people are not machines, and they don’t like being treated as such. By inducing millions of people to take up factory work and creating a social order in which those millions’ physical survival depended upon their doing such work for most of their waking hours, industrial capitalism created a state of affairs deeply inconsistent with the requirements of human flourishing—and, not unrelatedly, a highly unstable one at that.
…In pursuing the technical efficiency of mass production regardless of its human costs, the class system created by industrial capitalism divided people along very stark lines: those who work with their brains and those who work with their bodies; those who command and those who obey; those who are treated as full-fledged human beings and those who are treated as something less.
I spent two summers working in a plant that produced speakers for sound systems for buildings (think of the music piped in at shopping malls). A lot of the work was with materials that probably were dangerous to one’s lungs, including jute and fiberglass. Maybe my chronic cough comes from that. Otherwise, the work was not as rote as Lindsey depicts, and even when it was rote the time would pass reasonably well. On the plus side, there was no office politics, no ambitious co-workers stabbing you in the back or trying to steal credit for your ideas. But on net, I would tend to agree with Lindsey that we should be happy to see old-fashioned manufacturing production work phase out.
The last time I looked, which was a few years ago, the share of manufacturing production workers (as opposed to managers and supervisors) in the labor force was down to just over 5 percent. Fifty years ago, I believe it was more than 20 percent.
The erstwhile working class has moved in two directions. One direction is white-collar work. However, the other direction is non-employment. To address the latter, Lindsey offers this:
A more humane economy, and a more inclusive prosperity, is possible. For example, new technologies hold out the possibility of a radical reduction in the average size of economic enterprises, creating the possibility of work that is more creative and collaborative at a scale convivial to family, community, and polis. All that hold us back are inertia and a failure of imagination—and perhaps a fear of what we have not yet experienced. There is a land of milk and honey beyond this wilderness, if we have the vision and resolve to reach it.
To me, this sounds like the sort of utopian hope that we held for the Internet twenty years ago. As I pointed out in several posts a week ago, the reality has recently seemed to differ.
To me, this sounds like the sort of utopian hope that we held for the Internet twenty years ago.
Well, I still the Internet has not been a failure for sure but yes the utopian hopes did not come to pass. Probably the worst aspect of the diminished working class of 50 years ago, is long term family formation is exceptionally slowing down and local church/governments are diminishing.
For example, new technologies hold out the possibility of a radical reduction in the average size of economic enterprises, creating the possibility of work that is more creative and collaborative at a scale convivial to family, community, and polis.
Yeah, the idea that displaced factory workers are all going to become artisanal hand soap makers and thrive in some sort of medieval-localist craft economy but powered by the internet seems like wishful thinking in the extreme.
In a manner he rages against modernity. That’s happening a lot these days in many spheres. In this instance, I refer Micheal 1938 Phillips’ ‘The Most Important Book in Human History’ in which he discusses the importance of commerce in creating the modern world. Phillips is the guy who came up with the Mastercard concept. He breaks commerce into three forms, trade, clientry (lifetime relationship services) and industry. Industry being the defining one for modernity with its organized effort to improve efficiency and reduce the market price of goods and services. The very nature of work that is creative and collaborative is inefficiency and higher cost. Worth it for those who can develop new products for production, but at some point, you have to start producing a lot with the design on the board. And production means someone is bending, drilling, machining, extruding, assembling, testing, etc. thousands of parts or finished units without getting creative or collaborating. Artisanal is an expensive luxury if it is not just marketing.
And the division is not between “those who work with their brains and those who work with their bodies;” but rather those who produce words, written or spoken and those whose work expresses itself through their hands and result in a tangible product. There, of course, can be work that is a mixture, but those who are not good with words are the ones being left behind by the “knowledge” economy.
Is this sort of harsh criticism of capitalism commonplace at Niskanen? Makes me wonder if the criticism of that institution is not actually quite accurate.
Anyway, same issue with virtually all criticisms of industrial capitalism: is ut somehow ‘ore human’ to toil away on the brink of starvation on a small farm in a rural pre-capitalist society?
Brink Lindsey is presenting Marxism, dressed up a bit.
What is “industrial capitalism”? Does that differ from “agricultural capitalism”, or just “capitalism”? What is the alternative that Lindsey has in mind?
Capitalism is the individual ownership of productive property, the broad freedom to use it, and the private ownership of any surplus created. The alternative is ownership by state committee (or elaborate rules to that effect) and central planning. That has been tried many times, in different countries and cultures, and has always failed.
