Ruth Comfort Mitchell - "Jane Journeys On"

Henry Mann - "The Land We Live In"

Various - "Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883"

Dr. D.M. Brooks - "The Necessity of Atheism"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation

T >> Thorstein Veblen >> An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation




Under the new dispensation the standard of living, that is to say the
standard of expenditure, would reasonably be expected to advance in a
very appreciable degree, at least among the wealthy and well-to-do; and
by pressure of imitative necessity a like effect would doubtless also be
had among the undistinguished mass. It is not a question of the standard
of living considered as a matter of the subsistence minimum, or even a
standard of habitually prevalent creature comfort, particularly not
among the wealthy and well-to-do. These latter classes have long since
left all question of material comfort behind in their accepted standards
of living and in the continued advance of these standards. For these
classes who are often spoken of euphemistically as being "in easy
circumstances," it is altogether a question of a standard of reputable
expenditure, to be observed on pain of lost self-respect and of lost
reputation at large. As has been remarked in an earlier passage, wants
of this kind are indefinitely extensible. So that some doubt may well be
entertained as to whether the higher productive efficiency spoken of
will necessarily make the way of life easier, in view of this need of a
higher standard of expenditure, even when due account is taken of the
many economies which the new dispensation is expected to make
practicable.

One of the effects to be looked for would apparently be an increased
pressure on the part of aspiring men to get into some line of business
enterprise; since it is only in business, as contrasted with the
industrial occupations, that anyone can hope to find the relatively
large income required for such an expensive manner of life as will bring
any degree of content to aspirants for pecuniary good repute. So it
should follow that the number of businessmen and business concerns would
increase up to the limit of what the traffic could support, and that the
competition between these rival, and in a sense over-numerous, concerns
would push the costs of competition to the like limit. In this respect
the situation would be of much the same character as what it now is,
with the difference that the limit of competitive expenditures would be
rather higher than at present, to answer to the greater available margin
of product that could be devoted to this use; and that the competing
concerns would be somewhat more numerous, or at least that the aggregate
expenditure on competitive enterprise would be somewhat larger; as,
e.g., costs of advertising, salesmanship, strategic litigation,
procuration of legislative and municipal grants and connivance, and the
like.

It is always conceivable, though it may scarcely seem probable, that
these incidents of increased pressure of competition in business traffic
might eventually take up all the slack, and leave no net margin of
product over what is available under the less favorable conditions of
industry that prevail today; more particularly when this increased
competition for business gains is backed by an increased pressure of
competitive spending for purposes of a reputable appearance. All this
applies in retail trade and in such lines of industry and public service
as partakes of the nature of retail trade, in the respect that
salesmanship and the costs of salesmanship enter into their case in an
appreciable measure; this is an extensive field, it is true, and
incontinently growing more extensive with the later changes in the
customary methods of marketing products; but it is by no means anything
like the whole domain of industrial business, and by no means a field in
which business is carried on without interference of a higher control
from outside its own immediate limits.

All this generously large and highly expensive and profitable field of
trade and of trade-like industry, in which the businessmen in charge
deal somewhat directly with a large body of customers, is always subject
to limitations imposed by the condition of the market; and the condition
of the market is in part not under the control of these businessmen, but
is also in part controlled by large concerns in the background; which in
their turn are after all also not precisely free agents; in fact not
much more so than their cousins in the retail trade, being confined in
all their motions by the constraint of the price-system that dominates
the whole and gathers them all in its impersonal and inexorable net.

There is a colloquial saying among businessmen, that they are not doing
business for their health; which being interpreted means that they are
doing business for a price. It is out of a discrepancy in price, between
purchase and sale, or between transactions which come to the same result
as purchase and sale, that the gains of business are drawn; and it is in
terms of price that these gains are rated, amassed and funded. It is
necessary, for a business concern to achieve a favorable balance in
terms of price; and the larger the balance in terms of price the more
successful the enterprise. Such a balance can not be achieved except by
due regard to the conditions of the market, to the effect that dealings
must not go on beyond what will yield a favorable balance in terms of
price between income and outgo. As has already been remarked above, the
prescriptive and indispensable recourse in all this conduct of business
is sabotage, limitation of supply to bring a remunerative price result.

