The term "industrial revolution" implies a vast transformation of the economy and society that began in Britain in the 18th c. and spread throughout Europe and other areas of the world during the following centuries. It refers to the process of transformation of agricultural societies into industrial societies. In this process, the multiplication of production based on new technologies supported a growing population, allowed the urbanization of society and expanded European political power.
1. Factors of the industrial revolution
a) Population growth. During the pre-industrial time, population increase was limited by the growth of agricultural productivity. Population was constrained by the limit of the available food: beyond that limit, subsistence mortality appeared. The size of the population is important for the creation of an industrial market: the fall in price of the different products, and subsequently the fall in the cost of living is only possible when the market has reached a size enough to absorb a growing supply. Thus, economic development is limited by population growth, and this is impossible without an increasing agricultural production.
b) Agricultural revolution. Technological innovations were used to obtain the multiplication of food production: new machines, new crops. Certain authors underline the importance of the efficiency of distribution through better integrated markets and an international trade system that ensured food supplies.
c) Trade and communications. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Great Britain developed a profitable international trade system that constituted the basis for an early accumulation of capital. British trade capital was easily invested in new technologies and industries. On the other hand, Great Britain was an integrated market at the end of the 18th c., since domestic customs and barriers had disappeared. Goods and services circulated freely, thanks to an efficient communications network -channels and roads.
2. New industries, sources of energy and organizational methods
The invention of the steam engine in 1765 by James Watt was the most important technological innovation and the energy basis of the first industrial revolution. Steam engines used coal to boil water and to create steam, which powers different machines for multiple purposes through a piston that turned a wheel. Textile industry and communications (trains, ships) used extensively the new engine, which resulted in greater productivity and faster means of transport.
Cotton industry. A strong cotton demand favoured the inventions that mechanized the cotton textile industry (spinning and weaving). In 1733 John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which speeded up the weaving process. This stimulated the demand for thread1, which favoured mechanical weaving: in 1785 Cartwright invented a power loom. The advantage of all these inventions lies on the fact that the price of the manufacture is cheaper when the productivity and production are greater.
Iron and steel. Cheaper iron and steel was produced thanks to technological progress, above all better and bigger blast furnaces and a more powerful and cheaper coal -coke. Coke was used by Abraham Darby for the first time in 1709. In 1794 Henry Cort invented a new method of making better iron, more resistant and free from impurities, called "puddling". Afterwards, in 1856, Bessemer invented a converter that transformed iron into steel in a furnace. Iron and steel became the main component of the new structures of buildings and means of transport.
Means of transport. George Stephenson invented the first steam-powered locomotive in 1815. The first railway was built in 1825 between Stockton and Darlington in England, and the first passenger railways connected Manchester and Liverpool in 1829. The capacity of trains and steamships to carry rapidly bigger and heavier cargoes lowered the costs of transportation. The quick development of new transportation structures, above all railroads, supported the demand of iron and steel. European railroad networks expanded during the 19th c., connecting distant regions and favouring market integration.
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The factory. The key method of production in the industrial revolution was the factory. The factory system is different from the pre-industrial organization, firstly because it implies a tightened control of the workers by the manager. Work discipline and rhythm is imposed by the machine and the needs of production, not any longer by seasons, weather or the sun. Secondly, workers are mere wage earners that sell their work and depend on the entrepreneurs. Machinery becomes so expensive that a factory can be created only after a substantial accumulation of capital.
3. The second industrial revolution. Industrial capitalism
Energy. After 1870 new sources of energy appeared, replacing those of the first industrial revolution. Electricity from hydroelectric plants was used for all kind of applications: communications (telephone, invented by Graham Bell, telegraph by Marconi), public and private lighting (electric bulb created by Edison), transport (trams). Oil began to be used for the new internal combustion engine, a creation of Diesel and the basis for the car industry.
New industries. Chemical (explosives, fertilizers, artificial fibres, etc.), electric (General Electric, AEG, Siemens, Philips), food (canning).
Mass production. The factory production system evolved towards an unprecedented division of labour: unskilled workers made only a small part of the final product. The result was the improvement of speed and productivity. Henry Ford introduced the assembly line to automobile production in 1913, which allowed him to produce millions of cheap cars (half of the world production).
