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比治山大学現代文化学部紀要,第16号,2009 Bul. Hijiyama Univ. No.16, 2009 41

A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement

佐 中 忠 司 Tadashi SANAKA

Abstract

It is one of chief aims of this paper to make a rethinking of so-called Arts and Crafts movement in connection with manual industry. The second one is the disentanglement of the esoteric conception of such `value' raised by as ` intrinsic value'. In order to make an approach to the subject, a comparison of value is carried out between Karl Marx and Ruskin. In referring to the notion of `alienation', this essay also explores the socioeconomic implications of labour power and life-style within the bounds of production and consumption.

Preface

By 1860 a few people had become profoundly disturbed by the level to which style, craftsmanship, and public taste had sunk in the wake of the industrial revolution and its mass-produced and banal . So-called Arts and Crafts movement was English aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century that represented the beginning of a new appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe. It was a very broad, loosely structured movement, embracing numerous strands of thought and practice. It also aimed to reassert the importance of craftsmanship in the face of increasing mechanization and mass production. The movement had its basic ideas mostly of John Ruskin. He was the most eloquent and influential of the writers who hated the type of highly decorated, machine-made products that dominated the (1851). He believed that the beauty of sprang from pride in individual craftsmanship and deplored the aesthetic as well as the social effects of individualization. Ruskin himself may have had some ideas of passing from theory to actual social organization and teaching at the time when he planned the Guild of St George in 1871, but it was left to the businesslike genius of to translate Ruskin's ideas into practical activities. They had shared nostalgic longing for the standards of craftsmanship of the medieval guilds.

I. Socioeconomic Background to Arts and Crafts Movement

Industrial Revolution and British Empire The industrial revolution began in about 1750, marking a major turning point in human society. Many people moved from the countryside to work in the rapidly growing towns. Britain was the first country to change in this way. Within 100 years since the threshold the country developed from an agricultural society into an industrial nation with trading links across the world; almost every aspect of industrial affair had eventually a great effect on British social and economic life in many ways. 42 佐 中 忠 司

These were mostly made possible by the discovery of steam power and the invention of the steam engine together with a number of operating machines; the first industrial revolution, which began in the 18th century, merged into the second industrial revolution, around 1850. Mainly in textile manufacturing, the introduction of steam power fuelled primarily by coal, wider utilization of water wheels and powered machinery underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries. Technological and economic progress to be attributed to the innovative kind of operating machines of the time gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later in the 19th century with the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation. The impact of this change on society was enormous; many important devices were contrived to be introduced into a various parts of the national industry whereby small business was mostly doomed to decline or to disappear from the economy on the whole. Starting a factory required a lot of money and a new class of rich people, called capitalists, began to wield their influence in general. In due course, big factories were built which could produce a wide variety of goods in large quantities. As a result, the factory system was largely responsible for the rise of the modern city, as large numbers of workers migrated into the cities in search of employment in the factories. Businessmen survived by driving their competitors out of business. The result was often a monopoly, an industry where competition no longer existed. The same kind of development soon began in other countries in Europe and in the US. Victory over Napoleon left Britain without any serious international rival, other than Russia in central Asia. Between 1815 and 1914, a period referred to as Britain's ` imperial century'. Queen Victoria's rule was the longest of any British king or queen, and happened eventually as Britain's greatest period of world power and industrial development. At that time Britain had no equal in the leading economic and political power in the world, and wanted to protect her interests and also increase her international influence by obtaining new lands. British imperial strength was underpinned by the dazzling results of the industrial revolution, for example, the steamship and the telegraph, new technologies invented in the second half of the 19th century, allowing it to control and defend the Empire. Britain used to be said as an empire ` on which the sun never sets'. The British Empire was at its largest and most powerful around 1920, when about one fourth of the world's population lived under Her rule and over a quarter of the land in the world belonged to Her. Being second to none at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman, a state of affairs later known as the Pax Britannica(Latin for ` the British Peace', modelled after Pax Romana), and a foreign policy of ` splendid isolation'. It was the period of relative peace in Europe when the British Empire controlled most of the key naval trade routes and enjoyed unchallenged sea power. It refers to a period of British imperialism after the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, which led to a period of overseas British expansionism. Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain dominated a superior position in world trade. This led to the spread of the English language, the British Imperial system of measures, and rules for commodity markets based on English common law. She effectively controlled the economies of many nominally independent countries, which has been characterised by some historians as ` informal empire'. However, it was not long before that the industrialization of Germany, the Empire of Japan, and the United States of America further A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 43

contributed to the decline of British industrial supremacy following the 1870 s.

