The Wonderful Machine Age: Socialists, Communists, and Labor Unions

“In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. … Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability… Labour [is] unavoidably become dishonourable, as being evidence of poverty.”

Thorstein Veblen coined the terms “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The above quote, taken from the chapter, “Conspicuous Leisure”, points out the goal of every Victorian middle-class gentleman: to have so much money he needn’t work and was therefore able to buy whatever his heart desired.

The fabulous wealth generated by industry during the Machine Age spawned an entire class of people who didn’t work. They lived off their “living” and displayed their wealth in the most ostentatious manner possible.

Every coin, however, has a flip side. And while the Machine Age gave rise to a wealthy class, that wealth was generated on the backs of poorly paid laborers.

The lot of those in service was low wages, long hours, rudimentary living conditions, and the fear of being sacked with no reference.

Factory workers lost hands, arms, legs, or their lives working around machines with no safety guards. Lung disease was common amongst miners and textile workers. All in addition to receiving low wages, without any benefits.

It is reported that when the Titanic was sinking, the passageways from the lower decks were blocked to prevent any but the rich from getting a seat on the lifeboats.

When Marie Antoinette supposedly uttered those famous words, “let them eat cake”, it wasn’t because she was mean—it was because she genuinely thought the peasants had simply run out of bread and didn’t want to eat the cake they had. Ignorance of the plight of the peasant didn’t prove to be bliss in her case. And the lack of concern for how the middle class and the wealthy got their money at the beginning of the Machine Age, gave rise to powerful political and social dynamics that are still with us, long after the Machine Age came to an end.

Labor Unions

To improve working conditions, workers began to organize. In the US, the National Labor Union was founded in 1866. It was not overly successful and disbanded in 1874. It did, however, pave the way for more successful unions, such as the many railroad unions, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World.

In Britain, unions were legalized in 1871 and were responsible for the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 to represent their interests in the government.

The story of the labor movement is too long to be told here. The significance of the movement to my mind was it’s largely successful attempt to get a bigger piece of the pie for workers. The people who produced the goods that generated the wealth for the Leisure Class, we’re entitled to a fair wage, fair benefits, and safe working conditions.

All of which we take for granted today. Fair wages, fair benefits, and safe working conditions are no longer up for discussion. They are now the norm and I think that is good. The laborer is worthy of his hire, the New Testament says. And it took labor unions to make honest Christians of many industrialists.

The scene in the movie Metropolis where the hero, the naive son of a wealthy industrialist, sees the factory workers, portrayed as automatons, and then himself works at a machine, I think tells it all.

Socialism

The horror that was so often the late 19th century and early 20th century workplace and the wasteful opulence of the minority Leisure Class versus the majority Working Class, gave rise to Socialism — a social and economic system advocating social ownership or control of the means of production and the replacement of production for profit with production for use.

A socialist economy eschews the accumulation of capital and favors a system whereby goods are produced to satisfy individual and social needs.

Various forms of Socialism existed prior to the Machine Age. The form in which we see it today began as the Industrial Revolution ramped up the production of goods and successful business owners and industrialists grew rich, along with investors who didn’t work for a living. The notion that wealth should be shared by all gained adherents amongst the working class. How the working class should get their fair share was not universally agreed upon. But that they were entitled to more than what they were getting was universally agreed upon by Socialists.

The income tax (usually in a progressive form), worker-owned businesses, cooperatives, minimum wage, “free” public education (paid for by taxes), and “free” healthcare (paid for by taxes) are all ideas based on Socialist ideals.

Communism

Like Socialism, Communism existed in many forms prior to the Industrial Revolution. Vladimir Lenin advocated a particularly violent form of socialism which had its origins in the thought of Louis Auguste Blanqui, where a small band of revolutionaries should seize the government and then use the power of the state to enforce Socialism.

Lenin blended Blanqui’s views with those of Karl Marx to form the social-political-economic theories of the Communist Party. Marxism-Leninism has characterized the thought of Communists since the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Rising out of the Machine Age, Communism produced or was responsible for a multitude of horrors in the 20th Century. Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Nikolai Ceausescu, Kim Jong-il, Mao Zedong, and we must always remember Adolf Hitler rose to power in part as a crusader against Communism.

Some Thoughts

The Industrial Revolution and the Machine Age which followed were perhaps the greatest catalysts for social and political change since the invention of farming, which turned humans from wandering hunter-gatherers into civilization builders.

The Machine Age accelerated the urbanization of the Western world. Most people today live in cities and their sprawling suburbs and think their food comes from a store. They have little connection to the earth. How can they surrounded as they are by concrete, glass, asphalt, steel, plywood, and particle board? Is it any wonder people have little concept of what it means to protect the environment? Or why consumerism runs rampant, fueled by governments seeking economic growth? Growth which succeeds because people are no longer in touch with the earth, only the greed of their primal hunter-gatherer natures.

The Machine Age resulted in wonderful inventions which have enriched our lives — but it also had a dark side: dehumanization. I think this is in part why we have noir films and literature, why dissonance in art music became so prevalent from the 1920s onward, why totalitarianism became a reality in the ‘20s and ‘30s and continues in our democratic societies today as governments extensively monitor their citizens. And perhaps an even more insidious form of totalitarianism has arisen in the Digital Age with corporations such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon monitoring everything we do in order to try to control our behavior — all so someone can sell us something. Max Headroom?

