The industrial degradation of the workplace that Thorstein Veblen overlooked

Thorstein Veblen gave special importance to work. He claimed that once humans became tool users, their work activity was driven by an instinct of workmanship. This instinct is ‘an object of attention and sentiment in its own right’ beyond providing provisioning and serving another instinct, that of parental bent, or society’s wellbeing. Given appropriate social institutions, ‘labor might… assume that character of nobility in the eyes of society at large’. Yet, Veblen took little notice that during his lifetime between 1857 and 1929, the rapid industrialisation of the American economy massively proletarianised workers, greatly degrading their work experience. In Europe, this proletarianisation and degradation of the work process had begun centuries earlier with the rise of capitalism, and greatly accelerated with rapid industrialisation during Veblen’s lifetime. Although Veblen addressed how capitalism, as the latest predatory society, exploited workers, he presented industrialisation of the work process as positive for workers. This article first surveys the process of proletarianisation, focussing on the American experience. It then explores Veblen’s understanding of the impact of industrialisation on workers and how he missed a far-reaching labour-degrading process that was important in provoking massive violent insurrection, and which had earlier been addressed by political economists as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Because he failed to recognise the degradation of the work process that accompanied industrialisation, he missed its contributing role in the explosion of conspicuous consumption by Americans of all classes, the subject of his most renowned work, The Theory of the Leisure Class.