Freeman begins with the first plants, showing how these evolved out of the change needs of production in early capitalism. Initially these attempted to bring earlier forms of family production under one roof before moving to the more recognisable building with large numbers of workers doing similar tasks. As Freeman notes, we sometimes look back on these changes as the dawning of a new, positive era but at the time commentators noted something very different:
the Industrial Revolution is often associated with individual liberty and what is called the free market. But in the early years of the factory system, it was as likely to be dubbed a new form of slavery as a new form of freedom. Joseph Livesey, a well known journal publisher and temperance campaigner, himself the son of a mill owner, wrote of the apprenticed children he saw in mills during his childhood, "They were apprenticed to a system to which nothing but West Indian slavery can bear any analogy".Focusing on the birth of the factory system in England, Freeman highlights how the industrial revolution sucked people from the countryside into the cities, "Manchester and adjacent Salford more than tripled in population from 95,000 in 1800 to more than 3100,000 in 1841." Factory owners saw the development of the system as creating wealth that would trickle down and improve life for everyone - though the enormous profits they made rarely permitted paying decent wages. Factory life was brutal, hard and poorly recompensed - the workers suffered badly, something highlighted brilliantly by Frederick Engels. Freeman also argues that the factory system developed as a method of disciplining labour a change that required the British state's support - both in terms of permitting the factory organisation and in punishing workers who challenged the owners' power.
One of the great things about this book is that it celebrates the workers' struggles - both against the factory system and within it. In the chapter focusing on Lowell in the United States, one of the first places to successfully introduce cotton manufacturing to that country, he notes how the owners created a town were the cotton mills were "hailed as beacons of a bright future". The workers were paid well, and, despite severe restrictions on behaviour, had clean places to live. No less a critic than Charles Dickens in 1842 wrote that the city, when compared to places in England, "the contrast... [was] between the Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow". Yet this could not continue. Eventually management, under pressure from over-production, cut corners and attacked workers conditions. By the 1830s and 1840s strikes were common, and by the 1850s "when New England mills appeared in the news, it usually was because of untoward developments".
From here Freeman studies how the capitalists tried to create the perfect factory - integrating workers and machines. This is done through a brilliant study of Ford's car plants and he shows how Fordism was copied throughout the factory system. I won't dwell here on other aspects of Ford's company - some of that is in a review of Greg Grandin's book Fordlandia, which I highly recommend. But the startlingly thing that I found was how Fordism and its close cousin Taylorism, was integrated into Russian manufacturing. Both Lenin and Trotsky wanted the development of the factory system - seeing it as key to the development of the socialist economy. They were keen to adopt scientific methods like Fords - though for very different reasons. Under Stalin this was distorted into a parody of socialism - with men and women being worked to the bone for little in return. The chapter on factories in the Soviet Union was particularly interesting, even if I didn't entirely agree with Freeman's characterisation of that society (though he, notes that few care today about the exact nature of Soviet Russia!) I was particularly surprised to learn how closely US capital was involved in developing Russia's factory skills and infrastructure in the 1920s and 1930s.
From the Soviet Union, Freeman looks at the decline of the factory in Western Europe and the United States and turns to China and Vietnam were enormous plants are being built to satisfy the hunger for profits of corporations like Apple. These have many similarities - entire cities are being born and the countryside sucked dry of labour - with England in America in the early years of industrial capitalism. But the factories are also different - geared towards just in time production and rarely relying on a production line in the same way as, say, a Ford car plant.
This whistle-stop review of Freeman's book barely touches the surface of the material he has covered. It is a subtle study of the role of the factory in the development of capitalism, and what that means in the 21st century. He never loses sight of the fact that the factory always requires men and women whose labour is squeezed from them and turned into profits - so at every stage he notes the resistance, the rebellion, the attempts to organise and the strikes - that have terrified the bosses from England in the 18th century to China in the 21st. Freeman is not afraid of using the unfashionable work of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky to understand the factory system's history - and this means that he understands the interplay between capitalism and worker well.
If I had major criticisms, they would be that I wished Freeman had developed more on the role of the factory in the Russian Revolution itself. While he mentions the huge workplaces of Petrograd, he gives little space to the struggles of the workers there. I'd have liked more on how the Putilov workers helped make the Revolution. I also thought that the work of Andreas Malm would have been interesting to note - the way that the development of factories ended up locking capitalism into a fossil fuel system with all that means for the environmental crisis today.
But these minor comments aside this is a brilliantly written, fascinating and very human study of those most inhumane of workplaces. I highly recommend it.
Related Reviews
Grandin - Fordlandia
Engels - The Condition of the Working Class in England
Raw - Striking a Light: The Bryant & May Matchwomen and their place in History
Tully - Silvertown
Mosley - The Chimney of the World
Malm - Fossil Capital
Newsinger - Fighting Back - The American Working Class in the 1930s
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