What were some theories opposed to capitalism during the Industrial Revolution?

The rise of industrial capitalism throughout the nineteenth century went hand in hand with the rise of strikes and other forms of labor protests. By the end of the century most industrialized countries were collecting systematic strike data. No doubt the relevance of the issue—at the heart of capitalist social relations—and the ready availability of data led to a burgeoning academic literature. What do we know? Basically, that the temporal pattern of strikes follows the business cycle: the higher the level of unemployment, the lower the number of strikes. More generally, one thing is clear: strikes are cyclical with long up-and-down swings (with the down swings typically leading to predictions of the ‘withering away of strikes’). Strikes are also linked to organization: the better organized workers are (e.g., through trade unions), the more likely they are to call on strike a larger number of workers and to be successful in their demands. Finally, strikes are linked to the political position of labor: strikes have gone down wherever and whenever labor-oriented parties acquired a stable and durable control over the government within Western democracies. But what about the future? Has the nature of strikes fundamentally changed with the shift from manufacturing to services? The evidence does show some distinctive features of service-sector strikes. Whether strikes are a thing of the past, the future will tell.

New Dialectics; Certain Kinds of Networks (Capitalism)

Marxism has had a central interest in nature and nature-culture relationships from its inception, not least in how capitalism alienates society from nature and renders nature as property. Latterly, various attempts have been made to project Marxism into ecologism (or vice versa), seeking to make ‘green Marxism’. At the heart of the Marxist approach is dialectical materialism in which nature is embedded as a generative force. Particularly as developed by David Harvey, new dialectics attempts to extend these key trajectories and embrace a more fully relational, hybrid, view of the world. As such, it makes a sustained attack on both the nature/society dualism ‘and’ the dualism of space and time. Here, as in ANT and hybridity, there is a relational view of actants. They are not separate, or in possession of innate, stable identities; rather, their natures are relationally inscribed. But Harvey, from his Marxist base, suggests that capitalism infuses the majority of networks, or relations, which have constructed the modern world, arguing that this fundamental process needs to be confronted. Humans and nonhumans in ‘socio-ecological formations’, as Castree sums up, “become the ‘arteries’ through which an invisible process of ceaseless capital value expansion operates.” His materialist formation then sees not only society making nature in its image but transforming nature, and nature in turn dialectically reworking society. There is a resistance from natural elements as they are forcefully enrolled into capital accumulation networks, which sets up the dialectic dynamic. Castree offers fish farming as an example of this kind of dynamic between economy and nature. It seems to be a logical market response to the challenges and expenses of sea fishing and fish-stock crisis and resulting quota systems, but the many well-documented problems with fish farming reveal natural elements not simply conforming to capitalist logics but instead, subverting, resisting, and outflanking the impositions placed upon them.

Margaret Fitzsimmons supports this focus on industrial capitalism which over the last 200 years has, as she puts it, ushered in “massive ecological change … writing over the landscapes and lifeways of other human cultures.” She points to the four basic interactions among living organisms: competition and struggle; adaptation into niches; collaboration and cooperation; and environmental transformation and how, through the study of their entanglements, Harvey's purpose is to find

… a way of depicting the fundamental physical and biological conditions and processes that work through all social, cultural and economic projects … in such a way as not to render those physical and biological elements as a banal and passive background … [so that] … somehow the artificial break between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ must be eroded, rendered porous and eventually dissolved (Harvey, 1996: 192).

From this base, Fitzsimmons, after Harvey, advocates academic interaction between the natural and social sciences, and solidarity with active socio-ecological projects that address both justice and difference.

Castree feels that the impact of the new dialectics has been limited by the turn away from Marxism in geography and the social sciences. That said, even the new dialectics is thought by some to slip back inadvertently toward, or never properly to shake off, a dualized view of nature/culture embedded in dialectical reasoning. Another criticism is that relations are defined almost inevitably as conflict, whereas other approaches are keen to seek out positive sum relationships between, say, economy and ecology. Nevertheless, this perspective offers a focus upon the key role of industrial capitalism in shaping the spaces and networks of the world in which human and nonhuman elements are relationally articulated. Felix Guattari, in his book The Three Ecologies, makes it plain that it is capitalism which is denuding cultural, psychological, and ecological diversity to the extent that we are witnessing ‘ecocide’.

