“In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. … Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability… Labour [is] unavoidably become dishonourable, as being evidence of poverty.”
Thorstein Veblen coined the terms “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The above quote, taken from the chapter, “Conspicuous Leisure”, points out the goal of every Victorian middle-class gentleman: to have so much money he needn't work and was therefore able to buy whatever his heart desired.
The fabulous wealth generated by industry during the Machine Age spawned an entire class of people who didn't work. They lived off their “living” and displayed their wealth in the most ostentatious manner possible.
Every coin, however, has a flip side. And while the Machine Age gave rise to a wealthy class, that wealth was generated on the backs of poorly paid laborers.
The lot of those in service was low wages, long hours, rudimentary living conditions, and the fear of being sacked with no reference.
Factory workers lost hands, arms, legs, or their lives working around machines with no safety guards. Lung disease was common amongst miners and textile workers. All in addition to receiving low wages, without any benefits.
It is reported that when the Titanic was sinking, the passageways from the lower decks were blocked to prevent any but the rich from getting a seat on the lifeboats.
When Marie Antoinette supposedly uttered those famous words, “let them eat cake”, it wasn't because she was mean—it was because she genuinely thought the peasants had simply run out of bread and didn’t want to eat the cake they had. Ignorance of the plight of the peasant didn't prove to be bliss in her case. And the lack of concern for how the middle class and the wealthy got their money at the beginning of the Machine Age, gave rise to powerful political and social dynamics that are still with us, long after the Machine Age came to an end.
Labor Unions
To improve working conditions, workers began to organize. In the US, the National Labor Union was founded in 1866. It was not overly successful and disbanded in 1874. It did, however, pave the way for more successful unions, such as the many railroad unions, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
In Britain, unions were legalized in 1871 and were responsible for the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 to represent their interests in the government.
The story of the labor movement is too long to be told here. The significance of the movement to my mind was it’s largely successful attempt to get a bigger piece of the pie for workers. The people who produced the goods that generated the wealth for the Leisure Class, we’re entitled to a fair wage, fair benefits, and safe working conditions.
All of which we take for granted today. Fair wages, fair benefits, and safe working conditions are no longer up for discussion. They are now the norm and I think that is good. The laborer is worthy of his hire, the New Testament says. And it took labor unions to make honest Christians of many industrialists.
The scene in the movie Metropolis where the hero, the naive son of a wealthy industrialist, sees the factory workers, portrayed as automatons, and then himself works at a machine, I think tells it all.
Socialism
The horror that was so often the late 19th century and early 20th century workplace and the wasteful opulence of the minority Leisure Class versus the majority Working Class, gave rise to Socialism — a social and economic system advocating social ownership or control of the means of production and the replacement of production for profit with production for use.
A socialist economy eschews the accumulation of capital and favors a system whereby goods are produced to satisfy individual and social needs.
Various forms of Socialism existed prior to the Machine Age. The form in which we see it today began as the Industrial Revolution ramped up the production of goods and successful business owners and industrialists grew rich, along with investors who didn’t work for a living. The notion that wealth should be shared by all gained adherents amongst the working class. How the working class should get their fair share was not universally agreed upon. But that they were entitled to more than what they were getting was universally agreed upon by Socialists.
The income tax (usually in a progressive form), worker-owned businesses, cooperatives, minimum wage, “free” public education (paid for by taxes), and “free” healthcare (paid for by taxes) are all ideas based on Socialist ideals.
Communism
Like Socialism, Communism existed in many forms prior to the Industrial Revolution. Vladimir Lenin advocated a particularly violent form of socialism which had its origins in the thought of Louis Auguste Blanqui, where a small band of revolutionaries should seize the government and then use the power of the state to enforce Socialism.
Lenin blended Blanqui’s views with those of Karl Marx to form the social-political-economic theories of the Communist Party. Marxism-Leninism has characterized the thought of Communists since the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Rising out of the Machine Age, Communism produced or was responsible for a multitude of horrors in the 20th Century. Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Nikolai Ceausescu, Kim Jong-il, Mao Zedong, and we must always remember Adolf Hitler rose to power in part as a crusader against Communism.
Some Thoughts
The Industrial Revolution and the Machine Age which followed were perhaps the greatest catalysts for social and political change since the invention of farming, which turned humans from wandering hunter-gatherers into civilization builders.
The Machine Age accelerated the urbanization of the Western world. Most people today live in cities and their sprawling suburbs and think their food comes from a store. They have little connection to the earth. How can they surrounded as they are by concrete, glass, asphalt, steel, plywood, and particle board? Is it any wonder people have little concept of what it means to protect the environment? Or why consumerism runs rampant, fueled by governments seeking economic growth? Growth which succeeds because people are no longer in touch with the earth, only the greed of their primal hunter-gatherer natures.
The Machine Age resulted in wonderful inventions which have enriched our lives — but it also had a dark side: dehumanization. I think this is in part why we have noir films and literature, why dissonance in art music became so prevalent from the 1920s onward, why totalitarianism became a reality in the ‘20s and ‘30s and continues in our democratic societies today as governments extensively monitor their citizens. And perhaps an even more insidious form of totalitarianism has arisen in the Digital Age with corporations such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon monitoring everything we do in order to try to control our behavior — all so someone can sell us something. Max Headroom?
Labor Unions, Socialism, Communism, and even Fascism and Nazism were all attempts to deal with the dark side of the Machine Age. And they did, with mixed results.
Today’s world has been built on yesterday’s and done so with mixed results.
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