Functional socialism

86 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

tact with the workshop, both for his tools and his inspiration. There are so many kinds and degrees of craftsmanship that it is not easy to decide where and how A shall have special consideration over B. But it is our business to preserve that skill and craftsmanship which have been the greatest asset of British industry. We are apt to assume too readily that mass production is our destiny. This is far from the realities of our existing system and inconceivable in a functional society. It is true, of course, that mass production of many staple articles is desirable. All repetitive jobs, for example, are best done by machinery; in fact, all work that involves tedium. Nobody wants hand work merely to retain it for the individual worker, and providing it contains within itself no semblance of beauty or pleasure. And there is this to be said about machined decorations: they appeal to light purses. There are thousands of articles, mechanically decorated, which are not sold because they appeal, but because they are cheap. With a substantial rise in the standard of living, bringing with it, let us hope, an ever improving sense of colour and outline, the demand for mechanical production would fall and the demand for craft products increase.

The problem, then, of the craftsman is both internal and external—the internal arrangements to a large extent depending upon the economic and cultural conditions outside. If these external conditions can be observed, functional policy calls for the most liberal arrangements inside the workshop