The new dispensation offers two new factors bearing on this businesslike
need of a sagacious sabotage, or rather it brings a change of
coefficients in two factors already familiar in business management: a
greater need, for gainful business, of resorting to such limitation of
traffic; and a greater facility of ways and means for enforcing the
needed restriction. So, it is confidently to be expected that in the
prospective piping time of peace the advance in the industrial arts will
continue at an accelerated rate; which may confidently be expected to
affect the practicable increased production of merchantable goods; from
which it follows that it will act to depress the prices of these goods;
from which it follows that if a profitable business is to be done in the
conduct of productive industry a greater degree of continence than
before will have to be exercised in order not to let prices fall to an
unprofitable figure; that is to say, the permissible output must be held
short of the productive capacity of such industry by a wider margin than
before. On the other hand, it is well known out of the experience of the
past few decades that a larger coalition of invested capital,
controlling a larger proportion of the output, can more effectually
limit the supply to a salutary maximum, such as will afford reasonable
profits. And with the new dispensation affording a freer scope for
business enterprise on conditions of greater security, larger coalitions
than before are due to come into bearing. So that the means will be at
hand competently to meet this more urgent need of a stricter limitation
of the output, in spite of any increased productive capacity conferred
on the industrial community by any conceivable advance in the industrial
arts. The outcome to be looked for should apparently be such an
effectual recourse to capitalistic sabotage as will neutralise any added
advantage that might otherwise accrue to the community from its
continued improvements in technology.

In spite of this singularly untoward conjuncture of circumstances to be
looked for, there need be no serious apprehension that capitalistic
sabotage, with a view to maintaining prices and the rate of profits,
will go all the way, to the result indicated, at least not on the
grounds so indicated alone. There is in the modern development of
technology, and confidently to be counted on, a continued flow of new
contrivances and expedients designed to supersede the old; and these are
in fact successful, in greater or less measure, in finding their way
into profitable use, on such terms as to displace older appliances,
underbid them in the market, and render them obsolete or subject to
recapitalisation on a lowered earning-capacity. So far as this
unremitting flow of innovations has its effect, that is to say so far as
it can not be hindered from having an effect, it acts to lower the
effectual cost of products to the consumer. This effect is but a partial
and somewhat uncertain one, but it is always to be counted in as a
persistent factor, of uncertain magnitude, that will affect the results
in the long run.

As has just been spoken of above, large coalitions of invested wealth
are more competent to maintain, or if need be to advance, prices than
smaller coalitions acting in severalty, or even when acting in
collusion. This state of the case has been well illustrated by the very
successful conduct of such large business organisations during the past
few decades; successful, that is, in earning large returns on the
investments engaged. Under the new dispensation, as has already been
remarked, coalitions should reasonably be expected to grow to a larger
size and achieve a greater efficiency for the same purpose.

The large gains of the large corporate coalitions are commonly ascribed
by their promoters, and by sympathetic theoreticians of the ancient
line, to economies of production made practicable by a larger scale of
production; an explanation which is disingenuous only so far as it needs
be. What is more visibly true on looking into the workings of these
coalitions in detail is that they are enabled to maintain prices at a
profitable, indeed at a strikingly profitable, level by such a control
of the output as would be called sabotage if it were put in practice by
interested workmen with a view to maintain wages. The effects of this
sagacious sabotage become visible in the large earnings of these
investments and the large gains which, now and again, accrue to their
managers. Large fortunes commonly are of this derivation.

In cases where no recapitalisation has been effected for a considerable
series of years the yearly earnings of such businesslike coalitions have
been known to approach fifty percent on the capitalised value. Commonly,
however, when earnings rise to a striking figure, the business will be
recapitalised on the basis of its earning-capacity, by issue of a stock
dividend, by reincorporation in a new combination with an increased
capitalisation, and the like. Such augmentation of capital not unusually
has been spoken of by theoretical writers and publicists as an increase
of the community's wealth, due to savings; an analysis of any given case
is likely to show that its increased capital value represents an
increasingly profitable procedure for securing a high price above cost,
by stopping the available output short of the productive capacity of the
industries involved. Loosely speaking, and within the limits of what the
traffic will bear, the gains in such a case are proportioned to the
deficiency by which the production or supply under control falls short
of productive capacity. So that the capitalisation in the case comes to
bear a rough proportion to the material loss which this organisation of
sabotage is enabled to inflict on the community at large; and instead of
its being a capitalisation of serviceable means of production it may,
now and again, come to little else than a capitalisation of chartered
sabotage.

Under the new dispensation of peace and security at large this manner of
capitalisation and business enterprise might reasonably be expected to
gain something in scope and security of operation. Indeed, there are few
things within the range of human interest on which an opinion may more
confidently be formed beforehand. If the rights of property, in their
extent and amplitude, are maintained intact as they are before the law
today, the hold which business enterprise on the large scale now has on
the affairs and fortunes of the community at large is bound to grow
firmer and to be used more unreservedly for private advantage under the
new conditions contemplated.

The logical result should be an accelerated rate of accumulation of the
country's wealth in the hands of a relatively very small class of
wealthy owners, with a relatively inconsiderable semi-dependent middle
class of the well-to-do, and with the mass of the population even more
nearly destitute than they are today. At the same time it is scarcely to
be avoided that this wholly dependent and impecunious mass of the
population must be given an appreciably better education than they have
today. The argument will return to the difficulties that are liable to
arise out of this conjuncture of facts, in the way of discontent and
possible disturbance.

