30. The Revolution In Science and the so-called "Industrial Revolution"

Few things are so victimized by mashed-up and ill-thought historical understanding as the "Industrial Revolution". The common retelling is that because of "magic capitalism", industry popped into existence because some genius summoned it once it was "allowed", since "obviously" humans cannot be motivated by anything but tokens of currency whose value had already been shown to be dubious. When you see this "industrial revolution", there is neither a revolution nor any true industrial advance in the form of technology, where new machines suddenly and automatically put workers out of work "by natural forces". It must be remembered that the "industrial revolution", and all subsequent "industrial revolutions" were wars from the favored classes and orders against the workers, where the workers' land was confiscated, and the system of home manufactures was methodically attacked and replaced with the knife at the throat that is "capitalism". Nothing about this new arrangement was productive, efficient, or accomplished some great boost in the quantity of wealth or even products available to a country. The great "benefit" of these revolutions was a formalization of a new way of conducting the cull of the population. The first mechanization of farm labor did not lead to a reduction of labor-power employed, but an increase as the cotton gin led to a demand for slaves and demand for textile workers to make something out of all that cotton. It was a policy decision of the new free trade state and of the leading firms and business interests to end the system of home manufactures, because such an offensive was now possible. Farm labor had always been less than ideal and rife with inefficiencies, and over the preceding century, landlords would impose new taxes, new humiliations, and new ways to kick peasants off of their historical land. The most insulting revisionist stories are that the peasants streamed into the cities for industrial "opportunity", but the reality is that most peasants, as is the habit of the human race, died miserable deaths, with many explicitly tortured by their sadistic government and the sadistic manners of the English.

What was revolutionary was the approach to science that prevailed starting in the middle of the 18th century. At this time, enough learned men exchanged letters and books with each other, and the key event of the "Enlightenment" was the translation of Eastern texts for European readers, for whom the subject was increasingly interesting due to European involvement in the East Indies trade and plunder network. The ideas of the East were less important than a simple fact that became apparent to learned men. That is that the boundaries of the globe were now definite, and the total enclosure of the Earth was for the first time conceivable for Empire. Very often the Eastern ideas were imperfectly understood by European readers, save for those who specialized as the "hands" of firms and states in dealing with the Easterners. But, merely by familiarity with the ideas of the East, one thing was clear. The habit of science that had recently grown in Christian civilization had no direct equivalent elsewhere in the world. There were many who studied the old philosophers and contributed further writings in a similar vein, and certainly there were habits of science everywhere in the world. There was not a firm concept of "natural philosophy" as an area of investigation, and so where science existed, it was advanced by the occasional scholar who may have been followed by similar scholars in the future; but these men were uncommon and did not form a community dedicated to this sort of science that studied nature as something apart from the theological questions of interest.^[1] There were scientifically minded men who saw the extent of the world, liked their chances to hold it all, and decided to make the play for world domination not by the conquest of old, but by a belief in technology and science as the transformative force that will realize their vision. The technology to do this did not exist at the onset of this enterprise, and would never exist fully formed and ready in the way their theory required it to be. Science—science in the genuine sense that we would appreciate—could now see that such technology was both possible and, for this purpose, desirable so long as these men maintained their fidelity to reality. That is, the men involved valued their sanity, and were not at the outset given over to the poison that is ideology. The most capable men of science never did surrender their minds or souls to this beast called ideology, and even to this day there remain those who practice science in the genuine sense, however imperfectly. We in the 21st century are on the other end of this epoch, where the ability to grasp genuine science is fast disappearing from the world—as the civilization that allowed science to be sensical is destroying itself. Our present difficulty is not the inverse of an imagined darkness that existed before the Enlightenment, but a much fouler beast that could only exist in our time, for the reasons we know but that these ancients could barely fathom. There were certainly beastly men and women who would love to enslave the world with the same low cunning and filth that aristocracy has always employed. None of the aristocratic theories could ever speak of science and feared any technology that didn't tell the aristocracy what it wanted to hear in all things, in all times, in all places. This scientific revolution is marred by the very conditions that created the community of men engaged in science that did exist. Perhaps in another world, another history, it could have arisen in a very different way; but in history, we know it arose in this peculiar way, in this time and place, and the Enlightenment is a unique event in human history rather than just another phase or fad as so many bad histories would make it.

