Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c3.15

c3.15

The essential method of commercialism is to create a want in order to have the opportunity of profiting by the filling of it. Under the commercial system, it is no longer demand that regulates supply, but production that ‘forces a market.’ Machinery has enabled the capitalist to do this to the fullest extent. The promise of labour-saving machinery was: a millenium for the worker, shorter hours and easier work; its result have been merely increased production, increased profit to the capitalist, and not less, but less intelligent, work for the producer. Not merely is the workman through division of labour no longer able to make any whole thing, not only is he confined to making small parts of things, but it is impossible for him to improve his position or to win reward for excellence in the craft itself. Under guild conditions, it was possible and usual for the apprentice to rise through all grades of knowledge and experience to the position of a master-craftsman. But take any such trade as carpet making under modern conditions, by power-looms. The operator has no longer to design or to weave in and out the threads with his own fingers. He is employed in reality, not as a carpet weaver, but as the tender of a machine. He may rise to a higher place it is true,—but it is the place of a man responsible for the successful running of many machines by many men. He can never rise in virtue of his knowledge or experience in the craft itself. That craft is for him destroyed as a means of culture, aud the community has lost one more man’s intelligence,—for it is obviously futile to attempt to build up by evening classes and free libraries, what the whole of a man’s work is for ever breaking down. It is no longer possible for culture and refinement to come to the craftsman through his work; it must be won, if won at all, in spite of his work; he must seek them in a brief hour snatched from rest and sleep, at the expense of life itself. It is not strange that he does not seek them, nor that their expression is lacking in his work. He has not even the capacity for idling, but must continually seek amusement and excitement. There can be no quality of leisure in his work. In short, commercial production absolutely forbids a union of art with labour. It is instructive to compare the still surviving, but fast disappearing, relics of this union in the East, with the results of Western endeavours through education and free libraries to restore that general culture which cannot under commercialism exist; not there does the ploughman speak as elegantly as the courtier, not there are riches little valued; nor can these things be where life is lived, not as an art, but as a wild beast fight.*