In the essay How Wealth
Accumulates and Men Decay
capitalist system has almost left
us like.... in this real world.
Answers
How Wealth accumulates and Men Decay
‘How Wealth accumulates and Men Decay’ is a short essay by George Bernard
Shaw from his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.
In the essay Shaw exemplifies the disastrous nature of Capitalism on the human
mind. Shaw begins the essay with the example of pinmakers – their complete
knowledge of making, buying and selling the product door to door in earlier
times. Shaw praises the knowledge of the pinmakers and the skill that was
required of them in order to sell their product. This overall nature of their work
from its very inception to selling it to the customers was something that was
unique to the makers of the product.
However, with the coming of Capitalism on the scene Shaw writes, the workforce
of something as small as pinmaking was distributed among eighteen men, with
everyone doing little bit of a job without any knowledge of what the unique
features of the finished product. Although this system made the society affluent
with its production, it however turned ‘men into mere machines doing their work
without intelligence’. This accumulation of wealth with the help of capitalist
market where progress, development and advancement seem to be the
catchphrases, has actually led humankind to lose its skill and knowledge of the
work they are performing. The same Shaw holds true for the cloth makers. While
as earlier they had the knowledge of how clothes could be made from shearing
the sheep to the finished product, the modern man/woman (read consumer) isunable to even make a connection between the animal and the finished product.
The replacement of the knowledge on the part of the makers with machines has
led towards a disastrous unmaking for the humankind.
The capitalist system, for Shaw, apart from producing products at a huge scale
has nonetheless produced a ‘universal ignorance of how things are made and
done’ for the humans. The humans have thus been reduced to thoughtless beings
fed on nothing but ‘romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels
and plays and films.’ With its astonishing spread of ignorance, Shaw ridicules the
world of Capitalism which boasts of the spread of education and enlightenments.