The Enlightenment is most associated with its political ideas and the retrenchment of aristocratic political principles that were always practiced by the men about to seize power. The more lasting legacy of this time is not the political ideas, which really had nothing to do with the scientific thought beyond creating the circumstances where there were many men engaged in science that could meet for the first time in these assemblies, for this purpose. It was the growth of scientific thought, which proceeded regardless of the political ideas or any notions of Christian domination, that remains true. The political ideas of the Enlightenment have clearly failed from our view, with perfect hindsight and enough suspicions to figure out that the political ideas were meant to fail. The men of science scarcely ever had any political project that they needed to prove, and even when they wrote on matters of politics, they disdained to pick a side or cause that interfered with the truth that this community required for their enterprise to be worthwhile. They could be liberals or monarchists, and in many cases the scientific mind saw clearest what most did not want to see as a product of the Enlightenment—that it introduced not a blind faith in liberty, but the first solid conception of a despotism that could break entirely the republican idea. The scientist in these assemblies, especially considering the prospect of science ruling the world, would be the most likely to eschew the pleasantries of liberty or the stupidity of anarchy and see no great problem at all with despotism. The only want of the men of science is that they may continue their work; and if anything, a despotic society is more likely to feed courtiers that are useful, which a scientist would have considered himself to be. The scientific revolution is not a revolution of kindness and goodwill for all. The men of science hold in some sense contempt for the broad masses, which may be expressed in various ways. They could easily see a world in which most of the workers were obsolete and, since they served no purpose, were effectively there to be slaves or die. The path to that, if this was an interest of the scientist, was left to the political writers, who had their own reasons to make themselves Emperor. Throughout the history of the modern sciences, there is a constant of contempt of the scientific community for the broad masses, whose science remained crude. If some of these wretches could make themselves useful for the knowledge of this community, that would not be so bad; and there were among the scientists some who had no particular longing for the habit of betrayal every Mason burns into their soul at the earliest age possible. Even though there was a reasonably open inquiry into science, the human spirit retained its fickleness and its love for malicious secret societies. There was no moment, then and afterwards, of men who gathered for "pure science" or for discovery for the goodwill of all. There would be those who tried to accomplish this, only to run into the ugly reality of humanity at first and then the concentrated evil of those who glorified the cruelty for itself.

The men of science were drawn primarily from members of the middle class or the nobility with spare money to conduct these experiments, but the interest of science was not at this time an institutional monopoly nor was it associated with commerce and the interests of commerce. Ordinary men and, from time to time, women, were interested in this new science and its popularization, who could take from science lessons that were useful to them and, when they had something novel to add to the body of knowledge, contribute to these journals in some way. The poorest of the poor saw technology as their enemy moreso than science, and it was only the consolidation of science within institutional halls that promoted a hatred of science altogether among the poorest, who would see "science" repurposed to be a doctrine against the lowest class more than anything that was a sincere inquiry. The lowest class constitutionally had no affinity for or any place within science, even if their participation was to be cut up and studied as was the habit of the scientists for a long time; but, the decision for the scientists to embrace a jihad against the lowest class only arises when scientists meet in institutions, and the institution must win its existence in a world where exploitation and torture are the rule rather than the inquiry into truth, which was neither an interest of the lowest class nor their particular enemy compared to institutional society's permanent malice towards them. It would be by science that the "sorting of the poor" would commence, whether that science was a genuine science or the science were a constructed parody that enshrined all of the worst fads and prejudices of the commons. Few were convinced that the reign of science would begin an unprecedented age of prosperity and enlightenment for the poorest or the downtrodden, or that such a goal was even a worthwhile pursuit. In the main, the pursuit of science was not to produce a greater quantity of some substance to feed the people, but to produce novel qualities and repair the obviously undesirable qualities human society had accrued over the centuries, where before science and technology proceeded only in fits and starts and from imperfect principles. There would be among the scientists those who were already predisposed to the commons and the higher orders that asserted themselves politically, and the scientists who saw that science itself could bolster the position of the commoners rather than resting the legitimacy of the commons on commerce or justice or some form of democracy amenable to the commercial interests.

