Specialisation
The growth of
agricultural specialisation for the increasing mass markets of
towns was gradual. In early modern Europe it existed alongside and
overlaid the agricultural subsistence base. The preindustrial
agricultural specialists concerned with the production of beef,
mutton and lamb, kept a few acres for poultry and pigs to feed
their own families and servants. To partake of the rewards from a
mass market economy the emphasis changed; a major concern was now
to produce a marketable commodity, and growing food for immediate
and personal subsistence was only a minor concern. Land began to be
used to achieve maximum output, more livestock and crops were
tended by fewer people and in general productivy began to rise. The
developed consumers' economy of constructive groups comprising
symbiotic urban and rural sectors is closely dependent on the
stability provided by organized political systems.
One of the
distinctive features of producers' economies is
that they are organized to effect a transfer of goods from one
producer to another in unfinished form, as well as to govern
transfers between producers and consumers. A firm now acquires
goods, subjects them to partial preparation, and passes them on to
other firms. Exchange enters into the regulation of the productive
process itself, and there is a circulation not merely of finished
goods, but of all the factors of production-land, labour, capital;
and a single product is created in a number of different productive
stages which take place successively in different locations, and
are carried out by different firms. Production is serialized as
well as specialized; and for each stage of production, the
necessary materials and means are often assembled separately
through exchange mechanisms.
The organization of
production under a producers' economy differs from that under a
consumers' economy. In the handicraft production associated with a
consumers' economy, the technical basis of working organization is
the complete product. Each enterprise commands all the tools,
materials, and skills required to produce a given kind of article
or a number of similar articles. Raw materials are turned, within
the shop, into the final product. Leatherworkers in such
enterprises may acquire raw hides which they clean, tan, dye, cut,
fashion, and decorate to bring forth boots, garments, or saddles
ready for use. They often sell them in the shop.
The factory
enterprises of producers' economies are typically organized not to
turn out a complete product ready for the consumer, but to perform
only a part of the operations that produce it—the "job." A
single factory may produce only the bolts that belong to a
particular automobile assembly, or may only assemble pieces,
already made elsewhere, into a toy. In many large enterprises, work
is allocated among a number of different shops, each of which
executes one or a few of the many operations that go to create the
complex final product. An automobile factory, for instance, is a
compound of many such shops, and in addition relies upon small
independent plants to furnish certain of the parts it
assembles.
Production is broken
down into a series of many separate jobs, and the whole process is
spread out among many agencies over some distance. Different
equipment and facilities are assembled at various points; all are
connected by transport lines; and each is served by its own labour
force. Skillful organization of the movement of materials through
the proper sequence replaces skilled handiwork as the crucial
element in production. Workers are readily trained, moved,
discharged, or hired, and men take and leave jobs with little
concern; no social traditions exclude all but a few groups from
employment at a particular job, as is true with the crafts system.
Equipment is not made on the spot, but purchased from special
enterprises which design and produce it according to need. In some
countries, the processes used in production are restricted to
whatever enterprise can acquire legal rights over them, but
eventually they become common property. Equipment and processes
frequently change, personnel turns over rapidly, and even the
nature of the product is constantly developing.
Since exchange makes
available to producers services and goods that are created by other
producers expressly for their use, a supply of specialized means of
production, inanimate energy, component parts, and materials
becomes accessible to any enterprise, regardless of its size. The
large aggregate demand for productive goods and services supports
the growth of a large producers' goods industry and of public
utilities. A relatively high proportion of the factories and other
manufacturing plants is devoted to the production (more
technically, the conversion) of energy to operate other plants, to
the production of materials—like pig-iron, sulphuric acid,
and lumber—that are basic to other industries, and to the
building of production equipment—like machine tools and
chemical plants. A relatively small number of the manufacturing
plants in operation under a producers' economy actually turn out
only finished consumers' goods.
The spatial order
associated with factory production reflects the great diversity of
agencies concerned not only in production, but in the service of
other production, and recently also in the service of urban
populations employed in these activities. In the fully
commercialized producers' economy, the unparalleled volume of
exchange upon which production rests, the intricate division of
tasks in manufacture, and the variety of services, all require an
altogether unprecedented development of artificial
facilities.
Impact
The first impact of
mechanisation was seen in agriculture when machines were invented
to replace manual labour of hoeing, sowing and reaping. Eventually,
the spread of mechanisation based upon the internal combustion
engine resulted in the pneumatic tyre replacing the wooden wheel,
and saddlers and blacksmiths have been replaced by the agricultural
engineers based in modern premises with special equipment and
tools.
Cooperation and
interdependence between neighbouring farmers and craftsmen was an
essential element in the tapestry of country life. The advent of
corn binders did much to fragment the cohesion of close-knit rural
communities, by dispensing with the need for co- operative
activities by groups of neighbours at haymaking and
shearing.
