Industrial production

“ INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT.—Industries once carried on in the household or in small factories were conducted on a large scale by great corporations. The machine for making tin cans made possible the canning industry. The self- binding harvester and reaper made possible the immense grain fields of the West. The production and refining of petroleum became an industry of great importance. ”

“ Large investments of capital, specialization in production, the use of machinery in every process, and the consequent subdivision of labor in particular lines in which the technical skill of the handicraftsman is not required, together with the utilization of waste products and the rapid exchange of commodities, mark the progress of activity in the industrial arts. ”

“ The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. ”

“ To understand the present organization of the cotton industry the reader must begin by mentally separating the commercial from the industrial functions. By the industrial functions are meant the arrangements of factors in Modern organization. production—choosing the most suitable machinery and hands, combining them in the most economical system, adapting the material used to this system, and keeping its working at the highest attainable level. The commercial functions consist in business which is not industrial. ”

“ One is, the [pg 389] tendency of every extension of the market to improve the processes of production. A country which produces for a larger market than its own can introduce a more extended division of labor, can make greater use of machinery, and is more likely to make inventions and improvements in the processes of production. Whatever causes a greater quantity of anything to be produced in the same place tends to the general increase of the productive powers of the world.267 There is (2) another consideration, principally applicable to an early stage of industrial advancement. ”

“ On the contrary, within this last generation a number of discoveries have taken place in almost all the chief industrial arts, in the opening up of new supplies of raw material, and in the improvement of industrial organisation, which have registered enormous advances of productive power. ”

“ In order to build up a clear conception of industry it is possible to take either of two modes of inquiry. Taking as the primary cell or unit that combination of labour and capital under a single control for a single industrial purpose which is termed a Business, we may examine the structure and life of the Business, then proceed to discover how it stands related to other businesses so as to form a Market, and, finally, how the [11] several Markets are related locally, nationally, internationally so as to yield the complex structure of Industry as a whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The economy of effort for industrial purposes requires that a larger and larger proportion of inventive genius and enterprise shall be directed to an interminable displacement of handicraft by machinery in the construction of machinery, and a smaller proportion to the relatively unimportant work of perfecting manufacturing machinery in the detailed processes of each manufacture engaged in the direct satisfaction of some human want. ”

“ All possible trades -- weaving, workers in wood, in metals, in bone, in india-rubber, and so on -- may be found under the category of purely domestic trades, with all possible gradations between the purely domestic form of production and the workshop and the factory. ”

“ Or reversely, we may take Industry as a whole, the Industrial Organism as it exists at any given time, consider the nature and extent of the cohesion existing between its several parts, and, further, resolving these parts into their constituent elements, gain a close understanding of the extent to which differentiation of industrial functions has been carried in the several divisions. ”

“ In the last few chapters we have examined some of the influences of modern machine-production upon men and women in the capacity of producers, in relation to character, duration, intensity, regularity of employment, the remuneration of labour, and the economic relations which subsist between workers and employers. It remains to give special consideration to one factor in the environment of modern industrial life, which is of paramount importance upon the public, both in its working and living capacity. ”

“ 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 development of large scale factory production, the benefit of combination in the competitive struggle, and the tremendous advantage of concentration in securing possession of the unoccupied opportunities, were so great that vast accumulations of capital became the normal agency of the industrial world. ”

“ The question how industry would be located, assuming the whole surface of the globe was brought into a single market or area of competition, with an equal development of transport facilities in all its parts; or in other words, "What is the ideal disposition of industry in a world-society making its chief end the attainment of industrial wealth estimated at present values?" ”

“ As modern industrial societies develop they disclose certain material wants which are common to all or most members, and are less subject to fluctuations in quantity or quality of demand than others. These routine wants, representing that part of consumption which is common, can be supplied most economically by highly organised machinery and highly concentrated methods of production. ”

“ If this is true of England, which, having the start in the development of the factory system, has to a larger extent than any other country specialised in the arts of manufacture, it is probable that the net effect of machinery upon the demand for labour throughout the industrial world has been to throw a larger proportion of the population into industries where machinery does not directly enter. ”

“ In all the advanced industrial countries a smaller proportion of the population is engaged in those extractive and domestic industries which belong to rural life, a larger proportion in the manufacturing and distributive industries which belong to towns. But this movement is made possible by the fact that an increasing proportion of the food and the raw materials of manufacture used in these countries is drawn from the labour of the more backward countries. ”

