Domestic production

“ Our manufactures find a generous encouragement by the policy which patronizes domestic industry, and the surplus of our produce a steady and profitable market by local wants in less-favored parts at home. ”

“ Mines, factories and mills of all kinds, large business houses and stores, together with those farms whose owners would employ hired labor for the production of goods to be sold at profit, would all be looked upon as being among the principal means of production. ”

“ We propose to own the commodities we produce ourselves and to exchange commodities containing a certain quantity of necessary social labor, for other commodities representing an equal quantity of necessary social labor.
You and I work for the boss because he owns the factory or mine or railroad or the mill. Ownership of the means of production and distribution (the factories, land, mines, mills—the machinery that produces things) makes masters of capitalists and wage-workers of you and me. ”

“ It is thus that agriculture and manufactures are essentially allied in their interests; that unrestrained commerce is equally essential to the real and permanent interests of agriculture and manufactures; that capital and labour are equally united in their interests, whether applied to agriculture, manufactures, or commerce; that the producer and the consumer are equally united in their most essential interest, which is, that there should be cheap production. ”

“ The exchangeable value of all commodities, whether they be manufactured, or the produce of the mines, or the produce of land, is always regulated, not by the less quantity of labour that will suffice for their production under circumstances highly favourable, and exclusively enjoyed by those who have peculiar facilities of production ”

“ Under the stimulus of this the wheels of industry hummed. Factories covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry. ”

“ We may confine our attention to the system of distribution which is the most complex, and which virtually includes all others—that in which the produce of manufactures is shared between two classes, labourers and capitalists, and the produce of agriculture among three, labourers, capitalists, and landlords.
The characteristic features of what is commonly meant by industrial progress, resolve themselves mainly into three, increase of capital, increase of population, and improvements in production ”

“ It will have to take possession of land, factories, mines, means of communication, etc., and besides, it will have to study what products will promote general well-being, as well as the ways and means of an adequate production. ”

“ To this end the authorities have switched to a system of household responsibility in agriculture in place of the old collectivization, increased the authority of local officials and plant managers in industry, permitted a wide variety of small-scale enterprise in services and light manufacturing, and opened the foreign economic sector to increased trade and joint ventures. The most gratifying result has been a strong spurt in production, particularly in agriculture in the early 1980s. ”

“ Closely allied with the manufacturing occupations are those branches of industry classified in the census reports under the heading: "trading and transportation." They comprise all commercial activities. Merchants, clerks, bookkeepers, salesmen and women, typewriters, telegraph and telephone operators, etc., are enumerated in this class. Flourishing industries are invariably accompanied by flourishing commerce, and the capitalistic system of production depends upon a constant expansion of trade. ”

“ If we suppose the occupations of the society extended, that some provide canoes and tackle necessary for fishing, others the seed and rude machinery first used in agriculture, still the same principle would hold true, that the exchangeable value of the commodities produced would be in proportion to the labour bestowed on their production ”

“ The situation will be best understood if we contrast for a moment the different modes in which the improvements in production have been brought about in manufacturing industries on the one hand, in agriculture on the other hand. In manufactures the improvements have been better machinery, new processes, labor-saving inventions, the conduct of business on a larger scale, and so the greater and more effective division of labor. In agriculture the main cause of cheaper production has been different: it has been the opening up of new lands and new sources of supply. ”

“ Possessing, as we do, all the raw materials, the fruit of our own soil and industry, we ought not to depend, in the degree we have done, on supplies from other countries. It is important, too, that the capital which nourishes our manufactures should be domestic, as its influences in that case, instead of exhausting, as it may do in foreign hands, would be felt advantageously for agriculture and every other branch or industry. ”

“ The wide territorial extension, the immense investment in lands, buildings, animals, and equipment, the great improvement in dairy cattle, the acquisition and diffusion of knowledge as to economy of production, the revolution in methods and systems of manufacture, the general advance in quality of products, the wonderful increase in quantity, and the industrial and commercial importance of the industry, have kept pace with the general material progress of the nation and constitute one of its leading features. ”

“ A prosperity built on the basis of agriculture is that which is most desirable to us, because to the efforts of labor it adds the efforts of a greater proportion of soil. The checks, however, which the commercial regulations of Europe have given to the sale of our produce, have produced a very considerable degree of domestic manufacture, which, so far as it is of the household kind, will doubtless continue, and so far as it is more public, will depend on the continuance or discontinuance of the European policy. ”

“ In this country, as everywhere the small industries continue to exist, and new ones continue to appear as a necessary growth, in many important branches of national production, by the side of the very great factories and huge centralised works. ”

“ The development of large scale factory production, the benefit of combination in the competitive struggle, and the tremendous advantage of concentration in securing possession of the unoccupied opportunities, were so great that vast accumulations of capital became the normal agency of the industrial world. ”

