If we do not deal with this question now, while we have time to think about it, then the
whirligig of wasteful production and wasteful consumption will
start again and will again
end in war. And the driving power of labor will be thrusting to turn the wheels, because it is
to the financial interest of labor to keep the whirligig going faster and faster till the inevitable
catastrophe comes.
And, so that those wheels may turn, the consumer – that is, you and I, including the workers,
who are consumers also – will again be urged to consume and waste; and unless we change
our attitude – or rather unless we keep hold of the new attitude forced upon us by the logic of
war – we shall again be bamboozled by our vanity, indolence, and greed into keeping the
squ
irrel cage of wasteful economy turning. We could – you and I – bring the whole fantastic
economy of profitable waste down to the ground overnight, without legislation and without
revolution,
merely by refusing to cooperate with it. I say, we could – as a matter of fact, we
have; or rather, it has been done for us. If we do not want to rise up again after the war, we
can prevent it – simply by preserving the wartime habit of valuing work instead of money.
The point is: do we want to?....
Whatever we do, we shall be faced with grave difficulties. That cannot be disguised. But it
will make a great difference to the result if we are genuinely aiming at a real change in
economic thinking. And
by that I mean a radical change from top to bottom – a new system;
not a mere adjustment of the old system to favor a different set of people.
The habit of thinking about work
as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us
that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it
instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we
reserve for our unpaid work – our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do
for pleasure – and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people.
We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it
good?”; of a man, not “what does
he make?” but “what is his work worth?”; of goods, not “Can we induce people to buy
them?” but “are they useful things well made?”; of employment, not “how much a week?”
but “will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?” And
shareholders in – let us say – brewing
companies, would astonish the directorate by arising at shareholders’ meeting and
demanding to know, not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not
even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor
satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: “What goes into
the beer?”
You will probably ask at once: How is this altered attitude going to make any difference to
the question of employment? Because it sounds as though it would result in not more
employment, but less. I am not an economist, and I can only point to a peculiarity of war
economy that usually goes without notice in economic textbooks, In war, production for
wasteful consumption still goes on: but there is one great difference in the good produced.
None of them is valued for what it will fetch, but only for what it is worth in itself. The gun
and the tank, the airplane and the warship have to be the best of their kind. A war consumer
does not buy shoddy. He does not buy to sell again. He buys the thing that is good for its
purpose, asking nothing of it but that it shall do the job it has to do. Once again, war forces
the consumer into a right attitude to the work. And, whether by strange coincidence, or
whether because of some universal law, as soon as nothing is demanded of the thing made
but its own integral perfection, its own absolute value, the skill and labor of the worker are
fully employed and likewise acquire an absolute value.