Thoreau, Stuff, and Production

In "Economy," Henry David Thoreau wrote:

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.

We hear a lot these days about the responsibility that companies have to their shareholders. So much, in fact, that it seems strange to hear HDT's voice from a century and a half ago suggesting that the purpose of corporations ought to be something other than share prices and dividends.

Just a few years earlier, Marx and Engles wrote:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

And they complained that the bourgeoisie "has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.'" (Note: See also Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.")

What is this exchange of labor that reduces the measure of craftsmanship and artistry to a price tag? (Or, perhaps worse: a bar code?)

What has been lost over the last two centuries, I fear, is respect for (and perhaps understanding of) the intangible.

A couple of years ago, we had a yard sale, and I insisted on putting a $100 price tag on the ugliest vase you've ever seen. It was a gift that had spent all of its time in our garage, waiting for the day of its departure--it was horrid. But still, the $100 price tag intrigued people, and although no one bought it, everyone who stopped by that day picked it up, turned it over.

If we agree that a higher quality good demands a better price, then we run the risk of assuming the opposite is true--that a higher priced good is of better quality. But this is not necessarily the case. People assumed that this vase (which, I suspect, cost about a buck at the local Dollar Store) was valuable because of the price tag, not because of the craftsmanship with which it was made.

A question I've heard too many times: How do we put a price tag on art? The right question here is not how we put a price tag on art, but if we should put a price tag on art.

Which brings me back to the craftsman. Two hundred years ago, if you needed a new pair of pants, you would have (a) made them yourself or (b) bought them from your local tailor. In either case, there would have been a personal relationship among the maker of the pants, the pants themselves, and the wearer of the pants. Certainly, if you bought them, you would have paid the tailor more than the materials cost, and whatever price you paid would have something to do with the tailor's reputation, with the tailor's skill, with the craftsmanship of the finished pair of pants.

But compare that to today. Today, if you needed a new pair of pants, chances are that you would make a trip to the mall (or to any of a variety of big-box retailers). Here, the distance between factory and store is great, and this distance is metaphorically increased by the low-wage and mechanistic nature of jobs both in the factory and in the retail store. Although the price you pay might have something to do with the quality of the pants themselves, there is no tailor--only a collection of nameless, faceless factory workers we never see. There is no craftsman, so there is no appreciation for the craftsman's skill.

And if we do appreciate the quality of a particular brand, that quality is assigned to a company, an abstraction, rather than to a human being. And that company's motivation is profit, not quality: quality might be a means to profit, but if quality can be sacrificed to increase profit, it will be--because, the company will say, of its responsibility to its shareholders.

Thus, the relationship is no longer drawn among craftsman, product, and purchaser, but among a wide-ranging network of shareholders, suppliers, executives, workers, purchasers, and even teenagers making minimum wage selling clothes at the mall. Do shareholders make anything? Do suppliers? Do executives? Even, we might ask, do factory workers make the things made on their assembly line?

The problem that Thoreau sees here is with the dehumanization of the production of goods, the loss of craftsmanship and, therefore, of a sense of artistry, of beauty.