Jimmy Reid speaks to Henry Ford

An Imaginary Conversation
Jimmy Reid and Henry Ford

James Reid, 'Jimmy' was born in Govan, Glasgow, in July, 1932. He was a trade union leader who came to prominence leading the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in the early 70s, battling against the Conservative government of the day under the leadership of Premier, Edward Heath. Jimmy died last week. He was elected Rector of Glasgow University in 1971, at which time, he gave his ‘Alienation’ speech, saying famously that, “A rat race is for rats!”

Henry Ford – The founder of the Ford Motor Company, father of the assembly line, Ford believed that consumerism would lead to peace on Earth, and used Taylorism to mass produce the Model T Ford, which revolutionized transport forever. He was a pioneer of ‘welfare capitalism’.
Of course, this conversation between Henry Ford and Jimmy Reid never took place. If it had done, this is what the author thinks might have been said. It is his way of trying to understand some of the issues close to the heart of the late Jimmy Reid, and is presented respectfully as a tribute to him.
Robert L. Fielding

Jimmy Reid: Mr. Ford, you said once that consumerism would rid the world of the ills of warfare. What did you mean?

Henry Ford: I meant that if the population of the world had all the benefits that mass production could offer – cheap, affordable consumer durables, leading to well paid employment, all disputes over territory, and its attendant ‘power’ would end. As people prospered, they would have less interest in politics, which I see as an essentially evil system dividing man from man, brother from brother.

JR: I agree with you that the pursuit of power and the politics that goes with it is not the best way to govern people, but I take issue with your belief that people are placated by wealth and prosperity. Man has differing needs that are not always facilitated by his spending money to buy things.

HF: Then what, in your opinion, does facilitate his needs, what are those needs?

JR: The needs of people are as diverse as their numbers. Each has differing needs; and it is often in the dearth of something that man finds himself motivated to better himself.

If, for example, a man’s health is poor, then he will be most happy when he recovers. If he is poor, then earning some money will better his lot.

HF: Precisely. It is my contention that bettering his lot financially will make him happier, and a happy man has no need of warfare. I provide the means to give him that financial security that he needs. Man must work, you know.

JR: In asserting that you provide the means of giving a man financial security, and hence a measure of happiness, do you not think you are playing at being something other than an owner of a company that makes cars?

I agree that financial security is important in people’s lives, and I applaud you for supplying a means to attain it. It is just that your way – mass production, using the principles of Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management’ actually demeans man, treats him as a mere ‘arm of the machine’, making him work at tasks that do not give him the chance to exercise his other faculties – those apart from the strength of his arms.

Man is not a machine and nor should he be treated as if he were. It is this treatment that leads to his feeling of alienation. He is only deemed useful for that one skill, and not for anything more human.

I have to add that it is in treating people as units of production, rather than what they are – human beings, through the so called ‘laws of economics’ that you deceive yourself that you are doing good.

HF: And what system would you install, if not the one that I play a part in as a leader of industry?

JR: That is a good question, and one you think I will answer by resorting to some wishy-washy utopian version of socialism, in which all see my vision of the good life and bow to my own will.

I will resort to no such model. It may come as a surprise to you, but I know the value of the technological advances made since the Industrial Revolution. I know I cannot turn the clock back to ignore the many advantages that you and your kind have wrought through industry and ingenuity.

I lived in a city in which shipbuilding, coal mining and heavy engineering once played an important part in people’s lives. I spent most of my time fighting for the men and women you thought of as but one factor in an economic equation that puts profit on one side of the balanced, and people (labour) and plant and machinery on the other, to be manipulated always to the advantage of profit.

HF: How else could I run my company? You forget that I operated my firm in the midst of more or less perfect competition, so that if I slackened off, other companies would fill the breach, selling their own products in place of my own, resulting in loss of work for my men.

JR: Which is as good a plea for a world socialistic society as I have ever heard. It is the profit motive that drives most of the world, with its impersonal theories perpetuated in the name of modernity and commerce. We are told that there is no sentiment in business – and there is a very good reason for that; the world of business does not consider human beings in any other way than units to be entered into that equation we have already mentioned.

The wonder is not that people feel alienated from that system that governs their lives, but that it has continued apace and even strengthened its grip on all our lives.

I cannot leave it there, however. People who are used must feel it and react to it, albeit in widely varying degrees, from ennui to suicide, from petty crime to murder, and from petty personal hatred to warfare.

We are told, are we not, that man does not live by bread alone, and yet his life is ordered as if he did. When will we all realize that the gift of life is given to us by the Almighty to use all our faculties, all our creative talents, and all our ways of helping each other. When we come to realize the true gift of life in all of us, then I will rest.
Robert L. Fielding

The difference between working with shapes and colours and working with words

In what way does working with shapes and colours, as well as with words, expand the mind?
A conversation between a writer and an artist.

The Writer: Am I right in saying that you work mainly with shapes and colour?

The Artist: Yes, you are right, but I do include text in my designs, whereas I think you work only with words, being a writer rather than a painter.

TW: Yes, that’s true. I rarely deal with shapes. But when I come to think about it, what are letters but shapes on a piece of paper, or a computer screen.

TA: That’s true, they are, but I am guessing that you hardly attend to the shapes of the letters you use when writing.