Handicraft Industries in Adversity Over a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions in the country. Ordinary working people found increased opportunities for employment in the new mills and factories, but these were often under strict working conditions with long hours of monotonous labour dominated by a pace set by machines. One of serious problems was that there were few checks on a company's activities. Unrest continued in other sectors as they industrialised, such as agricultural labourers in the 1830s, when large parts of southern part of the country were affected by the Captain Swing disturbances. Threshing machines were a particular target, and rick burning was a popular activity. Living conditions during the time varied from the splendour of the homes of the owners to the squalor of the lives of the workers. Thanks to the socioeconomic effects attendant on the revolution, working conditions remained awful and people worked long hours for little money. Factories became known as sweatshops, and were dirty, noisy, dangerous places. It is often reported that huge numbers of the working class used to die due to diseases spreading through the cramped living conditions. The characteristic qualities associated with middle-class people of the 19th century are sometimes called Victorian values. Some people think they are mainly good, and see them as including loyalty, self-control and the willingness to work hard. It is style of architecture, making, and decorative art of the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901. But there are also critical ways of looking that they are mainly bad, and see them as lack of social concern for the poor, and lack of a sense of humour. The era was influenced by significant industrial and urban development, and the massive expansion of the British Empire. There began a transition in parts of Great Britain's previously manual labour and draft-animal-based economy towards machine-based manufacturing. Although the transition to industrialisation was not without difficulty, even for much of the 19th century, production was here and there done in small mills, which were typically water-powered and built to serve local needs. And then each factory to a greater or lesser degree would have its own steam engine and a chimney to give an efficient draft through its boiler. In some other cases the transition to factory production was not so much divisive. Increasing mass production by machines, on the other hand, threatened the existence of craft skills in various parts of the country. The development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal followed the mechanisation of the textile industries with increasing speed. In the end, the rapid industrialisation of the British economy cost many craft workers their jobs. Many people, such as John Ruskin, believed in designing objects and architecture primarily for their function, and not for mere appearance, acting not a little in favour of the development of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its nostalgia for the medieval way of life.

Ⅱ. Arts and Crafts Movement

Ideas of John Ruskin John Ruskin (1819-1900), the most influential art critic of the 19th, set himself obstinately and 44 佐 中 忠 司

short-sightedly against the effects of the industrial revolution in supplanting the older craftsmanship and opposed all efforts to raise the standard of design in industry and to institute schools for the application of good principles of design to mass-production. The scalding critique of industrial work by John Ruskin in The Stone of Venice(1851-3) taught then to see factory work as soulless and degrading; the pleasure in working in the traditional crafts was the secret of the object's beauty. The most distinctive of the Arts and Crafts Movement was its intellectual ambition. Ruskin's attack on factory work uncovered a fundamental malaise in modern industrial society, which Karl Marx identified as alienation. Despite his friendships with individual aesthetes, Ruskin would remain the dominant spokesman for a morally and socially committed conception of art throughout his lifetime. Although Ruskin later modified his views, the key ideas in his most influential works of art criticism were sincerity and truth to nature. He thought that good art is essentially moral and that bad art is insincere and immoral. In the process Ruskin introduced the newly wealthy commercial and professional classes of the English-speaking world to the possibility of enjoying and collecting art. Since most of them had been shaped by an austerely puritanical religious tradition, he knew that they would be suspicious of claims for painting that stressed its sensual or hedonic qualities. These medieval religious artists could provide, he believed, in a way in which the Dutch, French, and Italian painters of the 17th and 18th centuries could not, an inspiring model for the art of the ` modern' age. This medievalist enthusiasm was one reason that Ruskin was so ready to lend his support to the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), a group of young English artists formed in 1848 to reject the Neoclassical assumptions of schools. Through an account of the Greek myth of Athena, Ruskin sought to suggest an enduring human need for-and implicit recognition of-the supernatural authority on which the moral stresses of his artistic, political, and cultural views depend. Conscious of the spiritual significance of the natural world, young painters should ` go to Nature in all singleness of heart . . . having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.' Drawing on his serious amateur interests in geology, botany, and meteorology, Ruskin made it his business to demonstrate in detail that Turner's work was everywhere based on a profound knowledge of the local and particular truths of natural form. He saw as an aid to contemplation of the wonders of divinely inspired Nature and he praised the Gothic for its ` noble hold of nature' and for the ` careful distinction of species, and richness of delicate undisturbed organisation, which characterise the gothic design'. In architecture he loved the Gothic style and believed that the key to the beauty of medieval buildings was the delight that craftsmen took in their creation. Ruskin differs from these predecessors both in the poetic power of his prose and in his distinctive- and widely influential-insistence that art and architecture are, necessarily, the direct expression of the social conditions in which they were produced. Here, as elsewhere, the aesthetic movement, with its view of art as a rebellious alternative to the social norm and its enthusiasm for texts and artefacts, stands in direct contrast to Ruskin's Theoretic views. Gothic architecture, Ruskin believed, allowed a significant degree of creative freedom and artistic fulfilment to the individual workman. But by 1858 Ruskin was beginning to move on from the specialist criticism of art and architecture to a wider concern with the cultural condition of his age. Many of his social ideas, such as his advocacy of old age pensions, later became commonly accepted. A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 45

By the end of his life he had disposed of all his large inheritance in philanthropic work and maintained himself on the proceeds of his writings. By wearing the fetters of a benignly neofeudalist social order, men and women, Ruskin believed, might lead lives of greater aesthetic fulfilment, in an environment less degraded by industrial pollution. In short they would mediate the economic relationships between masters and men, producers and consumers, buyers and sellers with reference to the principles of justice and fairness. He used his wealth, in part, to promote idealistic social causes, notably the Guild of St. George, a pastoral community first planned in 1871 and formally constituted seven years later.1 From his work on Venice, Ruskin developed a comparative historical approach to the social conditions in which the ‘exertion of perfect life' can be fostered or damaged. In particular, following the English romantic writers and the architectural critic A. W. Pugin, he saw nineteenth-century industrial civilization as the enemy of wholeness in its rampant individualism, its substitution of ‘production' for ‘wealth,' and its basic misunderstanding of the nature of work. This kind of social criticism came in many respects to resemble the ideas of some philosophical socialists, and Ruskin's work had an important formative influence on the British labour movement, both directly and through his influence on William Morris, who united Ruskin's ideas with a direct commitment to . (do.) His formative importance as a thinker about ecology, about the conservation of buildings and environments, about Romantic painting, about art education, and about the human cost of the mechanization of work became steadily more obvious. Although Ruskin's worship of beauty for its own sake brought him into affinity with the advocates of ‘art for art's sake', his strong interest in social reform and ever-increasing concern with economic and political questions during the second half of his life (he used much of large inheritance for philanthropic work) kept him from accepting a doctrine of the autonomy of the arts in divorce from questions of social morality. These views were particularly influential on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. His eloquence in linking art with the daily life of the workman had affinities with the views of William Morris. In line with his opinions on the dignity and value of manual labour, he regarded factories as degrading places and he tried to improve the conditions in which the working class lived. People could not, and should not, take pleasure in an object that had not itself been made with pleasure. In this proposition lay the roots both of Ruskin's own quarrel with industrial capitalism and of the Arts and Crafts movement of the later 19th century. His insistence on regarding the state of the arts as a ‘visible sign of national virtue' and his constant emphasis on their moral function have been regarded as a conspicuous instance of the ‘moral fallacy' in aesthetics and criticism.

