The Industrial Degradation of Workers That Thorstein Veblen Overlooked

Thorstein Veblen gave special importance to work in human society. 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, workmanship enriches personal and social lives. Yet, during his lifetime between 1857 and 1929, the rapid industrialization of the American economy massively proletarianized workers and degraded not only their work experience, but also their lives. In Europe, this proletarianization and degradation of workers had begun centuries earlier with the rise of capitalism, and greatly accelerated with more rapid industrialization during Veblen's lifetime. Yet, paradoxically, Veblen ignored this degradation of work and presented industrialization as positive for workers. This article surveys the process of proletarianization, focusing especially on the American experience. It then explores Veblen's understanding of the impact of industrialization on workers and probes for an understanding of how he could have missed a far-reaching labor-degrading process that provoked massive and violent insurrection, and which had much earlier been recognized and addressed by political economists as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Because he failed to recognize the proletarianization of workers, he failed to see its role in generating the explosion of conspicuous consumption by Americans of all classes, the subject of his most renowned work, The Theory of the Leisure Class.