Clockwork Futures
Page 21
While our tendency is to protect ourselves from change (as Elting Morison says), technology creates its own expectations. If you don’t believe it, recall the chagrin of airplane passengers suddenly deprived of Wi-Fi—as if we had always been guaranteed this invisible connection to streaming data while hurtling through the space at thirty thousand feet. Once gained, it is very hard to go back to a techno “before,” and so we ought to proceed with incredible care. French technology theorist Paul Virilio, known for his work on engineering accidents, reminds us that all technology invents its own destruction. “When they invented the railroad, what did they invent?” he asks: “An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress—a vision a la Jules Verne [. . .] But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe.” It’s easy to understand why the bright lights and heady pleasures of the 1838 Newcastle meeting did little to lift the spirits of men and women hard pressed under industry wheels. They wanted change too. But of a very different kind.
In 1842, just four years into Victoria’s reign, a young man named Friedrich Engels would take a position in his father’s Manchester cotton mill—and the world would never be the same. “Working Men!” Engels would write, “to you I dedicate a work, in which I have tried to lay [. . .] a faithful picture of your condition, of your suffering and struggles.”9 Rather than drink “champagne and port” among the upper and middle classes, and waste time “in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette,” Engels spent his leisure hours in the dark halls and back corners and crowded rooms of a population oppressed.10 He concludes the opening address of his first publication, The Conditions of the Working Class in Great Britain, with a deeply troubling assertion. Despite all their words to the contrary, the rising middle classes (men like Armstrong, who were lifting themselves to great heights through the success of their factories and armaments) did not mean to improve the lives of all men. In fact, Engels claims, “the middle classes intend [. . .] to enrich themselves by your labor while they can sell its produce, and to abandon you to starvation as soon as they cannot make a profit by this indirect trade in human flesh.”11 Factory life was but slavery by a different name, the same sort of trade in bodies that the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act supposedly put to rest.* It was an ugly history, and one that Engels begins with the steam-powered loom that fueled Luddite backlash earlier in the century.
Before steam-weaving there was “hand work”; wives and daughters spun yarn, skilled weavers put it to loom. They did not grow rich, but they could put money away, sometimes enough to purchase a piece of land to cultivate and so feed and increase their families. Engels describes a pastoral paradise of youth spent in innocence and breathing fresh air. He compares it to the German countryside from which he comes, where no violent fluctuations held them in thrall—but where their minds were “dead.” The industrial revolution offered something more, to begin with, Engels explains. In the preindustrial state, humans “were merely toiling machines,” unaware of the “universal interests of mankind.”12 We’ve heard this language before. Judith Drake worried uneducated bodies would be “mere machines”; Descartes argued that the body (separate from the mind) was in fact a machine; Julian Offray de La Mettrie and the materialists suggested every bit of the human was only a clockwork creature, a thing of pistons and moving parts. But Engels speaks more like George Shattuck Morison, connecting machinery and mankind through the types of power they exert or control. “In every instance,” Morison explained, “changes are characterized by some distinct physical device by which man could either use his own strength better than before, or added another force to his own power”—and it is only this power that allows for “intellectual improvement.”13 Men cease to be machines, so goes the argument, the moment they have machines to control. But when Engels walked the factory floor of his father’s mill, he did not see men lifted from toil to greater heights thanks to these new machines. Instead, “hand-workers” were driven from one position to another, in the same way that factory workers today struggle to cope as one by one plants are closed or sent overseas. T. W. White’s 1844 short fiction Six Days’ Journey to the Moon picks up the thread of these lost workers; it offers a world where “machines have in a measure taken the place of men and snatched bread from their mouths because they work so much cheaper and faster.” The narrator asks what became of the thousand workers replaced by machines, and his host “entered a long dissertation to prove, that they were infinitely benefitted by the cheapness of everything occasioned by these labor-saving machines”—though “if they could get no work, or were deprived of adequate rewards, it was of little consequence to them that things were cheap, as they would have no money to purchase them.”14
