed on earth. But it is also one of the most limited and least dangerous.
Nevertheless, friends of democracy must keep an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times. For if permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy are ever to appear in the world anew, it is safe to predict that this is the gate by which they will enter.