Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen

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      The normal result of business control in industry - normal in the sense of being uniformly aimed at and also in that it commonly follows - is the accumulation of wealth and income in the hands of a class. Under the well-accepted principle of “conspicuous waste” wealth so accumulated is to be put in evidence in visible consumption and visible exemption from work. So that with due, but ordinarily not a large, lapse of time, an elaborate scheme of proprieties establishes itself, bearing on this matter of conspicuous consumption, so contrived as to “take up the slack.” This system of conspicuous waste is a scheme of proprieties, decencies, and standards of living, the economic motive of which is competitive spending. It works out in a compromise between the immediate spending of income on conspicuous consumption - together with the conspicuous avoidance of industrial work - on the one side, and deferred spending - commonly called “saving” - on the other side. The deferred spending may be deferred to a later day in the lifetime of the saver, or to a later generation; its effects are substantially the same in either case. There is the further reservation to be noted, that in so far as property rights, tenures and the conjunctures of business gain are in any degree insecure, measures will be taken to insure against the risks of loss and eventual inability to keep up appearances according to the accepted standard of living. This insurance takes the shape of accumulation, in one form or another, - provision for future revenue.

      Like other conventions and institutional regulations, the scheme of spending rests on current, i.e., immediately past, experience, and as was noted above it is so contrived as to take up the calculable slack, - the margin between production and productive consumption. It is perhaps needless to enter the caution that such a scheme of conspicuous waste does not always, perhaps not in the common run of cases, go to the full limit of what the traffic will bear; but it is also to be noted that it will sometimes, and indeed not infrequently, exceed that limit. Perhaps in all cases, but particularly where the industrial efficiency of the community is notably high, so as to yield a very appreciable margin between productive output and necessary current consumption, some appreciable thought has to be spent on the question of ways and means of spending; and a technique of consumption grows up.

      It will be appreciated how serious a question this may become, of the ways and means of reputable consumption, when it is called to mind that in the communities where the modern state of the industrial arts has adequately taken effect this margin of product disposable for wasteful consumption will always exceed fifty per cent of the current product, and will in the more fortunate cases probably exceed seventy-five per cent of the whole. So considerable a margin is not to be disposed of to good effect by haphazard impulse. The due absorption of it in competitive spending takes thought, skill and time for the organisation of ways and means. It is also not a simple problem of conspicuously consuming time and substance, without more ado; men’s sense of fitness and beauty requires that the spending should take place in an appropriate manner, such as will not offend good taste and not involve an odiously aimless ostentation. And it takes time and habituation, as well as a discriminate balancing of details, before a scheme of reputable standardised waste is perfected; of course, it also costs time and specialised effort to take due care of the running adjustment of such a scheme to current conditions of taste, ennui and consumptive distinction, - as seen, e.g., in the technique of fashions. It has, indeed, proved to be a matter of some difficulty, not to say of serious strain, in the industrially advanced communities, to keep the scheme of conspicuous waste abreast of the times; so that, besides the conspicuous consumers in their own right, there have grown up an appreciable number of special occupations devoted to the technical needs of reputable spending. The technology of wasteful consumption is large and elaborate and its achievements are among the monuments of human initiative and en-deavor; it has its victories and its heroes as well as the technology of production.

      But any technological scheme is more or less of a balanced system, in which the interplay of parts has such a character of mutual support and dependence that any substantial addition or subtraction at any one point will involve more or less of derangement all along the line. Neither can an extremely large contingent of reputable waste be suddenly superinduced in the accepted standard of living of any given community - though this difficulty is not commonly a sinister one - nor can a large retrenchment in this domain of what is technically called “the moral standard of living” be suddenly effected without substantial hardship or without seriously disturbing the spiritual balance of the community. To realise the import of such disturbance in the scheme of wasteful consumption one need only try to picture the consternation that would, e.g., fall on the British community consequent on the abrupt discontinuance of the Court and its social and civil manifestations, or of horseracing, or of the established church, or of evening dress.

      But since the growth and acceptance of any scheme of wasteful expenditure is after all subsequent to and consequent upon the surplus productivity of the industrial system on which it rests, the introduction, in whole or in part, of a new and more efficient state of the industrial arts does not carry with it from the outset a fully developed system of standardised consumption; particularly, it need not follow that the standard scheme of consumption will be carried over intact in case a new industrial technology is borrowed. There is no intimate or intrinsic mutuality of mechanical detail between the technology of industry and the technique of conspicuous waste; the high-heeled slipper and the high-wrought “picture hat,” e.g., are equally well accepted in prehistoric Crete and in twentieth-century France; and the Chinese lady bandages her foot into deformity where the Manchu lady, in evidence of the same degree of opulence in the same town, is careful to let her foot run loose. It is only that, human nature being what it is, a disposable margin of production will, under conditions of private ownership, provoke a competent scheme of wasteful consumption.

      Owing to this mechanical discontinuity between any given state of the industrial arts and the scheme of magical, religious, conventional, or pecuniary use and wont with which it lives in some sort of symbiosis, the carrying-over of such a state of the industrial arts from one community to another need not involve the carrying-over of this its spiritual complement. Such is particularly the case where the borrowing takes place across a marked cultural frontier, in which case it follows necessarily that the alien scheme of conventions will not be taken over intact in taking over an alien technological system, whether in whole or in part. The borrowing community or cultural group is already furnished with its own system of conceits and observances - in magic, religion, propriety, and any other line of conventional necessity - and the introduction of a new scheme, or the intrusion of new and alien elements into the accredited scheme already in force, is a work of habituation that takes time and special provocation. All of which applies with added force to the introduction of isolated technological elements from an alien culture, still more particularly, of course, where the technological expedients borrowed are turned to other uses and utilised by other methods than those employed in the culture from which they were borrowed, - as, e.g., would be the case in the acqquisition of domestic cattle by a sedentary farming community from a community of nomadic or half-nomadic pastoral people, as appears to have happened in the prehistoric culture of the Baltic peoples. The interposition of a linguistic frontier between the borrower and creditor communities would still farther lessen the chance of immaterial elements of culture being carried over in the transmission of technological knowledge. The borrowed elements of industrial efficiency would be stripped of their fringe of conventional inhibitions and waste, and the borrowing community would be in a position to use them with a freer hand and with a better chance of utilising them to their full capacity, and also with a better chance of improving on their use, turning them to new uses, and carrying the principles (habits of thought) involved in the borrowed items out, with unhampered insight, into farther ramifications of technological proficiency. The borrowers are in a position of advantage, intellectually, in that the new expedient comes into their hands more nearly in the shape of a theoretical principle applicable under given physical conditions; rather than in the shape of a concrete expedient applicable within the limits of traditional use, personal, magical, conventional. It is, in other words, taken over in a measure without the defects of its qualities.

      Here, again, is a secondary effect of borrowing, that may not seem of first-rate consequence СКАЧАТЬ