What this meant is that the scientists could foresee, without needing a guide or purpose, that the rise of science could answer the social question that I will describe further in the next chapter. If the social question were answered, so too would the price system and the underpinnings of free trade be questioned. There were among the scientists that answered the social question in the negative from the outset. For them, the rise of science had nothing to do with political liberty or any transformation of society. It did not need to create a society that recapitulated all of the mores of the ancien régime or justified in hindsight the obviously ruinous society of the past. They saw instead that science was a tool for capturing the state outright, just as military science perfected the tools and tactics of war. It did not require great insight to see that it was military science more than grasping for a lovely political idea that had much to do with the revolutionary government and the new situation for those joining the imperial game. The armies and leadership of the past gave way to a new creature, the military technocrat. Artillery and the ability to use it to devastating effect counted for more than courage or the command of men in the warfare of limited aims that was the standard of feudal armies. So too was it clear that naval power, which was almost unheard of in ancient history, proved decisive in modern history. Not only the development of cannons on ships, but the development of new propulsion, the first fully metallic sea vessels, and eventually the use of oil to build destroyers and battleships, became the new expectation. The naval arms race produced the most immediate effect, even though ships rarely expected to fight in a decisive battle. The mere threat of naval supremacy or challenges to it would be enough, increasingly so as naval power became the chief reason the British and later the Americans could accomplish anything, with the latter American naval power beholden to the same Empire as the British for all intents and purposes. In time, the same advances at sea would be asserted on land, as the cavalry and infantry of old were replaced with machine guns, tanks, and ultimately formations still in use today. The military scientist disdained new technology unless it won him some victory, and could easily see a world where military science froze in place or the tactics used in war deteriorated, so that war once again could be fought at a sufficient minimum of technique, and its traditional function as a past-time to expend human lives could be preserved. The scientist who saw science as a means to worldly power saw that new weapons could, at the very least, keep the men of science employed to create ever-greater engines of war, and perhaps create engines so terrible that war would become unthinkable and must be avoided at all costs. In the past, science had little impact on the daily routine of human society. Humanity remained predominantly invested in agriculture and the continued stability of the social system. In the future, the social question would be entirely unstable, and every controversy and every instigation had far greater impact than it would. Couple this with the habit of aristocracy to instigate simply to prove the power of their grouping, and you have a situation that was destined to lead to the most terrible ending. War would have to end, or war would end us, as the saying goes. We know now that war ended us, and the saddest thing is that it did not happen with a great battle or any last stand, but in the worst and most immiserating way it could have happened, where humanity has nothing left to say for itself.

It did not take long to see that the crop yields of the land, thought to be fixed and dependent on the fortunes of nature and some superstition about needing ritual sacrifice to till the land, could be improved with the simplest of techniques, and with fertilizer whose utility was premised on simple chemical knowledge that could be taught to just about anyone. The use of fertilizer to improve the land was in of itself not new. What was new was that this enterprise could constitute an industry unto itself, and products from all over could be purposed, rather than relying on manure and the limited supply of it. The first application of the study of biology would be the discovery of new fertilizers; but, unlike many sciences, biology would not be developed for this obvious industrial purpose, but for its exact opposite, as the overriding interest of the state and the nascent eugenists could not allow such an obvious solution to continue beyond a crude chemical understanding. At the critical period where biology would have led to insights that put the old fears and errors of agriculture to rest for good, biology would be unmoored from any mission that would lead to freeing farmers from the shackles of uncertainty, both in knowledge and political uncertainty about what fate the farmers would have in the coming world order. Just from the chemical knowledge, vast leaps in agricultural production were possible, and with it, a greater variety and quantity of livestock was possible. So too would understanding of food itself lead to improvements in the quality of foodstuffs, and a complementary denuding of the food as soon as the eugenic creed took over and asserted its program.

