Thorstein Veblen
"The Captains of Finance and the Engineers"
"DIAL. A Fortnightly", (New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.)
Vol. LXVI (Dec., 28, 1918, to June, 28, 1919)
June 14, 1919, pp. 599-606.
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[599]
The Captains of Finance and the Engineers

IN MORE THAN ONE RESPECT the industrial system of today is notably different 
from anything that has gone before. It is eminently a system, self-balanced 
and comprehensive; and it is a system of interlocking mechanical processes, 
rather than of skilful manipulation. It is mechanical rather than manual. It 
is an organization of mechanical powers and material resources, rather than 
of skilled craftsmen and tools; although the skilled workmen and tools are 
also an indispensable part of its comprehensive mechanism. It is of an 
impersonal nature, after the fashion of the material sciences, on which it 
constantly draws. It runs to "quantity production" of specialized and 
standardized goods and services. For all these reasons it lends itself to 
systematic control under the direction of industrial experts, skilled 
technologists, who may be called "production engineers," for want of a better 
term.

This industrial system runs on as an inclusive organization of many and 
diverse interlocking mechanical processes, interdependent and balanced among 
themselves in such a way that the due working of any part of it is 
conditioned on the due working of all the rest. Therefore it will work at its 
best only on condition that these industrial experts, production engineers, 
will work together on a common understanding; and more particularly on 
condition that they must not work at cross purposes. These technological 
specialists whose constant supervision is indispensable to the due working of 
the industrial system constitute the general staff of industry, whose work it 
is to control the strategy of production at large and to keep an oversight of 
the tactics of production in detail.

Such is the nature of this industrial system on whose due working depends the 
material welfare of all the civilized peoples. It is an inclusive system 
drawn on a plan of strict and comprehensive interdependence, such that, in 
point of material welfare, no nation and no community has anything to gain at 
the cost of any other nation or community. In point of material welfare, all 
the civilized peoples have been drawn together by the state of the industrial 
arts into a single going concern. And for the due working of this inclusive 
going concern it is essential that that corps of technological specialists 
who by training, insight, and interest make up the general staff of industry 
must have a free hand in the disposal of its available resources, in 
materials, equipment, and man power, regardless of any national pretensions 
or any vested interests. Any degree of obstruction, diversion, or withholding 
of any of the available industrial forces, with a view to the special gain of 
any nation or any investor, unavoidably brings on a dislocation of the 
system; which involves a disproportionate lowering of its working efficiency 
and therefore a disproportionate loss to the whole, and therefore a net loss 
to all its parts.

And all the while the statesmen are at work to divert and obstruct the 
working forces of this industrial system, here and there, for the special 
advantage of one nation and another at the cost of the rest ; and the 
captains of finance are working, at cross purposes and in collusion, to 
divert whatever they can to the special gain of one vested interest and 
another, at any cost to the rest. So it happens that the industrial system is 
deliberately handicapped with dissension, misdirection, and unemployment of 
material resources, equipment, and man power, at every turn where the 
statesmen or the captains of finance can touch its mechanism; and all the 
civilized peoples are suffering privation together because their general 
staff of industrial experts are in this way required to take orders and 
submit to sabotage at the hands of the statesmen and the vested interests. 
Politics and investment are still allowed to decide matters of industrial 
policy which should plainly be left to the discretion of the general staff of 
production engineers driven by no commercial bias.

No doubt this characterization of the industrial system and its besetting 
tribulations will seem overdrawn. However, it is not intended to apply to any 
date earlier than the twentieth century, or to any backward community that 
still lies outside the sweep of the mechanical industry. . Only gradually 
during the past century, while the mechanical [600] industry has 
progressively been taking over the production of goods and services, and 
going over to quantity production, has the industrial system taken on this 
character of an inclusive organization of interlocking processes and 
interchange of materials; and it is only in the twentieth century that this 
cumulative progression has come to a head with such effect that this 
characterization is now, visibly becoming true. And even now it will hold 
true, visibly and securely, only as applies to the leading mechanical 
industries, those main lines of industry that shape the main conditions of 
life, and in which quantity production has become the common and 
indispensable rule. Such are, for examples: transport and communication, the 
production and industrial use of coal, oil, electricity and water power, the 
production of steel and other metals; of wood pulp, lumber and other building 
materials; of textiles and rubber, as also grain-milling and much of the 
grain-growing, together with meat-packing and a good share of the stock-
raising industry.

