World History

Unit 5: Industrialism and Nationalism

Chapter 19: The Industrial Revolution

41. Thu, Feb 6, 2014

The ideas and theories of this chapter are of inordinate significance in shaping our present-day world. Indeed, the 20th Century could be described in a sentence as a wrestling match between Adam Smith and Karl Marx. I (Mr. C) must confess, however, that I have not read any of the books by any of the authors here, except the Communist Manifesto, which while perhaps the most inspiring of Marx's works, is not fully developed, and mostly gives a cursory examination of the issues he explored fully in Das Kapital. So my discussion here has to be guided mostly by the reputation of the writers and theorists in question, along with some familiarity with what came about as a result of their ideas.

I know enough to state with certainty, however, that the book gives all the ideas here nowhere near enough time. That is almost inevitable in textbook-writing, but the summaries here manage to distort the ideas so much that they sometimes come down on the opposite side of what the men in question (note that they are indeed all men) actually advocated. This leads me to wonder if the uncommunicative committee of authors went by reputation alone as well. John Stuart Mill probably suffers the worst at their hands; while he was called a liberal, liberalism in those days was a far cry from liberalism of the present. Libertarian might be the better term; Mill felt that government had the duty to protect the rights of citizens, and it's true that he defined both rights and citizens rather more widely than others of his age — but beyond that, I've read, he felt that government needed to stay out of the way entirely. That is not exactly the impression we get from pages 507-08.

We ought to begin with Adam, however — Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. While this is yet another work that I have not read, I know that the book's summary is true, if only broadly. Certainly Smith formulated the law of supply and demand, but Smith was also well aware of ways in which both supply and demand could manipulated, and probably was not as laissez-faire as many since would like to think. Smith's ideas of free markets and free enterprise were and remain hugely influential, however, and in many a way are the bedrock of our current economic system. If some have put too much stock in his ideas (so to speak), or misinterpreted him, then that is not really his fault.

Both he and Jeremy Bentham, however, put forward and popularized ideas of bettering life for as many people as possible, which you will note places happiness and prosperity front and center, rather intrinsic rules of right and wrong. This shifted the playing field rather dramatically. The most basic right that Bentham regards is not justice or wisdom or ethics but happiness — and that is a far cry from the ethic of salvation that essentially governed the world for the majority of the Christian era. Utilitarianism still comes up in many ideas and discussions of policy and politics, as you may note. There's still a little of the early utopian socialism in modern-day liberals, socialists, and progressives; there's also a fair amount of utilitarianism in the free-market ideology advocated by many on the political right.

But then we come to Karl Marx. It's important to note that while Marx's ideas may to a degree reflect and resemble utilitarianism, Marx himself would say that he was not advocating the greatest good for the greatest number. A man who did a lot of work in absolutes, Marx in fact saw his works not as prescriptions but as descriptions — in other words, he wasn't writing what he thought should happen, but what would happen, inevitably. (He would probably respond to the caption-writer on page 511 by saying, "It has avoided worldwide revolution so far.") It's also crucial to understand that Marx would probably loathe the "communist" countries of the 20th and 21st century. Communist China and Vietnam have now embraced capitalism so enthusiastically that they are having major labor problems, while Marx would certainly dismiss North Korea as a despotism founded on cult of personality, not on his theories. Just as we cannot hold Smith responsible for the excesses of those who have followed him, we cannot blame Marx for the pseudo-socialist dicatorships that sprang up in his name. It's worth noting that even the Soviet Union, in one of its more honest phases, acknowledged that it was not, in fact, a communist country going by Marx's definition; the state wasn't withering, but growing.

It's also crucial to understand the appeal of Marx in his own time. Knowing what we know about Stalin's gulags it's hard to see the appeal of communism today, and the book seems to fall into the same trap, hastening about as quickly as it can to remind us that authoritarian socialism ignores human rights. But recall that Marx was writing in an age when the state was invariably on the side of the upper classes against the lower ones, and so saying that the state would eventually "wither away" would be enormously popular with strikers getting bludgeoned by police; recall that Marx was writing about the workers taking control of the factories and everyone getting what they needed and no more when workers saw the factories they worked in churning out products they could never buy, and the lion's share of the profits going to a man who might never even set foot on the factory floor. Marxism is, to modern eyes, synonymous with loss of property and individualism, and those are reasonable critiques. But Marx was writing for people who were losing their property and individualism (to say nothing of their lives) to capitalism as it was, and many people who read him saw socialism as an improvement.

No matter where you stand on the issue — be you Smith's most laissez-faire disciple, or agree with Marx that the history of the world is the history of class warfare — these principles have governed the world ever since, and it is important to note that, by and large, Smith's ideas or a version thereof have prevailed. For those who felt shut out by that, Marxism has always provided the most critical and compelling critique.

• Last week it was all about racism; this time, Mr. C's Injustice of the Week is classism. How was it that the lower classes could be treated so poorly? How was the idea of a "lower" class even thought up (as opposed to a "laboring" class)? What ideas played a role in allowing the suffering of the factories to go on unchecked?
• Malthus gets a quick mention; considering the world is now at seven billion people, many of them living in abject poverty, was he simply ahead of his time? Can we agree with him now?
• How do those good old Roman principles play out in these class conflicts? Who had auctoritas? Potestas? Vis?
• "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Knowing what you now know about the ideas of the Industrial Age, who do you think said that? Do you agree with these words? Why or why not?

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