The technology that would prove to have the greatest staying power is the development of electricity, and eventually of electronics and of the appliances that became household staples in the 20th century. Electricity did not just present the potential to replace minute human motive power with a raw force summoned from nature. It represented the first practical application of directed energy without a human intermediary, in which electricity is fed to a servo that can regulate and govern the further flow of electricity. Electricity was suited for this purpose in a way that no other engine could reliably be, and this would come fully into its own during the 20th century. Before that time, electricity presented something truly alien and novel to human society. The power of steam or combustion is still little more than the amplification of power that was once used by animals or human beings, or the utilization of motive force of a sort no human could possibly produce. With electricity came a more thorough theory of matter and physics as we know it. As much as possible, the true motive force of the physical world could be reduced to this electricity, and to the electrons in each atom and molecule, which would be the first repulsive force another physical object encounters. The physical properties of the universe are most seen not in the core of the elemental atoms, but in the electrons that orbit them and allow for the bonding of these elements.^[2]

The descriptions of electricity, or any other potential "master weapon" become at times mythological and steeped in lore. Grand schemes are made to describe energy generally not as a physical event but as a spiritual happening that permeates all of existence. None of this should detract from the very real science that continues to this day and is applied every day, but it is helpful to see how easily aristocratic conceits are spread by theories of energy as spiritual motive power. Similar treatment is given to life, attributing it to a special energy or potency particular to it that can only be commanded by the eugenic faithful or some aristocratic power. So too would the imperial cults and religion center around cosmic theories of energy and the total command of them, far beyond anything honest science has discovered. The theory of the imperialists is that all science, all investigation, stems from a similar desire to command and enclose the world, so that knowledge is proprietary and belongs only to the ruling imperial power. This mentality is damaging to genuine science, but it is found among those who see science not as the imperial power but as their way to rise where other merits or standing are lacking. Whether by the imperial conceit or the conceit of low cunning, such a mentality will lead to the keeping of secrets and some conspiracy of those who apply this science against the broad masses, with predictable lying and predictable consequences. The more a science speaks of a general and common condition of the universe, the more likely habitual lying will enter discourse regarding it. There is not too much lying about petroleum or carbon-based fuel sources, despite the clear incentive of the oil monopolies to lie profusely. Those lies did not stand, nor find so ready an audience, as the lies about electricity, the lies about life, and the lies about society and information itself. It is the lies about information itself that would be the most rife with disinformation, precisely because information was so necessary to describe any systems and, when information itself is the subject of inquiry, the very subject of inquiry is a part of the process for that scientific inquiry. Society, as I laid out early in Book 2, is little more than social information, until that information is granted moral and political weight by human intrigues. It goes without saying that sociology, which begins in earnest in tandem with the conception of socialism, would be close to the science of information itself in the level of malicious disinformation written about it.