There is, of course, a large volume of industry in many lines which has not, 
or only in part and doubtfully, been drawn into this network of mechanical 
processes and quantity production, in any direct and conclusive fashion. But 
these other lines of industry that still stand over on another and older plan 
of operation are, after all, outliers and subsidiaries of the mechanically 
organized industrial system, dependent on or subservient to those greater 
underlying industries which make up the working body of the system, and which 
therefore set the pace for the rest. And in the main, therefore, and as 
regards these greater mechanical industries on whose due working the material 
welfare of the community depends from day to day, this characterization will 
apply without material abatement. 

But it should be added that even as regards these greater, primary and 
underlying, lines of production the system has not yet reached a fatal degree 
of close-knit interdependence, balance, and complication ; it will still run 
along at a very tolerable efficiency in the face of a very appreciable amount 
of persistent derangement. That is to say, die industrial system at large has 
not yet become so delicately balanced a mechanical structure and process that 
the ordinary amount of derangement and sabotage necessary to the ordinary 
control of production by business methods will paralyze the whole outright. 
The industrial system is not yet sufficiently close-knit for that. And yet, 
that extent and degree of paralysis from which the civilized world's industry 
is suffering just now, due to legitimate businesslike sabotage, goes to argue 
that the date may not be far distant when the interlocking processes of the 
industrial system shall have become so closely interdependent and so 
delicately balanced that even the ordinary modicum of sabotage involved in 
the conduct of business as usual will bring the whole to a fatal collapse. 
The derangement and privation brought on by any well organized strike of the 
larger sort argues to the same effect. 

In effect, the progressive advance of this industrial system towards an all-
inclusive mechanical balance of interlocking processes appears to be 
approaching a critical pass, beyond which it will no longer be practicable to 
leave its control in the hands of business men working at cross purposes for 
private gain, or to entrust its continued administration to others than 
suitably trained technological experts, production engineers without a 
commercial interest. What these men may then do with it all is not so plain; 
the best they can do may not be good enough; but the negative proposition is 
becoming sufficiently plain, that this mechanical state of the industrial 
arts will not long tolerate the continued control of production by the vested 
interests under the current businesslike rule of incapacity by advisement. 

In the beginning, that is to say during the early growth of the machine 
industry, and particularly in that new growth of mechanical industries which 
arose directly out of the Industrial Revolution, there was no marked division 
between the industrial experts and the business managers. That was before the 
new industrial system had gone far on the road of progressive specialization 
and complexity, and before business had reached an exactingly large scale; so 
that even the business men of that time, who were without special training in 
technological matters, would still be able to exercise something of an 
intelligent oversight of the whole, and to understand something of what was 
required in the mechanical conduct of the work which they financed and from 
which they drew their income. Not unusually the designers of industrial 
processes and equipment would then still take care of the financial end, at 
the same time that they managed the shop. But from an early point in the 
development there set in a progressive differentiation, such as to divide 
those who designed and administered the industrial processes from those 
others who designed and managed the commercial transactions and took care of 
the financial end. So there also set in a corresponding division of powers 
between the business management and the technological experts. It became the 
work of the technologist to determine, on technological grounds, what could 
be done in the way of productive [601] industry, and to contrive ways and 
means of doing it ; but the business management always continued to decide, 
on commercial grounds, how much work should be done and what kind and quality 
of goods and services should be produced; and the decision of the business 
management has always continued to be final, and has always set the limit 
beyond which production must not go.

With the continued growth of specialization the experts have necessarily had 
more and more to say in the affairs of industry, but always their findings as 
to what work is to be done and what ways and means are to be employed in 
production have had to wait on the findings of the business managers as to 
what will be expedient for the purpose of commercial gain. This division 
between business management and industrial management has continued to go 
forward, at a continually accelerated rate, because the special training and 
experience required for any passably efficient organization and direction of 
these industrial processes has continually grown more exacting, calling for 
special knowledge and abilities on the part of those who have this work to do 
and requiring their undivided interest and their undivided attention to the 
work in hand. But these specialists in technological knowledge, abilities, 
interest, and experience, who have increasingly come into the case in this 
way inventors, designers, chemists, mineralogists, soil experts, crop 
specialists, production managers and engineers of many kinds and 
denominations have continued to be employees of the captains of industry, 
that is to say, of the captains of finance, whose work it has been to 
commercialize the knowledge and abilities of the industrial experts and turn 
them to account for their own gain.