The point of departure for this article is the social tensions of industrial capitalism of Great Britain, and later on also the European continent, North America and, lastly, world wide. It discusses the importance of strikes and popular unrest as well as utopian and Marxian ideas for the development of the labor movements. It dates many national and international trade unions and political parties, and makes a short presentation of their programs and manifestations. The long term relations (cooperation, tensions, and fighting) between them are discussed, and the dominance of Atlantic, white male perspectives is stressed. The article also indicates how the labor movements after 1914 were influenced by and participated in international politics. Finally, it indicates how gender and ethnic issues have been introduced on the agenda of the labor movements, and how these issues during recent decades have revitalized the historiography of the labor movements.

The Uncertain Future

As those from the green sociopolitical movement and many others recognize, industrial society, capitalism, and economic development are based on the false assumption that infinite growth is possible on a finite base. Here growth refers to both population and economy. Base refers essentially to carrying capacity. The latter involves not only the ability of the land and natural resources to support a certain level of population without essentially irreversible resource depletion and environmental degradation, but also the capacity of ecosystems and the planet as a whole to absorb pollution and other anthropogenic stresses. Increasingly human impacts exceed the resilience of nature to regenerate and recover within a normal time span from any perturbations and stresses, natural or anthropogenic.

Until the demonstrably ecocidal ideas and practices of modern industrial society and related factors are corrected and ecosanity with some modicum of ecological balance is restored, the net impact of humans on biodiversity will be negative and only accelerate and intensify. Accordingly, all life, including that of humanity, will remain endangered. There is not much room for optimism, at least in the near future, given the great momentum of population and economic growth combined with political pressures for the so-called economic development and the elevation of the standard of living throughout the world, all at the expense of the environment and its natural capital of resources, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Indeed, the ozone hole, acid rain, acidification of the oceans, collapse of oceanic and freshwater fisheries, destruction of coral reefs, soil erosion, desertification, global climate change, and other environmental problems from the local to global levels may be symptoms of the failure of the experiment of industrial society after just two centuries. No human society is infallible and eternal – the archeological and historical records provide numerous cases of those that became maladaptive, collapsed, and disintegrated, such as Harappa in the Indus Valley, or ancient Greece and Rome, although the exact causes of some like Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are disputed.

Emergence and Justification

Bureaucratic regulation of industries emerged in the nineteenth century with the rise of industrial capitalism and the bureaucratic division of labor. Britain established a factory inspectorate for the textile industry as early as 1832. The use of inspectorates to address the more dangerous conditions at work – in match factories, in tenement labor – expanded dramatically throughout the Western world in the 1890s (Rodgers, 1998).

Regulation has proven to be at least partly reversible: central trends in capitalist economies during the 1970s and 1980s included both privatization of state-owned industries (see e.g., Graham and Prosser, 1988; Pistula and Rasmussen, 1990) and political pressure toward deregulating the already regulated industries (Derthick and Quirk, 1985; Harris and Milkis, 1996).

Economists have thought it important to explain why regulation is necessary within a capitalist economy, given that neoclassical economic theory holds that social purposes are best accomplished by markets. The importance of neoclassical theory has meant that advocates and critics of regulation have also expended effort understanding the justifications (see e.g., Breyer, 1982). Justification has sometimes centered on the concept of ‘externalities.’ A market requires that business pays for some components, for example, steel in manufacturing a car. However, the manufacturer does not have to buy the air that it pollutes in the process of making cars, and in turn, neither do consumers who drive the cars. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, concern about the inability of companies to take into account the social costs of doing business was used to justify regulating products and processes in manufacturing.

In addition to regulating products and processes, governments regulate price and entry: the price that an industry may charge and the requirements to enter into the business. The justification of price and entry regulation does not rely upon the concept of externalities. Rather, the argument is that some industries take on the characteristics of monopoly, whether as a natural monopoly or because there are very high barriers to entry. For example, it could be inefficient to have multiple railways competing against each other since the costs of laying railroad track are very high. What is more, because it is expensive to build a railway, it is extremely difficult to enter the business, which means that the competition that is supposed to ensure that prices and services are responsive to consumer demand does not exist. Without competition, railroads could charge what they would for services. Thus railroads, the first industry subject to national bureaucratic regulation in the United States, would charge more for short-haul than for long-haul trips because there was much less competition in short haul (Skowronek, 1982). Economists also note the importance of ‘network effects’ in monopoly. If the exchange of information is facilitated by having compatible computer systems, each person buying a computer system has an incentive to buy one compatible with those people already have, whether or not that is the best system. Advocates assert that professions like medicine and law require regulation because expertise is required to assess whether the profession is being practiced correctly. Consumers cannot assess whether a surgeon knows what he or she is doing until it might be too late.