Manufacture, said Engels, centralizes property in the hands of the few. Meanwhile, the masses trudge on, through filthy streets “through the difficulty of human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles” where people “sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to being to pass all the marvels of civilization.”15 Henry Mayhew described the lot of poor workers in London Labour and the London Poor, collecting stories of street urchins rendered destitute by the loss of parents to disease or accident: “Sometimes we hadn’t no grub at all [. . .] our stomachs ached with hunger” said a sixteen-year-old boy with vacant eyes. “[Mother] used to be at work from six in the morning till ten o’clock at night, which was a long time for a child’s belly to hold out [. . .] I was eight.”16 The slum houses stand stark and bleak on unpaved streets, glistening with brackish puddles of refuse. The “narrow courts and alleys” offer nothing of hope, only “tottering ruin” beyond description; “walls are crumbling, door posts and window-frames loose and broken [. . .] heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors.”17 Manufacturing towns disappear during the work week, swallowed by coal smoke clouds that choke the main arteries. Here, there is nothing for anyone but despair. Engels reported on child labor, on the maltreatment of young workers, floggings for missteps, whippings for running away. Sixteen-hour days, six days a week, some mills employed night work, and even suffered workers to run machines up to thirty hours at a stretch. Crippled workers appealed to commissioners, boys and girls with curved spines and bowed legs, malnourished and broken. Engels quotes a Leeds doctor as exclaiming, “I never saw the peculiar bending of the lower ends of the thigh bones before I came to Leeds. At first I thought it was rachitis,† [but now] express the opinion that they are the consequences of overwork.”18 Physicians and surgeons spent time treating deformity, and also dismemberment, malnutrition, and lung complaints caused by the wretched atmosphere. The high rate of child mortality in the mills speaks for itself; dark and greased, the air peppered with dust and grit, no windows, no fresh water, no air.
I have, myself, worked in a factory. A plant for making car mats, the cavernous space shook with noise and smelled of burning rubber. Each line employed three people. One tossed chunks of rubber onto hot griddles that sizzled like waffle irons; a carpet-layer (in heavy gloves) pulled it free, still steaming and smoking and acrid. Precut carpet, frazzled blue and red depending on the vehicle, was pressed into the hot mess to bond the glue—then the mat would be flung onto a belt for the final step. I worked the end of the line as a cutter/counter, receiving in my turn melty stacks of stinking mat, ripping away the excess rubber, and clicking the counter for rights and lefts. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. It was mind-numbing work; thoughts were impossible, just the one-two, one-two, cut and count repeated over like a mantra. I’d chosen it as a summer job; over a hundred degrees on the factory floor, sweat dripped past the safety goggles and rubber burned through the gloves. I coughed carpet fuzz, wondered if “carpet lung” were a real condition, and tried not to let the rubber collect in piles or cool in the wrong shape. It was miserable enough for me, but the lines stretched in either direction—and most employed permanent workers, mothers and fathers providing for families and relying on this one thing to keep food on the table. I scar
cely worked two months before the first layoff, however. And a few years later, the factory had gone, its derelict shape shedding bricks into a weedy parking lot. I’m under no illusion that my experience was, already, far better than the nineteenth-century mill worker—the factory had windows, ventilation, proper breaks, and reasonable hours. The Manchester mill, by contrast, was literally rancid. But “the worse situation,” Engels wrote, “is that of workers who have to compete against a machine that is making its way.”19 Because a body that could not keep pace was a body unemployed; a body employed was a ghost already—a shell, a husk, a nothing. So much for the promise of machines.