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Corporations. New entrepreneurial organizations emerged: the corporation became the most common form of business organization in industrial societies. The capital of a corporation is divided into shares or stocks. Investors receive dividends in proportion to their shares, although their responsibility is limited to their investment. The objective of the corporation is to attract capital from different sources, enough to make business possible.
Some big businesses tried to eliminate competition through the creation of monopoles or associations of enterprises. They could control industry through vertical concentration: a single corporation or a group of enterprises dominates the production process. For instance, the Standard Oil Company of John D. Rockefeller controlled drilling, processing, refining, marketing and distribution of oil in the USA. Competition could also be eliminated through horizontal concentration, the cooperation of different companies of the same business: the cartel. Cartels fixed prices and production.
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4. Social transformations
Industrialization changed the social patterns and the models of social organization. Before the industrial revolution society was mainly rural, agriculture was the main source of wealth and employed most of labour force. Ancient regime's society was based on the power of the privileged classes, which enjoyed a special legal status and were at the same time the largest landowners. Industrialization created new social classes and gave the economic power to a new group of bourgeois (entrepreneurs, businessmen, bankers, etc.). The bourgeois morality and expectations, based on the accumulation of wealth, substituted those of the old aristocracy, based on honour and the acquired rights of birth. On the other hand, the multiplication of production implied the enlargement of wealth, which became accessible for an increasing middle class. Middle classes became very influential in the bourgeois society, since they constituted a large market; they were also considered as a social reference.
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On the other hand, a new working class emerged. Workers depended on the wages earned at the factory and were subjected to the discipline imposed by the production and the entrepreneur. Since the application of the principles of economic liberalism implied freedom of salary and labour without intervention of the State, there were no limits for child work or labour exploitation (too many working hours, poor wages, no social protection for unemployment, retirement or sickness).
5. The organization of the workers
a) The beginnings
The first associations of workers, created in Great Britain, sought limited working hours and the improvement of salaries and labour conditions. At the beginning these aspirations were seen reluctantly by the governments as a distortion of the free market, and declared illegal. Afterwards, the recognition of the right of association allowed workers to create the first trade unions in order to improve their social and economic conditions.
Next step was to add political demands to socio-economic questions. The first worker movement asking for political rights was chartism. In a document called People's Charter, written in 1838, chartists asked the British House of Commons for universal suffrage and a more flexible electoral system to facilitate the presence of worker representatives at the Parliament. Other expressions of social thought had a more comprehensive approach. Utopian Socialists wanted to found a new society on the basis of the eradication of all inequalities. Robert Owen or Charles Fourier built communities where production and work were organized out of any competitive capitalist objective, stressing education and cooperation.
The failure of the first attempts to transform capitalist society led to new approaches: Anarchism and Marxism.
b) Marxism
Karl Marx assessed in his work Capital the inequalities of the European society of the 19th century, and concluded that capitalism created two antagonistic classes, the workers or the proletariat, who were exploited by the bourgeoisie and had but their work to sell, and the capitalists, who owned all means of production (industries, capital) and consequently the industrial production. Exploitation is benefit based on the difference between the prize of a product and the wage paid to the worker who made it.
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The political, economic and social framework of the liberal State constituted for Marx the main support of the capitalist class. The proletariat needed to realize its conditions of exploitation and to react against them. In the Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels predicted that the structure of capitalism led inevitably to its own destruction. When the situation of the workers were intolerable, the socialist revolution would take place spontaneously, and then the proletariat would control the State in order to abolish private property and all the repressive structure of capitalism -the dictatorship of the proletariat. Once attained the objective of destruction of the bourgeois society, the State would disappear and communist society would take place: a society without classes, State or inequalities.
Manifesto of the Communist Party (K. Marx, Friedrich Engels, 1848)
A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? (.)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (.)
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious.
(.) Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
c) Anarchism
Mikhail Bakunin focuses his analysis on the nature of individual freedom, which is only possible in the context of a complete lack of coercion or authority. Anarchism rejects the State as a repressive instrument, and industrialization and private property as agents of inequality. Since an anarchist organization is just a worker movement, it does not accept the participation in politics through the creation of a political party in order to improve the situation of the workers. Bakunin envisages a society without State or classes, based on a system of independent communities where the property will be collective.
Nevertheless, the nature of anarchism itself implies different views and developments depending on the thinker and the particular experience. Actually, some anarchists rejected violence as a means to reach social and political objectives (anarcho-syndicalism), although another group accepted the idea of using terrorist activities to destabilize all established authority.
