By Phil Shannon
Industry leaders, business executives, corporate entrepreneurs — what a much misunderstood community we have here, unjustly maligned by ungrateful plebs unable to see that their well-being depends on the noble spirit and good works of the capitalist class. The reputation of this class has suffered from black propaganda from pinko unions, red-raggers and bleeding-heart liberals from the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago.
But now, Roger Kerr, executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, has donned his armour and set forth, in the April pages of the Australian Financial Review, to rescue the honour of capitalists everywhere from their heathen tormentors, who have imprisoned them in the historical dungeon of misrepresentation about the alleged evils of the Industrial Revolution.
Kerr seeks to demonstrate that from the 1780s to the end of the 19th century, the mills, factories and mines of industrial Britain delivered nothing but rising living standards to the population, and that those who have maintained otherwise, the prattlers about "dark, Satanic mills", have been wrong.
Dickens
Kerr takes after Charles Dickens, in particular, with broadsword a-flying, claiming that Dickens' picture — children labouring for 18 hours a day in hellish cotton mills under sadistic overseers, and the aged, the sick and the poor dying in workhouses — is false.
Dickens never went near a factory, says Kerr, and Dickens' criticism of what he thought was going on in the industrial centres was only ever a moral critique anyhow: Dickens never wanted "to change the social structure" of capitalism, so he must have been a supporter of capitalist industry.
But before we expunge from the linguistic record the adjective "Dickensian" as synonymous with everything grim and inhumane about capitalism, let us scrutinise Kerr's argument. It is true that Dickens was of the middle class, but he did experience the sapping drudgery of office work in his youth (in a "white-collar" environment that did not know of flex-time or airconditioning).
It is also unfair to Dickens to belittle the empathy he felt for the sufferings of workers and the poor, and the repulsion he felt for the horrors of the prisons and "insane asylums", the prostitution and insanitary housing, of his society. You don't have to work in a textile factory in 1838, or a Nike sweatshop in 1998, to be able to take a stand on the issue.
Where Kerr sees only falseness, the huge numbers of the working poor who flocked to Dickens' public readings of his works found deep factual and emotional truth.
Neither does the fact that Dickens was not a revolutionary anti-capitalist logically make him a supporter of the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. Like many middle-class reformers who reacted to the miserable lot of the new factory proletariat with a mixture of humanitarian sympathy and fear of working-class revolt, Dickens brought real evils into the light of day.
Engels
Friedrich Engels is another demon to be exorcised in Kerr's quest to show that "factory labour represented a kind of social liberation for the poor". Kerr argues that Engels' observations of "harsh and worsening conditions for factory workers in the north of England" were "atypical" of real conditions, and that Engels' indirect accounts were distortions of more benign original sources.
Kerr relies on two British economic historians, William Chalconer and William Henderson, for his ammunition against Engels. The two Bills turn out duds, however.
Part of the so-called "optimistic", or "cheerful", school of historians of the Industrial Revolution, Chalconer and Henderson attempt to discredit Engels' 1844 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. They claim that Engels relies on the partisan accounts of reformers who highlighted the worst cases to arouse most indignation.
They argue, for example, that Engels gives the impression that women and children laboured underground in all the coal mining districts when "actually at this time, the employment of women was virtually confined to mines in the West Riding, Lancashire, Cheshire, Scotland and South Wales" and "the number of workers involved was quite small" — some 6000 women and girls were employed underground in all kinds of mines and only 2350 of these in coal mines. Furthermore, contrary to Engels' claim that the 1842 act forbidding the employment of women and children underground was a dead letter because no inspectors had been appointed, there was in fact one inspector.
The merits of this argument can best be evaluated by updating and relocating the scene and changing the cast. It would then run as follows: some partisan humanitarians have said that there is a problem in Australia with child prostitution, but really there are only 6000 child prostitutes, of whom no more than 2350 actually work the streets, and it is limited to Newcastle, Wollongong, the eastern seaboard capitals and Tasmania, and far from there being no social workers to deal with it, there is in fact one. Well, so that's all right then.
The moral blindness of Chalconer and Henderson, and Kerr, is matched by their inability (or unwillingness) to see the general pattern of abuse behind the exceptional examples used to illustrate it.
Wage rates
Kerr borrows other trusty steeds from the "cheerful" stable to prove that living standards were rising during the Industrial Revolution. Population growth was up and infant mortality was down because of improved nutrition and health care. Per capita income was climbing.
