The Economic Web of Thorstein Veblen

The Economic Web of Thorstein Veblen

Toward Slavery and Nomadism
Thorstein Veblen's "Instinct of Workmanship and Irksomeness of Labor"

In his paper "The instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor,"
Thorstein Veblen establishes a distinction between the instinct of workmanship
and the irksomeness of labor aiming to reconcile them with one another by
means of a dialectical reduction.
He writes that the instinct of workmanship results from the human need to
overcome the challenges posed by the environment, whereas the irksomeness of
labor is the outcome of the development and growth of industrial capabilities
achieved via the "productive work" by a specific community.
Man is naturally inclined to work, although he finds such disposition "irksome."
As Veblen puts it, there are two features of the human character which
determine and shape both the aforementioned "aversion to work" and, its
counterpart, the "instinct of workmanship": man's mental tendency to "believe"
that life has a purpose and his proclivity to action.
However, human action is of a predatory kind, "men are inclined to fight, not to
work." Be it as it may, such predatory disposition cannot be realized if priorities
are not set straight. Even though human beings are naturally inclined to work,
they must first overcome reality's forces which by rule exceed their own. Thus
they must work "together" in order to fabricate the tools which will liberate and
give them the advantage with respect of their surroundings' hazards. "Adaptation
to the environment was of an industrial kind." Once his immediate needs are
satisfied and his safety guaranteed, man's peacefulness, which hitherto had been
determined by the force of circumstance, will change to predation spurred by the
"psychological belief in self-purposiveness."
With the use of tools increases also the population numbers, for mortality rate
diminishes, and a large surplus of product is left "over what is required for the
sustenance of the producers"; thus leading, first, to a need for more food and,
consequently, to the division of labor. Two classes are born with the new
economic conditions: a class of producers and a non-productive class, namely that
of warriors, hunters...
Veblen, hereafter, wanders in the zone of "ethics" developing an interesting,
though confusing, web of the causes which contributed to the so-called "shifting to
predatory life" of peaceful men. Their instinctive predisposition to violence
notwithstanding, men have been forced to peace and to gregarious life in order,
by means of work, to overcome nature's might. With this goal accomplished,
efficiency begins to be regarded as a virtue (needless to add that it also generates
an immense amount of "free time") reinforced by the own sense of purpose.
Thanks to communal effort efficiency can be attained through force. Hunting
large game, the most primitive predatory activity, becomes possible and
necessary, rewarding the hunters with a life purpose and provoking, by the
"honor" implied in the pursue of that activity, the first division of labor and the
birth of the "subject" as self-consciousness.
For Veblen, as we can safely assume, the appearance of "self-consciousness" has a
moral makeup and leads to the division of labor and of classes (Gilles Deleuze's
"first great deterritorialization.")
When the shifting to a predatory kind of life obliges of necessity the division of
classes, the hunter is withdrawn from the community. As the social group grows
and accumulates wealth in the form of sedentary settlements, the hunter (bored
and unneeded) targets other human groups. Warfare has begun, bringing slavery
and ownership with it.
The hunter's "withdrawal" is rather an "intensive" severing from the social
corpus. The hunters are to plant the seed for the leisure class, comprised of
politicians, religious authorities and warriors. Simultaneously the rising of slavery,
with the seizure of women from adversary groups will pave the way for the firm
grounding of the notions of incest and taboo, which are no more than the creation
of economic possibility for the exchange of private property through marriage.
On the one hand, the leisure class expands the limits of the community and, on
the other hand, it creates a monstrous surplus of non-productive people who
must continue expansion and social redistribution; namely, the "armed forces."
Man's predatory tendency is encoded in the army's honor, and what once was the
inescapable consequence of survival in unfavorable conditions (hunting proper)
becomes the unaccountable desire for expansion that is at the very center of
social evolution (in itself an expansive process), that is nomadism.
The nomadic forces pushed away by the complexity and self-interest of various
social groups become a Barbarian Machine, capitalist in its raw core, and
maturing toward the second great deterritorialization of the social corpus and the
dawn of a new, more brutal reterritorialization under the name of the Western
World: the Imperial Machine—the Roman Empire.
The leisure class is sedentary, but its passivity is always at work creating a
monstrous surplus that wanders in Rome's periphery. Capitalist exploitation is of
a nomadic-predatory kind. And today we may be witnessing the intensive
journeys where classes are dissolved into the magma of a socious completely
mobilized by means of schizophrenia: the origin of colorful predators of any
imaginable ancestry.

Harrison Mujica-Jenkins