[Hplusroadmap] Fwd: [luf-team] The Real Evolution of the Industrial Age

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 8, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Subject: [luf-team] The Real Evolution of the Industrial Age
To: luf-team at yahoogroups.com


An interesting article on the misconceptions of Industrial Age and
economic history and another example of someone arriving at the
conclusions of the Post-Industrial paradigm from another very
different angle. Saw this mentioned by Paul Illich in another forum
and thought it might be of relevance to some of the discussions here.
Definitely backs up a lot of my own conclusions and understanding of
Industrial Age cultural evolution.

http://lakis.typepad.com/city_of_the_future/2008/04/why-everything.html

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com

Why Everything You Think You Know About Modern Society is Wrong (and
Why it Matters When Thinking About Peak Oil)
Over the past two hundred years, certain vested interests in the
industrialized world have promoted a particular narrative about the
nature of technology, development, economics and modern society.
Eventually that narrative became so widely accepted that today it is
virtually impossible to have an economic or political discussion
outside its frame of reference. The pervasiveness of this narrative
is, I have increasingly come to believe, one of the main reasons many
people have difficulty accepting the reality and imminence of peak
oil.

It is also the main reason proposed "solutions" to the problem—from
the liberal "subsidize alternative fuels" approach to the conservative
conviction that we should "let the market sort it out"—are so
misguided. More surprisingly, I believe the dependency and learned
helplessness this narrative engenders is a major cause of the
fatalistic despair many so-called peak oil "doomers" feel.

What is this narrative? It's impossible to summarize without resorting
to caricature, but that's how most people know it anyway. The story
goes something like this:

Before about two hundred and fifty years ago, the vast majority of
human beings lived lives that were, in Hobbes' words, "nasty, brutish
and short." But in the late 18th century, a series of innovations
arose in Britain—paradigmatically represented by James Watt's steam
engine—that, dramatically increased that country's wealth through
mechanization, automation, centralization and vast economies of scale.
Industrialization eventually spread to the United States, Continental
Europe and eventually the world.

There was a cost to this revolution, however; conditions in the new
factories ("dark satanic mills" as Blake called them) were atrocious.
Child labor was rampant, working hours were excruciating and worker
housing was cramped and diseased. These conditions (best illustrated
in the work of Dickens or later in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) were
so bad that over time, the government passed laws to protect workers
and regulate the workplace. In early 20th century America this trend
was encapsulated in the Progressive movement, which itself gave rise
to modern liberalism through FDR's New Deal in the 1930s and later
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the 60s.

For liberals, the "safety net" these programs provided, along with a
host of consumer protection and other laws, served as a check on the
ravages of the kind of "unfettered capitalism" which arose in the 19th
century.

For conservatives, "unfettered" was the good thing about 19th century
capitalism. However poor factory working conditions were, they argued,
they must have been better than life in the countryside, or the
workers would have never come to work. (The same argument is made
today in defense of third-world sweatshops). In the end, the rising
tide of free market prosperity lifts all boats, (though it may lift
some more than others); it's taxes and legislation that drain the
economy and actually impoverish everyone.

Both sides implicitly agree that presently existing capitalism is best
described as a free market system which is, for better or worse,
checked by government regulations.

The major problem with this description, as author Kevin Carson
convincingly argues in two recent books, is that it's totally false.
Modern day capitalism is manifestly not a free market, but a system
created and sustained by massive central government interventions in
the economy. As such, not only would it not thrive in the absence of
government intervention, it would collapse without it.

Carson, a self-described Free Market Anti-Capitalist of the Mutualist
tradition, has earned a reputation for himself in both anarchist and
libertarian circles by attacking liberalism, conservatism and what he
calls "vulgar libertarianism,"—which, he argues, has lost all
connection to libertarianism's true, radical origins and has become
little more than a shill for corporate hegemony.

In his two books, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, and
Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective (a work in
progress) Carson describes in detail how, far from being the
antagonist of presently existing capitalism, government was from the
beginning the instrument of its triumph. The examples he gives are too
numerous recount, but a few illustrations give a general picture.

