Re: Ed and Eva's exchange:
Capitalist ambition seems to be a transmuted form of ascent, where
spiritual ascent is replaced by symbolic ascent or ascent in other forms
e.g. progress.
Capitalism seems to flourish during periods when there is an emphasis
within the culture on people as individuals, deriving from religious
doctrine, as in the 11th through 13th centuries as well as the 16th through
17th. See Jean Gimpel The Medieval Machine and Morris Berman Coming to Our
Senses. Exceptional periods of inventiveness and innovation derive from
this concern with self and the interiority (introspection) which goes with
it and the psychological need to heal the gap between self and other with
everything from alcohol to self absorbing practices like art and invention
and social achievement. In particular there is an efflorescence of ascent
practices (body practices such as rhythmic breathing which lead to trance
states , designed to heal the gap between the heightened sense of self and
other - nature or God - see Berman on this)
In the first period, which had all the same characteristics of the second
in terms of intense investment in machines (water powered in mining,
textiles tanning and milling), factories (Cistercian abbeys of the period
were highly integrated and sphisticated factories) supported by a more
advanced agriculture (horse collar, metal shod deep plough and triple
rotation and new crops like beans which fixed nitrogen in the soil) things
were brought to a halt by a combination of Church fiat (the Pope shut up
Aquinas and slaughtered the Cathar heretics of Languedoc, the principle
source of interiority practice), exhaustion of the ecological niche
expoitable with current technology (all the streams were dammed, the
accessible forests cut down for charcoal and building construction) and an
adverse shift in climate which caused crop disasters and triggered the
plague.
In the second industrial revolution in the West (there had been another
similar episode in China, see Joseph Needham's history of technology in
China) the interiority was provided by the Reformation (Luther and Calvin).
The Pope couldn't put a stop to this episode of heresy, unlike the previous
one, because the printing press spread it so wide and so fast (see Keith
Thomas, An Incomplete History of the World). So far we seem to be
repeating the medieval model - pressing against the limits of our
ecological niche, climate change in the offing (cooling rather than
warming, if Milankovich is anything to go by, and since his theory matches
all previous cooling episodes I find it rather convincing) though no Pope
to put a stop to the orgy of interiority and belief in ascent (sublimated
as progress).
Not all the mills were satanic. Here is a short section from a book I am
writing on all this stuff to be published later this year by McFarlane,
Walter and Ross.
"A question for modern day supporters of industrial capitalism with its
monotheistic focus on individual selfishness is how it is that the group of
people who did more than any other to bring it about, the Quakers,
addressed one another as "fellow creature", believed in the brotherhood of
man and put community and concern for their fellow man before their own
needs and ambitions ? They might ponder the stories of Samuel Gregg, a
Quaker and Richard Arkwright an Anglican.
Beside the River Wye, near Bakewell in Derbyshire, is a piece of flat
ground covered with grass. Humps and low fragments of walls hint at its
original use. It is the site of the first mill built by Richard Arkwright
to house the new-fangled cotton spinning machine he invented, the Water
Frame. In the middle years of this century, excavations at the site turned
up the skeletons of children, buried in unmarked graves. They were unlucky
members of Arkwright's labour force, who worked fifteen hour days around
totally unprotected belt driven machinery. This may seem astonishing to
present day readers, but it is a fact that the labour forces in the cotton
mills of the First Industrial Revolution were children, the youngest only
five or six and the oldest of them teenagers. They were cheap, they were
compliant and the nimbleness of their small fingers was an asset in working
with the thread which was prone to break and frequently needed piecing
together. If they fell asleep, the overseers beat them. The teenage girls
were sexually harrassed. When they became pregnant they were dismissed and
thrown upon the Parish as paupers.
In 17-- adult hand spinners, whose livelihood was threatened by Arkwright
and his child labour force, attacked the mill. They smashed the machines
and burned the mill to the ground. Arkwright left for pastures new. He
adopted a machine named the Spinning Jenny, refused to pay its inventor,
Samuel Crompton any royalties, and consigned him to a paupers grave from
the ruinous litigation his unprincipled action caused. (He also stole
another inventors patent for the Water Frame which caused a prolonged court
case which he lost, though his version was in fact much more advanced.) He
went on to become Sir Richard Arkwright and one of the wealthiest men in
England.
Forty miles north east, in a small wooded valley near Manchester Airport,
stands an old cotton mill. The mill was built by Samuel Gregg in 17....
Gregg was a Quaker and his Quaker principles underlay the manner in which
he ran his mill. Quakers are pacifists and eschew violence of any kind.
They insisted then, as now, that every man came to God his own way by
studying the Scriptures. Gregg therefore thought it his duty that the
children who made up his labour force should learn to read and write. He
also trained them for trades which they could pursue when their days in the
mill were over (their mid to late teens). So he built a school to which the
children went daily. This, of course, severely curtailed their hours of
work in the mill compared to what Arkwright achieved. He also built a
model village of solid stone cottages for them to live in. They still
stand. So does the mill. The children flourished. There are no unmarked
graves.
