Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second section of Economics Is Diverse, the lecture Eli Siegel gave on November 27, 1970. This talk is part of his ever so careful, powerful, scholarly, exciting series titled Goodbye Profit System, begun in May of that year. Then, and later, Mr. Siegel described something no other historian or economist had understood—something humanity needs mightily to understand now. He said:

In May 1970, the conduct of industry on the basis of ill will has been shown to be inefficient….

There is a feeling all over the world on the part of persons who work that they are not getting their just share of the gross national product, and they feel that their not getting it is caused by ill will….What is being shown today is that without good will, the toughest, most inconsiderate of activities—economics—cannot do so well.

…I wish I could call it something else—good will and ill will are such pale words; but that is what it’s about. I say that the whole purpose of history is to show that the greatest kindness is the greatest power. The other thing has not worked.

In the half century that followed, the anger at being used with ill will as to work and one’s economic needs has not abated. That anger is more intense than it ever was. And so is people’s thirst, their deep demand, to be seen with good will in regard to economics. This demand is not political. It is ethical. And it is aesthetic: that is, the human justice that an economy must now have in order to work well is beauty too.

The Fundamentals: Are They Beautiful?

In the present lecture, Mr. Siegel is speaking about the fundamentals of economics. He quotes from a textbook he respected: Principles and Problems of Economics, by Otho C. Ault and Ernest J. Eberling (1936). And when Mr. Siegel spoke about economics, there was never a whiff of any dryness or dullness or forbiddingness, which people so much associate with economics. He had one feel its aliveness, and, yes, its beauty—in keeping with this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

For example, there is that very basic thing in economics: the fact that you need something, maybe a book—and somebody not you (we’ll call him Mr. X) has that book you need. And if you give him something he needs, maybe some money, he can provide you with that book. This is a primal idea in economics. And it happens to be a oneness of the largest opposites in everyone’s life: self and world. For here, what you feel you need in order to be more fully yourself is something in the outside world—a book—and is also a human being not yourself, Mr. X, who can have that book be yours.

Other great opposites are one in this elemental economic happening. Sameness and difference are one: because the dollars you pay are certainly different from the object you’re purchasing; yet they stand for it enough, are equivalent to it enough, so that the object—the book—can now be yours.

This exchange also puts together, quietly, the tremendous opposites of completeness and incompleteness. After all, before we purchase anything, including this book, we feel in some fashion that we’re incomplete without it. And then we have a feeling, however modestly, of being completed—because through some dollars we have and can give Mr. X, the thing we were incomplete without is now joined to us.

One’s Deepest Desire versus Contempt

I love the way Mr. Siegel speaks, in the portion of the lecture included here, about economic history’s showing a great desire in people. It is the desire to be more oneself by welcoming, more and more, products from different places—by meeting, more and more, what people different from oneself can produce. The fundamentals of economics stand for what Aesthetic Realism shows is humanity’s deepest desire: honestly to like the world. But some of the foulest, cruelest brutality has been in economics. Millions and millions of people have been made to be poor, and been kept poor, because economics has been used in behalf of what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the ugly, hurtful thing in the human self: contempt.

Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And a huge historical form of it is the seeing of a person in terms of how much financial profit one can reap from him or her. It is this contempt that human beings are objecting to with more and more clarity. From contempt has come all the economic cruelty of the centuries and now, including child labor, and including that “enterprise” which Mr. Siegel speaks of here—briefly, but factually and vividly: the “enterprise” that was slavery.

So we have the liking of the world, the desire to be in a fuller relation to the world, which the fundamentals of economics stand for. History proceeds; and what is it going for now—indeed, demanding now? Does history demand economics based on contempt for one’s fellow humans? Or does history demand that state which is justice as economics, ethics as economics?

Mr. Siegel explained in 1970, and for us now too: “That sense of justice, which is a name for good will, is tremendously powerful….Justice has come to a tangibility. It’s doing things!…Ethics is a force like electricity, steam, the atom—and will have its way.”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

What Economics Has

By Eli Siegel

Ault and Eberling say, quite rightly, that all the sciences are in economics, or are related to it: sociology, history, politics, law, ethics, psychology, geography. They have this sentence about psychology:

Such knowledge [i.e., psychological knowledge] will help to obtain a better understanding of man in his wealth-getting and wealth-spending relationships.

