DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT

Marx and the Death of the Author, Part IV: Big Macs and iPads, part 2

In the last entry, which still went over 1,000 words north of my self-imposed limit, I began the story of Britain's industrial revolution, its connection to India, West Africa, and the southern present-day United States. By the time we finished, the slaves had been freed, their former owners compensated, but not the slaves, oh no, that'd be ridiculous, and noted British Engineer and probable autism haver Robert Stephenson has given today's known autism havers the gift of trains.

MAJEL BARRET: AND NOW, THE CONCLUSION

The timing of the compensation of the former slavers and the invention of a reliable steam locomotive is important, because the sudden surplus of capital given by the British government to the former slavers spawned 'rail mania' in Britain, the sudden explosion of private rail networks across all of Britain, starting with the Liverpool-Manchester route. Someday, I will write more about what 'rail mania' tells us about Silicon Valley, and why it's ALSO not the capitalist success story I'm sure some will want to claim, but it is important to note that, on the basis of the abolition of slavery, of all things, the British government gave a considerable investment, at tax payer's expense, to the capitalist class, who immediately turned around and invested it in railways, yes, but more railway adjacent schemes, frauds, and predatory monopolies rather than actual functional railways. For every useful bit of rail, like what would become the basis for the modern East Coast Mainline, there were dozens more cases of outright fraud or small tiny lines built that went nowhere and still sucked in loads of capital. You don't call it 'rail mania' because everyone is acting rationally.

Finally, if you remember, Oliver Cromwell, one of those pro-Parliament types from the disagreement between Parliament and the Crown from earlier, despite being 'pro-Parliament', it'd be difficult to describe him as pro-democracy, rather pro-'Proto-Theocratic-Dictatorship where I'm the Dictator, also I'm a huge Puritan prick who thinks Christmas, theatre, and fun are unChristian, also I hate the Irish'. That last bit is important, because it's what he has in common with Elizabeth I, who wasn't content with ruining West Africa and South Asia, no, Liz I also wanted to ruin Ireland, and Ireland was considerably easier to ruin, what with it being next door and considerably less populated than West Africa and South Asia. Liz I, you see, had set up something in Ireland called 'the plantation system', to encourage English colonialisation of Ireland. The idea behind the plantation system works thusly: Irish people can't own land in Ireland, so as to break their power bases in country, and instead we set up a landlord class of English landowners. The landowners, of course, even land lords, wouldn't actually work the land. On account of being fancy rich English boys with vast sums of inherited money. The poor Irish, therefore, would still work the land they were no longer allowed to own. When James became king of England and Scotland, this system was expanded to encourage rich special Scottish boys to also colonise Ireland, especially in the north. Cromwell helped things along by further breaking Irish resistance with a regular, good old fashioned violent genocide.

Cromwell: Making O'Brien suffer long before those dirty Cardies

Resultantly, the farmers in Ireland no longer had the legal right to choose what they could plant on the farms they worked, and capitalist logic tended towards crops that were easy to cultivate with minimal investment and yet easy to sell at profit. The then newly discovered (by white folk) potato fit the bill. If you're familiar with Irish history, even the tiniest bit, you likely can see where this is going. This desire for 'cultivation at the lowest cost' led to extensive monoculture, increasing the potato crop's potential for a decimating genetic disease, said disease came in the form of the potato blight, and suddenly the body count that Cromwell had managed was being dwarfed. Worse, the British ruling class of the 1840s believed in several forms of what we now call Social Darwinism, and so the political will to help the starving Irish was non-existent, as the famine and the death of the Irish was 'natural selection' and teaching these lazy Catholics the value of a good 'Protestant Work Ethic'. The Irish Potato Famine, or the Great Death/Hunger as it is known in Ireland was nothing less than genocide by capitalistic inaction, and caused entirely by the Capitalist mode of production and colonial logic being applied to land ownership and farming in Ireland. Ireland's status as 'the prototype colony' would see many such stories repeated across the Empire, especially in East Africa and South Asia.

Back in Britain, there was already anti-industrialisation movements springing up. Popular British poet, William Blake had already written his poem, 'And did those feet in ancient times', which would serve as the preface for his epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books. Today, English folk think of this poem in relation to the patriotic hymn 'Jerusalem', which was not popularised until the First World War, but Blake's poem, published in 1808 entered a new phrase into the English language, namely the phrase 'dark Satanic mills', which Blake depicted as ruining the tranquillity of his poetic and romantic Agrarian England. By the mid-19th century British people were increasingly getting wary of the dead and dismembered children that these mills had produced as a side-product of their rapid expansion, there was also growing concern over the health of the perspective mothers, as women were seen as back then, being similarly maimed and thus impeding their capacity to out produce those Irish migrants pouring in, potentially weakening British society as we know it. The Irish were prone to singing and dancing after all, and frivolity was not the Victorian way. Resultantly, movements against child labour and for protections of mothers in work place began to spring up, and more broadly the whiff of reform was in the air. None of that violent revolution, no thank you, we are British after all, we will have lengthy debates in Parliament instead and call it the era of 'Great Reform', and even invent the modern concept of childhood as a distinct part of the human life cycle. Someone needs to read Dickens' lighter work, after all, the idea of a London Landlord willingly repenting after being shown the errors of his ways is just a bit too far fetched for the adults.

