DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT

Marx and the Death of the Author, Part IVa: Ordering Big Macs from iPads

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Author's note: This got really long, so I divided it into two parts, part two will be published later this week. Enjoy.

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You live in a big city, the landlord class in your city is largely unregulated (we'll come back to them in a future post), and so you live a not insignificant distance from your place of employment, so you spend 'only' half your income on shelter instead of the three-quarters or more that living closer would entail. As such, every morning you crowd onto a commuter train to rush into the centre of the city to engage in your labour. If you're autistic your love of trains runs counter to your hatred of overcrowding on these ageing carriages, but your national government just had to partially or fully privatise the rail network back in the 1980s or 1990s, either because of an internally imposed austerity via Margaret Thatcher or your local equivalent (nearly every country has a Margaret Thatcher of their own), or internationally imposed austerity via the EU or World Bank. As such, the rolling stock your on is from the 1990s, but was ordered and designed in the 1980s before the nationalised rail network blinked out of existence and Richard Branson, or your local equivalent, came along to milk the publicly built infrastructure for all it was worth before travelling internationally to do pseudo-inspirational speeches and guest star on a regrettable episode of post 1998 Simpsons. These facts are moving about your head, making you grumpy, but you're a recovering alcoholic, so instead of getting a pint of stout to help you calm down whilst you listen to a podcast about how the Pete Buttigiegs of the world (every country has one) ruined politics, you go to get a coffee.

In your home neighbourhood you have a small local independent coffee shop you support, and in the neighbourhood your office is in you also have a small local independent coffee shop, but you're somewhere in-between, switching trains, and in a train station named after a local landmark whose history is so dark it has a nursery rhyme. The second train has been delayed due to a signal fault, due to a lack of maintenance by Richard Branson or your local equivalent, at least this time Branson's lack of knowledge and foresight around national infrastructure isn't killing anyone. So you step out onto the street to grab a coffee from a local chain, you find one right outside the station, and step inside. Instead of ordering from a barista, the over worked and under paid employee behind the bar hurriedly points you to one of the massive tablets encased in a metal anti-theft cage, which is playing a slide show of the godless new crimes against coffee that the chain is trying to get trending on social media, with the words 'Touch Anywhere To Begin' helpfully displaying along the bottom. The world is still recovering from a disease pandemic that science says still hasn't gone away, and you're a germophobe, but you touch this very public display, trying to ignore how many unwashed hands with God only knows what diseases have also touched this display. It is after all, a publicly used touchscreen in the middle of one of the world's busiest cities. You ask yourself, 'how did we get here, to me ordering a latte from an over-glorified dirty, dirty iPad'? Before you can despair at the existential angst that is living in a cosmopolitan city in late-stage capitalism, you glance at your watch and rush off to catch that second train.

For many readers, this story will sound familiar. These automated point-of-sale (POS) units have become a regular facet of modern life, present in everything from our grocers, to our coffee shops, and even our sushi shops. They've had a... mixed reception by both consumer and capital alike, but for many they've come to represent the automation of the food service industry, an industry that was already infamous for its atrocious treatment of its labour. However, whenever baristas or restaurant workers in the past threatened to unionise the threat of these machines was dangled over their heads. They largely didn't unionise, and the machines came anyway. Moral of the story: always unionise.

Marx, it should be stated clearly, did not believe in utopianism. Like many 'philosopher' types to come from the post-Enlightenment school of thought, his view on the nature of humanity came with that sweet twinge of German-British Protestant pessimism: the human race is an utterly corrupted lot, who are in dire need of some form of salvation or the other. Nonetheless, Marx was what today we might call a techno-optimist. Machines, if owned by the masses, the workers, would be a liberation force, minimising the necessity of unpleasant repetitive labour, allowing all people to become philosophers like him. Machines, if owned by the capitalist class, however, would become the ultimate form of enslavement, with workers reduced to being idle, and replaceable, parts of the very machines they were working with and on, ultimately to be phased out once the machine became self reliant. Marx's encounters with automation, it should be made clear, where with the British and German varieties of the early 19th century. As such, let's do a quick examination of the British Industrial Revolution(s) to examine the common myths around them, that even Marx was struggling against in the 1850s and 60s.

