HKB
CIVILISATION AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT.
Sec. 1. Imperfect Adjustment of Industrial Structure to its Environment. Sec. 2. Reform upon the Basis of Private Enterprise and Free Trade. Sec. 3. Freedom and Transparency of Industry powerless to cure the deeper Industrial Maladies. Sec. 4. Beginnings of Public Control of Machine-production. Sec. 5. Passage of Industries into a public Non-competitive Condition. Sec. 6. The "raison d'etre" of Progressive Collectivism. Sec. 7. Collectivism follows the line of Monopoly. Sec. 8. Cases of "Arrested Development:" the Sweating Trades. Sec. 9. Retardation of rate of Progress in Collective Industries. Sec. 10. Will Official Machine-work absorb an Increasing Proportion of Energy? Sec. 11. Improved Quality of Consumption the Condition of Social Progress. Sec. 12. The Highest Division of Labour between Machinery and Art. Sec. 13. Qualitative Consumption defeats the Law of Decreasing Returns. Sec. 14. Freedom of Art from Limitations of Matter. Sec. 15. Machinery and Art in production of Intellectual Wealth. Sec. 16. Reformed Consumption abolishes Anti-Social Competition. Sec. 17. Life itself must become Qualitative. Sec. 18. Organic Relations between Production and Consumption. Sec. 19. Summary of Progress towards a Coherent Industrial Organism.
Sec. 1. Modern industrial societies have hitherto secured to a very inadequate extent the services which modern machinery and methods of production are capable of rendering. The actual growth of material wealth, however great, has been by no means commensurate with the enormously increased powers of producing material commodities afforded by the discoveries of modern science, and the partial utilisation of these discoveries has been attended by a very unequal distribution of the advantages of this increase in the stock of common knowledge and control of nature. Moreover, as an offset against the growth of material wealth, machinery has been a direct agent in producing certain material and moral maladies which impair the health of modern industrial communities.
The unprecedented rapidity and irregularity of the discovery and adoption of the new methods made it impossible for the structure of industrial society to adjust itself at once to the conditions of the new environment. The maladies and defects which we detect in modern industry are but the measure of a present maladjustment.
The progressive adjustment of structure to environment in the unconscious or low-conscious world is necessarily slow. But where the conscious will of man, either as an individual or as a society, can be utilised for an adjusting force, the pace of progress may be indefinitely quickened. A strongly-rooted custom in a man yields very slowly to the pressure of changed circumstances which make it useless or harmful, unless the man consciously recognises the inutility of the custom and sets himself to root it out and plant another custom in its place. So the slowness of this work of industrial adjustment has been in no small measure due to the lack of definite realisation by the members of modern communities of the need and importance of this adjustment. A society which should bring its conscious will to bear upon the work of constructing new social and industrial forms to fit the new economic conditions, may make a progress which, while rapid, may yet be safe, because it is not a speculative progress, but one which is guided in its line of movement by precedent changes of environment.
Regarding, then, this conscious organised endeavour, enlightened and stimulated by a fuller understanding of industrial forces in their relation to human life, as a determinant of growing value in the industrial evolution of the future, it may properly belong to a scientific study of modern industry to seek to discover how the forces of conscious reform can reasonably work in relation to the economic forces whose operations have been already investigated.