1 The artist's function is to reveal aspects of the universal truth, which is also beauty. Any corruption of the moral nature of the artist is an inevitable corruption of this revelation, but it is impossible, finally, for an artist to be good if his society is corrupt. The art of any society is, correspondingly,‘he exact exponent of its social and political virtues. Where there is a lack of `wholeness'in art (wholeness being a full and deep response to the organic life of the universe), there is a corresponding lack of‘wholeness’in society; to recover the one men must recover the other. Just as the beauty of art is the expression of the essential nature of the universe-what Ruskin called‘typical beauty'-so the goodness of man is the ‘exertion of perfect life,’which, in comparable relation to the grand design of the created universe, is no more and no less than the‘felicitous fulfilment of function' in all living things. Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summary: Ruskin, John (1819- 1900): retrieved from http://www.bookrags.com/research/ruskin-john-18191900-eoph/ 46 佐 中 忠 司

Achievements left by William Morris, William Morris (1834-96) was designer, poet, entrepreneur and socialist whose seriousness about the importance of art and whose vision of a pre-industrial utopia and the critique of industrial society owe much to the influence of Ruskin. In 1861, he founded a firm of interior decorators and manufacturers, and dedicated to recapturing the spirit and quality of medieval craftsmanship. On the work and human creativity Morris followed the Ruskin of ‘The Nature of the Gothic'. He was, arguably, taking Ruskin's idea to its proper conclusion, but only a few Arts and Crafts people followed him in the early stages. But, in due course, he became to be an inspiration to the whole movement, less for his pattern designs than for his exploration of old abandoned craft techniques and his lecturing on the decorative arts. Morris defined beauty in art as the result of man's pleasure in his work and asked, ` Unless people care about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how can they care about Art?' To Morris, art included the whole man-made environment. He repudiated the concept of and his company was based on the ideal of a medieval guild, in which the craftsman both designed and executed the work. He defined art as man's expression of his joy in labour, and saw it as an essential part of human well-being. However, his work bore lasting fruit, in England and abroad, in the emphasis it laid on the social importance of good design and fine workmanship in every walk of life. In the Arts and Crafts, tradition and modernity were not necessarily at odds. Arts and Crafts objects are often rich in association, carrying suggestions in their structure and decoration of things beyond themselves. Most ornament consisted of natural forms conventionalized, but in the work of Morris and many others it is a nature somehow so fresh and real that it carries the mind out to the country. As a socialist he wished to produce art for the masses, but there was an inherent flaw in his ambition, for only the rich could afford his expensive hand-made products. After a shaky start, the firm prospered, producing furniture, tapestry, , furnishing fabrics, carpets, and much more. Morris's wallpaper designs are particularly well known (they are still produced commercially today). Morris set about the re-creation of hand industry in a machine age, producing hand-printed, hand- woven, hand-dyed textiles, printed books, wallpaper, furniture, and so forth. His ideal of universal craftsmanship and his glorification of manual skill proved unrealistic in so far as it ran counter to or failed to come to terms with modern machine production. Aesthetically his work was highly successful in a sense of commerce, but his ideal of producing art for masses failed for the simple reason that only rich people could afford his comparatively expensive products. The skewed distribution of income and wealth that characterized Victorian capitalism meant that demands that labour satisfied were those for ` shabby gentilities' and ` degrading follies'. Further, the hegemony of the profit motive meant that labour was ` forbidden to have a share in the intelligent production of beautiful things' and was condemned to useless toil rather than joyful labour. While in addition, the competitive imperatives making for cheapness meant that the labourer was, in any case, `compelled to be quire careless of what art there profess to be in the wares he gets made'. In this regard, to raise productivity and lower cost, capitalists subdivided work to a point where the worker for `the whole of his life was hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never-ending task. . . an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians but scarcely fit enough for any other form of society'. Also, as might have been expected of someone driven to embrace socialism by his perception of the A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 47

contemporary degeneracy of the decorative arts and architecture, what Morris constructs is a critique of the material texture of capitalism: its artefacts, its buildings, its dress, its art, its material desires and its physical environment; a critique of a kind that cannot be found in Marxian political economy. As regards environmental degradation, Morris believed that if capitalism destroyed the possibility of beauty in and from labour, it also bid fair to corrupt or destroy the beauty of nature itself. For Morris, as for Ruskin, joyful labour of a kind that allowed the fulfilment of the creative potentialities of the labourer could only occur where it was predicated on the values of craftsmanship and communal purpose; values that had prevailed in the medieval period but were significantly absent in nineteenth-century Britain. The nature of the labour they engendered, the dominance of the cash nexus, the unrelenting pursuit of profit and the consequent imperatives to sub-divide labour that characterized Victorian capitalism destroyed the possibility of human creativity. International competition also ensured that capitalism's destruction of the possibility of artistry in labour was a global phenomenon. There is, therefore,much in what Morris wrote of nature of labour under capitalism that resonates with what Marx said on the alienation of labour in the Philosophical manuscripts. Morris designed for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other decorative products and generated the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and revolutionized Victorian taste. In his own time he was most widely known as the author of The Earthly Paradise and for his designs for wallpapers, textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th century it is as a designer and craftsman, rather than as poet or politician, that he is valued most, though future generations may esteem him more as a social and moral critic, a pioneer of the society of equality. Five years later Morris joined Henry Mayers Hyndman's Democratic (later Social Democratic) Federation and began his tireless tours of industrial areas to spread the gospel of Socialism.

