John Mace: “And you have datat that the population of GB was better off before that?”
Well as, Zorro point outs, they lived differently prior to industrialization: there were no large industrial towns, no factories none of the special social problems that arise with the different demographic of an urban, industrial society. But, in any case, you wanted proof that capitalism needs to be offset by socialism (of some kind) in order for the benefits of increased productivity to be spread throughout society. Now that you’ve been offered an understanding of that you’re changing your request.
The question of whether agricultural laborers were better off than industrial laborers is actually a complex one and ultimately depends on the specific examples. Industrialiazation definitely benefited some workers vis-a-vis their agricultural counterparts (as I said above): e.g., master spinners who were skilled factory workers, but whose skill was eventually displaced by machinery. That’s always the way it went (and still does): employers struggled to keep wages down as far as possible: by increasing hours, by employing women and children (who could be paid much less), by automating wherever possible, by repressing trade unionism. That’s very different from the kind of relationship you tended to have in the more paternalistic and quasi-feudal agricultural societies of the early modern period (as well as the apprenticeship system for trades). These were sometimes better and sometimes worse in terms an isolated variable such as mortality.
The point isn’t that industrialization shouldn’t have happened. The point is that prior to the labor movement and attendant socialist movements, industrialization was, by and large, disproportionately benefiting the wealthy capitalist class (as well as some of the older landowners who got into the act by various means). Certainly you won’t catch Marx complaining about industrialization; he doesn’t in the least romanticize feudal society or agriculture. On the contrary, he sees industrialization as providing the technological means–via greater productivity–for a communally owned society.
Zorro, I agree with most of your post but I do want to emphasize that Marx was not the central figure for British trade unionists or the British socialist movement (which included many educated middle-class people) during the nineteenth century. It wasn’t really until after his death (in 1883) that large numbers of people began reading Marx. Socialism prior to Marx was a very mixed bag and it included all kinds of intellectual and humanitarian streams, in addition to its more popular roots in the working classes. For much of the nineteenth century what workers wanted was a) the vote and b) trade unions–along with specific provisions such as the ten hour workday. Once all adult males got the vote (which didn’t happen completely until the 1880s), the advent of “collectivism” of some kind was all but inevitable. Again, John Mace, by that time it was very common for well-off educated people to think of themselves as socialists of some stripe because they (rightly) saw collectivism as the future. Trade unions, unemployment insurance, social security measures of one sort of another became fairly mainstream–with politicians such as the young Winston Churchill plugging for some of them under the banner of the old Liberal Party (traditionally the party of middle-class businessmen) and to try to head off the rise of the Labor Party.
“Proof” of this state of affairs is available in any good high school text book on the subject of the industrial revolution; it’s not in the least controversial. Though if you want to read a more substantive social history of the period, one of my favorites is still E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Classes (though it’s considered a bit out of date). Eric Hobsbawm’s contribution to the Penguin history series, Industry and Empire is another excellent introduction and has lots of figures in it. On the turn-of-the-century period, the period when even die-hard laissez-faireists realized that just to be competitive with other industrializing nations they had to have a better educated, healthier workforce I also recommend, The Quest for National Efficiency. If you surf the web you’ll find various places where academics have put interesting primary documents on the web: e.g., the testimony of child factory workers before parliamentary commissions of inquiry describing their brutal working conditions. I also strongly recommend reading Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations–but make sure it’s not an abridged version as the typical edited versions leave out a lot of the things that Smith said about social welfare.
This sounds as though you’re still arguing for British HK as a real-life example of (almost) pure capitalism. I thought we had agreed (and I thought my cites had demonstrated) that in fact its government played a fairly large role in regulating markets and subsidizing social services, which are generally viewed as “socialist”-type activities.