It is perhaps unnecessary to add the axiomatic corollary that the captains 
have always turned the technologists and their knowledge to account in this 
way only so far as would serve their own commercial profit, not to the extent 
of their ability or to the limit set by the material circumstances or by the 
needs of the community. The result has been, uniformly and as a matter of 
course, that the production of goods and services has advisedly been stopped 
short of productive capacity, by curtailment of output and by derangement of 
the productive system. There are two main reasons for this, and both have 
operated together throughout the machine era to stop industrial production 
increasingly short of productive capacity, (a)' The commercial need of 
maintaining a profitable price has led to an increasingly imperative 
curtailment of the output, as fast as the advance of the industrial arts has 
enhanced the productive capacity.

And (b) the continued advance of the mechanical technology has called for an 
ever-increasing volume and diversity of special knowledge, and so has left 
the businesslike captains of finance continually farther in arrears, so that 
they have been less and less capable of comprehending what is required in the 
ordinary way of industrial equipment and personnel. They have therefore, in 
effect, maintained prices at a profitable level by curtailment of output 
rather than by lowering production-cost per unit of output, because they have 
not had such a working acquaintance with the technological facts in the case 
as would enable them to form a passably sound judgment of suitable ways and 
means for lowering production-cost ; and at the same time, being shrewd 
business men, they have been unable to rely on the hired-man's-loyalty of 
technologists whom they do not understand. The result has been a somewhat 
distrustful blindfold choice of processes and personnel and a consequent 
enforced incompetence in the management of industry, a curtailment of output 
below the needs of the community, below the productive capacity of the 
industrial system, and below what an intelligent control of production would 
have made commercially profitable. 

Through the earlier decades of the machine era these limitations imposed on 
the work of the experts by the demands of profitable business and by. the 
technical ignorance of the business men, appears not to have been a heavy 
handicap, whether as a hindrance to the continued development of 
technological knowledge or as an obstacle to its ordinary use in industry. 
That was before the mechanical industry had gone far in scope, complexity, 
and specialization; and it was also before the continued' work of the 
technologists had pushed the industrial system to so high a productive 
capacity that it is forever in danger of turning out a larger product than is 
required for a profitable business. But gradually, with the passage of time 
and the advance of the industrial arts to a wider scope and larger scale, and 
to an increasing specialization and standardization of processes, the 
technological knowledge that makes up the state of the industrial arts has 
called for a higher degree of that training that makes industrial 
specialists; and at the same time any passably efficient management of 
industry has of necessity drawn on them and their special abilities to an 
ever-increasing extent. At the same time and by the same shift of 
circumstances, the captains of finance, driven by an increasingly close 
application to the affairs of business, have been going farther out of touch 
with the ordinary realities of productive industry; and, it is to be 
admitted, they have also continued increasingly to distrust the [602] 
technological specialists, whom they do not understand, but whom they can 
also not get along without. The captains have per force continued to employ 
the technologists, to make money for them, but they have done so only 
reluctantly, tardily, sparingly, and with a shrewd circumspection ; only 
because and so far as they have been persuaded that the use of these 
technologists was indispensable to the making of money.

One outcome of this persistent and pervasive tardiness and circumspection on 
the part of the captains has been an incredibly and increasingly uneconomical 
use of material resources, and an incredibly wasteful organization of ; 
equipment and man power in those great industries where the technological 
advance has been most marked. In good part it was this discreditable pass, to 
which the leading industries had been brought by these one-eyed captains of 
industry, that brought the regime of the captains to an inglorious close, by 
shifting the initiative and discretion in this domain out of their hands into 
those of the investment bankers. By custom the investment bankers had 
occupied a position between or overlapping the duties of a broker in 
corporate securities and those of an underwriter of corporate flotations such 
a position, in effect, as is still assigned them in the standard writings on 
corporation finance. The increasingly large scale of corporate enterprise, as 
well as the growth of a mutual understanding among these business concerns, 
also had its share in this new move. But about this time, too, the 
"consulting engineers" were coming notably into evidence in many of those 
lines of industry in which corporation finance has habitually been concerned.

