Memories of Class (Routledge Revivals) by Zygmunt Bauman

Author:Zygmunt Bauman [Bauman, Zygmunt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415573016
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

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The tendency of industrial society: an interim summary

In its sociological sense, the industrial revolution consisted in the subjection of the bodies and the thought (in so far as the latter was operative in the action of the bodies) of the producers to the control of other people than the producers themselves. During the industrial revolution this way of organising the process of production, which formerly played a secondary, even marginal, role in the totality of social production, had become the norm.

The pattern of control which the industrial revolution made the social norm was not a development of social patterns which had emerged and gestated in pre-industrial productive units. One cannot trace it back to the craftsman workshop for at least three reasons: in such a workshop, the position of subordination was ostensibly temporary, defined from the outset as a stage leading to, and an instrument of, emancipation and eventually mastership; for the duration of subordination, the co-ordination which the output required was accomplished, by and large, through task-control, rather than body-and-person control, and on the whole did not include the subjection of apprentices and journeymen to a uniform rhythm of physical exertion; the relationship between superiors and their subordinates spread well beyond the requirements and the intrinsic logic of the production process—approaching the totality of a social bond incorporated fully into a shared community membership and culture. With somewhat more justification one can seek an embryo of the industrial pattern of control in the economy of the manor and the category of farm-hands, numerically growing on the eve of industrial revolution. Also in this case, however, similarity was limited by two crucial circumstances: however rhythmical and routinised the productive activity of farm-hands tended to be, the rhythm was only secondarily imposed by man-made design, having been first and foremost determined by natural cycle and conditions to which both labourers and their overseers had to submit—which set unencroachable limits to the discretion of the controllers; and though the shared community membership and culture were absent, the relations between the masters and their hands extended beyond the framework of production proper. Most importantly, it included the characteristic exchange of deference for protection and the expectation of security.

The typically industrial pattern of control over procedures gestated outside the framework of pre-industrial forms of production. It emerged and developed in the dealings of the state power with the first ‘mass’ of history (if one does not count the episode of the Roman proletariat)—the poor and vagrant population which the locally organised, small-scale, productive units could not contain and accommodate. Before the industrial revolution, the phenomenon of the poor, as the result of its unprecedented size, had been re-articulated as a question of public order, rather than an issue of communal charity and individual salvation as before. The treatment of the poor became increasingly the problem of developing new, more comprehensive and efficient, means of punishment and drill; above all, of direct supervision of the totality of behaviour. This was best attained under conditions of

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