TW: That’s true in one way, I don’t pay much attention to the shape of each individual letter, but in reading, and writing, in using letters – recognizing them and the sounds they represent, or else producing them with a pen, I surely unconsciously deal with shapes, do I not?

TA: Yes, but what I am saying is that the shape of letters is not your main consideration when using them.

TW: Whereas you are primarily dealing with shapes – without meaning.

TA: While I agree that the shapes I produce in my paintings do not represent sounds, they do have a meaning – collectively.

TW: In what way do they have meaning, if they are abstract, particularly?

TW: I am not sure I can answer that question, especially using words.

TW: How can those shapes be said to have meaning if they are abstract and are not letters?

TA: I think that to answer that question meaningfully, we may have to make several important assumptions.

TW: Which are?

TA: That language has a poverty of meaning, particularly where emotion s are concerned, and even the senses too.

TW: In what way is language poor?

TA: Mere words cannot adequately convey what we feel. Do you agree?

TW: Yes, I think I do. But could you elaborate on what you mean?

TA: Yes. Take any emotion – love, for example. How can words express that feeling of loving – of being in love, or of being loved?

TW: Many have tried – using words. Poets have traditionally used words to convey their emotions.

TA: And I love them for that, but do they do what they set out to do? Do they really portray what love is, or do they merely write something that accords with generally accepted means of experiencing romantic love?

TW: I am sure that is what they do, but it does seem to be effective doesn’t it? We do feel moved by romantic poetry. But then, I am at a loss to really say what love really is using words – mere words, I think you said. Love is the emotion of personal affection – of identification with another, to love is a virtue - philosophical and religious, and psychological.

TA: That is undoubtedly all true – that is what love is, but can you say in words how you really feel when you are in love?

Or is that possible using art – in the sense of visual art in its various forms?

TW: Or musical?

TA: Certainly, music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, it is said. Which brings me back to my original proposition; can words convey the range of things we feel. How can words tell us what it feels like to be burnt, for example, other than in appealing to those senses we all experience.

TW: Yes, I see, it doesn’t actually explain to us. Rather, it appeals to us to compare our feelings with those of the writer, rather than really describing the pain felt when one is burnt by something hot. But where does that get us?

TA: We are trying to ascertain, are we not, whether using shapes, chiefly, affects us in the same way that using chiefly words does. We have clarified our thoughts on the poverty of language to express emotion. Now, if words cannot really express what love is, we must experience a world that is somewhat remote from language, or shall I say that it is not touched fully by language, or is itself really touched by using language.

TW: So what you are saying is that our thoughts, how we experience our life, does not necessarily depend upon our use of language; that our world – our personal world – our world of emotion, sense, faith and belief is conjured up, not merely by words, though words undoubtedly help, but via other means of expression – creative art – music, and so on.

TA: And if that is so, surely my manipulation of shapes and colours can go some way to expressing emotions – though I am at a loss to say how.

TW: Me too. We might have to draw upon the thoughts of the psychologist or the neurologist to help us. It is well known that doing various forms of mental exercise – solving crosswords and puzzles, mathematical and linguistic, help us to increase the complexity of the neural networks of the mind.

TA: Then what is true of those forms of mental gymnastics is surely true of artistic endeavour in more visual terms, do you not think?

TW: I am sure that what you do unfolds your own neural networks in ways that surely differ significantly from the ways that are affected by manipulating symbols – arithmetic or alphabetic.

TA: In the final analysis, we can only use words to get near to saying how our minds are expanded by using shapes and colours.

TW: What we can say is that as our expertise in manipulating anything – shapes or symbols increases, we become more versatile, ‘say’ more with words or with shapes.

TA: But still I think working with shapes and colours has some parallels with working with language.

TW: Please elaborate. I know all too well, as a writer, that as I write, more ideas flood into my mind, from the thoughts I have expressed using the written word, to further thoughts I think I would have been unaware of, had I not begun a train of thought expressed in writing. In what ways can working with shapes and colours be said to have anything in common with writing?

TA: Shapes have complementary shapes to right and left, above and below them, have they not?

TW: That is true.

TA: Then, when I form a shape on paper, further complementary shapes come to my mind, and having some expertise, as you have with words and sentences, I begin to see the larger picture, probably in much the same way that you see strands of an argument. I see colours contrasting with other colours I have not yet put on the paper, and so, you see, my imagination is expanded in similar ways, though probably not in similar directions, through my manipulating shapes and colours rather than words.

TW: That is interesting. Can I ask you if, like me when I am writing, that your thoughts take turns and directions you would probably not have imagined before putting any marks on the paper?

TA: I think that they do, but, unlike you, I am unable to articulate in words which direction my imagination will take me.

Like you I can sketch outlines beforehand. Still, within the broad strokes of my outline, I can expand detail in ways I can be surprised by, as you say you can by the direction an argument takes you whilst you are writing.

TW: So there is some similarity between writing and painting and drawing.

TA: Yes, but with the difference that whereas writing uses systems of logic – our perception of how the world is organized, art is characterized by spatial organization, which, whilst having its own logic, is much less hidebound than is what we term logic.

TW: Ideas flow in both activities, it seems, but the direction each takes is martialled by different combinations of our senses and our minds.

TA: So these directions taken probably originate in differing parts of our brains, each with its limitations and its range.
Robert L. Fielding