So far as concerns the present argument the ordinary duties of these 
consulting engineers have been to advise the investment bankers as to the 
industrial and commercial soundness, past and prospective, of any enterprise 
that is to be underwritten. These duties have comprised a painstaking and 
impartial examination of the physical properties involved in any given case, 
as well as an equally impartial auditing of the accounts and appraisal of the 
commercial promise of such enterprises, for the guidance of the bankers or 
syndicate of bankers interested in the case as underwriters. On this ground 
working arrangements and a mutual understanding presently arose between the 
consulting engineers and those banking houses that habitually were concerned 
in the underwriting of corporate enterprises.

The effect of this move has been two-fold: experience has brought out the 
fact that corporation finance, at its best and soundest, has now become a 
matter of comprehensive and standardized bureaucratic routine, necessarily 
comprising the mutual relations between various corporate concerns, and best 
to be taken care of by a clerical staff of trained accountants; and the same 
experience has put the financial 'houses in direct touch with the 
technological general staff of the industrial system, whose surveillance has 
become increasingly imperative to the conduct of any profitable enterprise in 
industry. But also, by the same token, it has appeared that the corporation 
financier of nineteenth-century tradition is no longer of the essence of the 
case in corporation finance of the larger and more responsible sort. He has, 
in effect, come to be no better than an idle wheel in the economic mechanism, 
serving only to take up some of the lubricant.

Since and so far as this shift out of the nineteenth century into the 
twentieth has been completed, the corporation financier has ceased to be a 
captain of industry and has become a lieutenant of finance; the captaincy 
having been taken over by the syndicated investment bankers and administered 
as a standardized routine of accountancy, having to do with the flotation of 
corporation securities and with their fluctuating values, and having also 
something to do with regulating the rate and volume of output in those 
industrial enterprises which so have passed under the hand of the investment 
bankers.

By and large, such is the situation of the industrial system today, and of 
that financial business that controls the industrial system. But this state 
of things is not so much an accomplished fact handed on out of the recent 
past; it is only that such is the culmination in which it all heads up in the 
immediate present, and that such is the visible drift of things into the 
calculable future. Only during the last few years has the state of affairs in 
industry been obviously falling into the shape so outlined, and it is even 
yet only in those larger and pace-making lines of industry which are 
altogether of the new technological order that the state of things has 
reached this finished shape. But in these larger and underlying divisions of 
the industrial system the present posture and drift of things is 
unmistakable. Meantime very much still stands over out of that regime of 
rule-of-thumb, competitive sabotage, and commercial log-rolling, in which the 
businesslike captains of the old order are so altogether well at home, and 
which has been the best that the captains have known how to contrive for the 
management of that industrial system whose captains they have been. So that 
wherever the production experts are now taking over the management, out of 
the dead hand of the self-made captains, and [603] wherever they have 
occasion to inquire into the established conditions of production, they find 
the ground cumbered with all sorts of incredible make-shifts of waste and 
inefficiency such makeshifts as would perhaps pass muster with any moderately 
stupid elderly layman, but which look like blind-fold guesswork to these men 
who know something of the advanced technology and its working-out.

Hitherto, then, the growth and conduct of this industrial system presents 
this singular outcome. The technology the state of the industrial arts which 
takes effect in this mechanical industry is in an eminent sense a joint stock 
of knowledge and experience held in common by the civilized peoples. It 
requires the use of trained and instructed workmen born, bred, trained, and 
instructed at the cost of the people at large. So also it requires, with a 
continually more exacting insistence, a corps of highly trained and specially 
gifted experts, of divers and various kinds. These, too, are born, bred, and 
trained at the cost of the community at large, and they draw their requisite 
special knowledge from the community's joint stock of accumulated experience. 
These expert men, technologists, engineers, or whatever name may best suit 
them, make up the indispensable General Staff of the industrial system; and 
without their immediate and unremitting guidance and correction the 
industrial system will not work. It is a mechanically organized structure of 
technical processes designed, installed, and conducted by these production 
engineers. Without them and their constant attention the industrial 
equipment, the mechanical appliances of industry, will foot up to just so 
much junk. The material welfare of the community is unreservedly bound up 
with the due working of this industrial system, and therefore with its 
unreserved control by the engineers, who alone are competent to manage it. To 
do their work as it should be done these men of the industrial general staff 
must have a free hand, unhampered by commercial considerations and 
reservations; for the production of the goods and services needed by the 
community they neither need nor are they in any degree benefited by any 
supervision or interference from the side of the owners. Yet the owners, now 
represented, in effect, by the syndicated investment bankers, continue to 
control the industrial experts and limit their discretion arbitrarily, for 
their own commercial gain, regardless of the needs of the community.