Movement of mass
produced goods into the deep countryside from distant factories was
facilitated by the transport revolution of the 19th century in the
form of turnpike roads, canals, and more importantly railways,
which came in mid-century are commonly used. Almost all of the
operations of cultivation are performed by machines driven by
motors or engines. The fields are like those of Western plough
agriculture, and the crops the same, except that there is an
increasing concentration on "industrial" crops like sugar beet,
cotton, and oilseeds. Animals are raised for meat, milk, hides, and
wool; and mechanical devices driven by inanimate power are often
used in their care.
Automatic power
machines are just beginning to be used in cultivation. They are
employed on a limited scale in hydroponic systems to control the
physical and chemical properties of a solution substituted for the
soil. Automatic devices are also used to control atmospheres in
greenhouses and laboratories. In these forms of cultivation there
is neither garden nor field, but a tank or soil-bed. The plant is
tended individually, at present, but perhaps this is only because
this form of cultivation is still largely experimental and a luxury
specialty. The crops grown are chosen for experimental purposes or
for a high-priced market. Automatic cultivation is found in
hundreds of laboratories and experimental greenhouses, in some
military bases and pioneering stations in high latitudes, and in
commercial hothouses that grow vegetables and flowers for market
under glass.
The use of animals
for traction is standard under agriculture proper. Where power
agriculture has arisen, parallel developments have taken place in
animal care, and modern dairy men, for example, in a highly
industrialized country, tend to equip their farms with power-driven
machines of many kinds. Except in true agriculture, however, the
raising of animals is not closely integrated with cultivation.
Large herds of animals were kept until very recent times by
separate social, and even national, groups peripheral to the
agricultural populations—wandering as pastoral nomads in
lands unsuited to cultivation. The nomad always had some
relationship with the agriculturist. Indeed, a great many pastoral
groups were part-time farmers. The raising of animals remains a
specialty in certain types of country under power agriculture, and
the growing of crops in places becomes subservient to
it.
Capital and nature
If we rank technical
equipment and installations on a scale from simple implements
through facilities, machines and power machines to automata, we may
expect a commensurate increase at each step in the power of man in
nature. The more advanced his technical means, the more a single
individual can do to his surroundings; the wider his effect can
extend itself in space; the deeper into the earth, and the higher
into the heavens his power will reach. The powers of society also
grow, in fact at a rate greater than the individual's; individuals
working together in a systematic way produce a greatly magnified
effect.
When humans possess
implements only, they can hardly scratch the surface of the ground.
If they are cultivators, however, they may actually modify their
surroundings to favour food production. People having only
implements are pitted little more than evenly against the beasts of
the wild. Missiles are as important to them as are implements in
the hunt; they avoid dangerous close contact with large predators,
and can only reach more timid and less wary prey. Fire is their
greatest ally, but they can scarcely control it. Having no
facilities or machines, such folk cannot even produce very
efficient tools, since they can only utilize materials which are
already at hand, easily worked, and which already possess the
appropriate physical qualities for tools. Men can do little
clearing of the forests with rude stone axes, even when they are
abetted by wild-running fires. Generally, where men still have only
simple equipment, the forest still stands. Wild game can be driven
with fire but probably cannot be exterminated with simple weapons,
unless it is already on the wane through other causes. The
exploitation of mineral materials is confined to carrying off what
can be picked up from the surface or scraped out from shallow
depth. Stones suitable for projectile points and the like, salt,
pigments, and bright pebbles and shells are available.
When facilities are
constructed men can store foodstuffs. They can accumulate large
amounts of seeds, roots and other products, and seeds may sprout or
some shoots may grow from these accumulations in the vicinity of
dwellings or refuse heaps. Men drive game into prepared snares,
corrals, and pits, sometimes using fire. They may line springs,
enlarge pools and may build or dig aqueducts. Living sites are
constructed having house platforms, palisades, squares and streets,
refuse heaps, and so on, though these facilities remain fairly
primitive in many cases. An even larger variety of facilities comes
to be associated with cultivation.
Mine shafts can be
sunk into the earth, and the subsurface is opened to exploitation.
Certain peoples who do not practice cultivation but who can build
facilities at this technical level produce many ingenious fishing
and hunting devices. The folk who build elaborate facilities,
whether cultivators or not, are capable of serious depletion of
game and fish supplies; of intensive modification of living sites
and their immediate surroundings; and of some use of subsoil
minerals. They can sometimes effect great changes in native
vegetations.
