Note 96 — Chapter IV · The Technology of the Predatory Culture

It may be pertinent to take note of the bearing of these considerations on certain dogmatic concepts that have played a part in the theoretical and controversial speculations of the last century. Much importance has been given by economists of one school and another to the “productivity of labour,” particularly as affording a basis for a just and equitable distribution of the product; one school of controversialists having gone so far against the current of received economic doctrine as to allege that labour is the sole productive factor in industry and that the Labourer is on this ground entitled, in equity, to “the full product of his labor.” It is of course not conceived that the considerations here set forth will dispose of these doctrinal contentions; but they make it at least appear that the productivity of labor, or of any other conceivable factor in industry, is an imputed productivity—imputed on grounds of convention afforded by institutions that have grown up in the course of technological development and that have consequently only such validity as attaches to habits of thought induced by any given phase of collective life. These habits of thought (institutions and principles) are themselves the indirect product of the technological scheme. The controversy as to the productivity of labor should accordingly shift its ground from “the nature of things” to the exigencies of ingrained preconceptions, principles and expediencies as seen in the light of current technological requirements and the current drift of habituation.