THE VESTED INTERESTS & THE NATURE OF PEACE. Thorstein Veblen

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СКАЧАТЬ of which the community is capable. The actual production in such a community will then be determined by the extent to which the available technological efficiency is turned to account; which is regulated in part by the intelligence, or "education," of the working population, and in greater part by market conditions which decide how large a product it will be profitable for the business men to turn out.

      The net product is the amount by which this actual production exceeds its own cost, as counted in terms of subsistence, and including the cost of the necessary mechanical equipment; this net product will then approximately coincide with the annual keep, the cost of maintenance and replacement, of the investors or owners of capitalised property who are not engaged in productive industry; and who are on this account sometimes spoken of as the "kept classes," Indeed, it would seem that the number and average cost per capita of the kept classes, communibus annis, affords something of a rough measure of the net product habitually derived from the community's annual production.

      The state of the industrial arts, therefore, is the indispensable conditioning circumstance which determines the productive capacity of any given community; and this is true in a peculiar degree under this new order of industry, in which the industrial arts have reached an unexampled development. The same decisive factor may also be described as "the community's joint stock of technological knowledge." This common stock of technological knowledge decides what will be the ordinary ways and means of industry, and so it decides what will be the character and volume of the output of product which a given man power is capable of turning out. Evidently no man power and no working population can turn out any annual product without the use of something in the way of technological knowledge, that is to say some state of the industrial arts. The working community is a productive factor only by virtue of, and only up to the limit set by, the state of the industrial arts which it has the use of. The contrast of industrial Japan or of industrial Germany before the middle of the nineteenth century and after the close of the century will serve for illustration; that is to say before and after those peoples had come in for the use of the technology of the machine era. The disposable excess of the yearly product over cost is a matter of the efficiency of the available state of technological knowledge, and of the measure in which the working population is put in a position to make use of it. These, of course, are obvious facts, which it should scarcely be necessary to recite, except that they are habitually overlooked, perhaps because they are obvious.

      The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century was a revolution in the state of the industrial arts, of course; it was a mutation of character in the common stock of technological knowledge held and used by the industrial population of the civilised countries from that time forward. The shift from the older to the new order of industry was of such a nature as to call for the use of an extensive equipment of mechanical apparatus, progressively more and more extensive as the change to the machine technology went on; and at the same time the disposable margin of product above cost also progressively went on increasing with each further increase of the community's joint stock of technological knowledge.

      This body of technological knowledge, the state of the industrial arts, of course has always continued to be held as a joint stock. Indeed this joint stock of technology is the substance of the community's civilisation on the industrial side, and therefore it constitutes the substantial core of that civilisation. Like any other phase or element of the cultural heritage, it is a joint possession of the community, so far as concerns its custody, exercise, increase and transmission; but it has turned out, under the peculiar circumstances that condition the use of this technology among these civilised peoples, that its ownership or usufruct has come to be effectually vested in a relatively small number of persons. Unforeseen and undesigned, the mechanical circumstances of the new order in industry have reversed the practical effects of the common law in respect of self-help, equal opportunity and free bargaining. The mechanics of the case has worked out this result by cutting away the ground on which those principles were based at the time of their acceptance and installation.

      The machine technology requires for its working a large and specialised mechanical apparatus, an ever increasingly large and increasingly elaborate material equipment. So also it requires a large and diversified supply of material resources, both in raw materials and in the way of motive power. It is only on condition that these requirements are met in some passable fashion that this industrial system will work at all, and it is only as these requirements are freely met that the machine industry will work at a high efficiency. At the same time the settled principles of law and usage and public policy handed down from the eighteenth century have in effect decided, and continue to decide, that all material wealth is, rightly, to be held in private ownership, and is to be made use of only subject to the unhampered discretion of the legally rightful owner. Meantime the highly productive state of the industrial arts embodied in the technological knowledge of the new order can be turned to account only by use of this material equipment and these natural resources which continue to be held in private ownership. From which it follows that these material means of industry, and the state of the industrial arts which these material means are to serve, can be turned to productive use only so far and on such conditions as the rightful owners of the material equipment and resources may choose to impose; which enables the owners of this indispensable material wealth, in effect, to take over the use of these industrial arts for their own sole profit. So that the usufruct of the community's technological knowledge has come to vest in the owners of such material wealth as is held in sufficiently large blocks for the purpose.

      Therefore, by award of the settled principles of equity and self-help embodied in the modern point of view, as stabilised in the eighteenth century, the owners of the community's material resources -- that is to say the investors in industrial business -- have in effect become "seized and possessed of" the community's joint stock of technological knowledge and efficiency. Not that this accumulated knowledge of industrial forces and processes has passed into the intellectual keeping of the investors and been assimilated into their mentality, even to the extent of a reasonably scanty modicum. It remains true, of course, that the investors, owners, kept classes, or whatever designation is preferred, are quite exceptionally ignorant of all that mechanics of industry whose usufruct is vested in them; they are, in effect, fully occupied with other things, and their knowledge of industry ordinarily does not, and need not, extend to any rudiments of technology or industrial process. It is not as intelligent persons, but only as owners of material ways and means, as vested interests, that they come into the case. The exceptions to this rule are only sufficiently numerous to call attention to themselves as exceptions.

      As an intellectual achievement and as a working force the state of the industrial arts continues, of course, to be held jointly in and by the community at large; but equitable title to its usufruct has, in effect, passed to the owners of the indispensable material means of industry. Though not hitherto by formal specification and legal provision, their assets include, in effect, the state of the industrial arts as well as the mechanical appliances and the materials without which these industrial arts are of no effect. It is true, a little something, and indeed more than a little, has been done toward the due legal recognition of the investor's usufruct of the community's technological efficiency, in the recognition of vested interests and intangible assets as articles of private property defensible at law. But on the whole, and until a relatively recent date, the investors' tenure of this usufruct has been allowed to rest informally on their control of the community's material assets.

      Still, the outlook now appears to be that something further may presently be done toward a more secure and unambiguous tenure of this usufruct, by suitable legal decisions bearing on the inviolability of vested interests and intangible assets. The outcome is, in effect, that these owners have equitably become the sole legitimate beneficiaries of the possible margin of product above cost.

      These are also simple facts and patent, and should seem sufficiently obvious without argument. They have also been explained at some length elsewhere. But this recital of what should already be commonplace information seems necessary here for the sake of a more perspicuous continuity in the present argument. To many persons, perhaps to the greater proportion of those unpropertied persons that are often spoken of collectively СКАЧАТЬ