MODERN HISTORY. THE III INDUSTRIAL R=EVOLUTIONS
Youth as energy -------------------Maturity as transport------3rd Age as a Weapon
XII C.:Gunpowder-1784:Steam engine-1820:Railroad-1857:Crash-1860:-Armoured train-1890
The 3 ages of the Steam cycle complete the I Kondratieff Cycle, with England on top of the World.
16. The I Industrial Cycle: Steamers and the British Empire.
In words of Adam Smith the pursuit of financial wealth is the goal of most people. So nations have to let companies re=produce, sell and make money with all type of products regardless of the harm they produce to human beings. While Governments should only care for security and order (buying weapons and making wars or policing and controlling workers). What Adam Smith defined with abstract words was the biological nature of companies, as ‘mothers’ of machines that only care for their re=production and the creation of a world made to its image and resemblance, with abundance of energy and information for those machines. Yet companies, the Free citizens of Free Markets, are not human beings but organic structures that reproduce machines. So the goal of all modern ‘Free Market democracies’ are not the ‘free goals of its human citizens’ but the natural reproductive and evolutionary goals of its machines and economic ecosystems. Those economic ecosystems were born precisely in Great Britain, where Adam Smith wrote his book, ‘The Wealth of Nations’ to please friends like Mr. Watt that was building the first steam machine. The Scottish, Calvinist Go(l)d believers, have no doubt about the value of those steam machines to empower Great Britain, which became thanks to the power of steam, the dominant global power of the age.
Let us then consider the Steam Cycle that transformed first Britain and the world at large through its 3 ages, as steam was applied to engines, transport machines and weapons, while the British cultural cycles went through 3 parallel ages off enthusiasm for the new machines, peaceful consumption and cynical, colonial wars. The graph shows those 3 ages of machine’s evolution that started with the discovery of the steam engine. Great Britain was at that moment the underdog of the Napoleonic Wars against France and America, which had the best land army and the best gunboats at sea. The American and the French, who fought like free men, were defeating their mercenary armies. But then a miracle took place: in 1783, just in time, Watt’s double actionsteam engine and Cort’s pig iron, changed industrial production. In 1800 Watt’s patents expire and steam engines started mass production, multiplying by 10 the English manufacture of weapons. England, with a powerful iron and steam industry, enters the age of the Machine and the I Kondratieff cycle of Steam Energy takes off. England makes more boats and artillery guns thanks to the combined steel & steam industry and Pitt defeats Napoleonic armies…
The founding fathers: The steam engine. I Age: discovery.
Industrial Britain wins the war lead by a new generation of hardy Scottish engineers that use the capitals of slave trade to create a white slave industry of miners, steel and mill factories. We consider the Founders of Britain the generation that took power after the American Independence War, when England suffers a deep change on his hierarchies of industrial power. It is a hard generation that crosses through the Napoleonic Wars, winning the last battle at Waterloo and develops the steam industries with ‘white slaves’, treated like the black slaves of their former plantations, only that now they are ‘leased as workers’. Since the American market for slave and cargo trade is gone, now ship-owners and City financiers reinvest their capitals in the new industries powered by steam engines. The R=evolution of Metal sprouts mills and smelting furnaces in Scotland and the axis Liverpool-Manchester, where Industrial manufacturing begins in earnest.
II Age. The reproductive generation: transport machines; the railroad
It is the Re=productive Generation that expands globally the English Empire, its trains and customs. Now Scottish engineers and financiers from the City will construct an Empire of railroad networks to satisfy travellers or speculate and invent money in stocks. In 1804 Fulton uses steam to move a river boat and the Mississippi basin acquires the topic image of its steamers. In 1825 the railroad Stockton-Darlington opens and the ‘Locomotion’ by Stephenson reaches the astonishing speed of 15 Km/h. The reproductive radiation of steam machines begins in earnest, taking the train to all continents. In 1851, in the Universal Exhibition dedicated to the new steam machines, (fig.15.15) Great Britain astonishes a world ready to accept the awesome ‘age of Energy’. ‘White slaves’, children working in mines and… horses that the train has made obsolete are the victims of the new engines. Within a decade 90% of horses are sacrificed. Meanwhile in Ireland, hundreds of thousands die of hunger, without resources to improve their agriculture...