* * * * *

Meantime, looking to the promise of the pacific future in the light of
the pacific past, certain further consequences, particularly
consequences of the economic order, that may reasonably be expected to
follow will also merit attention. The experience of the Victorian peace
is almost as pointed in its suggestion on this head as if it had been an
experiment made _ad hoc_; but with the reservation that the scale of
economic life, after all, was small in the Victorian era, and its pace
was slack, compared with what the twentieth century should have to offer
under suitable conditions of peace and pecuniary security. In the light
of this most instructive modern instance, there should appear to be in
prospect a growth of well-bred families resting on invested wealth and
so living on unearned incomes; larger incomes and consequently a more
imposingly well-bred body of gentlefolk, sustained and vouched for by a
more munificent expenditure on superfluities, than the modern world has
witnessed hitherto. Doubtless the resulting growth of gentlemen and
gentlewomen would be as perfect after their kind as these unexampled
opportunities of gentle breeding might be expected to engender; so that
even their British precursors on the trail of respectability would fall
somewhat into insignificance by comparison, whether in respect of
gentlemanly qualities or in point of cost per unit.

The moral, and even more particularly the aesthetic, value of such a
line of gentlefolk, and of the culture which they may be expected to
place on view,--this cultural side of the case, of course, is what one
would prefer to dwell on, and on the spiritual gains that might be
expected to accrue to humanity at large from the steady contemplation of
this meritorious respectability so displayed at such a cost.

But the prosaic necessity of the argument turns back to the economic and
civil bearing of this prospective development, this virtual bifurcation
of the pacified nation into a small number of gentlemen who own the
community's wealth and consume its net product in the pursuit of
gentility, on the one hand, and an unblest mass of the populace who do
the community's work on a meager livelihood tapering down toward the
subsistence minimum, on the other hand. Evidently, this prospective
posture of affairs may seem "fraught with danger to the common weal," as
a public spirited citizen might phrase it. Or, as it would be expressed
in less eloquent words, it appears to comprise elements that should
make for a change. At the same time it should be recalled, and the
statement will command assent on slight reflection, that there is no
avoiding substantially such a posture of affairs under the promised
regime of peace and security, provided only that the price-system stands
over intact, and the current rights of property continue to be held
inviolate. If the known principles of competitive gain and competitive
spending should need enforcement to that effect by an illustrative
instance, the familiar history of the Victorian peace is sufficient to
quiet all doubts.

Of course, the resulting articulation of classes in the community will
not be expected to fall into such simple lines of sheer contrast as this
scheme would indicate. The class of gentlefolk, the legally constituted
wasters, as they would be rated from the economic point of view, can not
be expected personally to take care of so large a consumption of
superfluities as this posture of affairs requires at their hands. They
would, as the Victorian peace teaches, necessarily have the assistance
of a trained corps of experts in unproductive consumption, the first and
most immediate of whom would be those whom the genial phrasing of Adam
Smith designates "menial servants." Beyond these would come the
purveyors of superfluities, properly speaking, and the large, indeed
redundant, class of tradespeople of high and low degree,--dependent in
fact but with an illusion of semi-dependence; and farther out again the
legal and other professional classes of the order of stewards, whose
duty it will be to administer the sources of income and receive,
apportion and disburse the revenues so devoted to a traceless
extinguishment.

There would, in other words, be something of a "substantial middle
class," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but
presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-class illusion that they are
of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and
sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-class population would
engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to
believe, in some passable fashion, that they touch the substance of
things at something nearer than the second remove. They would in great
part appear to be people of "independent means," and more particularly
would they continue in the hope of so appearing and of some time making
good the appearance. Hence their fancied, and therefore their
sentimental, interest would fall out on the side of the established law
and order; and they would accordingly be an element of stability in the
commonwealth, and would throw in their weight, and their voice, to
safeguard that private property and that fabric of prices and credit
through which the "income stream" flows to the owners of preponderant
invested wealth.

Judged on the state of the situation as it runs in our time, and
allowing for the heightened efficiency of large-scale investment and
consolidated management under the prospective conditions of added
pecuniary security, it is to be expected that the middle-class
population with "independent means" should come in for a somewhat meager
livelihood, provided that they work faithfully at their business of
managing pecuniary traffic to the advantage of their pecuniary
betters,--meager, that is to say, when allowance is made for the
conventionally large expenditure on reputable appearances which is
necessarily to be included in their standard of living. It lies in the
nature of this system of large-scale investment and enterprise that the
(pecuniarily) minor agencies engaged on a footing of ostensible
independence will come in for only such a share in the aggregate gains
of the community as it is expedient for the greater business interests
to allow them as an incentive to go on with their work as purveyors of
traffic to these greater business interests.