Actual Aspects of Arts and Crafts Movement Some important qualities can be found, overlapping one another, in most Arts and Crafts objects. They were more exclusively concerned with materials and technique, and there was no longer any hint of the anti-industrialism of Ruskin. Being involved in informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts, William Morris and his associates championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself. Alongside the named designers there were many anonymous workers, including amateurs and middle-class women excluded from the world by the code of gentility. Their work was essentially revived hand- craftsmanship done for the sake of creative satisfaction.2 It is not surprising that the imagery of the movement should refer to the twin Romance dream- worlds of the countryside and the past, for the Arts and Crafts was, in many ways, a late expression of . The main controversy raised by the movement-as no one ever denied the quality or

2 The phrase‘Arts and Crafts’was coined by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922) in 1887. In addition, some of its principal organisations were founded: the Art Workers’Guild (1884), a club that served as the social focus of the movement in London; the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society(1888), which brought members’work before the public in its annual and later roughly triennial exhibitions; and the Home Arts and Industries Association (1884), which encouraged craft classes for the urban poor and the revival of such rural industries as lacemaking. Ian Chilvers et al., eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Art, New ed., OUP, 1997. 48 佐 中 忠 司

aesthetic appeal of the work produced-was its practicality in the modern world. There was no particular style associated with the movement (influences came from many different sources), but there was an emphasis on `honesty'-on producing products that showed clearly what they were made of and how they worked. This advocacy of simplicity and integrity often involved emphasizing plain materials and surfaces, an approach that has had a lasting influence on modern design. When Morris tried to make art more accessible, giving as much attention to a table and a chair as to an easel painting, he challenged the whole esoteric tendency of . Arts and Crafts objects carry special, idealistic meanings: they tell the viewer about the value of art versus money, about how they are made, about nature or modernity or the satisfactions of hand work. Crafts Movement flourished it did so at the price of compromise and contradiction. It drew strength from Ruskin's words but ignored the fact that they applied to all kinds of mechanized and factory work: Arts and Crafts confined its attentions to the small (and relatively unmechanized) world of the decorative arts. Thus, Morris' ideas had great influence on craftsmen, teachers, and propagandists, and in the 1880s various organizations were founded to promote Arts and Crafts ideas, including the Art Workers' Guild (1884), which aimed to increase understanding and collaboration between different branches of the visual arts. was one of the leading figures of the Guild. The movement had passed its peak in Britain by the time of the First World War, but its ideas continued to be influential, for example on . Outside Britain, the movement had a particularly strong impact in Austria, notably on the Wiener Werkstatte. Although its hopes of changing the world were high and honourable, it is said that Arts and Crafts never managed to be more than just another movement in the decorative arts. By the 1880s Morris' efforts had widened the appeal of the Arts and Crafts Movement to a new generation. These men revived the art of hand printing and championed the idea that there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists' ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement. With reference to Ruskin and Morris, there are important ideas that have implications not only for socioeconomics but also for the walk of life with less alienation. Featuring and examining socioeconomic heritages of the Arts and Crafts movement, next section continues to probe further into such matters as `pleasure in labour', `arts and life', and `self-actualization and alienation’. Referring to the issues above mentioned, the following is a brief relevant study somewhat under consideration from the comparative view points between Ruskin and Marx.

Ⅲ. Some Economic Issues of Handiwork (1) Commodities

Man and Nature Labour is, above all, a process in which both man and nature participate. So far as labour is a creator of use-value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race. Man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re- actions between himself and nature. Useful labour therefore is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and nature, and therefore no life. In the first place people can not live without eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. This is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 49

of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. The first historical act is, thus, the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. This involves goods and services representing a quantity of labour equal to necessary labour or the necessary product of the time. It represents an average cost of living, an average living standard. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject whereby the former is materialised and the latter transformed. That which in the labourer appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without motion. The baker baked and the product is a loaf of bread. If we examine the whole process from the view point of its result, the product, it is plain that both the oven and the subject of labour, are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour. It is obvious that there is a clear distinction between labour and labour-power. By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description. It is, however, only by its exercise that labour-power becomes a reality, by setting itself in action by working. Labour refers to the actual activity or effort of producing goods or services (or what we call use-values).