Trains expand now globally as new nations imitate the British industrial culture. 3 new countries construct railway networks in their Empires: France, Germany and the United States. In the Northeast, the railroad New York-Chicago starts the American industrial takeoff. The 1850s witness a global a craze in the stock-market for train companies that invent paper-money in stocks faster that they build those lines.
III Age. The Great crash, the train Wars.
But in 1851 and 1857, 2 overproduction crises provoke the I great Kondratieff crash of train companies in all World Markets, which changes the mood of the industry. The railroad, iron and steel industry decide to sell weapons, since there are no more profitable lines to build. They force a change on Free Trade policies and Great Britain advocates for Imperial protectionism and the colonization of Africa. The Crimean war explodes in 1853. Now the military will use industrial steel in armoured railroads, steamers and guns. Soon the British and French colonize Africa. At home, the 1848 socialist r=evolution of labour is repressed. The European bourgeoisie accepts his supreme role as civiliser of a 3rd world that ignores the machine, the symbol of human progress, with the force of its cannons. Europe lives decade after decade of apparent happiness, while Colonial Empires build their railroads and provoke ‘collateral effects’ elsewhere. It is the beginning of an era that articulates empires around armoured railroads and steamer routes, the new imperialistic weapon that substitutes the gunboat, allowing the inner penetration of Africa through Jungle Rivers and steamers and the conquest of the American West. The imperial age of the railroad is called descriptively in America the age of ‘Robber Barons’.
17. The evolution of informative machines.
XV:Fixed age----------- XVIII C: consumption, mobile age----------------1857:war age
Books and Paper-Money Newspapers Pictures Yellow Press.
In the industrial age, informative machines multiply digital and verbal information, which convince the human masses of the goodness of technology. Only human artists, as machines becomes weapons and provoke wars, doubt of the ‘goodness’ of metal.
In the graph, machines of chemical information also go through 3 evolutionary ages:
- Max. E: A young age in which chemical information is applied to the reproduction of paper- money, the new energy of the economic ecosystem, that multiplies faster than the previous form of money, coins, did . Thus, if the steam engine gave global power to Britain, because it was able to reproduce weapons and industrial products faster than any other country, in the realm of information the key factor to hold global power is to reproduce money faster than any other nation and then give orders and value more things with your money. And indeed paper-money, pounds and English stocks multiplied the quantity of British money so much that now everything could be bought or valued with a price. As a consequence of this, the British could hire mercenary armies and buy human lives, ‘white slaves’, with a salary. Wages became then the modern way to control human time, substituting full time slavery; while paper money, mainly stock-money, substituted gold coins as the most common form of money. Yet since coins were minted by governments and stock money by companies, the change of money gave companies an enormous power to buy politicians and engage them as employees, making them proprietors of ‘shares’ and hence interested in the same goals of the company: to multiply machines and profits. The corruption of democracies by lobbyism is a direct consequence of their monopoly in the creation of the social language of power, money, which companies acquire in Britain in the XIX C.
Now money caused most of the ‘action s’ performed by human beings as workers of companies. So the world started to be designed no longer by human beings or their governments but by company-mothers and their biological will of reproduction and consumption of machines that became the goal of national societies. The British and American democracies soon elected M.P. members that were shareholders of those over powerful companies. They imposed Deficit Zero laws that increased the monopoly of companies over the language of money. Since now governments could not invent money but had to extort it from citizens through taxes. And finally they passed the Anonymous Society Law that excluded shareholders from any responsibility on the extinctive acts performed by those companies. While paper money of small denominations became so widely spread that the financial economy which rules with prices and salaries our societies, spread beyond England to the entire American and European continent. Thus, the global economic ecosystem, the Free Market, based in the values of money was born, replacing in the Western World the historic, legal societies that preceded it. Of course, to ‘hide’ that information from the common people, ‘classic economics’ elaborated all kind of Aristotelian arguments, which still are taught in Universities where citizens learn to be happy, good slaves of the economic ecosystem. Most men, as most systems in the Universe, are a ‘tabula rassa’ that can be imprinted with any lie as long as it seems truth and caters the ‘Galilean Paradox’ of the believer. So in the same manner that Buddhism had to sell the subjective lie of a ‘transmigration of souls’ to cover the objective truths of ‘Nirvana’=extinction’, and today it splits between the ‘little vehicle’, the original ‘Nirvana’ doctrine, and the ‘big vehicle’, the much more popular transmigration fairy tale, economics divides between the hard truths of Marxism and Bioeconomics and the ‘happy tales’ of classic economics in which each citizen is a ‘free consumer’ that ‘takes the decisions’ of the economic ecosystem. The harder they fall…
- E=T: The reproductive, mature age of chemical information started with the arrival of the daily press that multiplied economical information in favour of machines. And so ethic religions lost power to the new industrial means of communication. Pictures made dailies even more appealing. So the world witnessed the arrival of the 4th power, able to shape public opinion in favour of the Industrial R=evolution.