These sciences drove productivity not in a quest to make more quantity, but to produce novel qualities that were desired for the first time. Only after the novel qualities were discovered was a productive economy to feed this technological advance desirable. For the most part, advances in the production of quantity were never the result of new machinery, but the result of extorting more sweat and blood from the working class and exhausting more rapidly the lowest class to reduce the expenditure of product on what miserly existence they were allowed. Machines could be refined and industrial processes analyzed, but this does not characterize the "industrial revolution" or what happened under free trade immediately. Very little attention would actually be paid to how effective the machines were at producing per unit, so long as the capitalist could continue in business. The model of the capitalist was to work at a plodding level of efficiency, exhaust the workers as much as possible, and consider all of the product little more than the squeezing of surplus population for what could be taken from them until they expire. In this manner, capitalism continued for roughly 80 years. New machinery streamlined previously inefficient production processes, but this usually had nothing to do with a new science or some novel technology that was invented. What was not fully understood at the outset is that management itself was a science, and the managerial task was always a drain on every other process in the productive circuit. Only by trial and error did managers muddle through their usually inefficient productive processes, and the manager really had no incentive to be inventive or do anything that would improve productivity. The manager's most obvious recourse was to push workers harder, draw more blood from them, and disdain anything so quaint as technology or even looking at their own ruinously inefficient methods. In practice, the early industrial revolution did not consist of the assembly line we know today, but many workers who knew either beforehand or with minimal training what process they were expected to repeat, over and over, to meet quota. It would be the workers themselves who had the most obvious insight to see the inefficiency of what they were made to do, but the workers had little incentive to share technological advances like this. Instead, it was left to a process behind the backs of the producers to improve what workmanship remained. Usually the workers worked more efficiently only to make their job easier, and would undermine themselves or work lazily simply so the standard of labor remained low. Workers were also fond of skulduggery and arbitrary cruelty with no prompting from managers whatsoever, as this was the easiest way to secure their employment when they could get away with it. The Mason's instinct prevailed in the working class as it prevailed in the bourgeois order, but this instinct only went so far before it would spark riots. What would be needed was a way to teach the workers that the Masonic way was not only their way, but the only way. That science, though, would never be so perfect, and by the time it did appear as a worked-out theory and praxis, the workers were wary to the game that was played against them and just as many workers would frustrate Masonic skulduggery and things like it simply because they knew their lives had no meaning, and so disrupting such faggotry was a self-evident greater good and one of the few things they could accomplish in their station. It was around the time Marx writes his grand critique of free trade, Capital, that theories of scientific management can be worked out, and Marx's concepts of abstract labor and surplus value had more than a little to do with the manager's understanding of how much could be accomplished in the whole productive circuit and by the maximal exploitation of the worker. There is not really a reason why Marx's writing is supposed to liberate the workers by knowing these facts, though those facts were available to workers just as much as they were available to managers. All together, Marx's critique is not about freeing the workers or about socialism, but provided to the wisest of the readers a formula for total managerialism and driving the utmost value out of workers and all processes they were involved in. That would be the goal and the logical outcome of free trade itself, and it is certainly the outcome of Marx's system and description of free trade. What you will not find in it is any solution. Attempts to think of something else were made, but Marx's writing has little to do with them if you read what he believed in and what he wrote for.^[3] What readers should free themselves from is the notion that either capitalism or industrialization were about "efficiency" or producing greater quantity. The manager desires efficiency for himself and his part in the firm. The manager is less interested in the efficiency of society, or even if the efficiency of his management is competitive with other managers. Managers in practice conspire much like the workers to keep management and the conditions of production at an appropriately abysmal minimum; but even this abysmal minimum proved to create too much surplus, and eventually some managers and proprietors could countenance giving some of the lower orders a share of product as an incentive to turn against others of the lower orders. That was never an advance of technology or something "accidental". Every impulse of capitalism and managerialism conspired to keep production largely inefficient and ruinous, where the past system of home manufacture never faced severe difficulty meeting consumer demand or living standards and granted to the home manufacturers a level of independence from managerialism and its ruinous effects. It was the production of novel qualities in the form of new types of things that could be demanded by the well off that created some increase in the wages and a corresponding increase in the consumption of output, entirely against the wishes and design of the capitalist system. As always, when a novel demand is introduced by some social condition, the "laws of motion" break down and suddenly the demand will be met. There was never a shortage of men to produce goods. There was, and there would remain up to the present day, shortages of skilled laborers that can produce competitive qualities, or meeting all of the qualities a society of the technocratic type would require to fully realize its potential. This potential of the technocratic polity, as I hope to describe in the next book of this series, is what marked it as distinct from past forms of political organization; that it would see and plan for these conditions at a minute level and adapt more ably than the delivery of largesse to favorites that defined liberal capitalism and its conceits. When the technocratic polity is established, very different conceptions of the optimal labor force develop, for good and for ill. It was a sad and unfortunate fact that for humans, technocratic society coincided with, and was only allowed for, Eugenics, managerialism, and the program to bring the present ruin to the Earth.