These justifications for regulation have been subject to serious critique from those who believe that markets should be unregulated and from those who believe that regulation is ineffective because industries have special access to the state not shared by their workers or customers (Derthick and Quirk, 1985). In this view, regulatory bureaucracies, designed to incorporate public concerns into capitalist economies, become ‘captured’ by the industries they are to regulate. The regulatory bureaucracies then act largely to insulate the industries from competition and protect their interests. Sometimes that has happened by design: railroad regulators meant to maintain and steady the railroad industry. In the late nineteenth century, railroads in the United States wanted to be regulated to moderate the incentives to cut prices that were putting railroads out of business (Skowronek, 1982). In France, notaires welcome regulation to preserve their monopoly on drawing up legal contracts; opening that monopoly would have meant decreasing income as a result of competition (Suleiman, 1987).

Economists call the effort to gain protection from the market by legislative or bureaucratic intervention ‘rent-seeking behavior’ – that is, an effort to gain a return beyond what is required to keep one in the business – and many have argued that rent seeking is the heart of regulation. For example, lawyers benefit from the licensing of lawyers; it restricts the numbers of lawyers available and thereby maintains a higher price than would be the case if anyone could practice law. The claim that regulation protected inefficient industries from competition and used state power to keep prices artificially high provided a substantial part of the support for deregulation in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s (Derthick and Quirk, 1985; Harris and Milkis, 1996).

While the United States developed regulatory institutions in a context of mainly private ownership of industries, in other nations, critiques of state ownership of industries led to privatization, which in turn entailed regulation (Graham and Prosser, 1988). During the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the 1990s and 2000s in the developing world (Jordana and Levi-Faur, 2006; Minogue and Carino, 2006; Dubash and Morgan, 2013), regulatory agencies have proliferated. Their emergence and justification have been linked to purposes of both promoting economic efficiency (especially in essential services in both Europe and the developing world) and protection from risk or harm (especially in environmental or health and safety regulation in Europe). The importance of protective regulation can be seen by noting that the strength of the proenvironmental regulation lobby meant that environmental deregulation did not go far even in the United States (Harris and Milkis, 1996). Those advocating a more market-based approach in pollution rights gained recognition in Clean Air Act Amendments, and more recently in emissions trading regulatory schemes, but government officials remain deeply involved in regulation (Harris and Milkis, 1996; Ureta, 2013). Social solidarity and human rights have also provided justifications for the emergence of many regulatory regimes in recent years (Prosser, 2010).

1 Emergence and Justification

Bureaucratic regulation of industries emerged in the nineteenth century with the rise of industrial capitalism and the bureaucratic division of labor. Britain established a factory inspectorate for the textile industry as early as 1832. The use of inspectorates to address the more dangerous conditions at work—in match factories, in tenement labor—expanded dramatically throughout the Western world in the 1890s (Rodgers 1998, pp. 254–9).

Regulation has proven to be at least partly reversible: central trends in capitalist economies during the 1970s and 1980s included both privatization of state-owned industries (see e.g., Graham and Prosser 1988, Pistula and Rasmussen 1990) and political pressure toward deregulating already regulated industries (Derthick and Quirk 1985, Harris and Milkis 1996).

Economists have thought it important to explain why regulation is necessary within a capitalist economy, given that neoclassical economic theory holds that social purposes are best accomplished by markets. The importance of neoclassical theory has meant that advocates and critics of regulation have also expended effort understanding the justifications (see e.g., Breyer 1982). Justification has sometimes centered on the concept of ‘externalities.’ A market requires that business pays for some components, for example, steel in manufacturing a car. However, the manufacturer does not have to buy the air that it pollutes in the process of making cars, and in turn, neither do consumers who drive the cars. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, concern about the inability of companies to take into account the social costs of doing business was used to justify regulating products and processes in manufacturing.

In addition to regulating products and processes, governments regulate price and entry: the price that an industry may charge and the requirements to enter into the business. The justification of price and entry regulation does not rely upon the concept of externalities. Rather, the argument is that some industries take on the characteristics of monopoly, whether as a natural monopoly or because there are very high barriers to entry. For example, it could be inefficient to have multiple railways competing against each other since the costs of laying railroad track are very high. What is more, because it is expensive to build a railway, it is extremely difficult to enter the business, which means that the competition that is supposed to ensure that prices and services are responsive to consumer demand does not exist. Without competition, railroads could charge what they would for services. Thus railroads, the first industry subject to national bureaucratic regulation, in the United States would charge more for short-haul than for long-haul trips because there was much less competition in short haul (Skowronek 1982, pp. 124–5, 141–50). In air transport, too, the barriers to entry are high because airspace is limited and in any one airport runways and gates are limited. Someone must allocate the space and ensure that once the airline has the space it does not ignore what customers want. Economists also note the importance of ‘network effects’ in monopoly. If having compatible computer systems facilitates the exchange of information, each person buying a computer system has an incentive to buy one compatible with those people already have, whether or not that is the best system. Advocates assert that professions like medicine and law require regulation because expertise is required to assess whether the profession is being practiced correctly. Consumers cannot assess whether a surgeon knows what she is doing until it might be too late.