Two-fold Nature of Labour In connection with the facts, it is also very important to see that labour possesses the same two-fold nature. So far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use-values. Marx was the first to point out and to examine critically this two-fold nature of the labour contained in commodities. He then argues that labour viewed concretely in its specifics creates useful things, but labour-in-the-abstract is value-forming labour, which conserves, transfers and/or creates economic value. For example, we frequently find worth in the sense of value in use, and value in the sense of exchange-value. With the expansion of market economy, however, the focus of economists has increasingly been on prices and price-relations, the social process of exchange as such being assumed to occur as a naturally given fact. But it is vital to remember that, in the use-value of each commodity, there is contained useful labour, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim. While with reference to use-value, the labour contained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with reference to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labour pure and simple. In the former case, it is a question of How and What, in the latter of How much? How long a time? An increase in the quantity of use-values is an increase of material wealth. In this connexion we consider only its useful effect. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products, in proportion to the rise or fall of its productiveness. On the other hand, no change in this productiveness affects the labour represented by value. But it will yield, during equal periods of time, different quantities of values in use; more, if the productive power rise, fewer, if it fall. The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use-values produced by that labour, will diminish the total value of this increased quantity of use-values, provided such change shorten the total labour-time necessary for their production; and vice versa. To all the different varieties of values in use there correspond as many different kinds of useful 50 佐 中 忠 司

labour, classified according to the order, genus, species, and variety to which they belong in the social division of labour. And also, this division of labour is a necessary condition for the production of commodities, but it does not follow, conversely, that the production of commodities is a necessary condition for the division of labour.

Commodities and Market It is well conceivable that commodities being traded also have a general utility, implied by the fact that people want them. But this fact by itself tells us nothing about the specific character of the economy in which they are produced and sold. A commodity, in brief, is any thing necessary, useful or pleasant in life, an object of human wants, a means of existence in the widest sense of the term. Use- value as an aspect of the commodity coincides with the physical palpable existence of the commodity. Wheat, for example, is a distinct use-value differing from the use-values of cotton, glass, paper, etc. So far as they are values, the coat and the linen are things of alike substance, objective expressions of essentially identical labour. It is the expenditure of simple labour-power, i.e., of the labour-power which, on an average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual. But, as above mentioned, baking and weaving are, qualitatively, different kinds of labour. Baking and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. Use-values cannot confront each other as commodities, unless the useful labour embodied in them is qualitatively different in each of them. Whether the bread be baked by the baker or by his customer, in either case it operates as a use-value. Nor is the relation between the bread and the labour that produced it altered by the circumstance that baking may have become a special trade, an independent branch of the social division of labour. In a community, however, the produce of which in general takes the form of commodities, i.e., in a community of commodity producers, this qualitative difference between the useful forms of labour that are carried on independently of individual producers, each on their own account, develops into a complex system, a social division of labour. Although use-values serve social needs and therefore exist within the social framework, they do not express the social relations of production. For instance, let us take as a use-value a commodity such as a diamond. We cannot tell by looking at it that the diamond is a commodity. Where it serves as an aesthetic or mechanical use-value, on the neck of a courtesan or in the hand of a glass-cutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity. From the point of view of the financier or investor, the chief practical concern is not what exactly is being produced as such or how useful that is for society, but whether the investment can make a profit for him. Even so, the investor is obviously interested in the state of the market for the enterprise's products. If certain products are being used less or used more, this affects sales and profits. Being closely connected with use-values, the objective characteristics are very important for better understanding: (1) the development and expansion of market trade, and (2) necessary technical relationships between different economic activities (e.g. supply chains). There must also be a real market demand for it. And all that may depend greatly on the nature of the use-value itself, as well as the ability to package, store, preserve and transport it. A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 51

Process of Consumption Each kind of products can become commodities with regard to each other, as result from different kinds of labour, being carried on independently and for the account of private individuals. The labour- process, turned into the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in a proper manner, and that the means of production are used with intelligence, so that there is no unnecessary waste of raw material, and no wear and tear of the implements beyond what is necessarily caused by the work. Secondly, the product is the of the capitalist and not that of the labourer, its immediate producer. Suppose that a capitalist pays for a day's labour-power at its value; then the right to use that power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other commodity, such as a horse that he has hired for the day. The value of labour power is thus an historical norm, which is the outcome of a combination of factors: productivity; the supply and demand for labour; the assertion of human needs; the costs of acquiring skills; state laws stipulating minimum or maximum wages, the balance of power between social classes, etc. The use-values, coat, linen, & c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements-matter and labour. But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, & c., is wasted, and these require to be restored. The social relations under capitalism consist primarily of the capitalist and worker classes. The process of capitalism inevitably aggravates the division between the classes, which, in Marx's thesis, is in the short-term negative but in the long-term positive. The social relations between the classes must become sooner or later aggravated in order to bring about revolutionary conditions. To the purchaser of a commodity belongs its use. In the same manner, the seller of labour-power, by giving his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value that he has sold. From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist. By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the product. As same logic applies in the case, the labour-process is nothing more than the consumption of the commodity purchased, of labour-power. This consumption, however, cannot be effected except by supplying the labour-power with the means of production. The labour-process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that have become his property. The product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar. Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption.The result of productive consumption is a product distinct from the consumer. In so far then, as its instruments and subjects are themselves products, labour consumes products in order to create products, or in other words, consumes one set of products by turning them into means of production for another set. Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption. The latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for the living individual, on the one hand, and the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act on the other hand. The product of individual consumption is the consumer himself in other word. 52 佐 中 忠 司

