Modern production systems are characteristic of
'constructive groups' who construct a landscape to serve
their economic aspirations, populating it beyond the limits of the
local natural productivity, importing goods and services from
elsewhere, thereby destroying its ecosystems. Costructive groups
gather around sites where there is an application of inventions for
mass production. Workers migrate attracted by better wages and
prospects, taking advantage of improved communications.
No single technological change is sufficient to
mark the onset of the industrial revolution. For example, to point
to the steam engine as the keystone of the industrial revolution
obscures those developments that preceded it and that made the
steam engine so important. Any sharp conceptual
line of demarcation through what is actually a historical process,
and not an isolated event, must be arbitrary to some extent.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the gradual global dominance of
industrial modes of production has fundamentally altered the ways
in which people live and labour, with concurrent changes in social
organization and human subjectivity Its effects upon the rest of
nature have been equally profound
Industrial modes of production are not simply the
concentration of labourers in one place nor the use of energy to
power machines. Prior to the nineteenth century, there was a
certain degree of concentration of labourers in the manufacture of
textiles and other goods. Factories using energy sources,
especially water, existed in mining, shipbuilding, and other
industries as early as the sixteenth century
By the nineteenth century, material production with machinery
powered by outside energy sources became the dominant form of
production. Such machinery is expensive and requires a significant
outlay of capital Braudel argues that "the industrial revolution
was above all a transformation of fixed capital: from now
on, it would be more costly but more durable: its quality would be
improved and it would radically alter rates of productivity."
Several social conditions had to be met before
large investments in fixed capital could dominate the production
process. Relatively stable social and political organizations had
to exist for such endeavours to be of tolerable risk, and there had
to be opportunities for profit that compensated the risk.
Perhaps the most important point for understanding industrialism's
impact upon all of nature is that capital investment in machinery
and other conditions of industrial production requires an assurance
that human labour and raw materials will be available in sufficient
quantity.
Since elabourate machines are expensive they can
be worked without a loss only if the vent of the goods is
reasonably assured and if production need not be interrupted for
want of the primary goods necessary to feed the machines. Unless
this condition is fulfilled, production with the help of
specialized machines is too risky to be undertaken both from the
point of view of the merchant who stakes his money and of the
community as a whole which comes to depend upon continuous
production for incomes, employment, and provisions.
The need for large and consistently available
quantities of nature as resources and humans as labour is as
necessary within industrial socialism as it is within capitalism
These imperatives of industrial production press hard whether
capital investment decisions are made publicly or privately.
Industrial production crowds out all other forms
of production. The cost of industrially produced commodities is so
much less than handcrafted goods that the industrial system of
production spread relentlessly. Marx and Engels saw this clearly a
century ago. The cheap prices of its commodities compels all
nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production,- it compels them to introduce what it calls
civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois
themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
'
If craftsmanship remains, it is valued against
the background of mass production and becomes an expensive "luxury"
product.
The last century has seen a remarkable
integration of the global economy. Increasingly, global resource
systems are being managed by multinational corporations. . . Viewed
from space, the Global Factory suggests a human organism. The brain
is housed in steel-and-glass slabs located in or near a few crowded
cities . . The blood is capital, and it is pumped through the
system by global banks assisted by a few governments. The financial
centres . . . function as the heart. The hands are steadily moving
to the outer rim of civilization. More and more goods are now made
in the poor countries of the southern periphery under the direction
from the headquarters on the North and most are destined to be
consumed in the industrial heartland with the new postindustrial
look.
National economies which engage in export and
import are tied into global markets The greater such international
trade, the greater the impact of such markets on the life of such
nations. Transnational corporations and international financial
markets corrode the reality of autonomous nation states through the
mechanism of international markets.
As industrial production increases in complexity
and expense, the need for social planning increases. Modern
industrial production requires the subdivision of any task into its
component parts so that organized intelligence can be
utilized. As the span of time between the inception and
completion of the task increases, there are corresponding
expansions in the amount of capital "fixed" to the performance of
particular tasks. The need for specialized manpower and the need
for forms of organization to coordinate these specialists also
expands This requires a high degree of planning. From the
nineteenth to the twentieth century, there has been a steady
expansion in the need for planning. This need has grown from the
provision of resources and labour into other dimensions of social
life, including the state, the work place, all levels of education,
scientific and technological research, mass communication, and
entertainment.