The machinery question

The Machinery Question during the early Nineteenth Century was the question of the impact of technical progress on the total economy and society. The question was central to everyday relations between, master and workman, but it was also of major theoretical and ideological interest. The very technology at the basis of economy and society was a fundamental platform of challenge and struggle. In the early Nineteenth Century, it was political economy, the 'natural science' of economy and society which took up the theoretical debate on the introduction, diffusion, and social impact of the radically new techniques of production associated with the era. The machine question also came to infuse not only the theoretical realm of political economy, but also the wider culture and consciousness of the bourgeoisie and the working classes. The machine question reflected the close connections of the relations of production to the concerns and conflicts pervading theory, culture and politics.
This thesis has analyzed only one part of this many sided issue. It has focused on the attempt of the middle classes to use the new science of political economy to depict technical progress as a natural and evolutionary phenomenon. However, the thesis also shows that the great variety of theoretical traditions in political economy, combined with significant theoretical and working class dissent with the so called doctrine of political economy prevented the unqualified success of this attempt.
The depth of the controversy evoked over the machinery issue indicated the still marked uncertainty of the experience of industrialization. By the 1820's and 1830's the factory, urban agglomerations and the coal heaps of mining counties had transformed some parts of the industrial landscape. But the permanence of this change still seemed questionable. Such change was still confined to a very small number of regions, affected small sections of the population, and contributed minimally to national income. The experience of technical change was of great novelty and excitement for those who contemplated the prospects of wealth and power it might bring. On the other hand, for the first generation of factory labour and cast off artisans and domestic workers, it still seemed possible to stop the 'unnatural' progress of technology. Working men and women felt keenly the unprecedented demands for mobility, both geographical and occupational. For them the machine meant, or at least threatened, unemployment, an unemployment which at best was transitional between and within sectors of the economy, and at worst affected the economy as a whole at times of scarce capital. For them the machine was accompanied by a change in the pattern of skills, and involved all too often the introduction of cheap and unskilled labour.
In the period before the 1840's, when labour's great onslaught was against the machine itself, the machine question also featured in middle class doctrine. The times were still uncertain enough to demand that the 'cult of improvement' take on the shape of a cultural offensive rather than mere complacency. Thus the 'cult of improvement' during this era sought its -reatest scientific context in political economy. Most of the secondary literature on this period depicts the views of the middle classes and especially of political economy as ones of great pessimism. This thesis shows, to the contrary, that optimism and great faith in the new industrial technology was fundamental to the vision of political economy and to that of its middle class adherents.
Ricardo's work was an intellectual and doctrinal tour de force which gripped the whole period, but which, in addition, just as significantly generated a great array of criticism. Curiously, the great historical problem of Ricardo's work was the lack of understanding it met, and the serious distortion it suffered at the hands of his popularizers. The great range of Ricardo criticism in the decades after his death was based often on misconceptions of his work. His own Principles which exuded so much interest in and hope for technical progress generated a wealth of dissident literature which also focused on improvement, skill and technical change.
Though the political economy of these years was very diverse, and policy debates were hotly conducted, there is no doubt that the self-defined profession of political economy accepted certain assumptions and outlooks. There were several themes and conceptions which shaped the overall nature of this critique of Ricardo. These themes allow for the demarcation of two epochs of political economy between the 1820's and the 1830's. Political economists of the 1820's placed great emphasis on labour productivity and the skills of the artisan in their attempt to contradict the so called Ricardic predictions of overpopulation and the stationary state. By the 1830's economists still found in 'improvement,' technical change, and increasing returns, the great empirical and theoretical rebuttal to the 'Ricardian' predictions. However, 'improvement' was now discussed as the evolution of capital, and even more crucial to this change was the tendency to see capital as a material embodiment, as fixed capital and machinery.
This shift of concepts was accompanied by a new methodological thrust. The political economy of the 1830's reflected a polemically inductivist mood. Unprecedented energy was devoted to debates over abstraction and induction. The political economy which resulted was more empirical, comparative and historical. New interest was given over to visiting factory districts, drawing on government reports, and in using and participating in social surveys. Political economists devoted more time to comparing the course of economic development in Britain to that of other Western economies, that of primitive societies, and that of previous historical epochs.
