Re the end of guilds: The industrial revolution helped to end them but they live on in some unions. But if you want the guilds back then you want the support system, the patronage, that enabled them to exist. That means kings, aristocrats, dictators, the supremacy of a unaccountable state. No thanks. Manufactured wares are usually -- or could be -- much better than hand-made wares except for the filigree and doo-daddy decorations.
The one bad result, in my view, of manufacturing and the design methods serving it, is the shift from making things as good as they can be made to making things only as good as they need to be, or planned obsolescence. This is not a re-valuing of the hand made or guild made but a revaluing of the manufacturing process as a way to maintain market stimulus. I suppose that's fine in many cases but not fine in many others. For example, is it good to make, say, refrigerators that will break down in five years or to make them in the earlier way to last thirty or more years? I had a big, clumsy stove exhaust fan that worked perfectly after fifty years and replaced it during a gut rehab with one that'll probably burn out in ten years. That's true of almost all manufactured consumer goods now. I'm still using a 1960 electric jig saw but have gone through or six or seven much newer electric drills over the same time. Why? The basic motor parts are the same but their put-together quality is much changed. I was involved in a study of autos in the 1980s (supposedly an aesthetic study that was really a manufacturing study at Northwestern Univ. Engineering School) and it was determined that the only reason Japanese cars where better at that time than American cars was the variances of machined tolerances. The Japanese cars were made to very tight tolerances -- how parts fit together -- and the American cars had quite loose tolerances and so they wore out or broke more quickly. Otherwise the cars were identical in mechanical terms. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, January 8, 2012 12:29:37 AM Subject: "The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by th Didn't traditional skills begin to disappear with the decline of guilds?: - The <http://the/> feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class..." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