Lindsey sees a better way, where people work in fulfilling jobs that respect their entire characters. He should make millions (and give it all to the workers or to charity) by implementng the organizations which will do this, now. If he can’t, or won’t, and can’t find others to do it in collaboration, then he is expelling hot air.
Motto: I don’t know how to do it better, but I could if I set myself to it. Those others should be doing it better right now. You do it and I’ll identify the failings.
Unknown: Work doesn’t have to be fun. That’s why we call it work.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do6wp9Vydys
Thomas Sowell – 3 Questions for the Left
[edited] Thomas Sowell asks three questions of the left, saying it is rare that the answers are presented. This video considers the housing market crash in 2008 and challenges both the Right and Left. Asking honest questions is the only way of ensuring you remain objective. The radical left today appears to run into difficulty when those questions are asked.
Always ask: Compared to what? At what cost? What is your evidence?
“creating the possibility of work that is more creative and collaborative at a scale convivial to family, community, and polis.”
Most people aren’t very creative. And even among the creative, many lack the ambition or conscientiousness to make a living off of creativity. Moreover, the most successful “creative types” are workaholics who are usually not doing much for their family or community, at least directly.
I think Buchanan was correct that most people are afraid to be free. They don’t want responsibility, they want comfort and security. The masses don’t want to be entrepreneurs, they want a 9-5 with a pension.
Lindsey is very far out to lunch on this one, in so many ways it’s hard to know where to start. What did industrial capitalism invent in terms of “unnatural” drudgery that wasn’t commonplace for millenia in the life of peasants, most of which could only dream of any kind of individualistic liberation. Even a freeholding yeoman farmer could expect constant, rigorous labor without much opportunity for mental activity.
Fundamentally, his whole psychological model is way off base for most of the population. Intellectual self-actualization will always be the province of a tiny minority. There are plenty of formerly blue collar workers who wax nostalgically about their days working on some mind-numbing task “on the line”, but knowing they were “building actual tangible things”, e.g., cars, or buildings, or steel. The creativity involved in, say, finding a loophole to get around a compliance difficulty, would not appeal to them.
The capacity to reconcile with the annoyances and frustrations of ones labor and derive some kind of satisfaction from ones work derives in large part from a feeling of “dignity” which itself relies on the esteem and respect one obtains from ones reference social group. If working allows one to be a desirable breadwinner and support a family, a social position that is rewarded with community prestige, then one will experience a boost in motivation and pride sufficient to compensate psychologically for the need to conform to the needs of employment.
That is why society once preserved a norm regarding the dignity of labor. It does no one any good to demean these sorts of tasks and working conditions (in comparison with the preferences of high status intellectual workers) when the majority of the population is simply not suited to doing anything else as productive in terms of what they can earn in market compensation. That makes people feel like miserable losers, and makes taking orders and disciplincing ones impulses an intolerably frustrating and humiliating experience. That’s just going to encourage marginal young men to drop out, shift to “cad over dad” equilibrium, and try living in their parents’ basements, or mooching off girlfriends, or to dabble in crime.
Work needs to pay not just in money, but in status. And what Lindsey is doing, whether he understands it or not, is helping to push down the status of something that needs propping up.
Agree and well said.
“That’s just going to encourage marginal young men to drop out, shift to ‘cad over dad’ equilibrium, and try living in their parents’ basements, or mooching off girlfriends, or to dabble in crime.”
I get the feeling that, for many of the cognitive elite, these effects are implicitly viewed as features, not bugs.
I would venture that, to the progressive mind, a family-forming, gratification-deferring, marketable-skills possessing, productively employed, non-addicted working class is far from an unalloyed good. After all, if the unenlightened have sufficient social capital to organize their own rescue operations in the Houston flood, they might also have sufficient social capital to offer effective opposition to Obama’s bathroom mandates and similarly vital items on the social justice agenda.
The funny and important thing is that BoBos tend to have all those attributes. Their families may be formed later and have fewer children, but they are also more durable and stable, with high investment into child-rearing geared towards maximizing life opportunities and instilling the values necessary for success. It just has to be done under the quasi-hypocritical cover of contrary progressive values.
My impression is that the BoBos don’t hypocritically deprecate those attributes, but regard them as dangerously power-enhancing – therefore, those personal attributes should be diminished among those regarded as “unevolved” and reserved to those who can be trusted to use the resulting wealth and power for “good.” Not unlike the way progressives do not object to gun ownership in the context of security companies protecting Steven Spielberg.
Brinks dichotomy between mental labor and manual labor is simplistic. Even the most routine and repetitive factory work possesses a mental element. Moreover, these factory jobs become more and more automated with time, thus requiring the remaining factory workers to use more mental labor and less physical labor.