As I've hinted at before, British industrialisation and racialised colonial imperialism have been deeply intertwined from the beginning. A lecture series I'm currently pulling together examines the reasons we build machines and how the material realities around us dictate those reasons. The story of the modern steam-powered factory doesn't begin in Lancashire, although that's where the first automated looms would indeed be built, but in India. As the Ottoman Empire began to monopolise east-west trade, and as Britain split off of the Catholic Church and therefore out of good relations with Spain and Portugal, Elizabeth I, the Shakespeare one, commissioned the creation of the first modern corporation to facilitate non-Ottoman, non-Portuguese trade between India and England. This corporation and early instrument of immense human suffering would be the 'Honourable' East India Company, patented by Royal Warrant in 1600. The EIC was based in and around London, but held a government-sanctioned monopoly over all trade with Asia. This led to two things, first, a dramatic increase in smuggling (this is how Twining's got started) to break up the ridiculous monopoly the EIC created, and the widespread importation of Indian textiles into Britain. To facilitate this, the EIC either bought or leased (it was made intentionally unclear) the ports of Surat and Calcutta (now Kolkata) from the Mughal Empire, planting the first seeds of the not-at-all controversial lengthy 'involvement' of Britain in Indian affairs.

Then Liz died. Without heir at that. So her Scottish cousin came down from Edinburgh and became king of England, Wales, Scotland, and allegedly Ireland, creating the first version of the union. James was... problematic, he was very religious, giving us the King James Bible but also the witch hunts. He was so religious he decided to go and find out whether or not he was right about the afterlife in 1625, and still hasn't reported his findings back. As such, his son, Charles I became king and also believed in God, in so far as he believed he was God, or at least God's very special boy. So special there was no need for a Parliament, a sentiment that Parliament disagreed with, and so Britain would see a series of violent disagreements between Chuck 1 and Parliament from 1640-1660. For good measure, one of the leaders of Parliament did a quick genocide in Ireland, as was the style of the time. Chuck's son, Charles II would come back to be King, and would give Britain back Christmas, Shakespeare, and a whole lot of other things the genocidal bastard had taken away, but would also recognise Parliament's supremacy.

With the Civil Wars done, and the economy on the mend, the textile makers of northern England, whose cities and fields were now free of dead and dying soldiers, witches, Catholics, and Irishmen, noticed that Indian textiles were considerably more popular than their wares both at home and in the continent. This was in no small part due to the fact that India's population, both then and now, was considerably larger than Britain's. However, most in Lancashire were not good at maths, and this time it wasn't entirely the fault of Tory policy. As such, they began to try and figure out how to best compete with Indian textiles.

This is the point of the story where the myth and the reality begin to diverge. The narrative of the British creation myth and the Capitalist 'dogged determinism' myth state that the good, clever, intelligent people of Lancashire, inspired by the invisible hand of the marketplace, took a good look at the old water wheels on the side of the flour mill and created the power loom to work on the same basic design, harnessing the power of the River Mersey, and dramatically increasing their daily output, foxily and cunningly outwitting their Indian competition, who were still in the dark ages of feudal production. This created such a consumer surplus that the cost of cloth diminished. Capitalism had triumphed, and now the good people of Britain had their Sunday best in addition to their dirty peasant clothes, and Europe and the world saw the inherent value and virtue of British textile mills and fawned over them, purchasing the good, clean, British textiles instead of the dirty, heathen Indian ones. God Save the King.

But wait, I hear you say, what were the textiles in question made from? Well, turns out cotton is more comfortable than even the finest Yorkshire wool. Okay, you say, but cotton isn't indigenous to Britain, doesn't even grow particularly well in Britain, what with the clay-like soil, the lack of sun, the constant rain, and the generally unpleasant and dark disposition of the British people. Don't worry, Britain is still in control of a sizeable chunk of 'the new world', where south of the River Potomac, there is a land whose climate is comparable to India. Okay fine, you say, did the British automate the cultivation of cotton too? And doesn't India still vastly outcompete Britain in terms of population? What're those greasy French up to?

Your warranted Francophobia aside, these are the holes in the myth that might invite healthy scepticism, and healthy scepticism is the root of honest academic work. No, the cultivation of cotton had not been automated, and the mills across Northern England had an unquenchable hunger for cotton. Further, before, during, and after American independence, the fields of the American south were considerably larger than even the greediest of medieval lords could dream of, allowing for the cultivation of considerably more crops than ever before, but the number of British and Irish people available to work the fields paled in comparison to the labour demand, and the British workers did count as 'people' in the eyes of many of the time, regardless of how poor they were. What, being nominally Christian and all.

