Industrial concentration

“ The concentration of the population in the great industrial centres implied the improvement of the means of commerce; new organisation of industry provided with a corresponding apparatus of machinery; and the systematic exploitation of the stored-up forces of nature. Each set of changes was at once cause and effect, and each was carried on separately, although in relation to the other. Brindley, Arkwright, and Watt may be taken as typical representatives of the three operations. Canals, spinning-jennies, and steam-engines were changing the whole social order. ”

“ It is true that the Factory Inspectors represent each separate branch of a given industry as a special establisment. Thus, if an employer or a society owns a spinning mill, a weaving factory, and a special building for dressing and finishing, the three are represented as separate factories. But this is precisely what is wanted for giving us an exact idea about the degree of concentration of a given industry. ”

“ The opinion may be ventured that it is characteristic of such industrial arrangements as have prevailed in the United States, that the tendency towards diffusion of the results of advances in production (obscured, besides, by the growth of population) should lag seriously behind the tendency towards concentration. ”

“ To sum up, during the last fifty years a notable concentration of the factories took place in the big establishments; but the just-mentioned results, supported by the statistics of the patents, permit us to recognise that this concentration does not prevent the maintenance of a mass of -small enterprises, the average sizes of which increase but very slowly. ”

“ Mines have been opened, factories established, railroads built, electric plants constructed, by some individual or [Pg 67] corporation interested in making a profit on the investment, and with little or no relation to the well-being of the community. There has been no recognized intelligent guidance behind the development of the industrial system. ”

“ But the industrial revolution had the effect of bringing coal, iron, and water-power into enormous demand, and after 1775 the industrial center, and likewise the population center, of the country was shifted rapidly toward the north. ”

“ Industry must provide these expanding societies not only which employment but with products and aevices. They will experience massive increases the production of basic consumer goods and a concomitant build-up of industrial infrastructure – iron and steel, paper, chemicals, building material, and transportation. All this implies considerable increases in energy and raw material use, industrial hazards and wastes, accidents, and resource depletion.
28. The problems and prospects for industrial development vary among the Countries of the Third World, which differ greatly in size and resources. ”

“ If allowed to expand for 18 years without diversion to production, the factory output could exponentiate to more than 4 X 109 tons per year, roughly the entire annual industrial output of all human civilization. ”

“ It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. ”

“ The increase of the means of production and subsistence, accompanied by a relative diminution in the number of labourers, causes an increased demand for labour in making canals, docks, tunnels, bridges, and so on, works that can only bear fruit in the far future. Entirely new branches of production, creating new fields of labour, are also formed, as the direct result either of machinery or of the general industrial changes brought about by it. ”

“ Indeed, it suffices to study the processes already in use to extract coals and ore, to obtain steel and work it, to manufacture what is used for clothing, etc., in large industrial establishments, in order to perceive that we could already increase our production fourfold and yet economize work. ”

“ In centralizing manufacturing plants in cities, certain industrial economies are secured, such as: (1) economy in motor power, whether it be water or coal; (2) economy in machinery—it is not necessary to duplicate machines ”

“ It has essentially full employment, a modern distribution system, excellent internal and external communications, and a skilled labor force. Timber, hydropower, and iron ore constitute the resource base of an economy that is heavily oriented toward foreign trade. Privately owned firms account for about 90% of industrial output, of which the engineering sector accounts for 50% of output and exports. ”

“ The industrial overlord holds control of the job with one hand. With the other he controls the product of industry. From the time the raw material leaves the earth in the form of iron ore, crude petroleum, logs, or coal, through all of the processes of production, it is owned by the industrial master, not by the worker. Workers separate the product from the earth, transport it, refine it, fabricate it. Always, the product, like the machinery, is the possession of the owning class. ”

“ Here is a case of arrested development in the evolution of industry. It is even worse than that; for some trades which had been subject to the concentrating force of the factory system, have fallen into a sort of back-wash of the industrial current, and broken up again into smaller units. ”

“ In mining, railway transportation and building we have positive evidence of diminished efficiency of labor, which in the aggregate is not offset by the improvements of management, or but barely. There remains but manufacturing as the other great branch of producing industry, apart from agriculture. ”

“ We have almost everything needed by modern industry; the bulk of our imports are luxuries—coffee and bananas and music and French fashions. We have forty-two millions of workers, all carefully trained to their jobs, and we have the most highly organized industrial system. We produce 40 per cent of the world’s iron and steel, 52 per cent of its coal, 60 per cent of its copper, 75 per cent of its corn, 85 per cent of its automobiles, and so on through a long list. ”

“ Here are the beginnings of a modern industrial system: iron and steel for permanent investment, bound to yield large dividends; cloth as the cheapest exchange for invaluable raw material; liquor to tickle the appetites of the natives and render the alienation of land and the breakdown of customary law easier; eventually forced and contract labor under white drivers to increase and systematize the production of raw materials. ”

“ Manufacturing is the dominant sector of industry in terms of employment and output. In 1971 manufacturing accounted for 93.9 percent of the total industrial output and provided employment to 88.3 percent of the industrial labor force. Mining and energy production contributed 3.6 and 2.5 percent, respectively, of the industrial output and employed 10.3 and 1.4 percent, respectively, of the labor force. More than half the industrial establishment was devoted to the production of capital goods. ”

