The inevitability of the rise of the industrial revolution was implicitly manifest within the following two quotes:
“For the nature of humanity is to impel men to agree with one another, and its very existence lies simply in the explicit realisation of a community of conscious life.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807
“If science was put to the service of capital, the recalcitrant worker's docility would be assured.”
Andrew Ure, Philosophie des Manufactures, 1835
To meld, synthesize, and paraphrase, the above; "Those with both power and money may most easily use science to force their wills and gain the greatest benefits from those laboring in their service. Those without power, education, or money become as horse to rider, an animal with great potential power, to be fed and housed in a fashion commensurate to its value - no more, no less, unless noblesse oblige requires favoritism - and guided throughout life to perform the greatest service at the least cost." This concept is an unsaid primary underlying concept of the current economic system, and the very success of it over the past two hundred years is now on the verge of becoming its mode of spectacular failure.
Returning to the world around 1811, the introduction of newly designed machinery for making fabric destroyed the longstanding cottage industry model of economics in England, even more surely than any bomb or fire. The acquisitive nature of the British Empire required that every advantage be exploited, with the greatness of empire being founded upon the subjugation of nations and any person or resource not directly contributing to empire building. The citizens of the empire were chattel, with men being forcibly "pressed" into service in her navy, and dissenters shipped away to places like Australia, or economically forced from the country, so that their independent thought would not contaminate the glory and goals of the homeland.
The shift to the factory system and increased workload on textile workers was of great benefit to both merchants and the empire. This was in part because it forced labor into a more subservient state, requiring less capital and support for more high-value products. The empire was not concerned one way or the other about the common individual, and proof of such an attitude is shown in the way that England treated India right up through Indian independence. The January 1916 Popular Science, page 76, notes that in India, where labor was far cheaper than machinery, workers were still paid to do work that was far more efficiently performed by machines.
Understanding the balance of labor costs vs. the costs of machinery or any other method of performing work is key to understanding the economic system as it occurs today. If workers in China are cheaper than workers in the United States, and the support structure for a factory exists in China, and the global laws and lack of tariffs allow change, jobs will go there. If workers in Indonesia are cheaper than those workers in China, and the support structure exists, the jobs will go there. The balancing point of free trade is one of "Jobs gravitate to the lowest paid worker with sufficient skills, and the location willing to make the greatest concessions." The location or country constantly changes as more jobs require education, and educated workers begin costing more to employ. In sanguine theory, the Globalists can lay claim to wiping out the worst hellholes of poverty, country by country, through the simple use of the economic imperative.
As each country has climbed a rung higher on the economic ladder, its people have found work at jobs requiring a level of skill just above what they have been accustomed to, and rewards just a little greater than they have had in the past. The physical labor of a workforce in such situations becomes more and more supplanted by mental labor. Those who do not have the skills for mental labor have generally been left by the wayside of "progress" to fend for themselves as best they can, subject to the largess of their governments and relatives.
Until recently this progression has most impacted the unskilled and least powerful in the various job markets. Protestations have been easily countered and order maintained, sometimes with bread and circuses, (or to be more modern - food debit cards and free sportscasts of gladiatorial combat, where the fabulously wealthy gladiators come largely from the most impoverished, providing public examples of hope to them). Societies that in the past have held onto an enforced static economy, such as Cuba and the old totally communist China, have been forced to abandon those systems as the economic warfare that has supplanted the old blood-and-guts style of conflict has become predominant.
This "new" system of economic growth is, for better or worse, based on a Ponzi scheme dependent upon an ever-increasing lower class labor force, driving a larger consumer market. This scheme is soon to reach a crisis point. Globalization is running out of the large cheap labor pools of the Chinas and Indias of the world. The unlimited low-paid labor market of the world is being tapped out just as surely as the oceans have been overfished.
What happens next, when goods made with cheap labor no longer have cheap human labor to make them? What happens as the lowest of the low begin to rise and assert their dignity?
At this point, there are no certain answers. Anyone who claims to understand exactly what will happen and when is a fool. We do know that there are some factors that will become important in the upcoming changes:
First, just as the computer revolution eliminated many middle management positions, the advances in parsing human speech, as demonstrated by IBM's "Watson" recently, will eliminate nearly all helpdesk and telemarketing jobs. Soon after that, even upper-level management jobs will be at risk. The decision-making in correctly interpreting speech is a stepping stone to the decision-making process needed to guide a business.
Fast food jobs are already an anachronism, with some continuing much as the British allowed low paying jobs in India to continue. As far back as the 1950s, an almost completely mechanized fast food stand was successfully demonstrated. Rudimentary Automats were popular during that same period. For many years the holdback costs to complete automation in food service has been shrinking, and inventors have been quietly honing their skills at replacing cooks and prep workers. An entire segment of the entry-level labor market is at risk.
As fantastic as it seems, the future will hold a new balancing point for labor at all levels. Once standardized non-specialized robotics are brought into mass production, making them as ubiquitous as television sets or home computers, the low ongoing costs of computerized machines and robots will quickly make humans too expensive for almost all jobs. Imagine, for a moment, a country with no jobs and no prospects of jobs for its citizens, leaving them no method of earning money. Imagine then the subsequent complete collapse of that country's consumer-based economy.
As change occurs, the humans in governments will be forced to reexamine their past close ties with merchant capitalists, for fear of angry mobs and a plethora of lone assassins.
Will an end result be forced birth control, as in China? Or will there be a plague allowed to run rampant? Will physical wars come back into popularity as a method of population control? Or will citizens, like frogs in a pot slowly increasing in temperature, continue to accept the current state of affairs until "anti-terrorist" and "patriotic" laws turn their entire countries into prison-states more restrictive than any of those of history? Will those prison-states find the warehousing of citizens too expensive and find more efficient and "humane" methods of eliminating the unproductive?
Hegel proposed that the master must free the slave to become whole, that the greater consciousness of humanity only comes about through integration of all. Let us hope that he was correct and such a course is not only possible, but the choice of leadership. The Luddites understood that their way of life would be crushed by technology. Let us hope now for enlightened leaders that understand that life itself can be threatened by an unfettered marriage of technology and profit.
