C19th-today: A post-industrial psyche in a post-agricultural society

Here are excerpts from a thought-provoking article, which resonates for me, on how there is a new social order in the post-industrial world, just as uprooted as that created by the industrial revolution, but perhaps more psychically disoriented:

…in the first industrial era, the capitalist labour market created a different kind of humanity out of the wasting peasantry of an impoverished countryside, as people streamed towards the new industrial towns of the early 19th century. A different kind of human being, never before seen in history, was born – the industrial worker, created by the necessities of a national division of labour, which sent its children into mills, mines, forges and manufactories, to learn there a cruel pedagogy of survival. [… Many, such as Engels and George Orwell] tried to make sense of the strange and perverse character of people whose lives had long ago forsaken the cycle of seed-time and harvest, and had been remade by the harsh rhythms of industrial discipline.

In our time, the temper of industrial humanity has been dismantled, no less thoroughly than that of an archaic peasantry in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The epic disturbance in our age has dissolved a national division of labour, sent industrial work to distant countries, and left at a loss people who had never doubted their function and reason for existence…

The political vacuum has been filled by identities provided by consumer markets, in which people have searched for meaning, now that the factories have been ploughed into the earth, the great workshop of the world has fallen silent, its rusting machinery exported to distant third world factories, its products outsourced to young factory women in Mexico, Bangladesh or Indonesia…

EP Thompson called his great book The Making of the English Working Class. We have seen its undoing, and the reincarnation of the popular sensibility in a form for which no collective name exists. Whatever it is called, it represents a distinctive psychic structure from anything that preceded it. This remaking is now a fait accompli.
It remains the endeavour of conservatives of all stripes to restore the status quo ante, to place the new kind of human being into a familiar, recognisable and controllable context. This is impossible.

The “post-industrial” reality of contemporary Britain is not emancipated from industry, indeed, is even more deeply embedded within it globally, for even basic necessities in daily use are brought in from all over the world; but we look in vain if we seek continuities in the politics that grew out of derelict pit-villages, wasted city suburbs and provincial towns left high and dry by the extinction of the labour they performed.

Of the early industrial era, JL and Barbara Hammond said “the labourer is not a citizen of this or that town but a hand of this or that manufactory”. Today’s definition would be different – the people are not citizens of this or that place, but are the dependents of a global market. This change has the same irreversibility, a psyche refashioned for other, perhaps equally alien, purposes as those which drove people into the choice-less occupations of the industrial towns.

It is a rare hypocrisy that promotes an unchanged politics, when politicians themselves have sought so hard to supersede their own role by preaching the supreme virtue of market values, and then repudiating the consequences of the way these developments work themselves out in the world.

Here’s wikipedia on EP Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class -

The Making of the English Working Class (ISBN 0-140-13603-7) is an influential work of English social history, written by E. P. Thompson, a notable ‘New Left‘ historian; it was published in 1963 (revised 1968) by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and later republished at Pelican, becoming an early Open University Set Book. It concentrates on English artisan and working class society “in its formative years 1780 to 1832.”

Its tone is captured by the oft-quoted line from the preface:

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”

Thompson attempts to add a humanist element to social history, being critical of those who turn the people of the working class into an inhuman statistical bloc. These people were not just the victims of history: Thompson displays them as being in control of their own making. He also discusses the popular movements that are oft forgotten in history, such as obscure Jacobin societies like the London Corresponding Society. Thompson makes great effort to recreate the life-experience of the working class(es), which is what often marks it out as such an influential work.

Thompson uses the term “working class” rather than “classes” throughout, to emphasis the growth of a working-class consciousness. He claims in the Preface that “in the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers.”

From a book review of Thompson’s book -

The Making of the English Working Class. – book reviews
Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1994 by Robert Rossney

Before the Industrial Revolution, there really was no such thing as a “working class” in England. E. P. Thompson, who died this year, details exactly how the vast change in economic and political thinking we call “industrialization” permanently changed the social order of England.

