From: cher@ksr.com (Mike Cherepov)
Newsgroups: ne.politics
Subject: Re: Industrialization
Date: 31 Dec 92 19:22:21 EST
Organization: Kendall Square Research Corp.

This stuff is too much to bear.  Victor Yodaiken says:

>                                                         But I can't
>think of a nation that industrialized without committing some horrible
>crimes or getting foreign aid. Can you?

First, this condition is self-serving.  There were horrible crimes
committed across history, so crimes during industrialization prove
nothing.  What you need for your thesis (that Stalin-type crimes
are the rule at the industrialization stage) is some tremendous
surge in horrible crimes at every nation's industrializing stage.
But no such thing happened, eg, if anything, the worst of US slavery
came before industrialization, the anti-Indian atrocities were driven
by sale of Fed lands for farming.  In Britain, the Cromwellian times
were much more violent, and so was the Reformation on the Continent.

Secondly, even on your incredible terms, there are counter-examples
aplenty: Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, Finland,
Germany, Austria to pick an easy few, don't seem to have committed
particularly horrible crimes while industrializing.

Thirdly, while lacking emprirical evidence for the putative increase
in crime during industrialization, you presented no plausible theory
why there had to be crimes.  Industrialization obviously did have to
involve economic dislocation in the Old World agricultural sector and
social structures, but I can not see why "horrible crimes" are needed
to carry it out, even in theory.

>         The British industrial revolution immersed a huge section
>of the population in grinding poverty and slave labor work conditions,
>and those who dared to protest were murdered,

Welcome to the land of fact-free rhetorial flourshes.  Meanwile, in
the real world, the Columbia History of the World (a respectable
ho-hum volume) uses words like "striking prosperity", "improved
standards of living", "flourishing provincial culture", etc when
describing this period.  They later say that while life expectancy
of workingmen and their families was improving throughout the
Industrial Revolution, and it is impossible to speak categorically
about changes in the standard of living until mid-19th century,
a steady improvement from there on is undisputable.

Other historians argue that with universal availability of mass-
produced shoes in 1820s, Lancashire cottons, doubling of chairs
per family in early 1800, one can claim that the standard of living
was improving throughout IR, with some hiccups, only myths of the
bygone golden age of yeomen suggesting otherwise.  Take a pick.

Political rights for majority in Britain in the same period went
from near-zilch to universal suffrage, and unions went a long way
towards their post-WW2 dominance, and labor laws appeared, driven
by producers' desire to equalize competition, so your hazy mention
of some daring protesters' murders does nothing to prove that
Stalin's crimes were in some sense unexceptional or necessary for
other industrializing countries.

	Mike Cherepov
		with other people's stats and own opinions