Hitherto these men who so make up the general staff of the industrial system 
have not drawn together into anything like a self-directing working force; 
nor have they been vested with anything more than an occasional, haphazard, 
and tentative control of some disjointed sector of the industrial equipment, 
with no direct or decisive relation to that personnel of productive industry 
that may be called the officers of the line and the rank and file. It is 
still the unbroken privilege of the financial management and its financial 
agents to "hire and fire." The final disposition of all the industrial forces 
still remains in the hands of the business men, who still continue to dispose 
of these forces for other than industrial ends. And all the while it is an 
open secret that with a reasonably free hand the production experts would 
today readily increase the ordinary output of industry by several fold, 
variously estimated at some 300 per cent to 1200 per cent of the current 
output. And what stands in the way of so increasing the ordinary output of 
goods and services is business as usual.

Right lately these technologists have begun to become uneasily "class-
conscious" and to reflect that they together constitute the indispensable 
General Staff of the industrial system. Their class consciousness has taken 
the immediate form of a growing sense of waste and confusion in the 
management of industry by the financial agents. They are beginning to take 
stock of that all-pervading mismanagement of industry that is inseparable 
from its control for commercial ends. All of which brings home a realization 
of their own shame and of damage to the common good. So the engineers are 
beginning to draw together and ask themselves, "What about it?"

This uneasy movement among the technologists set in, in an undefined and 
fortuitous way, in the closing years of the nineteenth century; when the 
consulting engineers, and then presently the " efficiency engineers," began 
to make scattered corrections in detail, which showed up the industrial 
incompetence of those elderly laymen who were doing a conservative business 
at the cost of industry. The consulting engineers of the standard type, both 
then and since then, are commercialized technologists, whose work it is to 
appraise the industrial value of any given enterprise with a view to its 
commercial exploitation. They are a cross between a technological specialist 
and a commercial agent, beset with the limitations of both and commonly not 
fully competent in either line. Their normal position is that of an employee 
of the investment bankers, on a stipend or a retainer, and it has ordinarily 
been their fortune to shift over in time from a technological footing to a 
frankly commercial one. The case of the efficiency engineers, or scientific-
management experts, is somewhat [604] similar. They too have set out to 
appraise, exhibit, and correct the commercial shortcomings of the ordinary 
management of those industrial establishments which they investigate, to 
persuade the business men in charge how they may reasonably come in for 
larger net earnings by a more closely shorn exploitation of the industrial 
forces at their disposal. During the opening years of the new century a 
lively interest centered on the views and expositions of these two groups of 
industrial experts ; and not least was the interest aroused by their exhibits 
of current facts indicating an all-pervading lag, leak, and friction in the 
industrial system, due to its disjointed and one-eyed management by 
commercial adventurers bent on private gain.

During these few years of the opening century the members of this informal 
guild of engineers at large have been taking an interest in this question of 
habitual mismanagement by ignorance and commercial sabotage, even apart from 
the commercial imbecility of it all. But it is the young rather than the old 
among them who see industry in any other light than its commercial value. 
Circumstances have decided that the older generation of the craft have become 
pretty well commercialized. Their habitual outlook has been shaped by a long 
and unbroken apprenticeship to the corporation financiers and the investment 
bankers; so that they still habitually see the industrial system as a 
contrivance for the round-about process of making money. Accordingly, the 
established official Associations and Institutes of Engineers, which are 
officered and engineered by the elder engineers, old and young, also continue 
to show the commercial bias of their creators, in what they criticize and in 
what they propose. But the new generation which has been coming on during the 
present century are not similarly true to that tradition of commercial 
engineering that makes the technological man an awestruck lieutenant of the 
captain of finance.

