The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul

Author:John Ralston Saul
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Free Press

IV

FROM MANAGERS AND SPECULATORS TO GROWTH

DID THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION bring us prosperity?

If we begin with such a basic question, it may force the arid and convoluted world of economics into some contact with the reality it is intended to explain.

Well of course it did. The prosperity and comfort the West has experienced over the past 70 years would not have been possible without the Industrial Revolution.

But that is the answer to another question. Certainly, without the technology of early, modern and late capitalism, we could not have created and sustained this culture. And it was by no means just a matter of technology. Capitalism itself helped make this possible. And the free market. And a growing capital market to finance investments. And trade, because galloping trade was a major factor, on an increasingly global scale. So without technology, capitalism, the free market, the money markets, free trade and globalization—concepts still at the very centre of our lives—we could not have financed and maintained our standard of living.

That’s all very well, but let’s go back to the question—Was it the Industrial Revolution, composed of these factors, that raised our standard of living and brought us an historically unprecedented level of widespread prosperity?

Certainly it brought prosperity to a new class of owners and managers, but they represented until half a century ago only a tiny percentage of the population. In Britain, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most of the population left a simple rural or an artisan existence to move into the turbulent world of factories. In the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, the children of the poorest had tended to start as workers at the age of fourteen. They and the adults worked a twelve-hour day, including time for meals and rest. Traditional holidays remained in place from the pre-industrial period. However, a few decades later, in the early nineteenth century, it was common for children to begin as workers at seven or eight years old and to work fourteen hours a day in the unhealthful and dangerous factories. Many of the traditional holidays were simply ignored by the companies. It was a question of work or be fired. And in spite of working so much harder and longer, the labourer was worse off than a quarter-century earlier. 1

This experience very much parallels that of many in the developing world today. For example, the experience of the millions who left simple but stable rural lives for the slums of Lagos is virtually identical to that of the nineteenth-century British farmer become worker.

But surely what I’m describing were temporary conditions, the unfortunate, inevitable disorder of revolutionary change? The standard market forces view can best be expressed in a mess of metaphors: Eggs had to be broken while the ‘invisible’ hand of the market mechanism reached down to rebalance the social structure in the context of new economic conditions.

Well, actually these conditions could not be called temporary. They persisted until the second half of the nineteenth century and then only began to ease gradually.

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