Production process and individual consumption process

production process individual consumption process

productive substance consumptive substance goods (producticon goods) (consumer goods)

labour individual consumption labour power (consumption of labour power) (reproduction of labour power)

new use value final consumption results (product) (products) (maintenance of human life)

remarks transformation of nature conservation of humankind

Some political scientists may claim that according to Marx capitalists are basically `indifferent' to the use-value of the goods and services in which they trade. What matters to capitalists is in effect mere the money they make, and whatever the buyer does with the goods and services produced is, so it seems, of no real concern. Capitalists can never be totally `indifferent' to use-values. Inputs of sufficient quality (labour, materials, equipment) must be bought and managed to produce outputs in order to be able to sell at an adequate profit, with legal permission by the state to be sold and proper reputation of the supplier (with its obvious effect on sales). For this purpose, the inputs in production must moreover be used in an economical way, and care must be taken not to waste resources to the extent that this would mean additional costs for an enterprise, or reduce productivity. Different concepts of use value lead to different interpretations and explanations of trade, commerce and capitalism. If we focus only on the general utility of a commodity, we abstract from and ignore precisely the specific social relations of production which created it. The introduction to his Grundrisse manuscript by Marx had defined the economic sphere as the totality of production, circulation, distribution and consumption. But he often assumed in Das Kapital for argument's sake that supply and demand will balance, and that products do sell. Even so, he carefully defines the production process both as a labour process creating use-values, and a valorisation process creating new value. He usually assumes in his analysis that products sold in the market have a use-value to the buyer, without attempting to quantify that use-value other than in product units. It then follows that use-value as such lies outside the sphere of immediate investigation of political economy. Use-value is the immediate physical entity in which a definite economic relationship-exchange-value-is expressed. Political economy has been deemed to be a social science of the relations between people. Within the existing theoretical framework, we cannot therefore see how a consumption of products sold will take place in the following stages. This might cause some of his readers to take wrongly that use-value played no role in his theory. We will come back again to the facets of this process a little later.

Ⅳ. Some Economic Issues of Handiwork (2) Alienation and Self-activity

Alienating Effects Alienation (German Entremdung, also translatable as estrangement) is centrally the idea of A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 53

something being separated from or strange to something else. The notion of alienation refers, thus, to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony. Alienation is the estrangement of humans from aspects of their human nature. As one of the most important points, it refers to the social alienation of people from aspects of their ‘human nature' (as the case may be ‘species-essence' or ‘species-being'). Since human nature consists in a particular set of vital drives and tendencies, whose exercise constitutes flourishing, alienation is a condition wherein these drives and tendencies are stunted. The material progress of production and its differentiation through division of labour are established as the irreducible substance of capitalism, of which alienation is in particular a systematic result. This process of differentiation contains inevitable conflict between the interest of the working individual and the interest of the larger group of individuals who are engaged in production through division of labour and exchange of products, whereby capitalists play the leading role. For essential powers, alienation substitutes disempowerment; for making one's own life one's object, one's life becoming an object of capital. The notion of alienation is founded upon the observation that in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control over their lives and destinies by being deprived of control over their actions. Alienation in capitalist societies, thus, occurs due to the systemic result of capitalism. Workers as employee never become autonomous, self-realized human beings, but are directed, diverted, into the ways in which the employers want workers to behave. In work each worker contributes to the common wealth, but can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality through a production system that is not socially(publicly), but privately owned, and for which each individual functions, not as a social being, but as an instrument. So-called commodity fetishism is, in Marxist thought, the process whereby the products of labour come to appear to have an independent value separated from the labour of the people who created them. The role commodities have in exchange disguises the way that their value ought to be entirely derivative from the labour that produces them. In the most general terms, this concept describes the estrangement of individuals from one another, or specific situation or process. The individual becomes a part of a machine producing things, and in effect becomes a thing himself, alienating him from his true self, from the tools he uses and the product he makes, and from his fellow man. Exchange-values depend upon the ratio of the labour times currently needed to produce the objects. In conventional terms it can be described as the process whereby goods and services which formerly used for subsistence purpose are bought and sold in the market. This in turn refers us to social division of labour and the complex relationships of interdependence that exist in capitalist society. This refers to the production of commodities for exchange (via the market) as opposed to direct use by the producer. It signals the conversion of use-values into exchange-values and heralds a change in production relations. The commodity, in this manner, assume a fetish, in the sense that it is endowed with the powers of human beings, so seems that what happens to us depends upon the state and movement of the market. Commodity fetishism is one aspect of the analysis of ideology in capitalist societies. That is why the real underlying relationships are hidden from our perception and we build our understanding of the world only on appearances. The social relations are associated with commodity fetishism and resultant alienation. However, all forms of production result in ‘objectification', by which 54 佐 中 忠 司

people manufacture goods which embody their creative talents yet come to stand apart from their creators. Alienation is the distorted form that humanity's objectification of its species-being takes under capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour. Identification of alienation in labour under capitalism falls roughly into four types. ① the alienation of the worker from his or her‘species essence’as a human being rather than an animal; ② alienation among workers, since capitalism reduces labour to a commercial commodity to be traded on the market, rather than a social relationship; ③ alienation of the worker from the product, since its design and production are appropriated by the capitalist class, and so escape the worker's control; ④ alienation from the act of production itself, such that work boils down to an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive, trivial, and meaningless motions, offering little, if any, intrinsic satisfaction.3 That is, in the early period, dominated by craft industry, alienation is at its lowest level and worker's freedom at a maximum. Freedom declines and the curve of alienation rises sharply in the period of machine industry. It is argued that even the bourgeoisie, the capitalists themselves, become alienated by this process of dehumanization in which all relations are based on exploitation and money.

