Ping Pong 34: This is for Every One Now
The model for the Industrial Revolution discussed in the last Rant, became the great paradigm for all subsequent industrializations. No matter what the turmoil and suffering which the advent of the free market or industrialization caused, it was always thought to be worth it, always thought to be necessary, a mere stepping stone on the way to progress. Human History became a story not merely of progress but rather of trial by torture and deliverance. A country, like a saint, undergoing industrialization, needed to keep the faith however painful the process, and remain firm in the belief that one day the pain would stop, and true modernity would start. The developed nation thereby gained the double license to be callous and to be smug. Moreover this smugness is bound up with a certain series of beliefs in the power and uses of industrialization.
These beliefs originate in the various different elements implicit (and explicit) within the idea of industrialization. Each belief will attempt to synthesise the various different elements of the industrialization story (identified in last week’s Rant), and make these rather different elements appear natural and one and the same. One can perhaps identify six distinctive such theses. The theses might be summarized as; Belief in the monolithic nature of the Industrial Revolution; belief in the idea that industrialization and freedom run together; belief in the power of the market to create goods; belief in choice; belief in the rise of the middle class; and belief in the revolutionary nature of the change. In the rest of this Rant each of these theses will be considered in detail.
Firstly therefore there is the deeply held belief that a country really cannot remain merely partially industrialized (any more than one can be more or less square). Countries that undergo the change to industrialization are therefore expected to go the whole hog, and change, or at least be open to changing, anything and everything. - And if remnants of the old system continue, for instance peasant farming, those remnants are thought somehow to convey the inferiority of the change that has been attempted. All peasants, the argument runs, will eventually cease to exist in the face of cash cropping (as will all cottage industries).
Industrialization is then linked to a process which makes a culture or a nation anxious about its ‘earlier’ stages. This anxiety is made in the name of the great paradigm, the British Industrial Revolution. However this paradigm is a poor case model for the rest of the world in two respects. As was mentioned in the last Rant, it is by no means clear that the Industrial Revolution was exclusively linked to large-scale production. On the contrary it was often smaller cottage industries which were improved at the start of the nineteenth century. What changed was then as much about the efficiency of an organization, and the effectiveness of tradition methods, as about large-scale processes.
Industrialization need not be therefore, about the very large companies. Moreover it is not clear that Britain was in the eighteenth century (prior to the ‘revolution’) a typical ‘peasant based’ economy. On the contrary it might well be the fact that Britain actually had lost its peasantry or at least large portions of it, considerably before the Industrial Revolution (between say the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution). For industrialization in Britain to further undermine the status of the Peasant is in a sense no great change. The peasant was already in Britain, on the way out. The problem of course, is that this is far from the case in most places where industrialization is enforced. In these other countries the peasant is a viable force, a force which industrialization is expected, and angled to question and destroy.
The historically contingent conditions of Britain’s Industrial Revolution has become the absolute truth for all subsequent industrializations (or at least the expectation for what such a change must look like). This move has in turn lead to cultures that are not at ease with large elements within them. Peasants (or any other pre-industrial craft) becomes either an embarrassment or a badge of honour. The latter move (which perhaps originates in a Gallic resistance to the total ‘Anglo-Saxon revolution’), glorifies the peasant as somehow special and different. The peasant is therefore looked to for a series of cultural norms that might help a people or a nation resist the threatened homogeneity of industrialization. Norms which can of course embrace a whole variety of different extremes. These can range from the agreeable verities of French culture, to the Year Zero of the Khmer Rouge. Industrialization will turn the peasant into either victim or cultural icon, with either move being equally incomprehensible to the peasants themselves.
Secondly there is the belief that industrialization and freedom run together. This belief is an odd splicing of historical contingency with a back-reading into history of a change which was associated with (but distinct from) the first industrial revolutions. That is, in Britain and in America the rise of industrialization was associated with the advent of the wage labourer, and the abolition of slavery. This move was invariably confused with a subsequent history that saw the eventual (after a hundred years or so) arrival of universal suffrage. To be industrial and to have a free democratic society were therefore seen as somehow one and the same. No matter that throughout the nascent period of industrialization (early nineteenth century Britain and America) the societies were scarcely more ‘free’ than the non-industrial societies. And also no matter that at every stage of industrialization there has always been a whole variety of rather different ways that workers are organized into their respective industries, and given their own voice.
Some industries had and have traditionally large powerful and political unions, others did or do not. Some workers in some countries are politically free, even if economically trapped, while others in other cultures are economically free, but politically powerless. Or again no matter that the extent and power which individuals have in so-called free industrial societies is always spliced to hard facts about how wealthy they are. The paradigm decreed that industrialization and freedom (whatever that might mean) arose together or at least implied one another, and hence, that is what must be believed, irrespective of any evidence to the contrary (which would be dismissed as a mere historical abnormality).
