If we are Homo faber , the producing species, Joshua Freeman has given us a wonderfully well-written history of our progress to the modern form thereof. Combining immense knowledge with sensitive and revealing insights and clearly explaining technicalities in wider contexts, he takes us from the earliest mass-production in 18th century Britain into the industrial revolution, and thence to the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam.
In 1704, Thomas Lombe deployed — probably stolen — Italian techniques in his new textile mill in Derby, replacing the stronger and more expensive Indian cotton with the British variety. The building is obviously a factory, and the industrial revolution imposed radically new habits of timekeeping, regularity, and organisation on an underemployed labour force.
Richard Arkwright centralised production to protect his patents, and his piecework rates forced productivity up. As the division of labour intensified, factories became hideous places. Palls of filthy air hung permanently over cities, and waterways were full of toxic effluent. Magistrates — many of them factory owners — licensed the forced use of workhouse children as young as seven; the mainly female adult workers were often targets for rape and other sexual violence by owners.
On the factory floor
The new structures awed observers and the new system frightened them; Freeman quotes Anthony Trollope and Robert Southey. Even some owners said factories were worse than West Indian slave-plantations. New iron-production methods meant coal-fired steam powering larger factories, and the gaslight was an improvement — but it brought 24-hour production; the state and private militias used violence and murder to control workers in Britain and the United States.
In the U.S., factories followed a truly grandiose trajectory. Francis Cabot Lowell put water-driven cotton mills on rural rivers, employing local — white — Protestant women. The owners wanted no black workers, but the slave states supplied the raw cotton; Freeman, like Edward E. Baptist, shows that black slave labour was central to U.S. capitalism. The mills became towns, and the young, literate New England women rebelled against gross moral policing and extremely oppressive factory regimes. They struck work, and adapted a salacious song to end with “... I cannot be a slave.”
The owners grudgingly accepted legislation to limit child labour (this law was unenforceable, reduce the working day, recognise trade unions, and impose minimal safety standards — but they were terrified of competition, demanding import tariffs and getting Congress to legalise the cartel which became U.S. Steel.
The superpowers’ rise
The Bessemer process increased steel output, and Henry Ford made vast profits by standardising components and integrating sites. Freeman’s accounts of new inventions are excellent demonstrations of how surplus value — profit — is inherent in the use of the worker’s labour power for commodity-production; F.W. Taylor’s exemplary worker Schmidt’s productivity immediately rose by 400%, but Schmidt’s wages only rose from $1.15 to $1.85 an hour.
The owners also made millions helping the Soviet Union develop. Magnitogorsk and other factory-cities were built despite the enormous problems of industrialising a peasant culture, and U.S. unions made contact with Soviet counterparts. Urban family life developed, as it also did — after World War II — around Nowa Huta and Sztálinváros, in the less repressive systems of Poland and Hungary respectively.
Post-war workers gained political weight themselves; strikes in the U.S. won improved pay and conditions; in Germany — and France — workers were crucial to national legislation and long-term stability, with unions represented on larger companies’ boards. In the late 1970s, Central European workers undermined sclerotic one-party systems (in the 1930s, the Soviet regime murdered many great engineers). More recently, Egypt’s Misr plant workers have shown their own sense of nationalism and modernity.
Freeman always provides background – the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., the latter in the wartime production boom, put factories far inland, remote from attack — and he covers fascinating artistic developments, reproducing inter alia a Winslow Homer and many photographs. Margaret Bourke-White captured the sheer size of American factories; Soviet photographers, using the new 35mm cameras, combined a stunningly radical aesthetic sense with heartfelt hope for a fairer world. Yet, like Charlie Chaplin in his epochal film Modern Times , photographers often showed the production line as captivity; the Rockefeller family destroyed a Diego Rivera mural they themselves had commissioned, because it included Lenin.
What awaits
Familiar themes persist. In the 1980s, U.S. companies divided factories into smaller units to reduce workers’ power; as governments cut finance loose, firms moved work elsewhere. Where the U.S.S.R. expropriated grain to feed industrial workers, China gives industry free interns, and makes often remote municipalities responsible for factory workers’ healthcare.
Among the hyper-Taylorist and hyper-Fordist Chinese plants, one has over 300,000 employees. The factories — in unremarkable buildings — are not sweatshops, but the endless, mind-crushingly simple operations trivialise the very activity of production. Workers pay a price; one Foxconn response was to install nets to catch those who threw themselves out of factory windows. Strikes do happen, in China and Vietnam; Chinese firms are moving to Ethiopia, which so far has almost no record of union activism and environmental despoliation.
Branded retailers decide what is made, but scandals hurt manufacturers. Nike and Apple use Foxconn but market ‘hipness, worldliness, modernity, and fun’. We are all complicit; we buy enormous volumes of small-sized consumer goods, and big pension funds invest in the companies. As Freeman says, the factory has made both dreams and nightmares real — but he reminds us that we can reinvent the world again.
Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World ; Joshua B. Freeman, W.W. Norton and Company, ₹1,594.
