The Joys of Industrialization

Export or die!” It is a semantically, not to mention theologically, odd variant on the results of the wages of sin. “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.” Marx would have had some shrewd comments to make on Lenin’s famous apothegm. “What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States.” So would the Founding Fathers on “Engine Charlie” Wilson’s view of their mutual society’s purpose. Gross National Product: a growth rate of x per cent (never enough): the technological brain-drain (always too large); the need for ever more schools and training colleges, often misnamed universities, producing ever more technologists, salesmen, admen, industrial wizards of every sort with brains that may or may not be washed before they vanish down the drain: the managerial revolution: and, most hallowed received idea of all, the absolute desirability of a higher standard of living. It is inescapable, all over the world now, and in the Western or pink-skinned part of it for several generations past.

There is a counterpoint. Blake long ago contrasted the “dark Satanic mills” with “England’s green and pleasant land,” and by the time Engels came to Manchester there was little left of Lancashire or indeed of the North Country or the Midlands that was either green or pleasant. England was the first, and is now perhaps the worst. In America even vaster armies of landless, economically or politically transported peasants or proletarians, had little choice but. to build those disgusting slum-cities of the middle and late nineteenth century which gave such vast wealth, first, to a few American entrepreneurs and financial and industrial geniuses, then to the American nation, now to a large—but certainly not large enough—section of the American people. England had been the most powerful country: America succeeded to that position, while first Germany, then Russia moved into second place. Power has always been almost irresistibly attractive to any governing class. As Kipling wrote about Great Britain: “God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!” God did not respond, perhaps because that Sort of power, that might, was based on the denial of man’s dignity in the Liverpool slums of the 1840s, in the Chicago stockyards of the 1890s, in the smoke-filled Ruhr ten years later, in the Ukraine of the 1930s, in China today.

CF

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Constantine FitzGibbon

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Export or die!” It is a semantically, not to mention theologically, odd variant on the results of the wages of sin. “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.” Marx would have had some shrewd comments to make on Lenin’s famous apothegm. “What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States.” So would the Founding Fathers on “Engine Charlie” Wilson’s view of their mutual society’s purpose. Gross National Product: a growth rate of x per cent (never enough): the technological brain-drain (always too large); the need for ever more schools and training colleges, often misnamed universities, producing ever more technologists, salesmen, admen, industrial wizards of every sort with brains that may or may not be washed before they vanish down the drain: the managerial revolution: and, most hallowed received idea of all, the absolute desirability of a higher standard of living. It is inescapable, all over the world now, and in the Western or pink-skinned part of it for several generations past.

There is a counterpoint. Blake long ago contrasted the “dark Satanic mills” with “England’s green and pleasant land,” and by the time Engels came to Manchester there was little left of Lancashire or indeed of the North Country or the Midlands that was either green or pleasant. England was the first, and is now perhaps the worst. In America even vaster armies of landless, economically or politically transported peasants or proletarians, had little choice but. to build those disgusting slum-cities of the middle and late nineteenth century which gave such vast wealth, first, to a few American entrepreneurs and financial and industrial geniuses, then to the American nation, now to a large—but certainly not large enough—section of the American people. England had been the most powerful country: America succeeded to that position, while first Germany, then Russia moved into second place. Power has always been almost irresistibly attractive to any governing class. As Kipling wrote about Great Britain: “God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!” God did not respond, perhaps because that Sort of power, that might, was based on the denial of man’s dignity in the Liverpool slums of the 1840s, in the Chicago stockyards of the 1890s, in the smoke-filled Ruhr ten years later, in the Ukraine of the 1930s, in China today.