“Behemoth – A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World” by Joshua Freeman, 2018 (Part 1 Review)
A factory isn’t just a building. Though it is that, but designed in specific
ways, some quite impressive, and in this book, quite large. It is also a center of consumer culture; a
locus of class struggle; a social force impacting communities; a site of
surplus value; a building riven by class; a cultural icon; a signifier of
modernism; a church of technology and skills; a place to get injured or sick, a
temple of discrimination; a life history.
In short, the factory created the modern world.
Freeman takes up all these aspects as he narrates the
stories of the first silk and cotton mills on the rivers of Great Britain; the
textile mills in Lowell Massachusetts; the giant steel plants in the U.S.; the
even bigger automobile plants in Detroit; the huge heavy industry factories in
the USSR; their spread into central Europe after the war and the Foxconn & Co. assembly complexes in China. He is interested in the issue of ‘size’ and why
factories grew large. For instance Ford’s
River Rouge complex was the biggest one ever built in the U.S. It was more like a city with over 100,000+
workers at its height in 1929.
Freeman makes fun of the ridiculous notion that we live in
a ‘post-industrial society,’ as claimed by people like Alain Touraine and Daniel
Bell in the 1960s. We are still
absolutely surrounded by things made in factories, mills and plants. Just look
around. Yet ‘factory life’ is the
last thing on hip people’s minds, immersed in their computers while visiting
malls and living in housing developments that were built over former factory
land. But factories are still here – all
over the world and even in the U.S.
Why
Factories?
Freeman quotes Charles Babbage and other early English
writers as to why factory ‘size’ mattered.
The reasons were economy of scale; the ability to supervise; higher
productivity, attracting workers and increasing output due to the growth of
colonial exports and domestic markets.
The large domestic market was especially true in the U.S. for textiles. The
factory is really the physical embodiment of arriving capitalism, and some were
bigger than churches in England, which astounded locals. The first English plants became tourist
sites. River Rouge itself hosted 2 hour tours every half hour.
The textile mills of England were the first signs of this
new society, a model which was then copied across the world. Steel mills like the huge Carnegie’s
Homestead plant were the handmaidens to the railroads, which vastly improved
transportation. Ford’s acres-large Highland Park plant developed the Model T,
the assembly line and efficiency studies, and the car culture took off. “Fordism,” partly a Keynesian idea that pays
labor enough to buy their own products, was experimented with – and dropped. Soviet
factories later helped repel the Nazis, and U.S. plants were quickly converted
to war production too. Foxconn’s plants
have helped put the internet in almost everyone’s pocket across the world.
The factory changed communities – it made former farmers
and irregular or home workers into clock watchers, fined for tardiness or
absence. It created cities and
depopulated rural areas. Manchester grew into a crowded, polluted slum due to
coal and poverty after the mills moved from horse power, then water power to
steam. Coal and later gas and electricity were required to power these
factories, so those extractive industries thrived as a result. Early English
and U.S. textile companies hired young women and children, who they thought
could do detail work needed with their ‘tiny’ hands. Companies built new cities around their
facilities. Some industrialists built housing next to the factories, part of a
company town where they tried to control and surveil the morality of their
workers. Religion, abstinence from
alcohol, cleanliness and chastity were the hallmarks. This was especially true for new immigrants
at Ford and the rural girls in Lowell and Lawrence. Yet Ford had huge problems
with turnover – 370% in 1913 – until it introduced the $5 a day wage and
profit-sharing.
Politically in bourgeois thinking, factories were seen as
harbingers of ‘modernism’ – a project of social uplift, wealth generation and
consumer society. They spread the idea
of ‘joint stock’ companies and vertical integration. They were celebrated in industrial
exhibitions. They were the wellspring of
a new world, a new capitalist social system, praised as such until the dark
side revealed itself. Pollution, long
hours, drudgery, injuries, low pay, exploitation, sexual and physical abuse and
child labor made it more akin to slavery, especially as seen by reformers and
Marxists. This is where we get the notion of wage slavery. Freeman quotes Engels frequently, who helped
run a textile plant in Manchester, to illustrate the Left side of the equation.
CULTURE
Freeman hits cultural notes too, as factories and
industrialism impacted culture, as would be expected. He
spends time on the great Detroit Art Museum murals by Diego Rivera based on
scenes Rivera observed at River Rouge.
He describes Charlie Chaplain’s social-comedic film Modern Times and mentions of Ford in Dos Passos U.S.A. series volume, The Big Money about the Detroit auto
strikes. He dwells on Blake’s invocation of the ‘dark Satanic mills,’ Charlotte
Bronte’s attack on the Luddites in the novel Shirley; the descriptions of factories in Dicken’s Hard Times and Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong. He discusses Dziga Vertov’s film about Ukrainian factories called Enthusiasm; Margaret-Bourke White’s photos of auto plants;
Alexander Rodchenko’s constructivist photo montages of industrial facilities and many more.
(END of Part 1)
Note: Freeman is a history prof in NYC specializing in labor and comes from a working-class background.
Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “factory,” “textile,” “steel,” “Fordism.” ”Engels.”
And I bought this book at the used/cutout section of May
Day Books!
Red Frog / July 5, 2025
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