How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day by Paul Cockshott

Author:Paul Cockshott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

6.2 POWER

Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.

— LENIN 1965B, VOL. 34

Political power grew from the barrels of guns, but what about real power?

Capitalism progressed from water and wind power to steam for motive power, but communists, from the outset, plumped for electricity. German author Liebknecht [1901], writing in the 1890s, described having met Karl Marx in the 1850s after he had seen a model electric train. Marx enthused that just as steam had created capitalism, electric power would create a new economic and social order. Liebknecht remarked sardonically that in the ensuing forty-five years there had been no signs of electricity taking over yet. The trains were still steam, and the few electric tramcars were of no significance.

Looking back from the twenty-first century, Marx appears to have had the more acute sense of the promise of electric power. You have to take the long view when looking at the development of technology.

Revolutions are not accomplished in a sleight-of-hand fashion. Only the sensational shows in politics are called revolutions by the wonder-working rustic faith. And whoever prophesizes revolutions is always mistaken in the date. [Liebknecht, 1901]

We know that electricity has turned out to be quite important, as Marx suspected, but why was it seen as so crucial that Lenin should have singled it out as the very key to Soviet industrialization?

Human labor is a universal, abstract productive capacity. Our energy output may be modest at under 100 watts, but it can be applied in any trade or profession. The first available alternative to human effort was that of our brute servants the ox and horse. Strong as these companions are, their skills are limited. They helped us draw vehicles or pull plows, but they could not help crew ships, lay bricks, or spin wool. Steam went to sea with us, supplanting half a crew, replaced our beasts in traction, turned spinning mills and cut stone for our cities. But the steam engine was heavy, inflexible, and produced only motive force. It could not sing, wash, or see for us. With electricity we harnessed for the first time a power that rivaled that of human labor in flexibility, while vastly surpassing it in magnitude. Electricity wrote for us, then spoke for us then saw for us in telegraphs, telephones, and televisions. Its motors range in size and power from our little fingers to that of 50,000 horses. It lights our darkness, heats our homes, stores our records, reasons and calculates. It becomes power in the abstract, the General Watt.

We have become so accustomed to electric power that we have difficulty relating it to real effort so it is worth relating it to human power. A trained human cyclist, peddling hard, generates only enough power for one incandescent light (see Figure 6.1).

To become abstract general power, electricity requires networks of supply, initially urban, then national, continental, and in the future, world girdling. In the construction of these networks, competition of multiple private firms was counterproductive. Initially, with competing

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