This is because the early industrial workforce was a terrible place to work and live–and the phenomenon is not temporary, by most measures. It was true for between a hundred and a hundred and fifty years. Maybe longer. You worked longer (six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day was common in certain periods), you lived in urban filth, ate less, were sick more, grew to lower height if born into this, and died younger.

So, clearance was bad for the people who were cleared. I trust I don’t have to explain why European Imperialism was bad for most everyone else. Granted, European Imperialism predates the Industrial Revolution (but not the commercial, wind, and water revolutions), but it goes into overdrive during the Industrial period, and the gains of previous periods are definitely used to support the Industrial Revolution.

There are two questions to answer with regards to the clearance issue. First, whether or not clearances were necessary for the agricultural revolution to occur. With no agricultural revolution, there’s not enough food for expanding city populations.

The orthodox answer to this question is, “No.” But recently, a scholar, Robert C. Allan, went through the agricultural records and compared enclosed field to non-enclosed field production. Common fields were usually somewhat less productive than enclosed fields, but their gains increased almost as fast as enclosed fields did, and were even higher for certain crops (for instance, as with nitrogen fixers, like clover).

In other words, no, the agricultural revolution was not predicated on field enclosure–it just would have happened slightly slower in a non-field-enclosure scenario.

The second question concerns wages for workers, and is trickier. Allan argues that the Industrial Revolution happened in England for a simple reason: The coal was right there and could easily be shipped to factories. Shipping coal was hellishly expensive, and early steam engines were massively inefficient. Industrialization didn’t start in, say, Paris, because it lacked the resources. In Paris, it was cheaper to use more labor rather than to use coal.

Field enclosures made labor cheap in England. Without them, there are a lot less desperate workers, and a lot less desperate workers means higher wages and better treatment of workers (no one’s leaving the peasant village to go work 78 hour work weeks). Higher wages could make steam-driven factories unprofitable. No profit = no revolution.

This is an empirical question, and I don’t see the data to indicate the answer one way or the other. The theoretical point of view is this: Land clearances forced the cost of labor down. The higher wages are, the more you want to use capital (like equipment), not workers. In such a case, again, the Industrial Revolution happens, but it happens closer to Newcastle to keep the cost of coal down, and it is slow to gain traction due to profitability concerns. Once stabilized, however, the incentives for increasing machine efficiency of the machines faster could quite possibly have accelerated the Industrial Revolution faster than how it actually played out. Hard to say, but the argument is sound.

Now, for Empire.

With a very few exceptions, the main one being the USSR, every country which has industrialized, including Britain and the US, has done so with mercantalist policies, that is, behind trade barriers of some sort or another. They become free traders when their industry is well-established, not before.

Mercantalism does not require imperialism, but imperialism can augment mercantilism. When the British invaded India, India had more factories than England. Soon, they didn’t. India was a vast market for British manufacturing and provided raw materials.

The South in the US provided much of the cotton, through slave labor, as did Egypt and various other places which were conquered or absorbed through imperialism. (While the US South was, no, not under British control during this period, the Native Americans were cleared from it by European imperialism and disease and the slaves were brought over on European ships.)

Imperialism provides two things: Markets and cheap supplies for the factories. Even the Chinese opium/tea trade is related. Tea reduces appetites and enables people to work longer, and the British, even with the agricultural revolution, are somewhat underfed. Minus six half-day weeks, of course, they would not need so much food, but they do. (Ever done hard, manual labor all day? I have. I ate A LOT.)

There is clearly a benefit from Imperialism for industrialization under capitalism.

Could industrialization have happened without forcing open these barriers to British exports and without cheaper commodities like cotton, acquired through slave labor, plantations (which require shoving small farmers off the land), and so on?

What would have happened if we didn’t conquer, pillage, and enslave so many people? What would have happened if we didn’t deliberately retard their economic development? If we didn’t kill so many of them?

Perhaps they would have been more prosperous. Granted, many tribal societies have little use for money, but as the Hudson’s Bay experience shows, if you provide goods they really want, they’ll go out of their way to get what you want in return. And India, despite vast numbers of peasants, had vast mercantile cities and trade long before the British, Portuguese, and so on, arrived.