Labor Unions, Socialism, Communism, and even Fascism and Nazism were all attempts to deal with the dark side of the Machine Age. And they did, with mixed results.

Today’s world has been built on yesterday’s and done so with mixed results.

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The Wonderful Machine Age: Mass Marketing/Consumerism

Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair … because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity… One chanced … to say unto them, ‘What will ye buy?’

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678. His description of Vanity Fair predates the Industrial Revolution by eight decades and the Machine Age by two centuries. And yet nothing characterizes the Machine Age and the Modern Era so much as the question, “What will ye buy?”

Mass marketing and the accompanying Consumerism began in The Machine Age. And as it began, so did the hue and cry arise for us to return to a simpler life and eschew the call to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” Writers such as John Burroughs, David Greyson, Edward Bok, Ralph Borsodi, and Theodore Roosevelt wrote books and articles and gave speeches extolling the virtues of a life without “stuff”. And all the while the Ad Men appealed to our sense of need.

I know for myself there is life before iPad and life with iPad. I confess, I prefer life with iPad. Although I could live without the iPad, it would be much more difficult to dispense with the world wide web altogether. I’ve become used to having volumes of information at my fingertips that would have been difficult for even my local research librarian to glean a mere 40 years ago.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca, very much a voice for our age, counseled his friend that wealth was not in and of itself bad. What was bad was thinking we can’t live without it or that we should have it.

With stuff comes anxiety and the modern age is filled with anxiety. Thoreau’s image of the man pulling a massive barn-sized wagon down the road with all of his worldly possessions piled high in it comes to mind. There is something a whole lot simpler about a backpack.

How then did Mass Marketing and Consumerism arise? They arose out of the scale of production and the means to produce tens of thousands of an item, whereas previously only a hundred or two had been produced. They arose out of the dreams of our Victorian ancestors of what constituted progress and plenty.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were generally produced at home or in small shops. What today we call cottage industries. Local artisans and craftsmen produced goods to order in addition to what they produced for themselves. The extra money helped to supplement what was produced on the farm.

For example, in the American Revolution muskets and rifles were produced by hand. The British government contracted with gunsmiths to produce a certain number of weapons in a given period of time. An agent then went to the gunsmith’s place of business, collected the weapons, and paid the smith. The same was done for uniforms before the big textile mills were built.

The process was slow and costly. Production of goods was often secondary to the main livelihood of the producer, which was usually farming. With the advent of steam power and the invention of machines to manufacture goods, the scale of production went up. Instead of maybe ten or twenty pairs of socks a cottage industry could produce by hand, the mills could produce ten or twenty thousand in the same period of time or less.

This, however, caused a problem for the manufacturer. He simply had too many items on his hands. The cost to him to produce a thousand was often greater per item than to produce ten thousand. The economics of scale gives us a lower cost per item the more we produce because it is cheaper to buy in bulk than singly. So what was a manufacturer to do with the extra goods? Enter the Ad Man and the Salesman and the call, “What will ye buy?”

An interesting article is “The Commercial Christmas”, which gives a quick look at how the Victorians commercialized the holiday. And by 1890 editorials were appearing in The Ladies Home Journal complaining of Christmas being too commercial.

Today we have, through the world wide web, everything at our fingertips and ad agencies convince us we just can’t live without _________ (you fill in the blank). The amount of consumer debt is frightening. In the US, as of 31 March 2015, household debt was $11.85 trillion. Of that credit card debt was $684 billion. And as of the end of 2013 28% of Americans had more credit card debt than savings and only 51% had more emergency savings than credit card debt. And this doesn’t include other debt, such as school loans, car loans, and mortgages.

Consumerism is alive and well. Every government in the Western World worries when consumers stop spending and every developing country’s government  tries to figure out how to get its people to buy. The modern world is built on consumerism.

So why don’t we see more of this in our retro-future novels? Clearly the Steampunk and Dieselpunk real life worlds saw the beginning of mass marketing and consumerism and were in large part formed by them.

Is it a case, perhaps as with television, they are so much with us we see no fictional value in them?

I think of the short-lived, late ‘80s sci-fi TV show Max Headroom. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, it was a satirical and cyberpunk look at ourselves “20 minutes into the future”. The first episode, entitled “Blipverts”, explored mass marketing. [Spoiler alert here.] People were mysteriously exploding. It was discovered that Network 23 was using high-intensity commercials which had the ability to overload people’s nervous systems, causing them to explode.

Of interest is that the atmosphere of Max Headroom was about as depressingly noir as one can get. I think it was cyberpunk at its finest.

Surely there is something in this the steampunk or dieselpunk writer can use. After all both steampunk and dieselpunk are children of cyberpunk. I see both subgenres ignoring major expanses of territory which need to be explored. Where is the inventiveness of Jules Verne and H G Wells? Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Fritz Lang (the movie Metropolis from 1927).

Both subgenres are science fiction and from my observation (of my own work too), both have degenerated into using highly selective tropes to produce works which are simply mysteries or romances or adventure yarns set in an alternative historical universe. There is nothing wrong with this. I just think there is so much more. Something like “Blipverts”.

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