By training, and perhaps also by native bent, the technologists find it easy 
and convincing to size up men and things in terms of tangible performance, 
without commercial afterthought, except so far as their apprenticeship to the 
captains of finance may have made commercial afterthought a second nature to 
them. Many of the younger generation are beginning to understand that 
engineering begins and ends in the domain of tangible performance, and that 
commercial expediency is another matter. Indeed, they are beginning to 
understand that commercial expediency has nothing better to contribute to the 
engineer's work than so much lag, leak, and friction. The four years' 
experience of the war has also been highly instructive on that head. So they 
are beginning to draw together on a common ground of understanding, as men 
who are concerned with the ways and means of tangible performance in the way 
of productive industry, according to the state of the industrial arts as they 
know them at their best; and there is a growing conviction among them that 
they together constitute the sufficient and indispensable general staff of 
the mechanical industries, on whose unhindered team-work depends the due 
working of the industrial system and therefore also the material welfare of 
the civilized peoples. So also, to these men who are trained in the stubborn 
logic of technology nothing is quite real that cannot be stated in terms of 
tangible performance; and they are accordingly coming to understand that the 
whole fabric of credit and corporation finance is a tissue of make-believe.

Credit obligations and financial transactions rest on certain principles of 
legal formality which have been handed down from the eighteenth century, and 
which therefore antedate the mechanical industry and carry no secure 
conviction to men trained in the logic of that industry. Within this 
technological system of tangible performance corporation finance and all its 
works and gestures are completely idle; it all comes into the working scheme 
of the engineers only as a gratuitous intrusion which could be barred out 
without deranging the work at any point, provided only that men made up their 
mind to that effect that is to say, provided the make-believe of absentee 
ownership were discontinued. Its only obvious effect on the work which the 
engineers have to take care of is waste of materials and retardation of the 
work. So the next question which the engineers are due to ask regarding this 
timeworn fabric of ownership, finance, sabotage, credit, and unearned income 
is likely to be : Why cumbers it the ground? And they are likely to find the 
scriptural answer ready to their hand.

It would be hazardous to surmise how, how soon, on what provocation, and with 
what effect the guild of engineers are due to realize that they constitute a 
guild, and that the material fortunes of the civilized peoples* already lie 
loose in their hands. But it is already sufficiently plain that the 
industrial conditions and the drift of conviction among the engineers are 
drawing together to some such end.

Hitherto it has been usual to count on the interested negotiations 
continually carried on and never concluded between capital and labor, between 
the agents of the investors and the body of workmen, to bring about whatever 
readjustments are to be looked for in the control of productive industry and 
in the distribution and use of its product. These [605] negotiations have 
necessarily been, and continue to be, in the nature of business transactions, 
bargaining for a price, since both parties to the negotiation continue to 
stand on the consecrated ground of ownership, free bargain, and self-help; 
such as the commercial wisdom of the eighteenth century saw, approved and 
certified it all, in the time before the coming of this perplexing industrial 
system. In the course of these endless negotiations between the owners and 
their workmen there has been some loose and provisional syndication of claims 
and forces on both sides; so that each of these two recognized parties to the 
industrial controversy has come to make up a loose-knit vested interest, and 
each speaks for its own special claims as a party in interest. Each is 
contending for some special gain for itself and trying to drive a profitable 
bargain for itself, and hitherto no disinterested spokesman for the community 
at large or for the industrial system as a going concern has cut into this 
controversy between these contending vested interests. The outcome has been 
businesslike concession and compromise, in the nature of bargain and sale. It 
is true, during the war, and for the conduct of the war, there were some 
half-concerted measures taken by the Administration in the interest of the 
nation at large, as a belligerent; but it has always been tacitly agreed that 
these were extraordinary war measures, not to be countenanced in time of 
peace. In time of peace the accepted rule is still business as usual; that is 
to say, investors and workmen wrangling together on a footing of business as 
usual.

These negotiations have necessarily been inconclusive. So long as ownership 
of resources and industrial plant is allowed, or so long as it is allowed any 
degree of control or consideration in the conduct of industry, nothing more 
substantial can come of any readjustment than a concessive mitigation of the 
owners' interference with production. There is accordingly nothing subversive 
in these bouts of bargaining between the federated workmen and the syndicated 
owners. It is a game of chance and skill played between two contending vested 
interests for private gain, in which the industrial system as a going concern 
enters only as a victim of interested interference. Yet the material welfare 
of the community, and not least of the workmen, turns on the due ; working of 
this industrial system, without interference. Concessive mitigation of the 
right to interfere with production, on the part of either one of these vested 
interests, can evidently come to nothing more substantial than a concessive 
mitigation.