The commodities wouldn’t be so cheap, and Britain may not have gained so near a monopoly in early industrial manufacturing, but other societies would have also been richer–which means more purchasing power. Richer people can pay more.

The British still would have had that huge advantage: Coal near the manufacturing areas and near the coast. It’s an island. You can get what you manufacture to the sea easily, and you can use coal because the coal is near the sea too (everything is near the sea in England, from the Continental point of view).

This scenario suggests that England would have still industrialized first, and the Industrial Revolution still happens in Britain. Is it’s pace slower? Faster? I suspect slower at first, faster later. But it is more humane, and it leads to a better world.

If China and India had industrialized at a faster, more organic pace than they did; if they had been dragged along closer behind, standards of living would have risen faster. But standard of living is negatively correlated to the number of children.

A world in which all (or at least most) boats rise together, with England in the lead, but not excessively so, is one with a lot less of a population problem and a lot less of a poverty problem.

It may just be that being complete bastards to virtually everyone was not required for industrialization. It may be that we would have lived in a vastly better world.

It may not, of course, but I think the argument for “Being Assholes Wasn’t Actually Necessary” is pretty strong.

And I think it’s fairly important, because it’s at the heart of the whole “Is other people’s suffering required for some people to live the good life?” question.

(This is part 3 of a semi-series.  Read part one on “The Death of Capitalism” and part 2 on “What Capitalism is.”)

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Photo by Chilanga Cement

The post Did the Industrial Revolution Require Land Clearances, Slavery, Genocide, and Empire? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Most people don’t know what Capitalism is.

We’ll need two definitions.

Market: An economic arrangement in which price signals direct people’s actions.

Markets are old. There were markets in Sumeria thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, Sumerian society was not Capitalist. Most people were farmers, living on the land. They produced their own housing, their own food, and their own clothes. They bought some goods on the market, sold grain on the market (there was a very active market in loans denominated in grain or silver), but most of their needs were met through non-market methods.

Some people in that society (arguably) had their lives regulated by markets. There were money-lenders, urban inhabitants, merchants and traders, specialists, and so on who used money to buy what they needed. There were other such people who were essentially feudal lackeys; you might be a market scribe working for money, or you might be a palace or temple scribe.

The primary financial markets, by the way, were run out of temples.

But the rule is this: Most people in most agricultural and pre-agricultural societies produced what they needed, generally as part of an extended family, a tribe or some other arrangement. Sumeria was more mercantile than most agricultural societies.

Capitalism: An economic system in which people are directed towards particular actions by price signals from markets AND in which they obtain the necessities (and luxuries) of life from markets.

You may measure HOW capitalist a society is by how many people cannot create their own necessities as part of a relatively small group.

Now, let us return to markets. A market says:

• Do more of what makes more money
• Do less of what makes less money
• Stop doing that which is losing money

This is an oversimplification, but it’s less of an oversimplification than it seems. Take Amazon, for example: Amazon does not make a profit.  However, the decision makers at Amazon (Bezos, senior exectives, etc.) make plenty of money from Amazon.

Prices are not set solely by markets, they never have been and they never will be. Governments lean on prices through direct and indirect subsidies, taxes, and so on. Roads are a subsidy for trucking, auto-manufacturing and a host of other businesses, for example.  The US interstate highway system was the death-knell for the hugely powerful railroads that preceded it.

This is true despite the FACT that, if you include all costs, shipping people and (especially) freight by rail is cheaper.  The final price, as it effects the individual decision makers responsible for those individual, economic decisions, is what matters.

Markets are a way of telling people what to do and what not to do and how much of either.

The more money a person makes doing something, the more they try to do of that something (including hiring workers to do it for them).

If a decision maker’s profits are not aligned with social utility, well then, capitalism does not produce results with social utility. Bankers make a lot of money. Their businesses lost so much money the entire world economy could barely contain the damage and trillions of dollars were required to bail them out. So why do bankers keep doing what they were doing? Because they are still, personally, making money.

