The Industrial Revolution and Modernity

Episode 32: The Industrial Revolution and Modernity

The Big History of Civilizations (2016)

Dr Craig G Benjamin

Film Review

In this lecture, Benjamin mainly focuses on the role of Britain in ushering in the Industrial revolution, a process that “swept away millenia of cottage industries and created a global population explosion.”  Britain was also the birthplace of communism, owing to the deplorable conditions faced by its working class.

The unique characteristics, according to Benjamin that made Britain the birthplace of the industrial revolution were money,* cheap labor,** raw materials, an energy source (ie coal and the rivers and canals to transport it) and the strong natural defenses typical of an island nation.

Between 1500 and 1660, a shortage of wood led to a growing demand for coal for heating and cooking. Routine flooding of Britain’s coal mines led Thomas Newcoman to invent Europe’s first steam engine to pump them out.

Improved by James Watt in 1776, it was widely adopted in the textile industry to power looms, driving down the cost of cloth by 80%. By 1850, a half million workers (of a total 12 million population) worked in Britain’s largest industry textiles.

The steam engine, along with the (1856) development of the Bessemer process for mass producing steel, also enabled massive expansion of Britain’s railroads and shipbuilding industry. As the largest city in the world, London hosted the first World’s Fair in 1851.

Belgium, France, Prussia and the US were the next countries to join the industrial revolution. The US industrialized textile production in the 1820s. Although the US government facilitated railway expansion by granting free land for tracks, the railroads themselves were financed by European banks. The country’s steel industry also industrialized quickly, with the US Steel budget three times that of the federal government by 1901.

Japan was the next country to industrialize, automating farming and silk production around 1900. The Japanese addressed their lack of fossil fuel resources by invading Korea and Manchuria (and triggering war with China and Russia in the process).

Russia was really slow to industrialize. In 1861 when Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs, Russia was still a primarily agrarian state. His son Alexander III would launch construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1891.

According to Benjamin, the industrial revolution would lead to the creation of the modern nation-state with its powerful administrative bureaucracy, greater control of the economy and intrusion into people’s lives and higher taxes (for public services like education).  France, following the 1789 French Revolution, would be the first modern nation-state. The greater emphasis on human rights (or at least lip service to human rights) was another characteristic of the modern nation-state – with France, Britain, Denmark and eventually the US and Russia eventually eliminating slavery.

One of the ugliest outcomes of the industrial revolution was the total subjugation of non-industrial nations by the industrial North, largely via colonization. Benjamin mainly focuses on the example of India and China.

Benjamin also mentions the role of Dickens and reformists, such as the Luddites and Swing Riots, and revolutionaries, such as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in pushing back against the deplorable working and living conditions the industrial revolution imposed on working people. The same year Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, there were revolutions in Paris, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Denmark, and Britain.

Although all these revolutions were eventually crushed, the ruling elites were forced to address deplorable living conditions by expanding suffrage (prior to 1848, voting was limited to land-owning male citizens), legalizing trade unions, enacting labor laws improving work conditions and encouraging emigration (to the New World and other remote colonies) to ease population pressures.

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*In 1694, by King William of Orange granted the private Bank of England the power to create paper money in excess of its gold and silver money holdings. See 97% Owned

**The Enclosure Acts (enacted between 1604 and 1914) forced 50% of England’s agrarian workforce off communally farmed lands and into towns and cities as a source of cheap labor. See Forgotten History: The Theft of the Commons

Film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/industrial-revolution-and-modernity

The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy

People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy

Robert McChesney and John Nichols (2016)

Film Review

An extremely inspiring public presentation in which McChesney and Nichols talk about their latest book (of the same name)

McChesney begins with research indicating that 50% of current jobs will be eliminated by robots and artificial intelligence in the next 10-20 years. He also talks about the inherent inability of a scarcity/profit based economic system to address this crisis.

For me, the most interesting part of his presentation was a discussion of Franklin D Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights.* According to McChesney, both Germany and Japan incorporated this Second Bill of Rights into their constitutions after World War II. This, in his view, explains why both countries have become economic powerhouses.

Both men talk about the crucial need to form a post-capitalist society and economic system. Nichols talks more about the large global movements which have formed to build this new system. He, like McChesney, has been surprised by the popular candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The book predicts the appearance of proto-fascist and democratic socialist candidates in response to growing popular resistance movements. However neither expected it to happen so quickly.

