The Industrial Revolution does not Discredit Freedom or Justify Socialism

People wrongly associate the Industrial Revolution with increased poverty and hardship. This misconception has been used to discredit economic freedom, thus leading to inevitable socialist failure.

There is a mystery about modern history.  We live very well now, by any historical standard. That is because of industrialisation.  Affluence began with the Industrial Revolution which started in Britain.  Britain’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 created the pre-conditions, in terms of reliable legal protection of individual enterprise, necessary to kick-start prosperity.

But over the last century western countries have been converted to socialist dogma.  Populations abandoned individual liberty in exchange for state control.  Even though economic theory, and recent history, show that socialism wrecks everything it touches.

The key objective of socialist propaganda was to discredit the remarkable material progress achieved by industrialisation.  This progress was clear to nearly everyone in 19^th Century Britain, as was the role of individual liberty in making it possible.  That is why working-class leaders were typically pro-free trade.

Marx, in his work Capital, correctly stated that the history of all past, i.e. pre-industrial agrarian, societies was one of exploitation of the many, the peasantry, by landowner and military elites relying on state power.  He then set about discrediting British liberty by asserting that ‘Capitalism’ also meant ‘exploitation’ of working people.  However industrial Britain was a clear demonstration of the superiority of large-scale social cooperation.  It’s the socialists who recreate poverty by using the state to control and tax productive people.

How could Marx and his socialists deceive public opinion into rejecting liberty and the industrialisation that it created? 

In previous posts I suggest that the introduction of universal suffrage (one person one vote) gave power to a majority of much less informed, and much less productive, people who could be persuaded by socialist handouts.  But a fundamental misunderstanding of history may also, accidentally, cast the Industrial revolution in a bad light.

Few know how much worse pre-industrial living standards were

Whoever sets the history syllabus in Britain doesn’t seem to think it worthwhile to teach us about the unimaginably ghastly poverty of pre-industrial societies.  And yet it is among the most important facts in history, and the most useful for understanding our current predicament.  Because the Industrial Revolution represented fundamental progress.

Pre-industrial societies were terribly starved of energy and therefore very poor.  The only available energy was sunlight which is a very low-energy density fuel.  Solar energy was converted by plants in fields and woods into pitiable quantities of food, fuel and building materials.  Plants could only capture about 1% or so of the energy in sunlight.  There were also limited amounts of energy from water and wind power – both also the result of solar energy. 

Much of this meagre stock of energy was consumed by men and beasts to perform the labour needed to grow and process the unimpressive bounty of nature. The result, as evidenced by contemporary writings, is a situation of chronic over-population – even though agrarian populations were tiny compared to ours’ now. 

A third at least of England’s people in the late 17^th century, when England was still a largely agrarian society, were described as living ‘below subsistence’ by Gregory King, a senior official of the time.  Such people would not get enough food, clothing and shelter to survive and to replace themselves by having children.  Chronically underfed people, especially children, were vulnerable to infectious disease.  A typical family would be a small family, because so many babies died.  In bad years, when there was famine and/or war, many more people would become destitute.

This absolute agrarian poverty is hidden from us.  Excellent historical TV dramas set in the Tudor, Stuart and early Georgian periods focus on the top of the social hierarchy.  It was very small.  We see re-enactments of life at the top, played by actors who are a great deal more attractive and better fed and housed than real people in the past.  The reality is obscured.

In 17^th century England, the nobility comprised little more than a hundred families, followed by some tens of thousands of well-to-do people. The remaining 5 million or so people were made up of small landowners, farmers, small traders, sailors and a mass of landless day-labourers. For those on the lowest levels, wretched poverty was an ever-present reality.  The idea that poverty could be eliminated was not, and could not be, seriously considered possible.  It was unthinkable.  It is this hopeless agrarian poverty which explains much about the past which is otherwise incomprehensible.

For example, one might wonder why men ever volunteered to join a medieval army.   Anyone could see that death in short order, mostly likely due to starvation and disease, was much the most likely outcome.  Why would people migrate to overcrowded cities prone to plagues and violence?  Why were there so many sailors when the sea took so many lives? 

The answer must be, for the many people living below subsistence, that life on the land was even worse.  Misery and early death were nearly certain.  There was little chance of a lucky break.  At least by leaving the land there was a chance of making good.  Most men would fall by the wayside.  But a lucky few did loot their way to prosperity in the wars, or find economic opportunity in the city or at sea.

The Industrial Revolution brought prosperity and social independence

The Industrial Revolution is the process by which humanity gained access to great quantities of reliable, high energy-density, energy.  The major technical innovations automated and mechanised work so that the heavy lifting could be done by machines and not men.  It started here in Britain because we had created a nearly non-state, freedom-based, society.

All animal species depend on capturing enough solar energy to power their bodies’ operation and growth, and to reproduce.  Most individuals live on the edge of oblivion.  If the energy available to a species increases, so does its population.  If available energy falls, populations die back.  Mankind, in the agrarian state, was as vulnerable and desperate as any animal species.

Once endowed by industrialisation with an abundant supply of first coal, and then oil and gas, humanity was no longer vulnerable and desperate.  Medieval agriculture had been efficient in the sense that each calorie of food produced cost less than a calorie of human or animal effort.  But the food supply was niggardly.  Now we have modern agriculture which produces far more food by using hydrocarbon-derived energy to replace labourer and beast. 

We gained not just prosperity but also independence.  Industrial towns offered regular full-time wages sufficient to maintain a family in a better brick-built tile-roofed houses.  Instead of begging for occasional day labour from the local squire, men had a choice of possible employers competing for their labour.  A choice of employers made it possible, for the first time, for individuals to defy their social superiors to become, in fact, free.

