This is the continuation of a series on the history of capitalism– you can read parts 1 and 2 at the links on those numerals, but you’ll also be fine reading 3 first, as they work independently enough.

Early industrialization was hell for a great many people. Economic historians will sometimes cobble together statistics to refute this, to demonstrate that “living standards” really were rising. That work has value, and I don’t want to discount quantitative arguments in economic history, past or present. But as EP Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class:

It is perfectly possible to maintain two propositions which, on a casual view, appear to be contradictory. Over the period 1790-1840 there was a slight improvement in average material standards. Over the same period that was intensified exploitation, greater insecurity, and increasing human misery. By 1840 most people were “better off” than their forerunners had been fifty years before, but they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight improvement as a catastrophic experience. 

Why? Thompson’s classic study is old, but the basic themes of his answer are perennial and important. The experience of English workers in this era was one of loss: a loss of status (if they had any before), a loss of time (to lengthy factory shifts), and a loss of autonomy (while actually doing work). To understand industrial capitalism, and capitalism more broadly, we have to take this loss seriously without romanticizing the past or reducing this to an elegiac tale of a lost artisan arcadia. Fortunately, starting before industrialization helps with this; if you have read the previous entries in this series, I hope they are already sufficient to get us beyond any view of the preindustrial past as idyllic.

Where we left off with agrocapitalism (our second of five phases, after the first, capitalishm) capitalists had key foundations for the coming world-system. Merchants had complex financial instruments and markets. They had a hoard of wealth that could be deployed for all manner of ends and which they were encouraged by competitive forces to invest in areas that would produce good returns. The bourgeoisie had taken ever greater power in the English state from the mid-17th-century on, and by the late 18th century eclipsed aristocrats and the monarchy. France’s bourgeoisie had more formidable opponents, but was still wealthy and powerful. 

But agrocapitalism constrained how much Atlantic mercantile elites could profit. The plantations on which they grew cash crops devoured human life, which meant that there were political as well as climatic constraints on production: only a population legally defined as distinct and kept geographically distant from metropolitan subjects could be forced to work themselves to death. This same system also competed prices down– particularly in the case of tobacco– and there were both economic and agricultural limits on productivity growth in agricultural we could talk about. Finally, there is a finite appetite for sugar and tobacco. While that limit is lower than it would be for, say, wheat, one human can only smoke so much tobacco or drink so much sugar. 

Industrial capitalism allowed capitalists to loosen some of these constraints and escape others altogether. While sugar required a vicious and deadly production process on a tight time schedule, cloth was relatively better-behaved. Legal and cultural norms against slavery– Rule Britannia’s injunction that Britons never never never shall be slaves, the Somerset decision that people could not be enslaved on British soil-- did not apply to factory labor. The demand for clothing and textiles was enormous– clothing used to be one of the most expensive goods around. And among the well-off in England, there was enough money sloshing around for early 18th-century England to have a whole series of “luxury debates” over the meaning and morality of wealth. England was ready for a consumer society on a scale never before seen. 

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Humanity knew quite well how to make pottery and clothing before industrialists came along. Their great innovation was to build artisans’ carefully-accreted knowledge into machinery itself. Josiah Wedgwood, who turned pottery from a skill craft of small artisan shops into a mass production industry, was himself trained as a potter. Samuel Bentham, who tried to do the same for shipbuilding, had likewise received an apprenticeship as a shipwright. Richard Arkwright, who mechanized key steps in cloth production (spinning and carding)? Son of a tailor. (These will be familiar characters in the Another Way Cinematic Universe, to regular readers). 

As agrocapitalism enclosed space, industrial capitalism enclosed knowledge. The technical skills of artisans were shared– not with the world but within the community of the artisan. Artisans did profit from their knowledge, including in entirely transactional exchanges– parents paid a pretty penny for their children to learn a trade. But they did not “own” the secrets of their skills in a modern intellectual property sense. They had a socially accepted and legally protected right to gatekeep the introduction of new artisans– and there’s plenty of room to critique that; the artisan world was not a paradise– but not the right to destroy that world or sell off their knowledge. 

In contrast, industrial capitalists jealously hoarded their secrets and created new legal instruments to punish workers who might share them. Patent law is a product of the capitalishm era, and had since been expanding. Arkwright used patents to control his machines, and Wedgwood threatened workers who might take his production process overseas with prosecution. The power loom was zealously guarded. This latter effort failed– Americans stole it in the early 19th century– but while capitalists were only sometimes successful at protecting their knowledge from other capitalists, they succeeded in claiming artisan knowledge for themselves– in transforming what had once been a kind of imperfect commons (for a closed community) into property. 

Simply on an economic level, the results were devastating. Artisans lost everything— their way of life, their communities, their sense of self. Most people were not artisans before industrial capitalism, and it’s easy to get caught up in their stories of loss. But there was dismal suffering among the rest of the populace too. Working days could top 16 hours. Wages approached subsistence levels. For many early industrial workers, there was little to do but work and occasionally sleep until you died.

And there are things in this world you cannot put a price on. Britain started to restrict child labor seriously by the mid 19th century, but this did not prevent it, nor did it prevent children from living in miserable poverty. With capitalism came new kinds of authority– the boss. Josiah Wedgwood had to tell his workers off for playing ball in his workshops– this seems routine to us now, but represented a hideous indignity to workers. Who is this man to tell me what to do? I am the one making the pots. Why does he profit? Marx talked about “alienation of labor”-- unlike the craftsman, the factory worker cannot see their own hand (or their own choices) in their output. They can only account for what they lost producing it.

Sometimes historians shy away from making grand moral and political judgments. I see why. But I think we (the collective human we and not just the historians’ we) can and should make judgments about the past. This is a difficult area to do so, and therefore also an important one. To pass judgment here requires us to think about alternatives— what would have happened to these suffering workers if industrialization hadn’t happened?