A fine sight all these social indicators look from a distance, but close up they do not support the weight of the ideological jockey.
Kerr writes that "modern scholarship has confirmed" (a close cousin, no doubt, of "university tests show") that real per capita income grew over various periods of the Industrial Revolution by 50-100%. These claims are somewhat diminished in impact by the length of the periods — nothing under 70 years. If your real per capita income was increasing at around 1% a year, from a very low base, there wouldn't be all that much left to celebrate your rising living standards with.
The basis for Kerr's figures on increasing income is probably (we are not told) the time-rates for skilled artisans — not pieceworkers, employees on short time or hit by unemployment (a concept Kerr doesn't mention, for fear of spoiling his glossy picture). Thus they do not reflect actual earnings, which could also be eaten into by the severe fines for trivial misdemeanours that were a feature of the harsh factory discipline of the times.
The figures also conceal the economic slumps, and associated deep troughs of misery, that occurred frequently within such broad time frames.
Average wage rate figures are also less than helpful in examining the distribution of income, but are very good at concealing extremes of wealth and poverty. The more skilled artisans and the growing professional middle class, not to mention the capitalists, did considerably better than the unskilled.
Kerr prefers to highlight impressive-looking percentage movements in wage rates to distract attention from very low absolute figures — 100% times not very much at all is still not very much. The third of the population of Blackburn in 1833 that lived on a family income of nine shillings a week, well within the clutch of pauperdom, could be excused for missing the statistical good news.
Wages were so low that only long hours could supply a living income. It wasn't until the 1850s that the necessity of higher wages (modest, to be sure) to boost economic growth through domestic consumption began to be accepted by the capitalist class. Even by the 1870s, around 40% of the working class remained in poverty.
Health
As with income, so with nutrition: the question of distribution must be asked. Which sections of the population ate the cheese and meat and which the potatoes and black bread? In the 1870s, 12-year-old boys from the upper-class "public" schools were on average five inches taller than boys from schools in industrial centres.
The same with housing — factory owners got as far away from the overcrowded, unsanitary, epidemic-ridden, soot-stained slums of their employees as horse transport would allow. Civic improvements may have cleaned up the wealthier suburbs and the centre of London (the rich, after all, controlled local government), but it was a long time coming to the East End of London or Leeds.
Some of the gloss can also be taken off the statistical improvement in declining child mortality rates. Improvement there was, from around 75% mortality amongst 0-4 year olds in the mid-18th century to around 30% by 1830, but 30% is still very high, and in the industrial centres where it was closer to 50%, it is of little retrospective comfort to the working-class families where half the children died.
The Industrial Revolution contributed to such high mortality rates partly because of the maiming effects of intensive exploitation on women workers — the deformation of the pelvic bones of women who had worked since childhood in the mills, standing for 12-14 hours a day, and lack of paid maternity leave (one of those wanton and ruinous state welfare measures, interfering with economic freedom, that Kerr deplores).
Dying children and disease were distributed no more equitably than income or food. Life expectancy, as shown by parliamentary investigations into the sanitary and housing conditions of the poor in the early 1840s, was skewed to the "gentry" rather than to the "labourers" — 38 and 17 years respectively in Manchester, 44 and 19 years in Leeds.
On Kerr's social indicators, the record is unimpressive. For the first half of the Industrial Revolution, the average worker was very close to subsistence level, and not much above it after that, whilst national wealth was growing and passing into the hands of the employers.
Poor Law
The final black spot that Kerr has to whitewash is the workhouses, established by the 1834 Poor Law. Dickens is to blame, says Kerr, for giving such a bad reputation to the workhouse where, allegedly, vast numbers of the poor were virtually imprisoned, like Oliver Twist, on near-starvation rations. This is not how it was at all, says Kerr.
Choosing not to challenge Dickens' description of life in the poorhouses with any evidence, Kerr prefers his favourite technique of diminishing by sleight of adjective, arguing that there were "only" a million paupers in 1849, and "only" 750,000 in 1892. "Only" 93,000 of these were able bodied, and "only" 26,000 of these were in workhouses, the rest of the poorhouse population being the old, the mentally ill or others who could not live in the community.
Nor does Kerr venture anywhere near the political purpose the workhouses served. They were not a humanitarian safety net. They were a crucial means of forcing people, reluctant to work in the hell of the new factories, to enter the industrial labour force.
