The Cultural Incidence of the Machine Process
Veblen, Thorstein. "The Cultural Incidence of the Machine Process." Chapter 9 in The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York City: Charles Scribner's Sons (1904): 302-373. As of February 2025, selections available on line (and our source) here.[1]
In Public Opinion (1922), Walter Lippmann notes "Men who work at machines will tend, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen has so brilliantly demonstrated, to interpret experience differently from handicraftsmen or traders" (Blackburg, VA: Wilder, 2010: 103).[2] In the Wilder reprint, anyway, there are no citations, but the reference may be to this chapter. In any event, Veblen states
In an earlier chapter (II) the technological character of this machine process has been set forth at some length. The machine process pervades the modern life and dominates it in a mechanical sense. Its dominance is seen in the enforcement of precise mechanical measurements and adjustment and the reduction of all manner of things, purposes and acts, necessities, conveniences, and amenities of life, to standard units. [...] The point of immediate interest here is the further bearing of the machine process upon the growth of culture, - the disciplinary effect which this movement for standardization and mechanical equivalence has upon the human material. [p. 306]
This discipline falls more immediately on the workmen engaged in the mechanical industries, and only less immediately on the rest of the community [...]. Wherever the machine process extends, it sets the pace for the workmen, great and small. [...] It is no longer simply that the individual workman makes use of one or more mechanical contrivances for effecting certain results. [...] But such a characterization of the workman's part in industry misses the peculiarly modern feature of the case. He now does this work as a factor involved in a mechanical process whose movement controls his motions. It remains true, of course, [...] that he is the intelligent agent concerned in the process, while the machine, furnace, roadway, or retort are inanimate structures devised by man and subject to the workman's supervision. But the process comprises him and his intelligent motions, and it is by virtue of his necessarily taking an intelligent part in what is going forward that the mechanical process has its [p. 308] chief effect upon him. The process standardizes his supervision and guidance of the machine. Mechanically speaking, the machine is not his [...]. His place is to take thought of the machine and its work [...].
There results a standardization of the workman's intellectual life in terms of mechanical process, which is more unmitigated and precise the more comprehensive and consummate the industrial process in which he plays a part.[3]
Cf. and contrast Karl Marx, "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry" chapter of Das Kapital and note images of men at machines in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS.
RDE, finishing, 23Feb25