“ The question between the large and the small systems of production as applied to agriculture—between large and small farming, the grande and the petite culture—stands, in many respects, on different grounds from the general question between great and small industrial establishments. In its social aspect, and as an element in the Distribution of Wealth, this question will occupy us hereafter: but even as a question of production, the superiority of the large system in agriculture is by no means so clearly established as in manufactures. ”

“ But with the increasing division of labor, production for direct personal consumption becomes of less and less importance compared with the production of means of production, and therewith also the sphere of governmental production increases. On the other side this field is extended by the development of commerce and of the great industries, which bursts the local bonds of the market for each branch of production one after another, and transforms one after another from a local into a national industry. ”

“ These proceed from the consequences of that spirit of industry which is diffused over the whole people; in consequence of which, their lands are improved, the produce of them is readily disposed of, and what proves superfluous for domestic consumption meets with a ready market abroad, and thereby supports the value of all productions within the country. ”

“ There are four fundamental facts connected with the subject, viz., the points of production, places of consumption, methods of operation and means of communication. Production is upon the farm, consumption in the cities and towns, methods, to be determined by experience, and the mode and means of conveyance, a government function.
Regarding the first of these divisions, certain facts are apparent. The balance of trade, eight to one is against the farmer at the point of production; he receives very much more than he sends. ”

“ We may conclude, then, that improvements in production, and emigration of capital to the more fertile soils and unworked mines of the uninhabited or thinly peopled parts of the globe, do not, as appears to a superficial view, diminish the gross produce and the demand for labour at home ”

“ When trade has exhausted its power to find a profitable market, abroad or at home, the conversion of our unsaleable surplus produce into new forms, commonly denominated domestic manufactures, becomes an object of reasonable consideration. It is well known, that the cultivated soil and the bowels of the earth give us the following principal objects as the fruits of the culture of the land, or as its spontaneous productions. ”

“ But, as a matter of fact, the division of what was formerly the home into unproductive and productive departments, into domestic work and work outside the house, has been far less thorough and complete in the retail trade than in other spheres of labour. The factory, which has absorbed industry after industry formerly carried on in the house, is a comparatively modern institution ”

“ It is a reflection which may with propriety be indulged here that this eventual diminution of the prices of manufactured articles, which is the result of internal manufacturing establishments, has a direct and very important tendency to benefit agriculture. It enables the farmer to procure, with a smaller quantity of his labor, the manufactured produce of which he stands in need, and consequently increases the value of his income and property. ”

“ The first industrial tendency to be noted is that toward the concentration of capital and labor in large industrial enterprises. Not only have the factory and the mill superseded the individual system of manufactures, but the growth of “bonanza farms” and the increasing number of tenant farms show the same tendency in agriculture; the trust is the resort of wholesale business houses ”

“ It is too narrow an understanding of production which confines it merely to the making of things. Production includes not merely the making of things, but the bringing of them to the consumer. The merchant or storekeeper is thus as truly a producer as is the manufacturer, or farmer, and his stock or capital is as much devoted to production as is theirs. ”

“ But the magnitude and value of this industry are appreciated when the statement is made that of our total annual exports more than three-fourths are the products of agriculture, and of our total population nearly one-half are exclusively engaged in that occupation. ”

“ It is a principal mean by which the establishment of manufactures contributes to an augmentation of the produce or revenue of a country, and has an immediate and direct relation to the prosperity of agriculture.
It is evident that the exertions of the husbandman will be steady or fluctuating, vigorous or feeble, in proportion to the steadiness or fluctuation, adequateness or inadequateness of the markets on which he must depend, for the vent of the surplus which may be produced by his labor ”

“ I think there are suggestions in our very geographical position, and a great many of them in our history and experience, that we may well desire and reach for that condition in which we shall raise our own food and in which a manufacturing class, withdrawn from agriculture and other pursuits, shall furnish the farmer a market for his surplus near to his fields and gardens, while he exchanges with the farmer the products of the shop and the loom. ”

“ The industry is capable of development, yet chiefly with a view to local consumption. The normal expansion of this agricultural industry would appear to be in fully supplying the home demand and then in cultivation for the export trade. ”

“ It is of more consequence that the capital of the manufacturer should reside within the country. It necessarily puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labor, and adds a greater value to the annual produce of the land and labor of the society. ”

“ The front-line of production, as always, consists of the agricultural and the industrial sectors. Concurrent and articulated growth of production in these two areas remain our emphasis; as growth in industrial production proceeds, agri­culture is bound to be influenced in the direction of rationalization, in effect the industrialization of the agricultural process, which I feel will achieve our goals of development. ”

“ That system, by encouraging manufactures and foreign trade more than agriculture, turns a certain portion of the capital of the society from supporting a more advantageous, to support a less advantageous species of industry. ”

“ The employment of labour in manufactories tended to increase the population rapidly. The increase of numbers, the growth of wealth among the manufacturers, called into activity more skill in agriculture, and demanded the occupation of more land. Land to which recourse is had under this pressure is naturally the worse land; it therefore requires more labour to produce its crop, and the most laboriously produced crop sets the value of the whole; the prices of the necessaries of life began rapidly to rise. ”