Class Warfare and Revolution (Circa 1850)
In a recent post I discuss
six policies that spurred the Industrial Revolution in England – opening up
immigration, weakening the guilds, investing in infrastructure, privatizing
agricultural land, forcing a move to new energy sources, and policies for
bringing capital to the new, capital-intensive technologies – and suggest that
these policies have their analogues today as we face what history may view as
another industrial revolution.
But that is only one part of the story
of the Industrial Revolution. Another part is not always very pretty, but might
also be instructive.
Class
Division in the New Economy
The rise of the capitalist class during
the Industrial Revolution is well known, with a select few, the barons of industry, be it
steel, rail, or textiles, catapulting to a level of wealth rarely known before.
But less considered is the other tail of the distribution, the downward spiral
of what today might be termed the middle class.
The story of the steel-driver John
Henry’s race with the steam hammer is a type for the plight of English laborers
overrun by the Industrial Revolution. Labor was caught in the sea-change of new
technologies and economic organization.
Hand work could not compete with the machines, no matter how great the workers'
skill and determination. A whole generation of hand laborers kept up a
desperate struggle, but with an inevitable end. The same occurred for the small
farmers, who were squeezed out by the consolidation of farms that had been
initiated by the policy of privatizing enclosures. Some gave up their land and
drifted away to the towns to keep up the struggle a little longer as hand-loom
weavers, but then became part of the factory labor class, just as others gave
up their looms and devoted themselves entirely to farming for a while, but
eventually sold their land and dropped into the class of agricultural laborers.
The result was the same in either case: Household manufacture gave way to that
of the factory and the small farms were consolidated. For the many who did both
farming and hand work, their work, subsistence farms and homes were all
lost.The farmers who lost access to the
commons due to the policy of enclosures frequently failed to find alternative
employment near home and became paupers and vagabonds.
Just as the factory system
disenfranchised and commoditized the industrial workers, the farm workers
became separated from the land. Three classes emerged in agriculture: the
landlords, the tenant farmers, and the farm laborers. The landlord class was a
comparatively small group, a few thousand, of nobility and gentry who owned by
far the majority of agricultural land. Another
class, the yeomen who owned and cultivated their own small farms, disappeared
entirely, descending into the class of laborers.
Obviously, the Industrial Revolution
ultimately increased prosperity, but for a time it made a wide swath of the
populace worse off. The period of transition from the domestic to the factory system
of industry and from the older to the new agriculture was one of almost
unrelieved misery for those who could not integrate into the new economy,
whether due to lack of capital or lack of physical or mental adaptability.
New
Routes to Job Creation
While the hand-loom weavers kept up a
hopeless struggle in the attics and cellars of the factory towns, their
wages
sinking lower and lower until the whole generation finally died out, and
while
the small farmers bowed to the competition with the larger producers,
the
plight of the farmers and hand laborers descended with a vengeance on
their
children. Many landed in parish poorhouses, and it didn’t take long
before the
factories discovered this fresh new source of labor. They began taking
the
poorhouse children as “apprentices”, signing indentures with their
stewards, agreeing to give their wards room and board – and the promise
of
training – and then put them to work.
Children as young as seven years old
worked in the cotton spinning factories. The children began work while
extremely young and worked the same hours as the grown men and women. They
could do many jobs in the factories just as well, and in some cases, such as
when working with spindles and fine thread, even better than adults. They were
remotely situated in apprentice houses built near the factories, the burdens of
unrelieved labor and the harshness of their masters unnoticed by the community.
The actual working hours in the factories in the earlier part of the 19th century were
a technology-assisted twelve to fourteen hours a day; gas lights
illuminated the factories and steam power worked without tiring. When the
factory was running at full capacity the children were employed in two shifts,
one in the day and another in the night. It was said that "their beds never got cold," one shift climbing into bed as the other
got out. There was no effort to provide them with any training, nor education,
nor time for recreation.
While the conditions were harsh in the
factories, things could be worse. Here is an account of child labor in the
mines. It is so heart-wrenching that it might be dismissed as sensationalism
were it not based on the findings of an 1842 report of a Royal Commission charged with investigating the
conditions of child labor in the mines:
Children
began their life in the coal mines at five, six, or seven years of age. Girls
and women worked like boys and men, they were less than half clothed, and
worked alongside of men who were stark naked. There were from twelve to
fourteen working hours in the twenty-four, and these were often at night.
