Industrial system

“ 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. ”

“ This tradition never dies out among the organised craftsmen until the industrial system which had so been inaugurated went under in the turmoil of politics and finance or was supplanted by the machine era that grew out of it. ”

“ Latterly, in the days of their most pronounced technological advance, these peoples have had experience of an economic and industrial system organised on an unexampled scale, such as to constitute a very wide and inclusive industrial community within which intercourse has been increasingly easy and effective. ”

“ In its onward course to a further advanced system, society is going to utilize all that present day society has evolved and constructed. This the workers must know, and then they will also learn the intricate, interdependent arrangements of the component parts of the whole industrial system. Equipped with this knowledge, they will be able to construct and form their own industrial organizations, the frame-structure of the new society, accordingly. ”

“ Mechanical appliances for use in industry are designed and worked out as contrivances to facilitate or to abridge manual labour, and it is in terms of labour that the whole industrial system is conceived and its incidence, value and output rated. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 workers, conscious of their mission, must recognize the fact that the industries are developing to the highest state of perfection, and will be ready for operation under a new arrangement of things, namely after the class now in possession and control of them have gone the way of decay under the pressure of the advancing force of a new civilization. But it is imperative to arrange the human forces of production for the operation of the vast resources and implements of production under a system wherein commodities will be made for use alone. ”

“ The working class alone is interested in the removal of industrial inequality, and that can only be accomplished by a revolution of the industrial system. The workers, in their collectivity, must take over and operate all the essential industrial institutions, the means of production and distribution, for the well-being of all the human elements comprising the international nation of wealth-producers. ”

“ These consequences of the pecuniary economy may be interesting enough in themselves, even to the theoretician, but they need not be pursued here except in so far as they have an appreciable bearing on the community’s workmanlike efficiency and the further development of technology.110 But the more direct and immediate technological consequences of this move from a predatory to a peaceable or quasi-peaceable economic system are also sufficiently grave—partly favourable to workmanship and partly otherwise—and these it is necessary for the purposes of this inquiry to follow up in some detail. ”

“ That class, for its own protection and perpetuation in power, subjects all other institutions to their prevailing class interests. Conversely, there is a class that strives to change the foundation of the industrial arrangement. The workers realize that immediately following the change these social relations will also be shifted; institutions deriving their support and sustenance from the class in power will be made to conform to new conditions after the overthrow of the previously existing industrial system. ”

“ When the workers understand how the industrial system of today has developed, how one industrial pursuit dovetails into another, and all comprise an inseparable whole, they will not wantonly destroy what generations of industrial and social forces have brought forth. ”

“ Where subsistence depends on closed resources, slaves may occasionally be kept, but slavery as an industrial system is not likely to exist. There are generally poor people who voluntarily offer themselves as labourers; therefore slavery, i.e. a system of compulsory labour, is not wanted. And even where there are no poor men, because all share in the closed resources, the use of slaves cannot be great. Where there are practically unlimited resources, a man can, by increasing the number of his slaves, increase his income to any extent ”

“ Transportation facilities as the messengers for the exchange of products between countries and continents know no boundary lines—land, water, air have been conquered and rendered servants of the monstrous forces behind the prevailing industrial system of production and exchange. ”

“ The system broke down so soon as the state of the industrial arts no longer enabled the workmen to acquire the necessary technological proficiency and do the required work at the same time that they each and several were able to oversee and pursue their individual pecuniary interests. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The Manufacturing Industry.—It is the function of the agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial centres. It is the business of [181] the manufacturer and his employees to turn them into the finished product for the use of society. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turning our attention again to the industrial organism, we shall strive to ascertain the chief changes that have been brought about in the size and structural character of industry, in the relations of the several parts of the industrial world, of the several trades which constitute industry, of the processes within these trades, of the businesses or units which comprise a trade or a market, and of the units of capital and labour comprising a business. It will then remain to undertake closer studies of certain important special outcomes of machinery and factory production. ”

“ Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. ”

“ All clothing, carpets, draperies, tools, implements, furniture—everything was hand-made. In this process no large capital was needed, no great factories, no great assemblage of laborers, no great organization of industry. The work was done in homes and small shops by individual enterprise, mainly, or in combinations of laborers and masters. Power manufacture and the inventions named above changed the whole structure of industrial society. ”

“ Nothing in modern times has exerted a more profound or far-reaching influence upon the general course of civilization. The factory is the symbol of a new economic order. It has been said, and rightly, that three things,—steam, steel, and credit,—have revolutionized industry during the past hundred years.
Industrial Organization of Today.—In the days of hand-industry men needed no large amounts of capital in order to engage in the production of goods. ”

“ Slavery would not be capable of much development, if it depended upon the master’s personal superiority only; for slavery to become a social system, the master’s power over the slave must be recognized by the society. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ In presenting this plan of organization of industries, as it exists today, we have in mind only the object before explained. The workers, forced by capitalist ownership of the means of production to do service in all these industries, must organize themselves in their proper places in the industries in which they are engaged. Every worker who studies this map will find where he will fit in when the industries are organized for the control of the workers through industrial organization. ”

“ The passing away from the individual worker of personal control over the raw material and the instruments of production, which has accompanied the advent of the factory system, means that some degree of control corresponding to that formerly possessed by the individual should be assured to the group of workers in the factory or the trade. ”

“ Here, indeed, we have the factory system—in which the division of labor is a conspicuous feature—employed with all its modern details; but not the steam-driven factory, building great cities and changing the whole social life of the kingdom. ”

“ Social relations are the reflex of the grouping of industrial possessions. The owners of all resources and means of wealth form a class of their own; the owners of labor power as their only possession in the market, another. Political, judicial, educational and other institutions are only the mirror of the prevailing system of ownership in the resources and means of production. ”

“ All these acting in conjunction with the material force—invention—have operated on manufacturing industries to produce the factory system of to-day. It is, indeed, because the factory system is the resultant of so many forces working in the past that it touches in the present nearly every great economic, social, political, moral, and philanthropic question. ”

“ The keeping of the industrial balance, therefore, and adjusting the several industrial processes to one another's work and needs, is a matter of grave and far-reaching consequence in any modern community, as has already been shown. ”

“ What are the boundaries that divide the Jack of all Trades, the specialist and the victim of an overdose of repetition work.
Why industrial managers should know the cardinal principles of invention, of industrial engineering, industrial management, industrial relations and the human factor in engineering and in the industries.
Why a plant may be growing in size and paying dividends and may still be dead so far as the spirit of enterprise is concerned.
Why some men try to manage industrial plants regardless of the cardinal principles of progress of workers and the state. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The workers will utilize the knowledge of ages to build and to plant on a solid rockbed the foundation of a new industrial and social system.
The foundation must be firm and solid. The revolutionary climax, after an incessant course of evolutionary processes by which forms and methods undergo changes, will eliminate forever the cause for the industrial division of society into two hostile camps. Harmonious relations of mankind in all their material affairs will evolve out of the change in the control and ownership in industrial resources of the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ English manufacturing industry in the first half of the eighteenth century furnishes a variety of different forms of business of widely different nature and complexity. The simplest form of manufacturing industry is that in which an industrial family owning the raw material and the requisite tools, and working with the power of their own bodies in their own homes, produce commodities for their own consumption. ”