The new Poor Law did this by ending all relief other than through the workhouses, by paying the workhouse inmates less than the absolute minimum of the market wage, by penal discipline, by inadequate food, by separating husbands from wives and children from parents. The Poor Law Act of 1834 was an inhumane statute that starved, stigmatised and punished the poor.
Modern times
When Kerr applies his lessons from the Industrial Revolution to modern history, the performance, high in self-confident assertion, continues to fail in the execution. Having proven Engels wrong on capitalism in 1844, Kerr celebrates by tracing this original error of Marxism throughout the succeeding history of Marxism's misdiagnosis of capitalist economic health.
Admittedly, there was apparent life given to the Marxist snake-oil in Russia in 1917, and during the Great Depression of the '30s, but the overarching trend has been "that capitalism was raising living standards all round".
So we should not trouble ourselves over such little matters as the major economic depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, the plentiful recessions following the post-World War II economic boom, the imperialist wars, the sink of poverty that swallows the majority of the world's population or the ecological carnage.
No, what Kerr wants us to learn from the Industrial Revolution is the value of "the work ethic and belief in self-reliance", which was so important in making industrial capitalism the paradise that it was and which is so lacking in contemporary capitalism, especially "since welfare assistance has come to be viewed in the present century as a right, and circumstances creating eligibility for it as outside the control of the individual".
Such distressing welfare dependency — bludging on welfare and then blaming the system for your own failings — is sapping the muscular spirit of hard work and individualism.
Not that welfare is to be entirely dismissed — Kerr is not the heartless capitalist of Dickensian myth. Waving the magic wand of "private", Kerr can make even welfare sparkling and clean. Private charities and mutual aid friendly societies are the 19th century models that he would like to see revived to resist the obnoxious "tax-funded state pensions" and other government welfare handouts.
We must "shift the responsibility for welfare from the state back to civil society" — workers must provide for their own ill-health and retirement, the family must care for children, private fee-paying education should replace the "nationalisation of the school system". The Order of the Oddfellows is the way of the future!
The rhetorical temperature continues to rise as Kerr warms to his theme — alerting us to the perils of the "collectivist drive for state welfare", poverty lines, the emotive thuggery of "social justice" (he holds these words in tongs to avoid the risk of infection).
The Industrial Revolution, by contrast, was a triumph of individual freedom — economic, political and intellectual. It was nothing less than "an early and major episode in the story of human emancipation".
Questions of legitimacy
What Kerr is doing is not new. The conservative rewriting of the Industrial Revolution to serve ideological ends has a long history, resurfacing whenever capitalism is desperate to re-establish its legitimacy in the face of economic grimness and human suffering. It keeps coming back like one of those big, plastic knock-me-down toys with the silly grins, which always bounces back up no matter how often you hit it down.
The knockout punch to the Industrial Revolution whitewashers is their inability to explain why, if the Industrial Revolution was such a boon to working people, there were such intense and persistent bouts of desperate protest and bitter resistance.
Agitators and demagogues, perhaps? Rent-a-crowd? Or workers, in their millions and at the risk of jail or death, pushed by economic distress and intolerable political disenfranchisement to engage in "collective bargaining by riot" over the price of bread in 1795, breaking the machines in the Luddite revolt of 1815, joining illegal trade unions in 1824, storming and burning the workhouses in 1834, signing the massive (3.3 million signatures, six miles long) Chartist petition for political reform in 1842, joining the strikes, armed insurrections and monster demonstrations that accompanied Chartism.
To Kerr, all this is inexplicable.
To Marx and Engels, it was the logical outcome of opposing class interests. To turn capital into profit, labour power is essential. The working class are at once the indispensable source of wealth for the capitalists and a drain on their profits.
Thus the intense exploitation of the working class through starvation wages and long hours, especially during the first seven decades of the Industrial Revolution. Thus the seven-year-old boys working 15 hours a day in monotonous toil with fingers cut off and limbs crushed in machinery in the hell of the iron foundries.
Kerr merely deafens himself by the volume of his own revisionist rhetoric in his attempt to prepare the ground ideologically for further union bashing and welfare stripping. With Marx, on the other hand, the technical progress of the Industrial Revolution (minus its exploitation of people and environment) coupled with the human progress of the socialist revolution, will really be something to sing about.