Thirdly, there is the deep belief that industrialization and the free market are practically one and the same. This claim has two rather distinct guises. On the one hand, there is the claim that only the free market can organize industrial societies, and on the other, that the financial industry is on a par with manufacturing industries in its ability to produce wealth. The problem of the first of these claims is that it is utterly unprovable (as the ‘best’ alternative model cannot be defined to compare it with). All that can be said is that commercial organization of large scale companies has been effective in the sense that it has allowed those companies to freely and easily spread across the world. Organization in terms of the free market, is therefore very good at producing large and in the short term very flexible companies. The problem is however, that this organization famously is very bad at long term problems. Perhaps the most worrying fact about environmental collapse is our inability to understand exactly the scope and nature of that collapse within our existing model for industrialization. Companies bound up in the tyranny of shareholders need to make short term profit (ironically to help pension funds). Companies cannot therefore easily plan for (or at least finance) long term commitments. We are caught therefore is a system that while it will win every short term action, fails in the long term. Our system therefore annihilates (in the short term) the competition, but then cannot organize for the longer term itself. Is the free market the best of systems therefore? All one can say, is that it is the one that will, in an industrial society, win short terms struggles. And all we can hope for, is that another model, one that is better at planning for the long term, becomes at some point viable.
The second claim mentioned above, saw the City (as in finance) on a par in terms of earning, with manufacturing industries. This claim has of course always been about. In Britain at least, there has long been a prejudice that banking is somehow more respectable than making. This prejudice is of course rooted in history. The commercial revolution (Smith and Ricardo) predated the Industrial Revolution. The former therefore claimed priority, and with it respectability in contrast to the latter. Capitalists (and even more their heirs) aspire to leave the world of manufacturing, and enter the world of high finance (stocks and shares).
And yet of course there remains a clear difference between the two. While stocks and shares are based upon very human emotions such as confidence and belief, manufacturing confronts the world of hard physics as much as it deals with wider society. It is therefore open to far more and complex changes, and possibilities than the relatively anodyne world of finance. The result is, that the former ‘industry’ in saveable by politicians (who understand worlds constructed by belief alone), while the latter, the world of manufacturing, is condemned to frequent recession and depression. This last fact is of course all the more the case, because the world of banking insists that the world of manufacturing follows the laws of the free market, and so can be ruined, while banking following the same rules, must be saved…
Fourthly there is the deep belief that industrialization is better because it increased the overall amount of choice. This claim is rather problematic. It is less that choice is increased and more that it is transformed. That is, on the one hand industrialization renders every individual powerless. If the product is not produced one cannot buy it (as one lacks the skills to make it). One’s ability to choose therefore becomes contingent upon fashion and the beliefs of the industrialists about what will sell, and what it is profitable to make. One’s ability to choose is therefore dissolved into some else’s projected ability to make money. However this process is mitigated by the fact that industry endlessly produces new products, products one could not imagine ever existed before (or at an acceptable price). One’s freedom to remain as one is, is therefore curtailed, even as one’s endless wonder at new possibilities is opened up. One is caught therefore in the oddest freedom, at once trapped in the mechanics of profit and design, even as one has a secret hope of new freedoms to come. (The 1980’s couldn’t forecast the internet or what it could do.)
Fifthly, the story runs that industrialization and the middle classes seem somehow to arise together, and imply one another. This claim is made in spite of the fact that, as Marx and others noted, the logic of capitalism is that the middle classes should gradually be eroded. The myth of the middle class and industrialization clearly comes under strain in two directions. Firstly it is founded (at least partially) on a reversal of what was the case. The middle classes (that is, rich professionals) in Britain at least predated the Industrial Revolution by several centuries. One might argue that their money was necessary to the advent of industrialization (they were wealthy enough to buy the products). But one cannot argue, without collapsing history into itself, that they were a product of the process which they predated. The expectation that industrialization will produce the middle class world is therefore flawed. Moreover to make such a claim is to also ignore the fact that the mechanics of industrialization do not necessarily lead to an even spread of wealth. Indeed on a very real level the process of industrialization can only get under way if wealth is not evenly spread (as it was not in Britain): That is, if there are wealthy to buy, and poor to produce, so that not everyone can be middle-class. The middle class lifestyle of Britain or America is therefore fundamentally founded on poverty elsewhere in the system. Our freedom is their sweatshop. That is, the myth that all the world could be middle class, is simply not possible (even if it is desirable).
Finally there is the very deep myth that industrialization is a locatable event, which a country can simply undergo, if it will try hard enough. China and India have clearly bought into just this myth. Build factories, create wage labour (and poverty), and banking and we say, that middle class life will follow, (and with it, the world). An entire complex historical process is dissolved into a few banalities of production, finance, and suffering. We thereby, in a way surely seldom seen in human history, sell the contingencies of our own history as the universal model for humanity. It is of course deliciously appropriate that the Industrial Revolution comes with a mass produced history, a history which we can all share even as we share in the production process.
The Industrial Revolution matters as an idea because it baked into our minds one means by which, and through which, we were thought to change. It was transformed into a universal programme, which countries were at variance with at their own peril (and to their own weakness). All other possibilities were then dismissed or ruled ineffective. Industry became the great goal of humanity (and to that degree, the end of history). The problem is, that this is a paradigm that even in the face of melting ice caps we cannot move beyond. We are still caught up in that history, and looking for some other way to proceed. Perhaps then we need to go back into the alternatives that were suggested during the process of industrialization itself. Alternative ways to understand what it was to be a human or a society, an alternative approach that will be pursued in next week’s Rant.