The conceptual shift in political economy over these years seems to parallel certain tendencies and changes in the economy itself. The political economy of the 1820's appears to reflect the concerns underlying the economic-phase defined by Marx as the phase of 'manufactures'. The shift that takes place in theory in the 1830's approximates to the shift in the economy to the phase of 'modern industry.' But the conceptual changes in political economy over the period are also very closely connected to class struggle. This shows in the very seriousness attached by political economists to the 1826 anti-machinery riots in Lancashire and to the 1830 agricultural riots. Discussion of these two disturbances infused the very heights of economic theory. The establishment of political economy reflected the alarm of the middle classes and provided the 'scientific' answers to the working man's critique of machinery. Moreover, in debate with their critics, they helped to generate a new theory of technical change based on the machine and on the evolution and security of capital and the capitalist. The overall effect of these riotc on the middle clashes was a celebration of the cult of technical improvement.
The force of this 'scientific' optimism in political economy was given a deep cultural basis in middle class improvement societiesandmdash;the Mechanics Institute Movement of the 1820's and the scientific and statistical societies of the 1830's. These movements were attempts to involve both the working classes and the middle classes in a concerted energetic programme to promote technical advance. They also acted to forge new cultural connections between the provinces and the metropolis. A scientific movement which, in its rhetoric at least, focused on the practical, economic and technological connections of science, created a new nexus simultaneously economic and cultural between province and metropolis.
This scientific culture was material and empirical. It was a feature of everyday life that permeated to the technical and managerial manual, dictionary and encyclopedia. The empirical thrust of the scientific movement was a way of involving more people in the great scientific debates. It acted as a democratization of culture within the middle class, and provided a complement to the academic controversy of theory. This empiricist scientific movement was also very congenial to the inductivist mood of political economy in the 1830's.
The scientific movement which promoted fascination with the great prospects of technical progress was closely connected with the political economy of improvement. The study of science and the study of political economy were, for many, integrated pursuits practised in overlapping societies. One area of political economy, the study of the condition of the poor and the working classes, became the major concern of the social survey, the new method and tool of the statistical movement. The social investigators kept their interests in poverty away from the sensitive areas of the wages and conditions of work. They focused instead on moral problemsandmdash;education, religion, and providence. Political economy and science were left safely to indulge in the glorifidation of growth and technical change, while the statistical societies provided the basis of a 'scientific' philanthropy to lull the early Victorian conscience. The problem of the social impact of technical change was thus transferred from an economic question to a moral question.
These intellectual and cultural formulations of the road to improvement were not, as stated above, unchallenged and accepted ideologies. The intellectual vigour and richness of working class culture in the period was just as important in acting to create a fundamental critique and reformulation of the machinery question.
In contrast to the political economist of the middle clashes, 'big bottomed spiders, weaving their theoretical cobwebs in comfortable seclusion,'1 the working classes conceived of their own truly popular political economyandmdash;popular in the sense that it was written from the standpoint of the working classes. Middle class science promoted the integration of worker and master in the generation of technical progress, and hoped for a skilled, disciplined and hierarchical labour market. The working class conception of science was a demand not for 'useful knowledge,' but for 'really useful knowledge.' Science gave them materialist and rationalist explanations of the world which helped to free them from political and religious authority. The very act of learning not only science, but literature, art, and political economy was a claim to culture, to be acquired through 'mutual instruction' in contrast to the 'aristocracy of theory.' While the middle classes worshipped at the altar of improvement and marvelled at the new technology, the working classes resisted the mechanical culture which seemed to bring only degradation. They lamented their fate in verse and petition in ways like the following:
'Mechanics and poor labourers
Are wandering up and down
There is nothing now but poverty
In country and in town;
Machinery and steam power has
The poor man's hopes destroyed,
Then pray behold the numbers of
The suffering unemployed.'2
These conflicts in culture and ideology met directly in the political arena of the policy debate. Working men and masters clashed with each other and among themselves in the discussion of the source of Britain's industrial superiority during the policy debate over the repeal of the laws against the emigration of artisans and the exportation of machinery. These debates were crucial in highlighting and generating much more intellectual debate on the role of the capital goods sector and on the ownership of skill. This sector, which contained the possibilities for the manufacture of machines by machines, was the very heart of the development and diffusion of new techniques. The debates also projected and fostered a piecemeal and empirical view of technical change which fitted in closely with the scientific movement and the political economy of the time.
A contrast over the debate on the capital goods sector was the controversy over the handloom weavers. Great concern was shown in this period for the mechanization of the 'backward' domestic sectors of the fastest growing consumer industry, the textile industry. This concern was projected most strikingly in the handloom weaver debates, and they were certainly the most widespread of the political debates on technical progress.
The importance of the machinery question reached far beyond the place of production in the 1820's and the 1830's. It featured in the theoretical, cultural and political struggles of these years and as such, was formative to the consciousness of both the bourgeoisie and the working classes.
Cited by Raphael Samuel, 'Mayhew and Labour History,' Bulletin for the Society of Labour History, 1973, p. 52
The Present Condition of British Workmen, n.p., 1834.