Peoples with
machines are capable of proportionately greater effects, and
correspondingly larger benefits therefrom. Not only the direct
impact of their machines, but their widened needs for materials and
their improved means of communication play a telling part in
changing the environment. Some hunting peoples, as well as
cultivators, use machines, and they have been very effective
predators, able to feed themselves in a specialized way from
selected herds of ungulates or from particular sea mammals. It was
machine-using folk, too, who cleared the great woodlands of middle
latitudes, which could not be breached with simple implements. As
long as the power to drive machines must be furnished by animals or
humans, however, the machine proper has probably not been an
instrument of wholesale destruction of vegetation or mineral
deposits. Machines used in cultivation do expose poorly protected
soils to washing and gullying, and they do allow men to modify
greatly the soil surface. The use of machines in hunting also
greatly increases man's predatory pressure on animal
life.
The capabilities
conferred on man by power machines are prominently registered in
nature. There is such a large literature of alarm on this topic
that detailed comment is superfluous here. Man can dig miles deep
into the earth, plunge to the depths of the sea, soar far into the
heavens and aspire to reach the planets. With power machines men
can chop mountains to pieces for ore, move hills, force rivers to
run backwards, crack the atomic nucleus with a flash and a mushroom
cloud, and attempt to create living matter in the laboratory.
Nature is at the mercy of man, and man acts blindly at his own
peril. Great risks and great rewards await him.
The role of the
automaton is still to be revealed. It may act mightily for
destruction, sucking up insatiably the wealth of nature, or it may
make possible a calculated adjustment to the natural conditions
impinging on man's life and work, which will reduce the hazard and
the folly of uncontrolled exploitation of nature. Automatic
calculators are already being used to inform mankind of the prudent
course, and the automatic machines may someday manufacture goods
(and services) in ways so much more efficient, economical, and
sparing of natural resources that man's stewardship of earth may
greatly improve as his power grows. The issue probably depends more
upon the ways in which societies and economies are organized than
upon material technique itself.
Although the
consequences of man's technical activity for the conditions of his
life in nature are the subject of our discussion, only a sketch of
the impact of techniques upon environment has been possible here.
We need to know how capital is fitted into man's environment and
managed by his societies before we can tell more of its
effects.
Urbanisation
The degree of
technological development and therefore the level of artificiality
of the human environment is at its highest in communities where
immense urban settlement have taken root. These urban populations
are supported by a continual supply of goods moving in a multitude
of ways from an ever-expanding array of resource sites. The
relative concentration of human beings in settlements is in fact a
good index to artificiality. Another good indicator is the volume
of natural resources used per unit area of settlement and the
variety of goods and services locally on offer. Yet another is the
relative dependence of individuals upon highly specialised
productive roles of fellow citizens, and the fragmentation of their
social relations into many small, discrete, and unconnected
networks.
The environment
through which the nomad gatherers make their rounds remains,
although its vegetation may be altered radically, almost as vast
and empty as nature made it. In farming country, the cultivated
fields and gardens display the handiwork of man, but the
environments that they provide for crops remain ruled more by
nature than by man. The city and the road are altogether artificial
features, though, and commercial urban people live and work within
environments that they impose on nature.
The wanderers live
"off the land," garnering a livelihood from wild plants and
animals; and farmers live "on the land," feeding themselves from
their crops and livestock; but urban specialists live under highly
artificial circumstances, lack the means of producing crops for
themselves, and thus rely on rural populations to supply their food
in exchange for other goods and services. We have observed that
specialized commercial production of the kind associated with
cities is possible only when, in addition to the food-producing
symbiosis, there is a further symbiosis of exchange within the
society that allows some of its members to engage in pursuits other
than cultivation.
Large differences in
artificial spatial arrangements are related to differences in
economic forms. In subsistence societies, which have no appreciable
exchange, all the various stages of production are carried out by
the members of one very small household group in a small area. The
complex of artificial features associated with production is
"telescoped," and its component elements are little differentiated.
Resource sites are few; routes of circulation are short and hardly
improved; manufacture is carried on around the dwelling, and
specialized services are few in number. Many parallel systems of
production exist with little reciprocal effect, and the complexity
and size of any one of them are limited by the small numbers of
workers and the slight degree of specialization of the household
group.
Societies in which
much exchange is practiced display a different character. There,
routes of transport link the many sites of resource exploitation,
manufacture, and service; and along these routes are specialized
installations for various kinds of commercial production. The
artificial complex serves a large area, and tends to be connected
with other like complexes. The productive system commands the
labour and highly specialized skills of a large number of workers.
The uses made of particular places, the equipment and installations
devoted to particular tasks, and the working roles of individuals
are all well differentiated and specialized.
A system organized
around only the single symbiosis of and urban food supply develops
a multitude of unconnected, parallel economic units, each with its
own complex of artificial productive features. The double symbiosis
involving exchange in addition creates a single economic unit of
wide scope, having one large and more or less unitary complex of
highly specialized productive installations. The particular nature
of this complex depends upon the degree of commercialization
attained, i.e., the extent to which various commodities are subject
to exchange between urban and rural markets.