So what if a few brokerages and banks went out of business? Their executives are still rich.

Capitalism is dis-empowering. Serfs and peasants, for all we sneer at them, could support themselves, because they had access to the land they needed to do so. They spun their own clothes. They raised their own houses.

Peasants and serfs were better off than the industrial workers who replaced them. There is a reason land clearances had to be done by law and force: The peasants and serfs didn’t want to leave. They weren’t stupid, they weren’t fools–they knew they lived better than the people working six and a half days a week, ten to 12 hours a day, in the new factories amidst cities and towns, choking in their own filth before modern sewage was put in place.

Capitalism forces most people to base their decisions on price (salary, comissions, hourly wage vs. goods they buy) levels. It takes away their ability to support themselves without working for someone else.

Capitalism is the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few people.

This is why it is called Capitalism. Capital is what allows you to make other things. Land can be capital. Machines that make things, even machines as simple as a spinning wheel, are capital. You add labor to capital and you have products.

(It may be, with the rise of the sophisticated automation we call robots, that capital will be able to make capital soon, with little to no human intervention.)

Capitalism removes productive capacity from most people so they can’t support themselves. It orders the behavior of almost everyone through price signals.

Capitalism is a way of making decisions about what people should do, what products should be created, how they should spend their time and so on.

Because Capitalism is one of two major decision making methods in our society, and has been for the most important societies (starting with Britain) for hundreds of years (in varying forms; there are different types of capitalism), it is fair to judge capitalism by the results produced by those societies, especially the economic results.

Capitalism is NOT synonymous with industrialization, but most industrialization (outside the USSR) occurred under capitalism. Capitalism made the decisions about how to industrialize which were not driven by the internal logic of industrialization itself (too big a topic to go into in this article) or by government.

Capitalism fed back into government, however, because pricing matters. That coal was cheaper than solar for most of history (until about last year) mattered. In theory, we could have overridden that decision and said, “At X times the price is worth it and the sooner we make more the sooner the price will drop,” but in practice we did not.

We went with the flow.

Social choices, including those made by government, modify market signals. But when you live in a Capitalist society, you think first about VALUE as PRICE, even though the two are very different. The price of your life can be determined very accurately by life insurance charts (future expected earnings, discounted).

I doubt you consider the insurance market’s valuation of your life as the actual value of your life. If you do? Congratulations! You have splendidly adapted to the mandates of capitalism and markets.

Having read this far, and considered what you have read, next time someone yammers on about capitalism, you will know what they should be talking about. Because most people don’t know what capitalism is, despite living in it, you will also know, perhaps, what they are not talking about.

Capitalism uses markets as the main method to determine human economic behaviour and removes humans’ ability  to support themselves without engaging in the market.

Note the second characteristic listed: Removing humans’ independent means of support. In many cases, this had to be done by force. In others, it was done through blandishments. In both cases, the end result was a reduction in effective power for individuals who do not CONTROL capital–who are not capitalists (ownership is not always control).

To a remarkable extent, people are Skinnerian behavioural machines. Markets are one of the main methods used to condition people, to create their personality, to create them.

To control them.

To control you.

Under Capitalism, virtually everyone is subject to that control and conditioning, on penalty of living a miserable life, or, indeed, of death.

(This is part 2 of a semi-series.  Read part one on “The Death of Capitalism” ”)

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

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Capitalism has failed.

It has failed because it failed to deal with climate change.  This was a forseeable, and foreseen disaster.  We knew it, without any reasonable doubt, by the late 70s. If we had acted then, we could have stopped the worst of it.

We did not.

The death count will be in excess of a billion people. I think, given the way that damage counts keep coming in above prior estimates, and given how vicious cycles act, that the death count will be in the billions.

It is not inconceivable that we could see the end of human, and higher, life, on Earth, though it is still unlikely.

We are in the middle of a Great Extinction. Each life-form which dies off takes genetic wealth with it and weakens the ecosystem. Ecosystem collapse has happened in the past in limited regions, it can happen globally.