Value in Use and Intrinsic Value A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, & c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce commodities, people must not only produce use values, but use values for others, i.e., social use values. The process of commodification is not automatic or spontaneous. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange. On the other hand, nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it, whereby. On that occasion, the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value. To be a use-value is evidently a necessary prerequisite of the commodity, but it is immaterial to the use-value whether it is a commodity. Use-value as such, since it is independent of the determinate economic form, lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. It belongs in this sphere only when it is itself a determinate form. A use-value can neither be transformed into a social use-value nor into a commodity, without definite technical, social and political preconditions. As already mentioned, the use-value of a commodity is specifically a social use-value, meaning that it has a generally accepted use-value for others in society, and not just for the producer. Use-value is an expression of a certain relation between the consumer and the object consumed. The use-value of a labour-product is practical and objectively determined, i.e. it inheres in the intrinsic characteristics of a product which enable it to satisfy a human need or want. The use-value of

3 alienation(retrieved from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 55

a product therefore exists as a material reality vis-a-vis social needs regardless of the individual need of any particular person. As use-value has value only in use, it is realized only in the process of consumption. One and the same use-value may be used in various ways, but the extent of its possible application is limited by its existence as an object with distinct . It is, furthermore, determined not only qualitatively but also quantitatively. Different use-values have different measures appropriate to their physical characteristics. This way of understanding use-value seems akin to, but in reality differs from the neoclassical concept of utility. In neoclassical economics this utility is ultimately subjectively determined by the buyer of a good, and not objectively by the intrinsic characteristics of the good. Neoclassical economists used to see prices as the quantitative expression of the general utility of products for buyers and sellers, instead of expressing their exchange-value. Thus, the neoclassicals often talk about the marginal utility of a product, i.e., how its utility fluctuates according to consumption patterns. These complex relationships are not also obvious to those participating in market exchanges who see only the resulting relationships of price between commodities. This kind of delusion is the primary cause to so-called commodity fetishism. They therefore view these relationships as autonomous, and as governing rather than dependent on the social division of labour, and the relations it establishes between different producers. The fetishism in bourgeois economists is criticised because they took economic value to be intrinsic property of commodities, like their use-value. Ruskinian ideas of value in a different sense, on the other hand, seem to make important inquiries into the essential nature of a use-value in connection with the process of consumption. In effect, from beginning to end, and from production to consumption, use-value and exchange-value form a dialectical unity. If this is not fully clear from Marx's writings, that is, perhaps, chiefly because he never theorised the sphere of final consumption in any detail, nor the way in which commerce reshapes the way that final consumption takes place. Ruskinian ideas about intrinsic and effectual value, on the contrary, implicates something else from different angle including the sphere of ‘final' consumption. ‘Value derived from the Latin valor' which came ‘from valere, to be well or strong…strong in life (if a man), or valiant; strong for life (if a thing), or valuable.' To be ‘valuable', therefore, is ‘to avail towards life.' A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to ‘life with its whole strength'. Whether a thing was valuable and availed towards life depended, for Ruskin, on a number of things; ① First, there was the nature of the thing itself. For example,‘a sheaf of wheat of a given quality and weight has in it a measureable power of sustaining the substance of the body’.It was, whereby, possessed of‘intrinsic value’. ② However whether this was translated into what Ruskin termed‘effectual value’depended on the‘acceptant capacity’of the consumer; namely the consumer's capacity to use what was acquired‘properly’. ③ In effect,‘effectual value’was for that reason dependent‘on a degree of vital power in the possessor’, ④ and hence Ruskin believed that wealth should be distributed in a discriminate fashion. Distribution is distribution not absolute but discriminate; not of every thing to every man but of the right thing to the right man.4 The ‘intrinsic value' of objects of utility is, thus, considered to be a component of ‘wealth' and indispensable element for the fulfilment of ‘human life', whereby the ‘acceptant capacity' plays a 56 佐 中 忠 司

decisive role to materialize ‘effectual values'.In order to regain ‘self activity' as well as secure human's existence, effectual value must be enhanced not only about material but also cultural life.

A schematic diagram

effectual value = intrinsic value × acceptant capacity

* To a high degree of acceptant capacity, a high-altitude effectual value will correspond accordingly, and vice versa.

Ruskin's opposition to individualism as a social principle and to competition as a method of political economy was based on his idea of function, the fulfilment of each man's part in the general design of creation. This required a social order based on intrinsic human values, whereas the existing social order, based on the supposed laws of supply and demand, tended to put the economy above men- indeed, to reduce them to mere ‘labour'-and, by separating work from the pursuit of human perfection, to separate the work from the man, producing only an alienated and fragmented being. Wherever value is understood as ‘exchange value,' rather than as the ‘intrinsic value' derived from function in the universal design, this corruption of man to a mere tool or machine is inevitable. In particular, the confusion about the nature of value leads to false definitions of both wealth and labour. Labour is degraded whenever it is anything other than the ‘exertion of perfect life,' a creative activity comparable to that of the artist. Wealth is degraded whenever it is confused with mere production, for the meaning of wealth is human well-being, which in material terms is ‘the possession of useful articles which we can use.' Even if the existing system always produced useful articles, the kind of society that it also produced made just distribution and wise consumption impossible. Much actual production, and its widespread misuse, could more properly be called ‘illth' than ‘wealth,' for if it possessed only exchange value and not intrinsic value it corrupted its makers and its users.5

Seef-activity The opposite of alienation is ‘self-actualisation' or ‘self-activity' -the activity of the self, controlled by and for the self. It is said that ‘things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence' (The German Ideology by Marx). In order to reach a higher stage of self-activity, people must coincide with material life and then people may be expected to develop themselves into the commerce of individuals as such. The individuals must subsume the objective forces under themselves and thereby abolish division of labour. The division of labour cannot be abolished by, merely, forgetting about it. A wide variety of socioeconomic measures in face of ‘alienation' are necessary in order that men can regain their ‘self-activity' (German