Man has often been disposed to seem against money. For instance, there’s a famous phrase, filthy lucre. And there’s Money is the root of all evil. Well, psychology is around humanity’s activities—it’s present in sports, in sex, in the family, in economics, in travel. If people are around, they carry their psychology with them.

What Impels People?

In the second chapter, “Human Nature and the Economic Struggle,” the writers say:

It is probably true…that those who have not given serious and sustained thought to the question of what causes men to act as they do underestimate…the economic factor.

One of the biggest debates on the subject has been: Why was America colonized, particularly New England? Did the pilgrims go to America for religious purposes, to worship God in their own way, or were they interested in economic betterment and achievement? This question isn’t settled yet. What is “the economic factor”?

Then, an interesting sentence, showing the difference between 1936 and what goes on now, in 1970:

When we think of the population and standards of living in China, India, the Near East, and large portions of Africa, the intensity of man’s struggle for existence is impressed upon us still more deeply.

Things have changed since then—in China very much. There was a news item today about China’s lending money to Rumania. Where did China get the money to lend to Rumania?

Cooperation—from the Beginning

The writers deal with cooperation and personal enterprise, or free enterprise. Cooperation has been in economics from the very beginning. About every profession and trade is organized—they each have their journals. People interested in fruits are organized. People interested in pharmacy are organized. Then there is unconscious organization, because every person is aware that other persons are making what oneself might want, or, also, what oneself might sell. The writers say:

Hence, by means of the market, a form of co-operation in the present economic system is attained largely as the result of unconscious forces.

Let’s say somebody is making a clock, and other persons are making tissue paper and some kind of package in which the clock will be when it is sold. The person who makes the clock takes for granted that somebody else is making the packaging. It happens that oranges still are wrapped up in nice paper, occasionally with a little printing—and the person who cultivates the oranges doesn’t grow that paper. There is a tremendous interrelation of productive procedures, activities, and forces. Occasionally it is very interesting. For instance, it is quite clear that parts of a piano are made by different people, though the piano manufacturer gets it all together and sells the piano. And, to be sure, the composer is related to the piano.

So there is a kind of cooperation. That has to do with the nature of reality itself. Once you have a universe, it means everything has to be together—otherwise it’s not a universe. There is an immeasurable simultaneity. Lots of things are happening at any one moment, more than can be told.

Then, the writers say that the going for wealth is present in so much that human beings do:

There is probably not a single current question of great importance in which wealth-getting or wealth-using does not play some part, while in most of the important problems of the day it is the dominant question at issue. The struggle to exist or to live abundantly dominates our lives.

Yes, to live is to have the means to live. —Meanwhile, as I read passages and comment on them, my purpose is to give one a solid beginning for some of the conclusions I have stated in these talks.

A Question—& What It Includes

There are questions given in each chapter of this book, and they’re interesting questions, better than in most books of the kind. In chapter 2 there’s the following question:

Should Congress be given power to regulate business enterprises whose products either directly or indirectly enter into interstate commerce?

Well, that doesn’t seem to be too worrisome. But how much Congress can regulate business enterprise has been a question from the beginning. And it had to do with the largest question of the 19th century. Central to that question, slavery and the need to end it, was the attempt of Congress to regulate the “business enterprise” for which the plantation was famous, by saying who should work there and on what terms. The controversy about slavery had very much in it an attempt to regulate the business enterprise below the Mason-Dixon Line mostly, though elsewhere too. One may not think it was enterprise—but we know that there was the slave market, and people would bid for a likely lad, rather brown, who had a beautiful torso and could work well in the cotton field.

The problem of what Congress was going to do about regulating business enterprise has been around. And since in America everything is intrastate or interstate, Congress apparently, since it is national, would have more of a right to regulate interstate commerce, commerce that goes from one state to another. You’d get a sense of interstate commerce when, in the old days, you’d watch a series of railroad freight cars coming along with all kinds of names on them, representing lots of states—like Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Vermont. And all the freight cars would be together.