These justifications for regulation have been subject to serious critique from those who believe that markets should be unregulated and from those who believe that regulation is ineffective because industries have special access to the state not shared by their workers or customers (Derthick and Quirk 1985). In this view regulatory bureaucracies, designed to incorporate public concerns into capitalist economies, become ‘captured’ by the industries they are to regulate. The regulatory bureaucracies then act largely to insulate the industries from competition and protect their interests. Sometimes that has happened by design: railroad regulators meant to maintain and steady the railroad industry. In the late nineteenth century railroads in the United States wanted to be regulated to moderate the incentives to cut prices that were putting railroads out of business (Skowronek 1982). In France notaires welcome regulation to preserve their monopoly on drawing up legal contracts; opening that monopoly would have meant decreasing income as a result of competition (Suleiman 1987).

Economists call the effort to gain protection from the market by legislative or bureaucratic intervention ‘rent-seeking behavior’—that is, an effort to gain a return beyond what is required to keep one in the business—and many have argued that rent-seeking is the heart of regulation. For example, lawyers benefit from the licensing of lawyers; it restricts the numbers of lawyers available and thereby maintains a higher price than would be the case if anyone could practice law. The claim that regulation protected inefficient industries from competition and used state power to keep prices artificially high provided a substantial part of the support for deregulation in the United States. In the late 1970s and 1980s (Derthick and Quirk 1985, Harris and Milkis 1996). In other nations, critiques of state ownership of industries led to privatization, which in turn entailed regulation (Graham and Prosser 1988). Across the industrialized Second World, industries differed in their ability to maintain monopolies or other advantages regulation provides (Derthick and Quirk 1985, Suleiman 1987).

In the United States, deregulation seems to have promoted consolidation in the airline industry and the trucking industry just as understandings of ‘natural monopolies’ might have predicted. Perhaps surprisingly, the strength of the pro-environmental regulation lobby meant that environmental deregulation did not go far (Harris and Milkis 1996). Those advocating a more market-based approach in pollution rights gained recognition in Clean Air Act Amendments, but government officials were still deeply involved in regulation (Harris and Milkis 1996). Presidents elected on antiregulation platforms do not completely control the political environment in which they work. The American federal system also provides access in the states when people have lost at the federal level. For example, when the federal government tried to limit the regulation of advertising, activists turned to the more sympathetic state governments.

States approach regulation relying on different institutions that have, in turn, different styles. Courts, legislatures, local governments, marketing boards, and bureaucratic agencies all can (and have) imposed orders on capitalist enterprise. In the United States before the Civil War, rather than relying on negotiations between business and bureaucrats, or on rules from bureaucrats that were enforced in the courts, the United States relied on courts—largely state courts—to enforce statutes or common law duties. In addition, state legislatures granted charters to businesses and in return exacted some form of regulation: limits on what entrepreneurs could charge to cross a bridge or use a road (Hartz 1948), or requirements that those who owned docks contribute toward keeping harbors dredged and open (Hartog 1983). Such regulation is not a matter of general rules implemented through a bureaucracy, but it was an effort to require businesses to take into account public concerns not readily addressed in the market. By the late nineteenth century most states had instituted some bewildering array of boards, commissions, and special courts to instead ensure that a broader public interest was taken into account.

The Nonsustainability of ‘BAU’

It is the vast scale of the changes to the natural world unleashed by industrial capitalism that is the core issue for sustainability. The workings of markets, finance, and securitization have allowed an economic system to flourish that is divorced from its ecological moorings – to the short-term benefit of all who enjoy such a system. The mode of operation, however, is probing pathologies such as ‘overshoot and collapse’ in one market after another – peaking of oil and other fossil fuels being the most obvious symptoms. Global warming and its consequences constitute the end result. Financialization is taking its toll (i.e., finance becoming the prime driver of business), not just in the finance sector itself but in the commodities markets as well, undermining the operation of the entire industrial system. The issue is to reestablish the system's moorings by reframing capitalism as a system embedded in an ecological matrix.