To begin with, how did factory owners in the British Industrial
Revolution find such a compliant proletariat to work in such abysmal
conditions? At least part of the reason can be found in the passage of
the Acts of Enclosure, a series of laws in which traditional peasant
lands were "enclosed" and deeded to private owners, essentially
depriving countless villagers of their traditional lands. These acts
were direct successors to feudal expropriations in which ruling
classes simply claimed lands that were already occupied by peasants
and forced them to pay rent on it.

Combined with laws that restricted freedom of movement—which Carson
compares to the internal passport systems of the Soviet Union or
apartheid South Africa in the 20th century—the Acts of Enclosure
created the very conditions in the underclass that made the Industrial
Revolution possible in its historic form.

In other words, the Industrial Revolution arose as much from state
action as it did from any technological advance or supposed gain in
efficiency. In the absence of such actions, it is entirely possible
that many production innovations could have been applied at the level
of the artisan/craftsman—and history would have taken an entirely
different path.

Later, in the United States, massive state intervention created the
conditions necessary to create the "robber-baron" era in the second
half of the 19th century, through the control and manipulation of the
money system, patents, tariff barriers and transportation subsidies.

As for the 20th century, the symbiotic relationship of corporation and
government is even more obvious—though it goes strangely unnoticed by
many people. Examples include the military industrial complex, the
widespread subsidizing of transportation and communication, the
for-profit corporate benefits of government pharmaceutical and other
research, tax breaks and incentives for favored industries, the myriad
direct and indirect subsidies of suburban sprawl, agricultural
subsidies, etc.

In the absence of such overwhelming intervention, what would the
economies of industrialized nations look like? It's hard to say
exactly, but Carson makes a strong case that far from looking like the
current system on steroids, they would evolve toward something a lot
like the model advocates of relocalization promote: human-scaled,
diverse, egalitarian, community focused and local.

To those of us brought up to believe the corporate-state narrative,
this is a counter-intuitive argument to say the least. But Carson and
others provide good evidence to support it.

For example, one of the main myths of corporate-state narrative is
that of unlimited efficiencies of scale. Big is good; bigger is
better. Just think of the "always low prices" of the biggest goliath
of all, Walmart.

But apart from many other interventions, Walmart couldn't exist in its
present form without the Interstate Highway System—built, maintained
and paid for by the American public. If giant corporations were forced
to internalize costs that they typically pass onto consumers, there is
no way they could compete against smaller-scale, more local
enterprises.

As Carson sums up:

In conclusion: If we strip away all the starting assumptions of the
technocratic apologists for unlimited economy of scale, and
counterpose certain working hypotheses of our own, we come up with
this rival model of economic organization: In a decentralized economy
without subsidized transportation infrastructure, it is generally more
economical to make short production runs for local markets, using
multiple-purpose machinery. Given limited demand for any particular
product, these short production runs are likely to be in response to
demand-pull, with production being shifted to other goods when the
current demand is met. Absent the push model of creating demand for
predetermined outputs, product design is more likely to be for
durability and ease of repair, rather than planned obsolescence.
Demand is likely to be further reduced by greater reliance on
community repair and recycling centers, with even the remachining of
parts being more economical in some cases than the purchase of a new
product. Product innovation, in a demand-pull economy, is also more
likely to come about in the small shop or skunk works, with design
organized on a peer-production basis."
If Carson's analysis is correct, I believe at least two broad
conclusions can be drawn that have relevance to the issue of peak oil.

First, the widespread belief that our large-scale, energy-intensive
economy is the most efficient possible is false—even given the
availability of cheap energy.

Therefore—technocratic admonitions to the contrary—it is not
necessarily the case that a decrease in the size of the economy (as a
decline in available energy implies) must lead to a dieoff, or even a
dramatic decline in standard of living (depending on how one defines
"standard of living"). The only thing that would make a dieoff
inevitable would be government action (malicious or well-meaning) that
further distorts markets or is punitive to small-scale enterprises.
Unfortunately, as the situation with corn-based ethanol proves,
non-intervention is anything but a foregone conclusion.

As surprising a conclusion as it is for someone who has always been a
liberal, it seems increasingly apparent to me that the most important
political action citizens can take on peak oil is not to support
government-sponsored "Manhattan Project" energy programs but to resist
state interventions that could complicate the inevitable process of
relocalizing.

As for the specifics of these politics, I'll discuss some of them in a
later post.