If it does, we may need to bend over and kiss our asses, lives, and species goodybe.

Capitalism’s great claim to being a superior form of organization for production and distribution of goods and services is that it is best able to account for costs and benefits: It produces that for which people are willing and able to pay.

People weren’t willing and/or able to pay to stop climate change. In part, this is because actors with money were able to obfuscate both the science and the situation, spending millions on doing so, and buying the political process. In part, it is because climate change’s worst effects were expected to take place AFTER the death of the people who needed to act to stop it.

If you were 30 in 1980, you are 66 today. If you were 40, you are 76. If you were in the decision making class, overwhelmingly allocated to those who were 50+ in 1980, you are 86 today.

People who were in their prime and during their decision-making days, when we needed to act on climate change, were making a DEATH BET.

They bet they would be dead before the worst results of climate change happened.

They will win this bet.

This was a RATIONAL thing for them to do. I want to repeat that, because too many people think “rational=good.” It does not. It was rational for them to discount a future they would not see.

Note also that they did not prioritize their children and grandchildren’s well-being over their own. This, also, is RATIONAL.  How your children do after you are dead has only an imaginary effect on your well-being. (For instance, if you think they’ll be ok, that’s enough. And that’s an easy enough thing of which to convince yourself.)

Our capitalist markets did not discount the future properly. Capitalistic accumulation, which gave certain corporations and individuals excess rewards, and thus power, also made it easier for them to capsize the democratic process.

This does not mean that capitalism is entirely to blame, not directly. In 1980, the US was not yet an oligarchy. At that point, it took a mass movement, a constituency, to decide: “Fuck all that environmentalism and conservation crap.”

That movement was headlined by Reagan and presaged by Thatcher in Britain. Reagan won because of the so-called “Reagan Democrats,” who abandoned the post-war Democratic coalition to vote Republican. They were substantially and primarily SUBURBAN voters. The suburbs, now, but especially then, would have been hammered by properly done environmental and conservation changes, as they were massively energy inefficient. You do not get a generation and a half of suburban housing prices rising faster than wages and inflation in such a world. (You do get better wages, as there is more real work to be done.)

As time went by, the advantages that Reagan put into play disproportionately (and vastly so) benefited a small number of Americans, and America became an oligarchy. You can date America’s descent to oligarchy somewhere between Gore v. Bush (2001) and Citizen’s United in January, 2010. Personally, I would pick the passage of TARP, done in the face of phone calls in excess of one hundred to one against: 2008.

Capitalism has thus, in the span of less than five decades, ensured that there will be billions of deaths and has bought-out the popular sovereignty system of representational democracy.

Despite triumphalism, it is also true that we have had the ability to end hunger and famines for decades and have not done so. Serious poverty in Africa has dropped as a percentage, but risen in absolute numbers. In the past 30 years, the average amount of calories consumed in India has dropped. China has industrialized, but studies show that those who remained in traditional villages are happier.

It is very easy to look at what has been achieved under capitalism and cheer. Vast growth, vast increases in food production, and so on. One can argue how much was driven by capitalism, how much by democracy, how much by government bureaucracy, and how much by industrialization, but the last 200 years have seen massive accomplishments.

Those who die in the next 100 years will not be so sanguine about the costs, however, as they will be the ones to bear them. Those who do not die, but suffer and see their loved ones die, are unlikely to forgive.

They WILL be looking for an alternative to capitalism, because it will be clear to them: The cost of capitalism is too high.  Especially if we skirt species extinction in a visible way.

There is no “end of history” minus an end to sentient life. There never will be.

The world keeps changing, capitalism and democracy were never going to be the last systems, and it is now obvious and visible that they are unlikely to be.

It is possible that one or the other might survive, in a modified form, but only if it casts blame on the other.

This doesn’t mean markets won’t survive. Markets have been with us for thousands of years, but markets as the prime distribution and production mechanism for the majority of the population have not.

The Death of Capitalism, and possibly the Death of Representational Democracy, are nigh. If you are young, you will see one or both. You may even if you are middle-aged.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

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