There Is a History

We have the next chapter, “Organized Economic Society.” The history of economics and production is given a summary form here, and I don’t know of a better summary form.

Very early, a good deal of work used to be done in one’s home. Then later, with feudalism, work was done on the manor. A manor would be a town owned by a lord, and its chief industries would take place there. A few people on the manor heard of other manors, but they didn’t have to. They could be born on a manor and stay there. One aspect of human history is that as years went on, people would get around. At one time, though, you could be born on a manor, stay there, and have a kind of interesting life, and have your religion brought to you. Feudalism was, in a large sense, static.

But then there was an interest in what the rest of the world was doing. And out of that came something Ault and Eberling write about: weekly markets, and fairs. These sentences are under the head of “Town Economy”:

During the period of town economy the self-sufficing system of economy gradually changed. Weekly markets were held in nearly all the towns to which outsiders brought their goods for sale. In the more favored trading centers great fairs were held…at which goods from the different marts of the world might be purchased.

Fairs occurred because people were more interested in the world. We see that in America later. When all the townships in a county would come together, you’d have a county fair; then, when all the counties of a state came together, you’d have a state fair. The agglomeration, the coalition of things which were separate before, has to do with the coming to be of the fair. And one can say that the World’s Fair goes on all the time now. While there is international exchange, that can be so, and while about any product can be brought anywhere.

This has to do with the world expanding and concentrating, which has to do with the beauty of the world. Aesthetic Realism hasn’t put aside its chief statement about people: a successful life is one that likes the world, and through the honest like of the world, likes itself, its own life.

Factories

The writers have this sentence about the change from work in the home to production in something larger than the home:

As a rule, the artisans still worked their trades in the homes, but by the eighteenth century there was evidence that workers were assembled in buildings used exclusively for manufacturing purposes.

That is important. It has to do with profits. The first person who felt, “Why not get all these workers together? I can sell their produce”—great guy, that guy. You have some of this in the 16th century: the destruction of the commons, and the change into a kind of production that was more managed by one person. There are many details in this matter. And I’ll say again that the statement in these talks arises out of a great deal of careful history—I didn’t suddenly decide, Ooh, the profit system is going to come to an end!

The idea of the factory is a late one. People had worked in the fields together; one can get an idea of that from the Bible. In Egypt they worked together, but not so much indoors. That had to do with the machine, although it’s possible to have people without machines all working together.

About people working together in a building, Ault and Eberling write:

Thus, it might be said, in this fact we had the beginning of the factory system of production. The factory system, however, depended for successful growth and development upon the great inventions, and the introduction of power-driven machines.

We should be interested in the relation of invention through art to the inventions Ault and Eberling speak of. What is the kind of mind that makes for an invention? What went through Watt’s mind as he kept improving on the steam engine, or through Hargreaves’ mind as he came to the spinning jenny?

Every inventor was someone who was a means for profit, but who, himself or herself, was a mental worker. Invention is a phase of mind, and it is work. The history of invention is mighty large. But the person who would make profit on an invention is usually different from the person who invented it—even the successful inventors like Goodyear, and Edison, and McCormick, who invented the reaping machine, or Howe with the sewing machine. You don’t have a Howe Building; you have a Singer Building—which means something. It doesn’t mean everything. And every invention has a history by itself.

Power & Human Beings

“The factory system, however, depended for successful growth and development upon the great inventions, and the introduction of power-driven machines.” Something “power-driven” used by a person, means something that extends the power of the human being.

Horse power extended the power of the human self. The various kinds of power—steam, electricity, gas, coal, water power, nuclear power—whatever the power, it is an extension of the power of human beings. It’s a human self who comes to it. A power-driven machine is one that adds to the power of man. The difference between a machine and a tool is: every time a tool works, a person has to be there and attend to everything, while the machine does a few things by itself. Occasionally a machine will keep on working even if the person attending it makes a telephone call. But that can’t happen with the pick. It’s just a tool. And you can’t do that with a spoon—it’s an indoor tool.