This was the Britain that Marx had moved into. Some things were familiar, the social and political unrest, the factories, the migrations, other things were not, the expansiveness of the railways, the free press, being at the centre of a global empire, and a country that had already done away with the monarchy once, and then gone back to it for reasons no one was every really sure about other than just fatigue over the Puritans, and Cromwell and his nepo-baby in particular. London was already more diverse than any German cities, it was the largest city in the world, with people coming in from the failed revolutions of 1848 on the continent, from the farthest points of the Empire on trading ships, and from neighbouring Ireland, fleeing the famine by going deeper into the belly of the beast. The British were in the process of figuring out who they were, a process that had started with the union of the crowns in 1604 when 'British' as an idea began to wrestle with 'English', 'Scottish', and to a lesser extent, 'Welsh'. Many would argue the process is still ongoing as of this writing. London, therefore, was similarly struggling with trying to figure out what it was, a process that is also ongoing. The exploiters and the exploited all sharing a city, in close proximity, the exploited fighting back, as the close proximity gave them something they'd lacked in the countryside, a time and place to organise. Britain was not, as we know now, on the verge of revolution, but it was constantly on the verge of something, and Marx and Engels could likely feel that, and a large part of that something had to do with the factories that had given London its nickname of 'the big smoke'.

Those factories staffed by Irish migrants, fed by raw materials coming in from across the Empire, and whose beating heart were the large metallic creatures, the machines dominating the space, devouring the life and limbs of workers who had gotten too close, with gross indifference. The machines that would cause one of Marx's later countrymen to proclaim 'God is dead, we have killed him'. William Blake was dead by the time Marx hit British shores, and had been for sometime. For a variety of reasons, I don't think they would have liked each other. If I'm honest, I'm not particularly fond of Blake either, but still am of the opinion everyone should read him at least once, as his imagery of Britain still persists not only in the British national psyche, but also in broader English and English-language literature. Blake viewed the factories in and of themselves as being evil, a symbol of the cruel indifferent modernity that was destroying the centuries old way of life and culture in England. Instead of calling technophobes 'Luddites', we should call them Blakites. Blakers? Blakists? Someone who's better at language than me can sort that out.

Marx was not a Blakist. The factories themselves were not the problem, in fact they would be the solution. Marx did not share Blake's romanticised vision of Britain past, he knew that the majority of people in agrarian Britain were subsistence farmers at best, barely eking out a living on a harsh terrain, and hoping that a fight between different inbred nobles wouldn't lead to their violent death. There was no going back to pre-industrial Britain, and for the masses there was no benefit in going back either. No, Britain was in the 'primitive accumulation phase' now, and that was good, it meant more clothes and more food for the masses. The problem with the factories, was the ownership, that a few benefited from the labour of the many. That absentee English landlords benefited from the rent paid by workers, the labour done by Irish farmers, and the slavery, and now near slavery conditions of workers in the colonies. That these landlords would, in the press they owned, discuss the superiority of the British way of life, but deny the majority of British workers access to the fruits of this way of life. The factories, Marx thought, should be owned by the workers, and the fruits of their labour enjoyed by them, not the shareholders of central London, who rarely visited the factories they invested in, as even they found them unsavoury.

I write this in modern London, most of those factories are gone now, London is still 'the big smoke', but most of the smoke in question now comes from petrol engines, and woe to any politician, especially a 'Muslim one' that tries to address that. But, I'm sure many of my British readers are reading over the conditions that Marx was writing about in the 1850s and 60s and realising that in many ways, London hasn't moved on, it is still very much the London that Marx would have known, absentee landlords and shareholders still ever present, still exploiting workforces, both in Britain an abroad. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Indeed this Marxist is watching a sometimes violent resistance to automation building again, not unlike the ones Blake had inspired two centuries ago, and I come to the same conclusion Marx did slightly less than 200 years ago, it's not the machines, I'm even rather fond of computers and the good I think they've both done and will do for the masses, the problem is the ownership. Instead of worrying about inbred nobles quarrelling and it leading to my violent death, I now fear a violent death brought about from the petty fightings and politicking of CEOs who have increasingly been vocal about dreaming of being feudal royalty. At least this time the Irish count as white, I guess, so we've got that going for us.

Right, time to kill the author, and not just with my own work and opinions. Guy Standing's The Corruption of Capitalism expands the modern landlord, as they presently exist in London, wider Britain, and across the world and showcases how advancement in capitalism has nothing to do with hard work, and everything to do with ownership. Statistically, you can't get ahead, and it's already too late to even try. In the last section I already hinted at, but will now expand on Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not which expands upon the Marxist idea of ownership and expands it to, 'but what if my country is literally owned by Britain'. Finally, I have already hinted at, reviewed, and am once again pushing you to pick up Marx and the Robots. Also of the books I've already reviewed, Feeding the Machine is all about how little of the 'intelligence' is artificial, and how much of it is just good old fashioned labour exploitation, typically from 'poorer' Commonwealth countries such as Kenya and India.

For bonus points: The Cost of Free Shipping will make you swear off Amazon, if you haven't already.

For another week, Marx is dead, long live Marx. Next week we'll be expanding Marxian notions of class, so more jokes about inbred nobility inbound.