“ The direct causal connection between the increased productive power of modern machinery and trade depression clearly emerges from a comparison of the fluctuations in the several departments of industry in different industrial countries. ”

“ And now what resources have we for our industrial economy? We have some of the world's biggest iron deposits and abundant coal and manganese to provide the raw materials for the basic steel industry rightly called the mother of 101 other industries. To complement this, it is definitely known that the bosom of our Earth contains unlimited mineral oil deposits to turn the wheels of industry and the propellers of prosperity. We have the natural hydroelectric resources which can be harnessed, as a number of them already are, to supply cheap industrial power. ”

“ The factories and workshops are idle or are ill-equipped, for materials, tools, and fuel are everywhere lacking; unemployment holds large industrial populations in destitution and despair. Even where plant and materials are present, the physical strength of the workers is so let down that efficient productivity is impossible. ”

“ Strong courage eliminates the injurious and opposing forces by summoning their masters, the yet stronger forces that will serve you.
Courage is yours for the asking. All you have to do is to believe in it, claim it and use it. To succeed in business believe that it will be successful, assert that it is successful, and work like a beaver to make it so. Difficulties soon melt away before the courageous. One man of courage can fire with his spirit a whole army of men, whether it be military or industrial, because courage, like cowardice, is contagious. ”

“ They at least propose some way of consummating their program of a revolution. But the middle-class is more frantic in its wailings of despair. In their band wagon they are lining up a large following of workers. Millions are made to believe that an impending struggle against predatory wealth will have as object the restoration of by-gone conditions, or the enforcement of restrictive measures for curbing further concentration of industries.
But the workers are not, and should not be concerned in the hopeless struggles of a decaying element of society. ”

“ In the place of a half dozen or dozen who were employed, each a skilled artisan, employed to do the work, you have a machine process to do that work and it resulted in the organization of the industry on an industrial basis. You have the oil industry, controlled by the Standard Oil; you have the lumber industry, controlled by the Lumbermen's Association of the South and West, and you have the steel and copper industry, all organized on an industrial basis resulting in a fusing, or corporation, or trust of a lot of former owners. ”

“ Class Separation of Employer and Workmen.--The first effect of machinery is to give a new and powerful impulse to the centralizing tendency in industry. "Civilization is economy of power, and English power is coal," said the materialistic Baron Liebig. Coal as a generator of steam-power demands that manufactures shall be conducted on a large scale in particular localities. Before the day of large, expensive steam-driven machinery, manufacture was done in scattered houses by workers who were the owners of their simple tools, and often of the material on which they worked ”

“ Farms depend on railroads, railroads on mines, mines on factories, factories on farms, and so on.
This extreme specialization of the economic system is the product of the past two hundred years, the outcome primarily of the industrial revolution. The experience of society with these specialized economic forms does not, therefore, extend over more than five or six generations. This experience is sufficient, however, to indicate, that there are three general lines along which economic organization may develop ”

“ From the bowels and the treasures of the earth labor puts out the material for fuel and the essential things which, after being transformed, comprise the implements and machinery of production and distribution. With the matter thus furnished production proper for the providing of all necessary things of life and comfort is carried on in the various, but inter-depending places of production, mills and factories. ”

“ Aside from the development of hydro-electric power and the construction of public works of various kinds including railways, it is probable that agriculture and fisheries present the most favorable openings, with good possibilities also in manufacturing industries, stone cutting, and mining. Stock raising is already pretty well developed. ”

“ The industrial development has been rather slow: sugar-refineries, tea-packing, oil-mills, tanneries, steam flour-mills, iron and mechanical works, factories of jute sacks, chemical works, tin-plate works, paper-factories are the chief. ”

“ The scattering of industries over the country ----so as to bring the factory amidst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profits which it always finds in being combined with industry (see the Eastern States of America) and to produce a combination of industrial with agricultural work--is surely the next step to be made, as soon as a reorganisation of our present conditions is possible. ”

“ We hear much, in these latter days, of business and industrial efficiency. Experts in this line are able to systematize a business, a railroad, or a factory so that a given amount of labor will produce a maximum of results. Even such unskilled labor as shoveling is susceptible of scientific improvement. An efficiency expert employed by a great corporation decreased the number of movements of ore shovelers one-half, with a corresponding increase in tonnage of ore handled, and without an increase in the expenditure of physical energy. ”

“ Production has somewhere been checked and this reduction in the supply of some things has shown itself in cessation of demand for others, the check propagating itself through the whole framework of industry and exchange.
The real obstacle The industrial pyramid manifestly rests on the land. ”

“ There is hardly a line of industry which cannot there be carried on successfully. That of coffee growing is so well developed as to be somewhat overcrowded, but in almost any other line there is a field for the investor. Whether it be mining of gold or diamonds, of coal, iron, or manganese, be it agriculture, stock raising, the lumber industry, or manufacturing, the harnessing of the waterfalls to produce hydro-electric power, the construction of public works, the field for the capitalist, large or small, is of infinite variety and excellent promise. ”