“ Largely determined by the two groups of influences named above are the forces which represent the national character at any given time, the outcome of primitive race characteristics, food supply, speed and direction of industrial [110] development, density of population, and the various other causes which enter in to determine efficiency of labour. The play of these natural and human forces in world-competition leads to such a settlement of different industries in different localities as yields the greatest net productiveness of labour in each part. ”

“ Labor is applied to extract the material that nature has stored up or generated. Production continues with the transportation of these products, mostly raw material, or fuel-matter, to the centers of manufacture and commerce. The construction of places of shelter for a man and things, the building of agencies of communication, are functions of another industrial branch of the system. We observe, finally, how the care-taking, the education, the providing for public convenience, fall to the functions of another department in the interdependent processes of industrial life. ”

“ The workman, however, still retains the ownership of the implements of his craft and works in his own house. The condition of the worsted trade later in the century, about 1770, well illustrates this industrial form. ”

“ The process of production does not cease until the finished product reaches the consumer. All workers engaged in the process of distribution are members of the same industrial union, or Department Organization in which the makers of the commodity are organized. ”

“ It appears that in the earlier eighteenth century, while there existed examples of various types of industrial structure, the domestic system in its several phases may be regarded as the representative industrial form. The object of this chapter is to examine the nature of those changes in the mechanical arts which brought about the substitution of machine-industry conducted in factories or large workshops for the handicrafts conducted within the home or in small workshops, with the view of discovering the economic bearing of these changes. ”

“ By ancient habit, handed down from the days of handicraft and petty trade, this pecuniary management is conventionally conceived to be directed to the production of goods and services, and the businessman is still conventionally rated as a producer and his gains accepted as a measure of his productive efficiency. ”

“ The development of such an industrial society has been attended by the minute division of labor, by a growing separation of classes, by concentration of the population in urban centers, by the increasing cost and complexity of machinery, by the development of improved methods of transportation and of credit, by the combination of labor and of capital, by the enormous increase of production, and by the growing concentration of wealth. ”

“ But it is the combination of industrial changes in which machinery plays the central part—the increased application of machinery to agriculture reducing the demand for agricultural labour, the development of manufacturing industries in towns, the labour of transport and distribution requiring centralised machinery—that makes this movement physically and economically feasible. The shift in the proportionate demand for labour in towns and in country attributable to machine-production is a principal direct agent in the movement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Machinery of manufacture as well as of transport has a levelling tendency which makes directly for expansion of the area of competition. As the spread of knowledge places each part of the industrial world more closely en rapport with the rest, the newest and best methods of manufacture are more rapidly and effectively adopted. ”

“ The growth of the unit of capital in the developed modern manufacturing business entails also a growth in the unit of labour, though not a corresponding growth. The number of employees in a business is larger in proportion as the business passes into the stage of highest industrial organisation. ”

“ The social and moral progress of industrial nations requires, as a first condition of orderly progress, that these cases of arrested growth shall be absorbed into the general mass of machine-industry. ”

“ In the ordinary course, it should seem, such an advance in the industrial arts as will result in an accumulation of wealth, a considerable and efficient industrial equipment, or in a systematic and permanent cultivation of the soil or an extensive breeding of herds or flocks, will also bring on ownership and property rights bearing on these valuable goods, or on the workmen, or on the land employed in their production. ”

“ An increased stability both in the several trades and in the individual businesses within the trade is a first requisite to the establishment of a fixed healthy home for the industrial worker and his family. ”

“ When the workers engaged in a particular industrial production organize industrially, all are subject to the same rules governing the affairs of each industry. But certain fundamental rules and principles governing all component parts of the "one big union of workers" cannot be infringed upon by any of its component parts without doing injury to the whole organic body. ”

“ From this primitive form which required no commerce and no industrial organisation we may trace the growth of various forms of higher industrial development, many of which co-existed in eighteenth century England. ”

“ To convert force and power into useful operation requires intelligence. And that intelligence must guide us to use the accumulated force for a defined purpose. That purpose, as it seems to be agreed, is to form a new social, or rather industrial structure within the shell of the old. To accomplish this the advocates, the militants for the new, must know to what extent the present factors in industrial development have organized and systematized industrial production. ”