The consequences of scaling up the industrial system to its planetary limits are by now clear enough and well known in the scientific literature. The impact of humans on the terrestrial cycles of the earth is now so profound that it has spawned a new term for a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2007). Successive reviews have pointed to the seriousness of the changes unleashed – culminating in the threat and reality of global warming (Garnaut, 2008; Stern, 2007). But air and water pollution are simply the most visible of the problems created as the industrial system expands to become global. Of more immediate concern is the pressure imposed on existing supplies of fossil fuels and resources, with the prospect of political and ultimately military clashes between countries over the remaining resources. As the peak is passed in one commodity after another (particularly for conventional oil and gas) so the industry searches for more extreme resources (Klare, 2012) – meaning that they become extremely difficult to find, to produce, and entail extreme levels of danger (as evidenced in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill experienced by BP in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010). Energy security concerns, and resources security more generally, loom large as immediate problems generated by the BAU trajectory.

On top of the physical problems, there are problems facing firms that elect to continue with BAU in the form of investment in assets such as coal-fired power stations or deepwater drilling that are likely to lose value as pressure to find an alternative pathway intensifies. These ‘stranded assets’ that could grow to mean billions or even trillions of dollars constitute a uniquely business response to the sustainability issues raised by the existing industrial system (CTI, 2012).

19th Century: Two Celebrated Precedents

Two publications, both written at a time of major demographic upheaval associated with the development of industrial capitalism, are central to population geography's history. First, cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus, at the turn of the 19th Century (1798) when England's population was just a sixth of what it is today, published his famous—in some contexts, infamous—judgmental first An Essay on the Principle of Population. With dispassionate logic, Malthus hypothesized that while the human population tended to increase in size geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16…), food supply could only manage a corresponding arithmetical increase (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…). This situation implied famine and consequent population mortality if “restraints” on such geometric growth—on fertility—were not put in place. Population survival on the Earth, at least across some of it and for some people (the poor), was thus problematized. This issue is still widely debated today by population geographers and many others.

Malthus' focus on births and deaths and their geographical emplacement were soon joined by population geography's other major focus, human migration. Between 1876 and 1889, a German-born former cartographer for the British War Office, Ernst Georg Ravenstein, published 11 laws of migration based mostly on early population census data. Listed in Table 1, almost all Ravenstein's laws were more or less accurate accounts of migration expressed across Europe and beyond at the time. Although many remain empirically true today, like Malthus' ideas, they lacked clear or critically assessed theoretical grounding. This task was taken up by 20th-Century population geographers.

Table 1. Ravenstein's “laws of migration”.

1.

Most migrants go only a short distance.

Migration proceeds step-by-step.

Long-distance migrants generally choose main urban centers.

Each current of migration produces a compensating countercurrent.

Urban natives are less migratory than those of rural areas.

Females are more intranationally migratory, males more internationally migratory.

Most migrants are adults and families rarely migrate out of their birth county.

Large towns grow more by migration than by natural increase.

Migration increases as industries and commerce develop and transport improves.

The main direction of migration is from rural to urban areas.

The major causes of migration are economic.

Source: simplified from Grigg (1977).

The article seeks to locate the origins of sustainability debates as part and parcel of the development of industrial capitalism from the mid-nineteenth century and the development of critical social sciences (including human geography), also from that period. Concerns about ‘sustainability’ thus significantly predate the more recent (post-1980s) widespread usage of the term itself. They are linked with a more profound questioning of the ‘metabolic rift’ which occurred with the onset of industrial capitalism, and the subsequent decrease in the renewability of ecological resources.

It then attempts to focus upon some of the key dimensions of scholarly work which is based in the fields of environmental geography and other social science disciplines. The 1980s and 1990s were a particular formative time of intellectual ferment and they have given rise to new branches of the field in human geography, regarding: questions of governance; recognitions of complexity and scale; questions of what really constitutes ecological modernization; questions of spatial inequality and uneven development.

The onset of sustainability debates has had a profound impact on human geography; not only in defining new substantive areas of study, or in revising old areas of study in new ways. More profoundly they have raised important methodological and conceptual questions about recasting nature/society relationships, the nature of spatial inequality, and the wider need to recognize and to problematize what might be meant by the social–ecological metabolism. Clearly, this involves both a reappraisal of spatial relationships and a new integration of both critically normative, as well as interpretative approaches.

Which theories were against capitalism?

What was the main criticism of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution?

Who opposed the concept of capitalism?

What are the three theories of capitalism?