It is a vast book Parts of it are nearly impenetrable, presuming a level of knowledge of English social and political history that most of us do not have. but most of it is compelling, and some of it is surprisingly intimate. It is as if Thompson read every scrap of writing by every man and woman alive in England between 1790 and 1820, and quoted anyone who had anything germane to say.

He had to. Even 150 years after the time he covers, Thompson’s ideas challenge many strongly held positions: that the miseries of industrialization were exceptions rather than the rule, that the rising standards of living brought by industrialization were more than adequate compensation for the temporary sufferings of the workers, that “class consciousness” was a Marxist folly. He does this by crafting a piece of historical writing whose research is unassailable. This book paints a vivid and genuine picture of chaos: the chaos of a society in transition between an old order and a new one, Thompson details the human cost and doesn’t let the people who profited from misery get away with glib rationalizations. And his book should remind us that it may be another 150 years before anyone is able to get a solid grasp on what we’re living through right now.

* From another aspect we may see the Luddite movement as transitional. We must see through the machine-breaking to the motives of the men who wielded the great hammers. As “a movement of the people’s own”, one is struck not so much by its backwardness as by its growing maturity. Far from being “primitive” it exhibited, in Nottingham and Yorkshire, discipline, and self-restraint of a high order. One can see Luddism as a manifestation of a working class culture of greater independence and complexity than any known to the 18th century. The twenty years of the illegal tradition before 181 I are years of a richness at which we can only guess; in particular in the trade union movement, new experiments, growing experience and literacy, greater political awareness, are evident on every side. Luddism grew out of this culture — the world of the benefit society, the secret ceremony and oath, the quasi-legal petition to Parliament, the craftsmen’s meeting at the house of call — with seeming inevitability. It was a transitional phase when the waters of self-confident trade unionism, dammed up by the Combination Acts, strove to break through and become a manifest and open presence.

* It is an over-simplification to ascribe the cause of the debasement of the weavers’ conditions to the power-loom. The status of the weavers had been shattered by 1813, at a time when the total number of powerlooms in the U.K. was estimated at 2,400, and when the competition of power with hand was largely psychological. The estimate of power-looms rises to 14,000 in 1820, but even then it was slow and clumsy and had not yet been adapted to the Jacquard principle, so that it was incapable of weaving difficult figured patterns. It can be argued that the very cheapness and superfluity of hand-loom labour retarded mechanical invention and the application of capital in weaving. The degradation of the weavers is very similar to that of the workers in the dishonourable artisan trades. Each time their wages were beaten down, their position became more defenceless. The weaver had now to work longer into the night to earn less; in working longer he increased another’s chances of unemployment. Even adherents of the new “political economy” were appalled. “Did Dr. A. Smith ever contemplate such a state of things?” exclaimed one humane employer, whose honourable practices were the cause of his own ruin:

It is vain to read his book to find a remedy for a complaint which he could not conceive existed, vis. 100,000 weavers doing the work of 150,000 when there was no demand (as ’tis said) and that for half meat, and the rest paid by Poor Rates, could he conceive that the profits of a Manufacture should be what one Master could wring from the hard earnings of the poor, more than another?

* It is quite possible for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions. A per capita increase in quantitative factors may take place at the same time as a great qualitative disturbance in people’s way of life, traditional relationships, and sanctions. People may consume more goods and become less happy or less free at the same time. Next to the agricultural workers the largest single group of working people during the whole period of the Industrial Revolution were the domestic servants. Very many of them were household servants, living-in with the employing family, sharing cramped quarters, working excessive hours, for a few shillings’ reward. Nevertheless, we may confidently list them among the more favoured groups whose standards (or consumption of food and dress) improved on average slightly during the Industrial Revolution. But the hand-loom weaver and his wife, on the edge of starvation, still regarded their status as being superior to that of a “flunkey”. Or again, we might cite those trades, such as coal-mining, in which real wages advanced between 1790 and 1840, but at the cost of longer hours and a greater intensity of labour, so that the breadwinner was “worn out” before the age of forty. In statistical terms, this reveals an upward curve. To the families concerned it might feel like immiseration.