Industrial Revolution

Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

One product of the Enlightenment was the Industrial Revolution. It was the child of scientific progress and colonization and a growing consumer society. Wealth had become a substitute for breeding. The Industrial Revolution represented progress, but it was technological progress rather than human progress. The Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers were there to explain it all away and convince us that we all benefited from this progress. Think of them as early apologists for capitalism.

It was the Enlightenment's fascination with science that gave us things like the steam engine and the factory. Now work could be done on a scale previously unimaginable. Machines could produce many times more than human labor could have done. They could automate the physical labor with machines, but the machines still couldn't think for themselves or repair themselves, so human hands and more importantly human minds were needed to do these things. And of course with more consumer goods being produced there had to be more raw materials and more consumers to buy them.

Agrarian Society

Up until then the peasants had lived mostly agrarian lives. The population was not concentrated in cities but in villages. Education was reserved for the wealthy and the upper class because what would a field-hand or a milkmaid need to know how to read for? It would only make them overqualified and dissatisfied with their lot. For that matter, until the industrial revolution peasants didn't handle a lot of money in their day to day life either. The industrial revolution made it necessary for them to be educated to provide people to work in the factories and keep records and do secretarial work. Now instead of education being a waste of a perfectly good peasant, it was being called a human right, a necessity for the good of mankind and an investment in their futures. Educational attainment became a new metric for social class as the capitalists and industrialists needed to create a middle class who would consume the output of mass production. The working class was needed to run the machines and the middle class was needed to buy the products of their labor.

For the new middle classes, it raised their quality of life. They could send their children for higher education and buy houses and enjoy a standard of living far better than any previous generation. For the lower classes it only made things worse. They moved into cities and lived in tenements. They suffered from new diseases caused by things like overcrowding. Money became the ruling force in their lives, because now instead of tenancy on an estate they had to live in apartments and pay rent. Homelessness and destitution became a problem. There were no labor laws so pay was decided by the employers, as were the length of the working day and working conditions. There were no safety regulations or worker protections. People died all of the time from accidents and malnutrition. Children worked too because there were no child labor laws.

Max Weber

The first philosopher to raise the alarm was Max Weber. He was alive to see the transition from an agrarian society to an industrialized capitalist society. He began to notice how the suicide rate was alarmingly on the rise. He decided to study the problem and figure out where all of this despair was coming from. He came up with an interesting answer. His answer was Calvinism. Calvinism believed basically that we are born with sin and that there was no possibility of redemption. Only God could forgive and nobody was privy to God's decision until they reached the afterlife. God didn't put us on this earth to have fun, but to work. If you weren't working hard, you weren't a good Christian and society had no use for you. We absorbed this work ethic and started equating hard work with our value to society. If you didn't work or you couldn't work, you were without value. Those who could work were working themselves to death and those who couldn't were committing suicide. Society judged them as harshly as they had judged themselves.

When Marx came along he was only pointing out the unnaturalness of the situation, that mankind wasn't meant to live like this and that we were being robbed of our labor to enrich the landlords and industrialists. This message began to spread and the working poor began to organize for things like workplace safety laws and fewer hours and overtime. The ruling class had decided on wealth as the determining factor of membership in their class and many of them had gotten there by exploiting cheap labor and resisting laws that limited their greed.

As Marx's ideas caught on, more and more workers started feeling that they deserved something better, and that under capitalism they had been swindled out of their basic human dignity. They had been working under terrible conditions, both in terms of safety on the job and the aggression unleashed upon them by their bosses when they tried asking nicely for some improvement in their working conditions. A lot of people died. It took the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to finally begin some investigation into the circumstances people were living and working in. People were working 70 hours a week and employers would lock them in in order to stop them from organizing labor unions. This very practice led to the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. 146 workers died because they were locked in a building full of flammable material. All it took was a spark. The horrified response of the public led to new regulations.

There is so much more to the story of the American labor movement, but that's another post. Their fight for worker's rights gained us the 5 day workweek and the 8 hour day. It exempted children from working. It gained us health and safety regulations, and each one could be said to be written in blood, like the blood of the 146 workers who died in the fire. People died getting us those things, but as soon as we started accepting them as our rights, we grew complacent. The corporate and industrial employers had never wanted to make those concessions, and as we forgot what it cost us to get them in the first place they began to take those gains away. Things like overtime and sick pay and vacation. We've reverted almost to the point where we were before the fight began. People work themselves to death just to support themselves and their families. Sometimes they work three jobs to do it. Americans don't go on vacation or take their sick days because they don't dare. 

Max Weber had been right. We still have those internalized Calvinist values. We've become convinced that we haven't got a right to leisure or our own time. We believe that there's nothing to life but work and sleep. I keep hoping that we'll wake up again and realize that we have a right to our own time and leisure. Consumer products and technology are not substitutes for having a life of your own outside work. They can't replace community and human relationships. Perhaps the loneliness and despair we feel now has the same source as the despair in Weber's time.