In order to understand the attitudes of the two men it is necessary to go
back to the English Revolution again and the civil war that it caused. (It
also helps to understand the whole history of interiority and ascent during
the Reformation and the history of sects like the Quakers, discussed
earlier in the book, but which I have not reproduced here as it is
lengthy). When Cromwell, who led the Parliament against the King and became
ruler of England, died, the King's eldest son, Charles II was restored to
the throne. He caused his Secretary of State, Lord Clarendon to issue a
set of codes designed to keep the radical protestants who would not accept
the established church, and who had beheaded his father, out of public
life. They could not vote in elections, they could not be elected to
Parliament, they could not join the civil service, the army or the navy and
they could not be ordained Ministers in the Church of England. In other
words, all of the conventional career paths of the time were closed to
them. Gregg, in common with other Nonconformists (the name given to people
who would not "conform" to the Church of England) like Methodists and
Presbyterians, was thus forced to follow either an artisanal or business
career. Also, being outside the establishment, Nonconformists were forced
to establish their own schools, which naturally focused on those subjects
which would be most use in their limited areas of economic and social
opportunity - the new sciences and the new mathematics and business
methods. This was at a time when the best establishment schools taught
only Greek and Latin and Euclidean geometry. Their creative energies
focused on business and technology and they were successful.
Nonconformists like Gregg, as we have seen, drove the First Industrial
Revolution.
Arkwright, by contrast, was a member of the established church, and though
of humble birth he was a member of one of the quintessentially lower middle
class occupations, the barber-surgeons, whose social ambitions made them
zealous defenders of the social order. The memory of the social
establishment which guarded that order still resonated with the
instabilities and horrors of the English Civil War. Their revulsion at
this memory was only strengthened by the experience of the French
Revolution, which showed England's elite what happened when the Mob gained
control. It was willing to accept even one so uncouth as Arkwright into
it's ranks (he was knighted) so long as he defended the social order,
belonged to the established church, and was wealthy. Education gave people
ideas above their station and was therefore best restricted to the elite.
They also adhered to the adage that to spare the rod, spoiled the child.
The best English schools, to which the elite sent their boy children, were
renowned for the frequency and brutality with which the pupils were flogged
both by masters and by older boys placed in authority over the younger
ones. Beating not only brought compliance, it was also thought to improve
character.
(A Canadian note: the Iroquois and other native peoples were horrified by
the way in which the French regularly beat their children - it was a
universal European practice until Rousseau's ideas started to percolate
through the culture in the late 18th century. Interestingly, it appears
that Rousseau and his circle got these self-same radical child-rearing
practices from studying accounts of natives peoples in Polynesia and North
America. The practice was still prevalent in the late 19th century,
reports of beatings of child employees by factory owners and managers fill
the record of an investigation into working conditions in Montreal
factories at that period - they saw themselves in loco parentis and only
did what they thought the parents would have done in their place. It
rather makes you wonder who were the civilizers and who were the savages,
doesn't it ?)
The conditions in mills run like Arkwright's became such a byword for
cruelty, that in 1819 a Parliamentary Committee was established to enquire
into working conditions and recommend measures to correct the worst abuses.
The charge was led by Nonconformists like Wilberforce and Robert Owen.
The committee was chaired by Robert Peel, himself a wealthy millowner.
Robert Owen had managed a model mill and town at New Lanark in his native
Scotland for his father-in-law on the same lines as Samuel Gregg. He used
statistics to show that mills organized as his was, actually achieved
higher levels of productivity and profitability than those run in the way
Arkwright ran his. The Committee subsequently recommended that the working
hours of children in cotton mills be regulated and reduced. Gregg and Owen
showed that people centred management of industry was more productive as
well as more humane 150 years before people like William Deming and Tom
Peters and companies like 3M and Hewlett Packard demonstrated the same
truth in our own time. "
NB There has always been a suspicion that Peel, along with other more
humane mill owners, were more concerned that Arkright and his like would
drive them out of business, but the actions of his more famous son, Robert
Peel ("inventor" of the Metropolitan police, still known as "Peelers"), in
supporting the development and legalization of unions and repealing the
Corn Laws, in part to help relieve starvation in Ireland (even at the price
of splitting the Tory Party and effectively destroying it), would seem to
indicate higher motives predominated.
I will be treating the question of whether or not Gregg's model,
interpreted as one based on sharing the fruits of industrialism fairly in
the community and concern for others and owner employees replacing child
labour is in fact a model for the future in a later section of the book,
not yet written, or whether there are inherent tendencies in industrial
capitalism which make it unreformable, particularly the ability of
individuals and corporations to accumulate great wealth and power. (If
there is interest I will post it, when completed). Even in the Medieval
Industrial Revolution, the abbey capitalists used their great power to
compel local residents to use their grist and fulling mills rather than
hand grind and full their own corn and cloth. If an institution set up on
Christian principles of charity and love of fellow man could resort to this
practice, what chance in a secular age of achieving better behaviour ?