4 Donald Rutherford ed., The Biographical Dictionary of British Economists, Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. 5 Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summary : Ruskin, John (retrieved from http://www.bookrags.com. /research/ruskin-john- 18191900-eoph/) A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 57

Selbstbetatigung) as well as in order to secure their existence. This is impossible without community. Ruskin and his followers were not interested in dry economic life of the time. It seems that fundamental objectives of the Arts and Crafts movement were to remove the misery, the affection of the capitalistic development. They fought in effect against detestable misery especially due to the situation of the modern industrial system, and they also proceeded with a good heart to tackle alienation. From the view points of economics, their undertakings finally met with virtual failure, nevertheless there are a wide variety of important implications worthy of reconsideration. In order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants, human being , opposing himself to nature as one of her own force, sets in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body. By acting thus on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. At the end of every labour-process, man gets a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his method, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. The elementary factors of the labour-process consist of the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, the subject of that work, and its instruments or means of the work. Throughout the labour-process, man's activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. But the process disappears in the product, and the latter is nothing but a use-value, nature's material adapted by a change of form to the wants of human being. Such are particularly the cases with handiwork industries. As already mentioned, it is said that freedom declines in the period of machine industry and ‘alienation' is obviously aggravated by the fast-growing modern economy. In the medieval period, dominated overwhelmingly by craft industry, alienation was at its lower level and people were arguably less subject to restrictions on their freedom to work. We live now in an epoch of social alienation. In reference to ‘self-actualization', Abraham Maslow argues that there is hierarchy of human needs, each having to be met before a person achieve his or her full potential. Part of his research involved the study of self-actualized people, and he provided substantial listings of the characteristics of such individuals. ‘What a man can be, he must be. He must true to his own nature.' From socioeconomic view point, it seems vital to understand that this ` self-activity' could be a form of labour, because worker takes material production, at least in its non-alienated form, to be the essential activity of the human species. The problem then becomes one of establishing the social conditions in which labour itself can at the same time become ` self-activity'. Carrying out production as human beings, man has, in general, in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In his production he would have objectified his individuality, its specific character, and therefore 58 佐 中 忠 司

Characteristics of self-actualized people (A. Maslow) (ascending hierarchy)

(Ⅴ) The need for self-actualization, or the desire to become everything that one can become

(Ⅳ) The need for self-esteem: for both self-respect and esteem from other people

(Ⅲ) Need to belong and to love

(Ⅱ) The needs for safety and security some kind of order, certainty and structure in our lives

(Ⅰ) Basic physiological needs

(Source)Figure drawn in accordance with the substantial listings in; Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, New York: Harper, 1970.

enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of his life during the activity, but also when looking at the object he would have the individual pleasure of knowing his personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In the other person's enjoyment or use of his product he would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by his work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another person's essential nature. Men's products would be so many mirrors in which they saw reflected their essential nature.

Conclusion As already suggested, such medieval craftsman's case as Ruskin appraised presumably could be one of the example of those who materialized ‘self-activity'. -Activities of the workers are chosen by the craftsmen themselves. -Ownership of production/product is in hands of craftsman; who also receives in person. -Workers are likely to be interconnected with fellow workers within community. -Workers inherit tradition in order to activate their potential and become mindful of tasks. In such case, the points seem to lie in a mode of activity reclaimed from self-estrangement. Man must regain himself completely from his alienation in order to become the perfectly free and independent being which in essence he is. So-called medievalists such as those involved in the Arts and Crafts movement tended toward to condemn the decorative arts of their day as revivalist in style, machine-made and heavy with meaningless ornament. They were apt to look instead for fresh, unpretentious design, honest construction and appropriate ornament and, also, wanted to break down the hierarchy of the arts, challenging in the freedom to work in such materials as wood, metal, enamel and glass. In reference to the theory of ` value' in his sense, Ruskin, perhaps, inquires into matter within the sphere of consumption especially final one, which affects almost every aspect of how we live. The socioeconomic aspects of the movement offer a new approach to the interconnections between use value, intrinsic value and effectual value. The ideas concerning to the effective value will contribute A Socioeconomic Essay about the Arts and Crafts Movement 59

greatly to the substantial arguments about the use-value realization beyond the commodity exchanges.

References

Aalto-Asia Minor, Western, Encyclopedia of World Art, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, 1959. Morris, William. & Morris, Mary, Morris dictionary of word and phrase origins, New York,:Harper & Row, C1977. John Ruskin, The complete works of John Ruskin, Vol. 1-39, Hon-no-tomosha, Tokyo, 1990. William Morris, The collected works of William Morris Vols. I-XXIV, Routledge/Thoemmes Press, London, 1992. The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., Encyclopædia Britannica, 1992. Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, Macmillan, 1996. Ian Chilvers et al., eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Art, New ed., OUP, 1997. Donald Rutherford, ed., The Biographical Dictionary of British Economists, Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. North Sydney, Encyclopædia Britannica, CD-ROMs 2004. , William Morris: artist writer socialist (with an introduction by Peter Faulkner), Tokyo: Edition Synapse,2005 John Scott et al., Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 2005. Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 2005. Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summary (retrieved from http://www.bookrags.com. /research/Ruskin - john-18191900-eoph/) The Oxford Dictionary of Art (http://www.enotes.com/oxford-art-encyclopedia) The concept of alienation in Marx (http://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704698.html) Chapter 1 Commodities (marx.eserver.org/1867.../1.2.labor.in.commodities.txt) use-value, abstract labour and concrete labour (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) labour (MIA; Encyclopedia of Marxism Glossary of Terms )

佐中 忠司(地域文化政策学科) (2009. 10. 10 受理)