But owing to the peculiar technological character of this industrial system, 
with its specialized, standardized, mechanical, and highly technical inter-
locking processes of production, there has gradually come into being this 
corps of technological production specialists, into whose keeping the due 
functioning of the industrial system has now drifted by force of 
circumstance. They are, by force of circumstance, the keepers of the 
community's material welfare; although they have hitherto been acting, in 
effect, as keepers and providers of free income for the kept classes. They 
are thrown into the position of responsible directors of the industrial 
system, and by the same move they are in a position to become arbiters of the 
community's material welfare. They are becoming class-conscious, and they are 
no longer driven by a commercial interest, in any such degree as will make 
them a vested interest in that commercial sense in which the syndicated 
owners and the federated workmen are vested interests. They are, at the same 
time, numerically and by habitual outlook, no such heterogeneous and unwieldy 
body as the federated workmen, whose numbers and scattering interest has left 
all their endeavors substantially nugatory. In short, the engineers are in a 
position to make the next move.

By comparison with the population at large, including the financial powers 
and the kept classes, the technological specialists which come in question 
here are a very inconsiderable rfumber; yet this small number is 
indispensable to the continued working of the productive industries. So 
slight are their numbers, and so sharply defined and homogeneous is their 
class, that a sufficiently compact and inclusive organization of their forces 
should arrange itself almost as a matter of course, so soon as any 
appreciable proportion of them shall be moved by any common purpose. And the 
common purpose is not far to seek, in the all-pervading industrial confusion, 
obstruction, waste, and retardation which business as usual continually 
throws in their face. At the same time they are the leaders of the industrial 
personnel, the workmen, the officers of the line and the rank and file; and 
these are coming into a frame of mind to follow their leaders in any 
adventure that holds a promise of advancing the common good.

To those men, soberly trained in a spirit of tangible performance and endowed 
with something more than an even share of the sense of workmanship, and 
'endowed also with the common heritage of partiality for the rule of Live and 
Let Live, the disallowance of an outworn and obstructive right of absentee 
ownership is not likely to seem a shocking infraction of the sacred 
realities. That customary right of ownership by virtue of which the vested 
interests continue to control the industrial system [606] for the benefit of 
the kept classes, belongs to an older order of things than the mechanical 
industry. It has come out of a past that was made up of small things and 
traditional make-believe. For all the purposes of that scheme of tangible 
performance that goes to make up the technologist's world, it is without form 
and void. So that, given time for due irritation, it should by no means come 
as a surprise if the guild of engineers are provoked to put their heads 
together and, quite out of hand, disallow that large ownership that goes to 
make the vested interests and unmake the industrial system. And there stand 
behind them the massed and rough-handed legions of the industrial rank and 
file, ill at ease and looking for new things. The older commercialized 
generation among them would, of course, ask themselves: Why should we worry? 
What do we stand to gain? But the younger generation, not so hard-bitten by 
commercial experience, will be quite as likely to ask themselves: What do we 
stand to lose? And there is the patent fact that such a thing as a general 
strike of the technological specialists in industry need involve no more than 
a minute fraction of one per cent of the population; yet it would swiftly 
bring a collapse of the old order and sweep the timeworn fabric of finance 
and sabotage into the discard for good and all.

Such a catastrophe would doubtless be deplorable. It would look something 
like the end of the world to all those persons who take their stand with the 
kept classes, but it may come to seem no more than an incident of the day's 
work to the engineers and to the rough-handed legions of the rank and file. 
It is a situation which may well be deplored. But there is no gain in losing 
patience with a conjunction of circumstances. And it can do no harm to take 
stock of the situation and recognize that, by force of circumstance, it is 
now open to the Council of Technological Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies to 
make the next move, in their own way and in their own good time. When and 
what this move will be, if any, or even what it will be like, is not 
something on which a layman can hold a confident opinion. But so much seems 
clear, that the industrial dictatorship of the captain of finance is now held 
on sufferance of the engineers and is liable at any time to be discontinued 
at their discretion as a matter of convenience.

THORSTEIN VEBLEN.
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