NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/ne/politics/3174

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-01 | 7.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!noc.near.net!nic.umass.edu!dime!chelm.cs.umass.edu!yodaiken
From: [e-mail] (victor yodaiken)
Newsgroups: ne.politics
Subject: Re: Industrialization
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 1 Jan 93 18:56:27 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Mike Cherepov) writes:
>This stuff is too much to bear.  Victor Yodaiken says:
>
>>                                                         But I can't
>>think of a nation that industrialized without committing some horrible
>>crimes or getting foreign aid. Can you?
>
>First, this condition is self-serving.  There were horrible crimes

Self-serving? I don't gain anything from abominations of the past.

>committed across history, so crimes during industrialization prove
>nothing.  What you need for your thesis (that Stalin-type crimes
>are the rule at the industrialization stage) is some tremendous
>surge in horrible crimes at every nation's industrializing stage.
>But no such thing happened, eg, if anything, the worst of US slavery
>came before industrialization,

This is false. The development of industry in the north that made the
US one of the pre-eminent industrial powers came early on, and the
manufacturing prowess of the north played a key role in the Civil war.
Note that the slave economies both of the cotton states and of the
rum/sugar islands were primary sources of hard currency for the shipbuilding
and textile industries that grew up in the mill towns of New England.
Perhaps you want to claim that "the worst of US slavery" had passed before
slavery was abolished, but that seems like a weak limb to stand on.


>the anti-Indian atrocities were driven
>by sale of Fed lands for farming.

This is even worse. Anti-indian atrocities were now caused by the Federal
government's sale of land!! In any event, it is indisputable that US
shipbuilders profited from the logging of the New England woods and
that this land was stolen from the original inhabitants.

>In Britain, the Cromwellian times
>were much more violent, and so was the Reformation on the Continent.

Read up on the enclosures in England. See, for example E.P. Thomspon
History of the English Working Class, or Foster "Class Struggle in the
Industrial Revolution" or works by Christopher Hill.

>
>Secondly, even on your incredible terms, there are counter-examples
>aplenty: Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, Finland,
>Germany, Austria to pick an easy few, don't seem to have committed
>particularly horrible crimes while industrializing.

Switzerland and Iceland indeed. I am not well informed on the
hsitory of German industrialization, I suspect that you are less so.
Try harder.

>
>Thirdly, while lacking emprirical evidence for the putative increase
>in crime during industrialization, you presented no plausible theory
>why there had to be crimes.  Industrialization obviously did have to
>involve economic dislocation in the Old World agricultural sector and
>social structures, but I can not see why "horrible crimes" are needed
>to carry it out, even in theory.

I don't argue that crimes were necessary, but that they appear to be
associated with rapid industrialization. When an agrarian nation is
transformed into an industrial one it requires 1) a labor force, and
2) a source of capital. This is why both the  late Romanov's and
Stalin embarked on policies which squeezed the peasantry, forcing
workers off the land and into the factories and accumulating investment
capital via agrarian taxes and other transfers of wealth to urban centers
from the countryside. Similarly, the English enclosure movement and the
continuing pillage of Ireland sent a stream of destitute ex-peasants
into the  factories. The US was different for obvious reasons.
My sympathies here are not with the industrializers and their police,
the Luddites, the Ukranian anarchist rebels, Daniel Shays and
Cinque appeal to me far more than Pitt, Lenin, Hamilton or Jefferson Davis.
But it may not be most illuminating to attribute the bad behavior of
Lenin to his personal qualities or his ideology if there were economic
and historical forces that made it possible for him to set up a police
state or made it unlikely that a democratic alternative could flourish.


>
>>         The British industrial revolution immersed a huge section
>>of the population in grinding poverty and slave labor work conditions,
>>and those who dared to protest were murdered,
>
>Welcome to the land of fact-free rhetorial flourshes.  Meanwile, in
>the real world, the Columbia History of the World (a respectable
>ho-hum volume) uses words like "striking prosperity", "improved
>standards of living", "flourishing provincial culture", etc when
>describing this period.  They later say that while life expectancy
>of workingmen and their families was improving throughout the
>Industrial Revolution, and it is impossible to speak categorically
>about changes in the standard of living until mid-19th century,
>a steady improvement from there on is undisputable.

Welcome to the world of dogmatic assertions about fields in which one
is not trained. If you consult the extensive literature on this topic,
I recommend Thompson's classic volume, you will see that while comparitive
living standards are
an area of great controversy, the appalling poverty of the industrial
labor force in the 18th and 19th century  is beyond dispute.  This is
reflected not only in the current historical literature, but in the
literature of the time. For example, Cobbett's "Rural Rides" or
even Dickens will give you a glimpse of both how the laboring force
lived and why the Pitt government was compelled to issue the Combination
acts to outlaw all types of union activity and to enforce this act with
the army.

>Other historians argue that with universal availability of mass-
>produced shoes in 1820s, Lancashire cottons, doubling of chairs
>per family in early 1800, one can claim that the standard of living
>was improving throughout IR, with some hiccups, only myths of the
>bygone golden age of yeomen suggesting otherwise.  Take a pick.

What other historians? I'm fascinated.  There were epidemics of Cholera
in the working class industrial towns in 1831 and 1840 -- not evidence
of propsperity. The  "First Report of the Registar-General" (1839)
showed that 20% of the death rate was caused by TB -- a disease that is
directly associated with poor living and nutritional conditions  and
there is good reason to believe that this was an understatement.
There are thousands of reports and contemporary accounts of the misery
of the urban poor, reports on the increased infant mortality in
the children of mill worker girls who developed a narrowing of the
pelvis from working one their feet for 14 hour days starting at age 8,
reports on the characteristic deformities of cotton workers, the
absence of any workers over the age of 25 in certain industrial
occupations, government enquiries on housing conditions, and etc.

>
>Political rights for majority in Britain in the same period went
>from near-zilch to universal suffrage, and unions went a long way
>towards their post-WW2 dominance, and labor laws appeared, driven
>by producers' desire to equalize competition, so your hazy mention
>of some daring protesters' murders does nothing to prove that
>Stalin's crimes were in some sense unexceptional or necessary for
>other industrializing countries.

It may be hazy to you, but I was referencing well known historical
facts. Look up Chartism, Peterloo, and the combination acts before you
speak further. You might also want to learn something about the
Luddites and why they believed that their rights were being curtailed
by the rise of the industrial system. Tom Paine's book, The Rights
of Man was contraband in 19th century England and that alone should
tell you something about the validity of your analysis.




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