Seeds of Anarchy
Let us return to William Armstrong once more. He may have favored water power and longed for hydro energy (something he experimented with at his estate at Cragside), but his own works were nearly as dangerous as the mines that fueled them. In 1854, a fire in a Gateshead clothing factory superheated sulfur until “it came out in torrents, like streams of lava.”20 The sulfur caught fire and spread to Armstrong’s warehouse, housing a Molotov cocktail of nitrate of soda, tallow, sulfur . . . and gunpowder. The blast felt like an earthquake; five hundred people were injured and fifty-three killed, with property damages exceeding one million pounds.21 Industry might have seemed a boon to the expanding wealth and power of nations, but to workers in the grit, struggling for safer working conditions and better pay (and not getting them, usually), every single innovation came at cost. The Pemberton Mill of Massachusetts collapsed, killing many instantly and burying six hundred men, women, and children alive in the rubble. New owners ignored the building’s capacity and shuttled more and more operating looms into the space. Iron supports groaned and heaved, and lacking the flexibility of steel, the girders crumpled. The debris caught fire during rescue operations, and the trapped burned alive, still crying out to those who could hear them and do nothing to save them. Death by disaster, dismemberment by machine, or replacement for mechanized labor seemed imminent for many, though the New York Times lamented, “Let the calamity be a warning,” of the “unavoidable dangers of machinery and steam.”22 The Pemberton mill lost 145 workers, with another 166 maimed, but—significantly—jobs for over one thousand people went up in smoke.
The industrial age began as an age of steam, but it was also an age of soot, ash, and disaster. The worker, Engels believed, must work to escape these horrors, must work—just like Oliver in Whitechapel Gods—to overthrow the masters. Their own survival must come at the expense of the bourgeoisie set on exploiting them; the middle class, those men and women bobbing on Armstrong’s lighted terrace or tucking their sketchbooks under arm to wander the scientific and engineering exhibition halls, had become the enemy. If the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offered chaos and filth and death by disease, the nineteenth century had somehow failed to do better—not, at least, for the working man. And so chaos returns to haunt, but in a new guise, as anarchy. Engels had begun with the plight of workers. He would go on, in 1848, to coauthor The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx.
In America, the word “communism,” calls up images of Josef Stalin, the Cold War, and Red Dawn. But Marx and Engels’s work has little to do with the manipulations that came after, and much more to do with helping the most disenfranchised and downtrodden members of society: the laboring poor. Engels praises the earlier Chartist movement, calling it the true separation of the proletariat (working class) from the bourgeoisie (capitalist wealthy class). But the future, for Engels, lay in the combination of Chartist with Socialist ideals, a creation of English Communism. Only then, he claimed, “will the working class be the true intellectual leader of England.”23 The revolution had begun right under the noses of mill owners: “it is too late for a peaceful solution.”24 For all the brilliant leaps of imagination, for all the fiery sparks of power, the New Epoch set the stage for class contest—and conflict—and one of the most fiery centered around the very Elswick works that Armstrong made famous.
In turning his attention to the manufacture of armaments, William Armstrong turned a successful business into an expansive and booming one. It stretched nearly a mile along the river Tyne and employed increasing numbers; the town had octupled in two decades and “houses and streets were thrown up in a constant attempt to keep up.”25 The crowded slum tenements described by Engels in big cities like London and Manchester began to creep into the once bucolic districts until scarcely a patch of ground remained. The promise of work brought men from everywhere, including from towns where machinery had already pushed them from more traditional workmen’s labor. At first, all seemed well for Armstrong’s works and reputation. But the narrative spun by the talented Engels (who has been compared both to Charles Dickens in his ability to describe dismal realities and to Thomas Carlyle in his fervor to change them) began, increasingly, to take hold of the northern laborers. They had not read Engels (it wasn’t translated until 1887). Rather, the very conditions he described begin, at last, to foment real resistance among workers—spurred on, in part, by the blind greed of masters, mill and mine owners. What they feared most aligned with what the slave-masters feared: revolution, anarchy, riot, revolt. They’d fed the beast themselves, nursing it on expanded hours and reduced wages, grown fat on dead children and colliery fires. And not surprisingly, it’s from those same dark tunnels that the trouble first emerges, clawing its way to the light with militant force.
