The First Industrial Revolution
The First Industrial Revolution began in mid-18th century England and was brought on by the invention of the steam engine. At heart, the First Industrial Revolution was a revolution in energy conversion. Beforehand people were almost completely dependent of plants as primary sources of energy. Steam engines converted heat energy into movement and ever since then people have been obsessed with the idea that machines could be used to convert one type of energy to another.
Steam power was used to directly drive spinning and weaving equipment of the growing textile industry in England. The textile industry was experiencing a steep rise thanks to the large supply of cotton imported from Britain’s colonies in North America. The cotton was cheap as it was almost completely grown by slaves. The colonies supplied British textile industry with cotton and provided a market to sell the finished goods.
Before the industrial revolution, production was distributed, spinning, weaving, and other tasks were done in cottages. The cottage industries, also known as the ‘domestic-system,’ used timber-framed machines that made several threads at the same time. They were operated via foot pedals and essentially acted like many spinning wheels.
The shift in manufacturing occurred when the various stages of production were centralized in one building, the factory. Centralization reduced transport costs, as material did not have to be moved from one cottage to another, and increased quality, as skilled overseers can monitor every stage of production.
Work in factories was specialized with workers and machines being arranged in an order that increased efficiency and output. Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith addressed the importance of specialization in his writing and his logic was widely adopted by most factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution. Smith observed that tasks done by one person in a single day could far more profitably be split into many tasks carried out by multiple people over whole careers. He called this the ‘division of labour.’*
Division of labour significantly increases productivity. When one worker must switch between many different tasks, it costs time. By employing a division of labour, one worker can focus on one skill, and that wasted time is turned instead into productive time. Smith predicted that national economies will become richer the more specialized their workforce was. But there is one huge problem with specialization: meaning.
Adam Smith recognized this problem and insisted that the specialized factory owners had an extra responsibility to their workers; to remind them of the purpose and dignity of their labour.
Centralization and specialization marked the beginning of the “factory-system” in Britain. The factory-system generally refers to the whole new mode of production that came with factory, including the workforce that had to be assembled, the conditions of labour, life for those workers, and broader socioeconomic impact. Many mill owners had to develop physical, social, and psychological infrastructure to make factory production possible. This might include housing for the workers, churches, schools, inns, and markets.[1]
Sir Richard Arkwright established one of the first ever cotton mills in central England, beside a river which powered the new mechanical equipment. He didn’t like the fact his workers were late and tired coming to work because of the long walk they had to make every day. To increase productivity, he built what amounted to a whole new village called Cromford. The village included a railway station to import raw materials and export finished goods.
Other mill owners opted to set up factories in urban areas, thus gaining access to larger labour pool and avoiding the need to supply housing. This ultimately led to large waves of urbanization. Factory towns, like Manchester and Glasgow, experienced massive growth that more than tripled their population.[2]
Factory workers consisted primarily of women and children as mechanical power eliminated the need for most heavy labour. Working conditions were harsh; long working hours in loud and damp environments, breathing air full of cotton dust, and smell of stench from the animal grease used to lubricate the machines and sweat of hundreds of workers.
Factory work proved physically and mentally draining in ways other labour was not. Workers were essentially extensions of machinery and were at the mercy of its demands and its pace. Although factories of the First Industrial Revolution are generally portrayed in a negative way, as “dark satanic mills”, statistics suggest that working on farms was even worse.
The factory workers moved from mud-walled cottages of rural communities to the brick buildings in urban centres, which protected them from dampness and disease. Even the poorest families had access to clean clothing and better hygiene thanks to the mass-produced clothing and soap, as well as a richer diet because of increased income. Migrating to cities also placed workers in closer proximity to doctors and schools.[3]
The essentials of food, clothing, and shelter became readily available. This created a surplus of time, time that could be invested in other nonessentials that defined the modern world: ideas, innovation, learning, politics, the arts, and creativity. This was the ultimate outcome of the First Industrial Revolution, the colonization of time. It initiated a positive feedback loop where ideas free up time, which can then be used to create more ideas, resulting in more free time.
While this outcome appears extremely positive, at its core it rests on an economic structure and political ideology which many (even today) regard as negative. This system is called Capitalism.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of means of production and their operation for profit. Notable social critics, reformers, and economists have criticised Capitalism, ever since its monstrous rise during the First Industrial Revolution.
Charles Dickens argued that capitalism is evil because it encourages appalling conditions for the producers. John Ruskin on the other hand takes aim at the consumption side, concluding that workers are being exploited and the environment ruined in order to sell people absurd things. Arguably the greatest critic of Capitalism is Karl Marx.
In his book, Das Kapital, Marx identifies several problems with Capitalism. The key one being that modern work is alienating and profit is exploitation.
One of Marx’s greatest insights is that work can be one of our greatest joys. Labour offers us a chance to externalize what’s good inside us. The problem is that with the factory-system work becomes incredibly specialized. As Adam Smith pointed out, specialized jobs make the economy highly efficient, but they also give workers little opportunity to derive a sense of genuine contribution they might be making to the real needs of humanity. Marx argued that this leads to alienation: a disconnection between what you do all day and who you feel you really are. This is a major contradiction: while division of labour helps make production more efficient, it makes the workers less motivated, and thus less efficient.[4]
Marx’s biggest qualm with Capitalism was that workers get paid little while capitalists get rich. Capital is created only when workers produce more in commodity values than they are paid in wages. Essentially, labourers are dispossessed from the real value of their labour. For Marx, profit was simply theft. Capitalists are stealing the hard work and talent of their work force. Profit is a fancy term for exploitation.
Marx proposed that the capitalist system is very unstable and characterized by a series of crises. These crises are crises of abundance, rather than crises of shortage, as they were in the past. The worldwide price and economic recession which began in 1873, also known as the Long Depression, did not mark the collapse of Capitalism, but an evolution.
* Smith focused on the pin making industry and concludes that while one worker could make up to 20 pins a day, a team of ten specialized workers could make not 200 but 48,000 pins a day.
[1] Joshua Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 17–22
[2] Ibid., 29
[3] Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, (New York, Crown Business, 2012), 36–37
[4] David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, (London, Profile Books, 2015)