So why does the Industrial Revolution look so bleak to us if it was such a beneficial development?  Well, it took time.  Britain was the pioneer testing the revolutionary possibility of permanent hydrocarbon-powered prosperity.  It was trial and error on a massive scale.  We made many mistakes. There were no other industrialising societies to learn from or to trade with.  Every country that has industrialised since has had the advantage of knowing that industrialisation was possible, and how to do it.  They could simply copy Britain, and learn from its mistakes. 

We had a hard industrialisation.  It was made worse by nearly continuous warfare with France between 1688 and 1815.  Because of war, the country experienced heavy taxation, several deflationary bank-credit booms and busts, abrupt transitions to and from military production, and periodic loss of overseas markets.  Much of the distress in industrial areas after the Napoleonic Wars was the result of deflation and retrenchment in a hugely indebted country almost exhausted by warfare.

It is claimed, by Marxists among others, that the Industrial Revolution was enabled by British colonial trade, based in some degree on slavery and empire.  One might suggest instead that only the Industrial Revolution could have paid for the century of warfare which created Imperial Britain.  It is hard to see that the British population benefited from war.

The Industrial Revolution occurred in the Midlands and the North in areas remote from London and furthest away from government meddling and restrictive guilds regulation.

The new mill-towns grew by immigration from the surrounding countryside.  The rural poor, those living below subsistence on the land, migrated to them.  Obviously, they would not move to factory towns if they were a bad option.  Continual migration towards industrial towns proves that the well-documented, grim (to us) conditions created by industry were an improvement on the undocumented but clearly grimmer conditions in the villages.

What did the migrants get?  Industrial Britain was the first place where most people were in regular employment and got paid every week.  In contrast, agrarian societies had been composed of put-upon peasants, many tending towards serfdom or even slavery, resting uneasily on a proletariat of desperate landless men.  In pre-industrial Britain, apart from domestic service dependent on the whims of the gentry, there had been little of what we would call employment. 

A job in a factory meant children were fed regularly.  The first obvious sign of radical progress therefore was that the children of the working poor generally survived.  Very large working-class families became common for the first time ever.  Population surged but prosperity surged faster – which is a remarkable and wonderful thing. 

Within a few generations, which is a mere blink of an eye in historical time, but frustratingly slower when experienced, affluence became more and more general as investment, technology and access to high-grade energy grew.  Not only was there material progress but there was also a great deal of social innovation.  The industrial cities created non-state, universal welfare, education and health care provision.  In the nineteenth century, Britain and other anglophone societies would also create the modern world’s team sports.

Apart from the government’s ‘indoor’ (aka ‘The Workhouse) and ‘outdoor’ poor relief system, all this was achieved by private initiative.  Unfortunately, the memory of this achievement has been blotted out by the arguably well-meant but damaging and ill-advised introduction of the Welfare State a little over a century ago.  Clearly it suited the Marxist promoters of the Welfare State to vilify the Industrial Revolution.  Otherwise people would realise that they didn’t need statist central planning solutions to problems which British people had already solved. 

In trying to discredit Liberty’s amazing triumph in Britain, replete with genuine technological heroes such as Brunel and Stephenson, socialists drew on a new 19^th century cultural development exemplified by the work of Charles Dickens.   For the first time, enough people were affluent enough to buy enough magazines and books to make writing fiction remunerative.  Dickens could prosper by writing sentimental serialisations – which became novels – about the condition of the poor in London (at that time a barely industrialised city surrounded by backward southern English regions).

This represents the first time that people began to believe that the absolute poverty of agrarian Britain could be ended.  And if it could be ended, the attempt to end it must, of course, be made by ‘society’.  In fact, the automatic increase in living standards which characterises free societies would solve poverty anyway.  But interventionist, socialist politicians would take the credit for such progress.

So, we can see how the Industrial Revolution is accidentally undervalued because no memory remains of how dreadful pre-industrial Old England had been.  But there is another, almost accidental, perceptual problem which might also explain why the Industrial Revolution in Britain has had such a bad press.

The Paradox of Rapid Material Progress Discrediting the Past

Let us imagine a thought experiment in which there are two identical planets, each in their year 1688.  Each planet contains an identical and fundamentally poor agrarian England. 

On one, unlucky, planet the forces of Catholic Absolutism, represented by Louis XIV in France, and in Britain by his cousin James II, triumph.  The Glorious Revolution of 1688 doesn’t happen.  Its absolute protection of property rights in Classical Liberal Britain doesn’t happen.  Britain instead imitates France in killing thousands of entrepreneurs who offend against guild regulations.  As a result, there is no Industrial Revolution.  Humanity remains mired in agrarian misery up to the present day.  However public opinion does not regard the institutions which have led to stagnation as defective.  They know no better. We can call this Planet Stagnation.   

On the other planet, history instead unfolds as it actually did.  British liberty creates the Industrial Revolution and therefore the modern world.  The whole planet is on the way to previously unimaginable affluence.  We can call this Planet Prosperity.

On Planet Prosperity, freedom has enabled incredibly rapid progress.  Precisely because of such progress, people find themselves looking back on low living standards in past centuries with understandable horror.  They retain a memory of poor living conditions rather than an appreciation of the economic freedom which brought about such great and continuing improvement.  As a result, they mistakenly reject economic freedom, which was the necessary pre-condition for the initial industrialisation, and is a requirement for sustained future material progress.