Little girls of six or eight years of age made ten to twelve trips a day up
steep ladders to the surface, carrying half a hundred weight of coal in wooden
buckets on their backs at each journey. Young women appeared before the
commissioners, when summoned from their work, dressed merely in a pair of
trousers, dripping wet from the water of the mine, and already weary with the
labor of a day scarcely more than begun. A common form of labor consisted of
drawing on hands and knees over the inequalities of a passageway not more than
two feet or twenty-eight inches high a car or tub filled with three or four
hundred weight of coal, attached by a chain and hook to a leather band around
the waist.
The job creators, with the prosperity
of England no doubt foremost in their minds, lobbied against the hand of regulation and
labor reform. Their points were three-fold:
First, that abolishing child labor
would harm those who promoted job creation and productivity. Manufacturers
opposed the child labor laws as an unjust interference with their business, an
unnecessary and burdensome obstacle to their success, and a threat of ruin to
the class who provided employment to so many laborers and created the
productive engine that was the source of commerce for the country.
Second, that if child labor were
restricted England would be placed at a competitive disadvantage. This would
not only affect the capitalist class, but affect the size of the pie to be
distributed, and thus ultimately trickle down to affect the working class itself.
Third, that at a more fundamental
level government regulation should be broadly cast aside because it was
detrimental to competition and essential freedoms: freedom of labor, freedom of
capital, and freedom of contract. If the employer and the employee were both
satisfied with the conditions of their labor, why should the government
interfere? How this related to children who had been indentured by their
stewards is unclear.
There was, however, opposition slowly grinding out successes in one
industry after another over the course of the decades, though the most oppressive industry,
that of mining, being literally underground and hence less visible, was only
addressed toward the tail end of the reform.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Cry of the Children,
published in 1842, is an influential example of the
outpouring of sympathy for the plight of child labor, but the most
persuasive
argument for reducing the hours of children did not come from sympathy
as much
as from economic practicality worthy of laissez faire. Work in such a
stifling
and harsh environment stunted the children’s growth and led to disease
and
degenerative conditions. Therefore, some in the capitalist class were
won over, or at least muted in their opposition because they deemed it
advisable to reduce the harsh
labor conditions for the “physical preservation of the race”.
The Revolutions of
1848
There are different possibilities
available at any historical moment; the socioeconomic sphere can adjust to
change in any number of ways. In the face of the social tumult brought on by
the industrial revolution, the course taken in Europe differed from that of
England. In England awareness and change came about gradually through the force
of government reforms. In Europe the epiphany occurred with the revolutions of
1848. As did the events in the England, these revolutions reflect some of the
stresses and some of the glimmers of political and social activity we are
seeing today.
The 1848 revolutions were the
culmination of a number of stresses, some similar to those felt in England,
which had been building over the course of decades. There were social costs
incurred as the small farms and guilds of the artisans were replaced with
larger, impersonal agricultural and industrial plants. There had been a decline
in the standard of living compared to that of the previous generation. The problems reached a crescendo in the
years immediately preceding the 1848 revolutions because of the interrelated
crises of years of poor harvests, a credit crunch brought on in part by the
need to borrow in the face of the resulting high food prices, and an economic
downturn precipitated by, among other things, a banking crisis. These all combined to lead to lower income and high
unemployment.
The revolutions of 1848 spread by force of
ideology, spurred on by new modes of communication that, ironically,
were facilitated by the concentration of the masses due to the factory
system. The revolutionary events began in
January 1848 in Palermo, the provincial capital of Sicily. Uprisings
were a
regular occurrence there and in southern Italy in general, but this time
they
found more success and quickly spread from there to the Italian
mainland. From
there they moved on to Paris, where there were street demonstrations and
clashes between demonstrators and police, with the demonstrators
erecting
barricades throughout the city. By March demonstrations and clashes
between the
demonstrators and police spread to Munich, Vienna and Budapest, and then
to
Milan and Berlin.
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