One last comment, re: the steam engine. If anyone invented it, in the
sense of being first, it was Hero of Alexandria. In modern times Thomas
Savery and Thomas Newcomen antedated Watt, who improved Newcomen's engine
by adding a governor and separate condenser - his mentor of the time,
Roebuck, the owner of the Carron Iron Works and attendant coal mine which
tended to flood badly, asked him to improve a Newcomen engine which was
employed in pumping out the mine. Roebuck went bust and Watt joined up
with Mathew Boulton, a Birmingham Quaker, who carried Watts improvements to
fruition and market. Watt, by the way was a non-conformist (Presbyterian)
as was his mentor at Edinburgh University (James Black, whose discovery of
latent heat revolutionized the distilling industry and gave cheap whisky to
the world, a dubious distinction for a Presbyterian, I should have thought
:-)).
Mike H
>In an off-list posting a few days ago, Eva Durant said:
>
>>However, there were free market sytems in history,
>>in England in early capitalism, and in the US also
>>(probably elsewhere, too) they produced the
>>Victorian poverty and child-labour etc in unregulated
>>factories and inspite the minimal state interference,
>>they run out of markets, overproduction and competition again
>>produced poverty.
>>I know, you have similar argument for my marxism in
>>USSR etc, however, I can list the reasons why it didn't
>>work. Can you tell me, why was actually necessary
>>for state intervension to make the "market system"
>>survive? E.g. without state intervension to establish
>>humane conditions in workplaces and making
>>unions more or less part of the establishment,
>>mass social upheaval was avoided - for
>>some periods of time. So - why weren't your free markets
>>working for everyone - when they had more chance than ever,
>>with relatively captive markets, slave-like workers and no
>>regulation?
>
>Capitalism, in the form of monopoly capital able to dominate markets and
>dictate the conditions of production, consumption and exchange did not
>emerge as a serious force until the invention of machines and industrial
>techniques which enabled mass production in a central location - the
>factory. I would argue that it was not free-markets that enabled the rapid
>growth of monopoly capital, but rather technology as embodied in the steam
>engine and the various spinning and weaving machines of the latter part of
>the 18th Century. The steam engine was invented by James Watt in 1764. By
>1785, was being applied to the driving of spinning machinery. In 1767,
>Richard Arkwright invented the spinning throstle. Engels referred to the
>throstle and the steam engine as the most important mechanical inventions of
>the 18th Century. More and more machines were invented - Samuel Compton
>invented the mule, a combination of the jenny and the throstle, and so forth.
>
>The establishment of the factory as the primary place of work created
>tremendous social upheaval. Among the earliest goods produced by mass
>methods for the mass markets were textiles based on wool. In rural Scotland
>one can still find the remains of the houses of the many thousands of
>crofters who were cleared off the land to make way for sheep. Much the same
>thing took place in England on a larger scale. These "clearances" and
>"enclosures" happened not because of free markets, but because of
>class-based entitlements in which a very few people owned all of the land
>and crofters and peasants owned nothing. If the landowners wanted to move
>people off the land, there was nothing to stop them. Where did the peasants
>and crofters go? Many emigrated to the New World, but ever so many others
>moved to the burgeoning cities of western Europe where they became grist for
>the satanic mills of the rapidly expanding industrial revolution.
>
>People did not choose to work for the satanic mills, but they had to accept
>the terms of the mill owners to survive. Gradually, however, throughout the
>19th century, a balance began to be achieved. The displaced proletariat
>became the urban working class which developed considerable political clout,
>inspiring the state to establish a system of legally protected rights and
>entitlements. As the industrial economy grew, reforms were initiated and
>unions emerged as a powerful countervailing force. The ultimate result was
>a society which functioned as mutually hostile camps, capital on one side,
>labor on the other, each with political power, and each pushing its
>interests. State intervention should, I think, be viewed as the product of
>this uneasy balance, at times favoring one side, at times the other, but
>always striving for a compromise. Of course, not everyone was included in
>this. Poverty was endemic among the latest immigrants and dispossessed who
>did not know the language and who were not connected to the system.
>
>Would there have been a revolution without state intervention? Yes, quite
>likely. But my argument is that a revolution was indeed taking place, for
>the most part quietly and bloodlessly, and state intervention was its
>product. The state itself was at stake. If it had not changed, the result
>would have been chaos. We should not overlook that revolution did happen in
>Russia and might have happened in Germany and other nations in Europe.
>
>I believe we are now moving into something new and different. We are not
>sure of what it is, but we have labeled it "globalization". It too would
>appear to be the product of a critical change in technology - technology
>which has permitted overleaping of national boundaries and which permits
>production to take place and markets to be accessed almost anywhere in the
>world. The assembly line and supermarket have become global. There is no
>question but that this change favors capital over the individual as both
>worker and consumer and, moreover, takes away much of the power of the
>nation-state as intervener. Monopoly capital is again ascendent.
>Nation-states will need to work cooperatively if they are to impose some
>semblance of order on the emerging international economy. Whether they can
>do so effectively remains to be seen. I must admit I am skeptical.
>
>Ed Weick
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