Thankfully, Liz foresaw this problem, and also created the Royal Africa Company, thus continuing her legacy of contributing immensely to the number of crimes against humanity Britain would have attached to its legacy. The mills of the early industrial revolution hungered for cheap cotton, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the resultant 'free' labour would present the cotton to the capitalists of northern England. Thus freeing up capital to continue to refine the 'power looms' pressing the textiles into existence. Namely, the number of children and women losing their hands in these machines was becoming a problem, not because of the mangled workers, they were replaceable, but because they had the audacity to bleed on the textiles, and the stoppage time also came at a cost. Also, slavery wasn't cheap either, it was necessary to deploy violence against the enslaved people, both to enslave them, and to force them to comply. Sometimes too, the cost of transporting them would become too much for the ship captain, and so he would 'drop tonnage' halfway through the voyage, by throwing the enslaved people overboard, still in chains, en masse. There was profit to be had, you see, and sometimes mass death is profitable.

This still didn't solve the fact that Indian textiles were still both cheaper and better quality. Obviously, the free market pressed the British textile makers to refine their product, so it could out compete the Indian competition, right?

As Parthasarathi argues, no. The market was not free. The textile makers lobbied Parliament to limit the import of Indian textiles into Britain. This was enforced through the violence of the East India Company, both in Britain itself and in India. Fortunately for Britain, the Mughal Empire had had better days, and was busy fighting a lengthy war, known as the Deccan War, with the Maratha Empire, which had split off of it. This war was the height of futile, the likes of futility that would not be seen in India again until the Burma campaign of the Second World War, and exhausted the resources of the Mughals and the Marathas, pushing the Mughals into being a 'satellite state' of Britain, and the Marathas into France's hands, ultimately pushing France out of South Asia altogether during the Napoleonic War. The largest battle of the Napoleonic War, the battle of Agra, would haunt Wellington the rest of his days, and he considered that battle to be the defining moment of his career, not Waterloo.

Once there was no more independent India, the British textiles didn't have to worry any more.

Let me drive this home, industrialisation was not a product of the free market, or of sheer capitalist ingenuity, but rather extreme violence against Irish folk, Black folk, and Asian folk. Oh, and English folk. A few years before Marx was born, workers in the textile factory began to notice they were receiving terrible wages compared to the price of their goods, and they were being treated literally as part of the machine. The Luddites, as they came to be known, went on strike for better working conditions and better pay. The mill owners, friends with the British media, worked overtime to paint the striking Luddites as uneducated backwards imbeciles, who were afraid of the technology. This narrative stuck, helped along by the ongoing Napoleonic War, and a general British anxiety of a French-style revolution spreading to British shores and bringing the violence of the continent up to Britain. The Luddites, undeterred, continued to demonstrate, destroying the machines to send a message to the owners. The British Army, who really seemed to have more important things going on in Spain, Portugal, Canada, the US, and India at the time, still took the time and manpower necessary to massacre the striking workers. Napoleon and his unlikely, unwitting allies in the Marathas and the Americans were indeed a threat to British capital, but so were these class conscious workers.

Napoleon was a proto-fascist, and the enslaved persons had it the worst in all this, I want to make that very clear. But it is also important to make note of the considerable amount of genocide and violence necessary to establish capitalism. This is not a 'natural evolution', but rather a forceful revolution in its own right, with a body count comparable to anything from Russia or China. Capitalism also requires a certain amount of gaslighting, it seems.

Eventually, nearly two centuries after the start of the whole debacle, pockets of wealthy British people began to feel bad about slavery, leading to the growth of the abolition movement in the latter half of the 18th century. I'm not going to say one of the reasons America sought independence from Britain was because it saw the writing on the wall, and knew that Britain was on the verge of abolishing slavery, but the majority of the American economy was reliant on slavery, the wealthiest member of the independence movement were all slave owners, and the first anti-slavery legislation in Parliament passed in 1807, not too long after the Americans left. By 1833, slavery had been abolished, on paper, across the entire Empire. Considering the amount of capital in Britain that was there because of the immense labour by enslaved persons not only in the US south but also in the plantations of the British-owned portions of the Caribbean, that perhaps some of that capital would be given back to the formerly enslaved persons as recognition for their contribution to British wealth.

Of course, you're a fool, and white economists have spent the better part of the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries coming up with intellectualised reasons why reparations to the descendants of the enslaved people is the fever dream of mad men. Someday, I'll likely write about that. But Britain did pay reparations at the end of slavery.

To the former slavers. For 'loss of property'. 'For the good of the economy'.

About this time, British engineer Robert Stephenson had demonstrated his new contraption, the 'Rocket' steam locomotive.