t deepened the desire for protection of private property and
the strengthening of property laws against human laws, it was not
a _socializing_ force. While the craftsmanship period strengthened
personal claims on workmanship and interest in it, mechanical power
and division of labor have impersonated industry.[A] In the labyrinth
of mechanical processes and economic calculation it is not to-day
possible for a worker to think or speak of a product as his. He has no
basis for ownership claims in any article; even the price is arranged
between buyer and seller and he is not the seller. An article owes its
existence to an infinite number of persons and its place in the market
to as many more.

[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen--Instinct of Workmanship, Chapter V.]

A worker's claim to the product of his labor is merged in an infinity
of claims which makes the product more nearly the property of society
than of any one individual. And this merging of claims which has
resulted in the submerging of all wage workers, has set up the new
educational task of discovering the possibilities for creative
experience in associated enterprise.

While an article manufactured under business conditions is the product
of enforced association, we have in this condition the mechanics of
a real association. As it now stands, the association is one of
individuals, with the impulse for association and for creative effort
left out. The interests of some ninety workers associated together in
the making of a shoe are not common but antagonistic, except as they
are common in their antagonism to the owner of the shoe on which they
work. They hang together because they must; their parting is the best
part of a working day.

And yet the practice of dividing up the fabrication of an article
among the members of a group instead of confining the making of it
to one or two people, opens up the possibility of extensive social
intercourse, and has the power, we may discover, to sublimate the
inordinate desire for the intensive satisfaction of personal life.
Although the division of labor has given us a society which is
abortive in its functioning like a machine with half assembled parts,
it offers us the mechanics for interdependence and the opportunity to
work out a cooerdinated industrial life.

CHAPTER II

ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY--THE AMERICAN WAY

As machine power rivalled hand work, promoters of industry until
recently relied for its adv