The current, and still more this prospective, case of the
quasi-self-directing middle class may fairly be illustrated by the case
of the American farmers, of the past and present. The American farmer
rejoices to be called "The Independent Farmer." He once was independent,
in a meager and toil-worn fashion, in the days before the price-system
had brought him and all his works into the compass of the market; but
that was some time ago. He now works for the market, ordinarily at
something like what is called a "living wage," provided he has
"independent means" enough to enable him by steady application to earn a
living wage; and of course, the market being controlled by the paramount
investment interests in the background, his work, in effect, inures to
their benefit; except so much as it may seem necessary to allow him as
incentive to go on. Also of course, these paramount investment interests
are in turn controlled in all their manoeuvres by the impersonal
exigencies of the price-system, which permits no vagaries in violation
of the rule that all traffic must show a balance of profit in terms of
price.

The Independent Farmer still continues to believe that in some occult
sense he still is independent in what he will do and what not; or
perhaps rather that he can by shrewd management retain or regain a
tolerable measure of such independence, after the fashion of what is
held to have been the posture of affairs in the days before the coming
of corporation finance; or at least he believes that he ought to have,
or to regain or reclaim, some appreciable measure of such independence;
which ought then, by help of the "independent means" which he still
treasures, to procure him an honest and assured livelihood in return for
an honest year's work. Latterly he, that is the common run of the
farmers, has been taking note of the fact that he is, as he apprehends
it, at a disadvantage in the market; and he is now taking recourse to
concerted action for the purpose of what might be called "rigging the
market" to his own advantage. In this he overlooks the impregnable
position which the party of the second part, the great investment
interests, occupy; in fact, he is counting without his host. Hitherto he
has not been convinced of his own helplessness. And with a fine fancy he
still imagines that his own interest is on the side of the propertied
and privileged classes; so that the farmer constituency is the chief
pillar of conservative law and order, particularly in all that touches
the inviolable rights of property and at every juncture where a division
comes on between those who live by investment and those who live by
work. In pecuniary effect, the ordinary American farmer, who legally
owns a moderate farm of the common sort, belongs among those who work
for a livelihood; such a livelihood as the investment interests find it
worth while to allow him under the rule of what the traffic will bear;
but in point of sentiment and class consciousness he clings to a belated
stand on the side of those who draw a profit from his work.

So it is also with the menial servants and the middle-class people of
"independent means," who are, however, in a position to see more clearly
their dependence on the owners of predominant wealth. And such, with a
further accentuation of the anomaly, may reasonably be expected to be
the further run of these relations under the promised regime of peace
and security. The class of well-kept gentlefolk will scarcely be called
on to stand alone, in case of a division between those who live by
investment and those who live by work; inasmuch as, for the calculable
future, it should seem a reasonable expectation that this very
considerable fringe of dependents and pseudo-independents will abide by
their time-tried principles of right and honest living, through good
days and evil, and cast in their lot unreservedly with that reputable
body to whom the control of trade and industry by investment assigns the
usufruct of the community's productive powers.

* * * * *

Something has already been said of the prospective breeding of pedigreed
gentlefolk under the projected regime of peace. Pedigree, for the
purpose in hand, is a pecuniary attribute and is, of course, a product
of funded wealth, more or less ancient. Virtually ancient pedigree can
be procured by well-advised expenditure on the conspicuous amenities;
that is to say pedigree effectually competent as a background of current
gentility. Gentlefolk of such syncopated pedigree may have to walk
circumspectly, of course; but their being in this manner put on their
good behavior should tend to heighten their effectual serviceability as
gentlefolk, by inducing a single-mindedness of gentility beyond what can
fairly be expected of those who are already secure in their tenure.

Except conventionally, there is no hereditary difference between the
standard gentlefolk and, say, their "menial servants," or the general
population of the farms and the industrial towns. This is a
well-established commonplace among ethnological students; which has, of
course, nothing to say with respect to the conventionally distinct lines
of descent of the "Best Families." These Best Families are nowise
distinguishable from the common run in point of hereditary traits; the
difference that makes the gentleman and the gentlewoman being wholly a
matter of habituation during the individual's life-time. It is something
of a distasteful necessity to call attention to this total absence of
native difference between the well-born and the common, but it is a
necessity of the argument in hand, and the recalling of it may,
therefore, be overlooked for once in a way. There is no harm and no
annoyance intended. The point of it all is that, on the premises which
this state of the case affords, the body of gentlefolk created by such
an accumulation of invested wealth will have no less of an effectual
cultural value than they would have had if their virtually ancient
pedigree had been actual.

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