The best part of Nichols’ talk is his discussion of the massive Luddite and Chartist movements in Britain (and the populist and progressive movements in the US) that would ultimately lead to universal suffrage, honest elections and the rise of the trade union movement.

Nichols stresses that none of these reforms resulted from the heroic efforts of a political savior – they all resulted from the dedicated and persistent mass organizing of ordinary people.

 

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*Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights included the basic right of all Americans to

• Employment (right to work)
• Food, clothing and leisure, via enough income to support them
• Farmers’ rights to a fair income
• Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
• Housing
• Medical care
• Social security
• Education

 

Forgotten History: the Theft of the Commons

Stop Thief: the Commons Enclosures and Resistance

by Peter Linebaugh (2014)

Book Review

Free download at https://libcom.org/library/stop-thief-commons-enclosures-resistances

Occasionally you come across a book that totally turns your worldview on its head. This book is definitely one of them.

Stop Thief is about the loss of the Commons through enclosures,* which author Peter Linebaugh maintains is the essence of capitalism. Until 200 years ago, communally owned moors and forests were fundamental to all human civilization. In Europe, the Commons included specific customary rights, including gleaning, grazing rights, and access to the forest for medicines and wood for fuel, housing and tools. These rights had been guaranteed for thousands of years (they’re mentioned in both the Old and New Testament) and were codified in the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. Thanks to the Commons, which provided for the basic subsistence needs of the population, there was virtually no crime as we know it and no extreme poverty.

In the essays in Stop Thief, Linebaugh details 800 years of enclosures, as well as the popular riots and rebellions that have resisted them. In doing so, he establishes a clear continuity between the organized resistance against European enclosure and the work of great revolutionary thinkers, such as Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, William Morris and Edward Thompson

According to Linebaugh, the European enclosure acts didn’t just enclose (privatize) moors and forests, but they enclosed handicrafts as factories, community markets as shops and women as units of reproduction who ceased to have a legal persona (women who resisted enclosure were burned and/or tortured as witches).

Enclosure: A Global Phenomenon

Enclosures, which occurred worldwide thanks to European colonization, began in the 13th century with peaks in the 15-16th century, the 18th-19th century and the 21th century. The latter have resulted in the theft of pensions and homes by banks, the privatization (and destruction) of the environment, the capture of health care by insurance companies and current attempts to privatize (enclose) the Internet. In other words, the essence of capitalism is dispossession, ie theft.

In Europe, enclosure mainly took the form of imprisonment and the privatization of communal land. In the 18th century, enclosure was accompanied by a prison building spree and the creation of a “civilian” police force, as well as massive emigration to European colonies. Commoners who persisted in claiming their customary rights were criminalized and either hanged (for minor crimes such as stealing firewood or a loaf of bread) or imprisoned.

Resistance to Enclosure Has Been Continuous

The resistance to enclosures, especially in England and Germany, was more or less continuous. Over 800 years, peasants blocked privatization of their communal land by petitioning, fence breaking, stoning officials for posting enclosure notices, riots and organized rebellion. Despite continuousl military occupation, it took 17 years to drive the peasants out and fully privatize Otmoor.

The Peasants Revolt of 1381, the Ketts Rebellion of 1549, the formation of Levellers, Ranters and Diggers movements that would culminate in the English Civil War in 1649, and the formation of the Luddites in the late 18th century were all part of the popular resistance to enclosures.

Marx and the Theft of Wood

Marx refers to the process by which the ruling elite encloses the Commons, depriving common people of the means of subsistence (aka the means of production), as primitive accumulation. Linebaugh traces how Marx’s interest in political economy was directly influenced by coming of age as the Moselle region in Germany was being enclosed. His very first essays on “Debates of Law and the Theft of Wood” expressed outrage at the appropriation of local forests by rich burgermeisters and the criminalization of customary wood gathering.

I also really enjoyed the essays on Tom Paine, which discuss his upbringing as the Norfolk commons was being enclosed and his critical influence in the Irish and French revolution. His essays and books calling for the restoration of the Commons are rarely discussed in American history textbooks.

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*Enclosure is the legal (usually violent) process by which common people are driven off communal land to enable it to be fenced off as private property.
**The Charter of the Forest is a charter originally sealed by King Henry III under the regency of William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke. A companion document to the Magna Carta, it re-established rights of access to the royal forest that had been eroded by William the Conqueror and his heirs.