Before the end of the 1860s, growing dissatisfaction with a 59-hour work week (which could blossom into 70) ignited tempers. In Elswick, where wages were fixed by a district trade agreement, those hours were frequently the only thing they had to bargain with. Spurred on by miner’s strikes, the Nine-Hour Movement took hold.26 The first petition appeared in Wearside, where engineering workers argued for reduced hours so that they could improve themselves through education, mirroring in its way the complaint of Engels. What good is machinery if it doesn’t free men from drudgery to expand their minds? (In reality, it was also a way of arguing for overtime pay on the fixed system, but the point was a valid one.) The petition was dismissed, and the workers went on strike—and after less than a month, the employees had their nine hours. It had been too easy. Riding the wave of their success, workers formed the Nine Hours League in Newcastle, electing John Burnett president, and sending a letter to all employers of Newcastle and Gateshead asking for reductions to the work week.27 It seemed little enough; from fifty-nine to fifty-four hours a week—surely none would deny them?
On Saturday, May 6, 1871, a statement was issued by the then-Sir William George Armstrong, declining, with unanimous support, the worker’s petition. It was cold, impersonal, a direct reversal of the open and supportive dialogues Tyneside labor disputes had carried in the past. The resulting indignation jeopardized the one thing Armstrong had been known for: mutual respect.28 Henrietta Heald makes certain to distance Armstrong from the direct conflict in her history of the strike. He had given over the management to a man named Andrew Noble, himself an “imperious, autocratic” and even “volcanic” employer, who treated the Elswick workers as though they were but boys meant to jump at his commands.29 That he would be facing off to John Burnett of the League, an intelligent man with socialist leanings, would result in one of the most fiery conflicts in England. But Armstrong wasn’t without blame; he made no move to replace Noble, who accomplished his work at a distance, and he would soon find himself face to face with an opponent he’d never encountered before. The mine workers may have begun the hard work in the 1860s, but their militancy had been easily overturned; crime, as Engels wrote, did not build alliances or create lasting movements. Burnett’s Nine Hours League wasn’t going first to arms; they were going first to the papers.
Joseph Cowen’s Newcastle Daily Chronicle carried the stories, showing the demands as legitimate and the masters as inflexible. The masters, he wrote, feared that the men “have got political and now that want social and trade power”—in other words, they want to become their own masters, with a sta
ke in the game.30 The employers would not budge, however, and on the 27th of May, 7,500 men went on strike. Men at Armstrong’s Elswick works dropped their machinery and walked away, and Armstrong, in a fit of anger or despair, made one of his greatest mistakes. He fired two hundred workers who had never signed up for the strike at all, making an example of them. And suddenly, it wasn’t just the Chronicle that turned against the arms magnate. “Masters who reply cavalierly by lawyers’ letters,” wrote the Pall Mall Gazette, “and act as nearly as they can like despotic governments against revolutionary bodies can hardly expect [. . .] the sympathy of the public.”31 Armstrong lost money each day the strike continued; the machines fell silent, all the innovations of his armaments and big guns (for which he’d been praised a year or two earlier) stood at naught. But his heart was hardened and he would not meet terms. “We are now determined to break this strike by importing foreign labour,” he wrote, and in due course, his emissaries went abroad to Europe in search of willing hands.32 He closed the schools of Elswick works, using them to house his foreign transplants and refusing to open them except to loyal workers. The cities, already crowded, became insufferable. Men poured in to work the machinery, some of whom went, themselves, on strike, and requiring additional replacements. And then, on September 11, the clamor of dissent in the north suddenly erupted into the national papers, when the Times attacked Armstrong for his despotic part in the struggle. He returned fire, suggesting that no men ought to have the right to wrest power from their employers—and that “more educated and intelligent classes” ought to know better.33