-Max. I: Finally, with the arrival of the military age of steam machines, after the 1857 crash, both the press and paper-money put their informative resources to the service of war. ‘Informative noise’ and epic rhetoric multiplied, hiding the truths of war. While paper-money reproduced without limit to pay for those wars. So while the Imperial Yellow Press expanded the notion that colonialism was a way of civilizing Third World People, the Pound bought their kings and politicians by the simple method of printing papers with the face of the queen.
18. The cultural cycle: The optimism of audiovisual media Vs the angst of human artists.
I Age:Epic Youth. II Age:Realist Maturity. III Age:Formal baroque & fascism. War:Death
Blake:’God, Scientist’. Turner:’Rain, speed’. Dante:’Lilith’. Colonial Coffee. I WW
‘Money is the invisible ‘A struggle for existence happens ‘Capital will expel all workers and
hand of God’ when species reproduce’ substitute them by machines’
A. Smith Darwin Marx
The results of those 3 informative ages were 3 parallel cultural ages. Since industrial, mass-media systems of information that ‘indoctrinate’ humans in favour of ‘technology’ define the ideas of modern human beings. So societies go also through 3 parallel cultural ages that mimic the 3 ages of energetic, peaceful and war machines:
- Youth: An age of infantile, epic enthusiasm and grandiloquent art that coincides with the discovery of a new machine/energy form.
- Maturity: A happy age of consume coincides with the development and massive reproduction of a peaceful transport machine.
- 3rd Age: And finally, an age of fascist culture, an age of decadence and cultural repression, happens when weapons, industrial lobbyism and political corruption brings global war. Then industrial mass-media systems create fascist noises to push people into death and war for industrial profits.
But since in wars life is at stakes, it is not so easy to ‘cheat all the people all the time’. So the highest ‘neurons’ of social organisms, its ethic priests and visual artists, often oppose the ideas of the government provoking revolutions, protests, angst, rebel art and a cultural baroque.
It is in that 3rd age when culture suffer a deep division between true art made by protesters belonging to the traditional, human-based forms of art, verbal religion and literature, concerned with the ethic values and survival of man; Vs official art made by lesser artists that live on, and communicate through information machines, which accept war to increase their profits and power. The way both kind of ‘informative systems’ and ‘artists’ react to the new age is quite different. Most religions and classic artists hate war and the world of the machine and try to escape from it or destroy it. Romantic artists find refuge in the past or in far away regions. Religious leaders become inquisitorial, fearing all signs of modernity. Poets commit suicide. Revolutionaries attack the system… But the power of corrupted artists is also huge. So they ‘downplay’ the collateral effects of war and hail nationalisms that foster war. And especially they hail technology, making art with the proportions and metallic materials of machines that become canonical in ‘modern architecture’. Meanwhile the press explains the new ethic values of the industrial world: go(l)d profits, consumption and war that substitute the ethic human values of peace, charity and social evolution.
In the graph the English culture went through those 3 ages during its long I Industrial cycle:
- First artists and writers hailed a global empire, based in the belief that scientific machines and money were the new Gods of Man, creating a lineal, epic art that hailed the machine (Blake: ‘God, the Scientist’, Adam. Smith).
- Then reality came and smoke destroyed the beauty of the English green lands while machines competed with workers in environments suit for metal not for the human flesh. So artists and writers became ‘realists’: Turner painted ‘Train, speed and rain’ and Darwin wrote ‘The origin of species’.
- Finally as the Industrial cycle exhausted itself, workers were killed in wars and economists understood the competence between men and machines (Marx, ‘Das Capital’). While artists, unable to confront the incoming death of I W.W., reversed their temporal direction towards the past, as in any other process of death, making a nostalgic art (Pre-Raphaelites: ‘Lilith’). Yet the duality of art showed also in the explosion of ‘artistic advertising’ for industrial companies that imposed their own ‘perception’ of colonial wars with posters of African happy Negroes.