PASSAGE VI
I want to stress this
personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has
passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose
that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to little familiar
things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a
pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so, and
I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to
women.
There was a time when
pinmakers could buy the material, shape it, make the head and the point,
ornament it, and take it to market or to your door and sell it to you. They had
to know three trades: buying, making, and selling; and the making required
skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from
beginning to end, but could do it. But they could not afford to sell you a box
of pins for a farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman’s dress allowance was
calling pin money.
By the end of the eighteenth
century Adam Smith boasted that it took eighteen men to make a pin, each man
doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of
them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when
it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some
idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that
they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pinmakers,
you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its
effect was so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each
man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over
again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly
five thousand pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The
country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had
turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and
being fed by the spare food of the capitalist as an engine is fed with coals
and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as
well as a poet, complained that ‘wealth accumulates, and men decay’.
Nowadays Adam Smith’s
eighteen men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The eighteen flesh-and-blood
machines are replaced by machines of steel, which spout out pins by the hundred
million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result
is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody
knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker
in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent and skilful and
accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we have for this
deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible
value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy
dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that
verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a
sin to steal a pin.
Many serious thinkers, like
John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as
Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance
in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able
to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the
Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old
ways; for if the saving of time by modern machinery was equally divided among
us, it would set us all free for higher work than pinmaking or the like. But in
the meantime the fact remains that pins are now made by men and women who
cannot make anything by themselves, and could not arrange between themselves to
make anything even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot
lift their finger to begin their day’s work until it has all been arranged for
them by their employers who themselves do not understand the machines that buy,
and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine
maker’s directions.
The same is true of clothes.
Formerly the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to
the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be
done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the
women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays
nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the
milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a
sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will
she be quite unable to do it, but you are as likely as not to find that she is
not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her
clothes, which she does by buying them at a shop, she knows that there is a
difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino,
perhaps even between stockinet and together wefts; but as to how they are made,
or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to
buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no
wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of
them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own
clothes.
Thus the capitalist system
has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done,
whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic
scale. We have to buy books and encyclopaedias to find out what it is we are
doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and
who get their information from other books, what they tell us is from twenty to
fifty years out of date, and impractical at that. And of course most of us are
too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need
is a cinema to take our minds off it and feed our imagination.
It is a funny place, this
word of Capitalism, with its astonishing spread of ignorance and helplessness,
boasting all the time of its spread of education and enlightenment. There stand
the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers; none of them
able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells
them, none of them having the least notion of how it is that they find people
paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel
they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to
make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder
would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of
our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of
illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us
alive; but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or
less dangerous lunatics in the real world.
Excuse my going on like
this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself; I know the folly and
peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost
ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the
blind forces of Capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that
the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political
minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been
formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a
while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are
intelligent enough to listen to me.
64.
A suitable title to the passage would be…
[1] You can’t hear a pin drop nowadays.
[2] Capitalism and labour disintegration:
pinning the blame.
[3] The saga of the non-safety pins.
[4] Reaching the pinnacle of
capitalistic success.
65.
Which of the following is true as far as pins are concerned?
[1] The cost of pins is more nowadays to
produce.
[2] Earlier, workmen made pins with
a lot of love and care.
[3] Pinball machines are the
standard pin producing gadgets nowadays.
[4] It took far longer to make a pin
earlier.
66.
Why do you think that the author gives the example of Adam Smith?
[1] Because he thinks that Adam Smith was a
boaster without any facts to back his utterance.
[2] Because he wants to give us an example of
something undesirable that Adam Smith was proud of.
[3] Because he is proud to be a believer in a
tenet of production that even a great man like Adam Smith boasted about.
[4] Because he feels that Adam Smith was
right when he said that it took eighteen men to make a pin.
67.
It may be inferred from the passage
that the author…
[1] is a supporter of craftsmanship
over bulk mechanised production.
[2] is a supporter of assembly line
production over socialistic systems of the same.
[3] is a defender of the faith in
capitalistic production.
[4] None of the above.
68.
The reason that children have to be taught that stealing a pin is wrong is
that:
[1] they have an amazing proclivity to steal
them right from childhood.
[2] pins are so common and cheap that taking
one would not even be considered stealing by them.
[3] stealing a pin would lead to stealing
bigger things in the future.
[4] stealing an insignificant thing like a
pin smacks of kleptomania.
69.
Which of the following is not against the modern capitalistic system of mass
production?
[1] John Ruskin
[2] Goldsmith
[3] Adam Smith
[4] William Morris
70.
Which of the following can be a suitable first line to introduce the
hypothetical next paragraph at the end of the passage?
[1] The distribution of leisure is
not a term that can be explained in a few words.
[2] If people wear clothes they
hardly seem to think about the method of production.
[3] Machines are the gods of our age
and there seems to be no atheists.
[4] Cannot be determined from the
passage.
71. When the author says that a woman now is not
likely to know about any connection between sheep and clothes, he is probably
being:
[1] vindictive
[2] chauvinistic
[3] satirical
[4] demeaning
72.
Goldsmith’s dictum, “wealth accumulates, and men decay,” in the context of the
passage, probably means:
[1] the more wealthy people get,
they become more and more corrupt.
[2] the more rich people get, they
forget the nuances of individual ability.
[3] people may have a lot of money,
but they have to die and decay someday.
[4] the more a company gets wealthy
the less they take care of people.
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