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In England the answer might be oblivion— they would be dead or never born. I’m mostly avoiding data and details to keep this series the short birds-eye view I want it to be (this is a subject you could write whole shelves of books on, and people have), but here we need some. England’s population roughly quintupled between the middle of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th. You can see a clear inflection point:

The beginning of this was not because of industrial capitalism— it’s too early. (Arguments about causes range from housing improvements to smallpox inoculation to wealth.) But industry did create employment for this growing population, and while the life it gave them was not a good one, it was a life— in other words, it’s plausible this trend would have slowed or stopped earlier in the absence of industry. Rural areas probably could not have sustained this growing population, domestic service could only sustain so many people…

Let’s broaden our approach here by moving to Japan, another country that sharply industrialized. Here we get an inflection point that’s during industrialization rather than preceding it (I’m being loose here but for our current purposes that’s alright).

A very crude analysis then might suggest that industrialization allows for and accelerates population increases while providing only the barest of living standards, at least for a few generations, for this increasing population. I am vigorously opposed to the notion that human life is net negative (“antinatalism” in philosophy; despite the shared use of ‘natalism’ this is distinct from debates over birth rates in policy) but early industrial life was so dismal lives that those who suffered it sometimes wished they or their children did not have to live at all. We’re not going to get out of moral quandaries with these half-lives.

That hasn’t stopped some people from trying. For staunch capitalists, this is a story of necessary sacrifices on the road to progress. I simply refuse to believe this. I cannot imagine looking an elementary-school-aged coal miner in the eyes and saying this is how it has to be. I cannot imagine doing the same to the countless similarly suffering victims of capitalism today. I can’t. If this is the best we could have done and can do, I’d rather rage and be wrong than accept it. Fine. I confess my motivated reasoning, with utter conviction in the motivations behind it. But intellectually I think the Panglossian progress narrative is also suspect. Of all the possible paths history could have taken, the probability that the particular one we took is the best is low, and of course, one can imagine an infinite array of moderate changes that would have been better (e.g. more and earlier restrictions on child labor).

The progress narrative can easily be modified into something less vile and ridiculous. Popular versions tend to involve more discomfort and shying away from the misery of industrial capitalism, or a sense that it was temporary and has been solved since, which is true in some senses and deeply wrong in others. Marx gave us a version of the progress narrative himself— his harsh criticism of capitalism also came with an appreciation of it as an improvement on what came before in many respects, while still seeking something yet better in the future.

In the long term, capitalist competition did produce material prosperity for many. Thompson points out this is an argument “which many working men who lived through until better times adopted. . . But this is an argument which discounts the suffering of one generation against the gains of the future.” On one hand, this is almost too charitable still. Capitalism is not an event– it is a process. These kinds of dislocations happen again and again and again. Future generations reap the benefits of past sacrifice only, in many cases, to make sacrifices themselves for the future. These sacrifices in many cases decreased in magnitude— the shoe factory my grandfather worked in was a kinder place than the textile factories his grandmother’s generation worked in— but that’s not especially reassuring. Human beings do not live in the long run, or on the average. But for this very reason we do also have to take the future into account!

I’m spiraling in a maze of buts and howevers here— the only way out of this is to focus on alternative presents suggested by the past. It is too late to save the artisans of the 1810s, but some of their political values– as the self-described neo-Luddites I have criticized before in this newsletter rightly insist– may be relevant or important today. We don’t have to choose between the security and respect artisans desired and the material progress that industry helped produce, although we do have to do hard work to figure out how to achieve both.

Part of constructing alternatives— making them in our future and not just imagining them in the past— means partially disaggregating technological and material progress. Technology can have enormous social force, and social dynamics constrain some technologies and make others nigh-irresistible. But there is plenty of room for variation even within the most powerful tides of history. You do not need to invent industrial capitalism to have sanitation– Rome and Tenochtitlan were both cleaner cities than early modern London. 

Moreover, technology is something we create. Factories did not create capitalism; capitalists created the factory system. That does not mean we can simply unmake technology, or make any technology we might like. Overcoming economic pressure with collective action is one of the most difficult things human beings can do, and we tend to succeed only with specific political frameworks and in particular conditions. It’s important to neither overemphasize the ease of collective action here, nor to downplay the possibilities it presents.

Industrial capitalism was not the beginning of capitalism, but it’s rightly central to how we think about it— industrialization was a profound world-historical transformation. We can close with some key features of this first subphase (sorry) of industrial capitalism; what we might call industrializing capitalism. One, a greater and greater array of human affairs placed under the aegis of the market. This is a general trend in capitalism– especially in this account, since market dependence is, after Ellen Meiksins Wood, how I’m defining it– but one that expanded massively here. Industrial capitalism pulled more people into the wage economy generally, made more goods subject to market-driven commodity production, etc.

Two, advances in humanity’s material and energy throughput. Early capitalism was mostly about optimizing violence and market connections; slaveholders got pretty good at maximizing sugar yields with forced labor, but this is neither a remarkable achievement nor one with broad effects. Prior to industrial capitalism, changes in our physical powers were incremental and limited– better shipping over generations, slow improvement in agricultural productivity. Industrial capitalism, in contrast, changed what humans are capable of across the board. We could move more things, issue more physical force, expend more energy than ever before, and the pace at which these increased was dramatic. 

Three, a remaking of fundamental social relations, from the family to the state. Child labor was not new, but sending your children to labor for twelve hour days in a dark warehouse was. State hegemony was not new, but the form the state took was. In the next installment, we’ll turn to the politics that this industrializing capitalism helped create, with new possibilities for emancipation and oppression alike.