The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct

While both the bolshevists and the fascists look upon themselves as pathfinders of progress, it is fairly clear, I think, that they are, in the literal meaning of the term, reactionary. They have won their victories among the people to whom modern large scale industrial organization is still an unnatural and alien thing. It is no accident that fascism or bolshevism took root in Italy and Spain, but not in Germany and England, in Hungary but not in Austria, in Poland but not in Czechoslovakia, in Russia but not in Scandinavia, in China but not in Japan, in Central America but not in Canada or the United States. Dictatorship, based on a military hierarchy, administering the affairs of the community on behalf of the "nation" or of the "proletariat," is nothing but a return to the natural organization of society in the pre-machine age. Some countries, like Russia, Mexico, and China, for example, are still living in the pre-machine age. Others, like Italy, had become only partially industrialized when they were subjected to such strains by the War that they reverted to the feudal pattern of behavior. Unable to master the industrial process by methods which are appropriate to it, the fascists and the bolshevists are attempting to master it by methods which antedate it. That is why military dictatorship in a country like Mexico may be looked upon as the normal type of social control, whereas in Italy it is regressive and neurotic. Feudal habits are appropriate to a feudal society; in a semi-industrialized nation they are a social disease. It is the disease of frightened and despairing men who, having failed to adjust themselves to the reality of the industrial process, try, by main force and awkwardness, to adjust the machine process to a pre-machine mentality.

The more primitive the machine process is--that is, the more nearly it resembles the petty handicrafts of earlier days--the better are the chances for survival of a bolshevist or fascist dictatorship. Where the machine technology is really established and advanced it is simply unmanageable by militarized functionaries. For when the process has become infinitely complicated, the subdivision of function is carried so far, the internal adjustments are so numerous and so varied that no collection of oligarchs in a capital city, however much they may look like supermen, can possibly direct the industrial system. In its advanced stages, as it now exists in England, Germany, or the United States, nobody comprehends the system as a whole. One has only to glance over the financial pages of an American newspaper, to look at the list of corporations doing business, to try and imagine the myriad daily decisions at a thousand points which their business involves, in order to realize the bewildering complexity of modern industrial society. To suppose that all that can be administered, or even directed, from any central point by any human brain, by any cabinet of officeholders or cabal of revolutionists, is simply to have failed to take it in. Here is the essential reason why bolshevism and fascism are, as we say, un-American. They are no less un-Belgian, un-German, un-English. For they are unindustrial.

The same reasons which make dictatorship unworkable are rapidly rendering obsolete the attempts to reform industry by policing it. Every year as the machine technology becomes more elaborated, the legislative control for which the pre-war progressives fought becomes less effective. It becomes more and more difficult for legislatures to make laws to protect the workers which really fit the rapidly changing conditions of work. Hence the tendency to put the real law-making power in the hands of administrative officials and judges who can adjust the general purpose of the law to the unclassifiable facts of industry. The whole attempt to regulate public utilities in the interest of the consumer is chaotic, for these organizations, by their intricacies, their scale, and their constant revolutions in technology, tend to escape the jurisdiction of officials exercising a local jurisdiction. The current outcry against the multiplication of laws and the meddling of legislatures is in part, but not wholly, the outcry of old fashioned business men demanding their old natural liberty to pursue their own interest their own way. The outcry is due no less to a recognition that the industrial process is becoming too subtly organized to be policed successfully by the wholesale, uninformed enactments of legislatures.

Yet the very thing which makes an advanced industrial organization too complex to be directed by a dictatorship or to be policed by democratic politicians, is forcing the leaders of industry to evolve forms of self-control. When I say that they are being forced to do this I am not referring to those ostentatiously benevolent things which are done now and then as sops to Cerberus. There is a certain amount of reform undertaken voluntarily by met who profess to fear 'bolshevism,' and if not bolshevism then Congress. That is relatively unimportant. So also is the discovery that it pays to cultivate the good will of the public. What I am referring to is the fact that the sheer complexity of the industrial system would make it unmanageable to business men, no less than to politicians or dictators, if business men were not learning to organize its control.

It is the necessity of stabilizing their own business, of directing technical processes which are beyond the understanding of stockholders, of adjusting the supply and demand of the multitudinous elements they deal in, which is the compelling force behind that divorce between management and ownership, that growing use of experts and of statistical measurements, and that development of trade associations, of conferences, committees, and councils, with which modern industry is honeycombed. The captain of industry in the romantic sense tends to disappear in highly evolved industrial organizations. His thundering commands are replaced by the decisions of executives who consult with representatives of the interests involved and check their opinions by the findings of experts. The greater the corporation the more the shareholders and the directors lose the actual direction of the institution. They cannot direct the corporation because they do not really know what it is and what it is doing. That knowledge is subdivided among the executives and bureau chiefs and consultants, all of them on salary; each of them is so relatively small a factor in the whole that his personal success is in very large degree bound up with the success of the institution. A certain amount of jealousy, intrigue, and destructive pushing, of office politics, in short, naturally prevails, men being what they are. But as compared with the old-style business man, the ordinary executive in a great corporation is something quite strange. He is so little the monarch of all he surveys, his experience is so continually with stubborn and irreducible facts, he is so much compelled to adjust his own preferences to the preferences of others, that he becomes a relatively disinterested person. The more clearly he realizes the nature of his position in industry, the more he tends to submit his desires to the discipline of objective information. And the more he does this the less dominated he is by the acquisitiveness of immaturity. He may on the side gamble acquisitively in the stock market or at the race track, but in relation to his business his acquisitive instinct tends to become diffused and to be absorbed in the job itself.