Welfare work capitalism in historical perspective

Welfare work capitalism developed from the onset of the industrial revolution in 18th-century Britain. Textile factories created the first factory villages with workmen's dwellings. But also, other forms of welfare work were introduced, such as factory shops, provisions in case of sickness, libraries, sports facilities, and so on. In due time welfare work could encompass, not only in textiles but also in other sectors, a wide variety of provisions varying from housing, education, recreation, profit sharing, stock ownership, reading rooms, dance halls, medical care, sickness payments, pensions, social work, grievance procedures, and worker participation. Well-known examples of early British welfare work capitalism are the textile mills of New Lanark (on the Clyde in south-west Scotland) and Saltaire (in Bradford, West Yorkshire). Of course, there existed big differences in the supply of welfare work between factories and enterprises. The actual size and quality of these developments depended on various factors. An important one was the availability (or lack) of relevant local infrastructure, the availability of workmen on the local labour market, the speed at which factories grew and so on. The motives of employers for introducing welfare work also varied. These could be ideology- or religiondriven. For example, in the UK and the United States Quaker employers very often introduced sizeable packages of welfare work based on the idea that the owner was obliged to do good for his workers. Next to ethical motives, many employers had other reasons. For example, welfare work could contribute to economic growth of the firm, could improve competitiveness, could prevent social conflict, and so on.

Introduction

The Modernist industrial novels I will consider in this chapter were written after World War I in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.

This requires the introduction of two interrelated terms: ‘Constructivism’ and ‘New Objectivity’. Both terms are primarily linked with developments in avant-garde visual art in various countries in the aftermath of World War I. Well-known avant-garde movements in the visual arts included German and Russian Expressionism (Kirchne, Nolde, Die Brücke, Dada, Kandinsky, Malewitsch), Cubism, and Italian Futurism (Marinetti) (Bowlt, 1988, xix–xl). It is important to realize that the avant-garde did not limit itself to painting but also encompassed sculpture, architecture, cinema, theatre, and literature. Compared to pre-war artistic movements such as naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism, a new and remarkable characteristic of the avant-garde movement after the war was the idea that art not only had an aesthetic goal, but also had to contribute to societal progress, social change, and even to a new and more just world. French- Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov wrote a penetrating essay about this newly emerging relationship between art and politics between the introduction of Futurism in Italy before the Great War until the rise of dictatorship in Italy, the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s (Todorov, 2009, 193–230). In Germany the armistice of November 1918 was followed immediately by revolution and the abdication of the Kaiser, and the following month a group of artists – called the November Group in honour of these tumultuous events – was founded.

Introduction

A few years after World War II the collected writings on La Condition Ouvrière (‘The Condition of the Worker’) by French philosopher Simone Weil were published (Weil, 1951/2002). Although the author herself had died in exile in southern England in 1943, her ideas concerning overcoming worker alienation strongly influenced not only Italian entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti and Italian writer Ottiero Ottieri, as we saw in the previous chapter, but also French authors of post-war industrial novels. In France, the genre of the naturalist or realist industrial novel had been known for quite a long time since Emile Zola's seminal industrial novel Germinal, written in the 1880s. And as in the United States and Weimar Germany, there were also some workers themselves who published novels or poems. Industrial sociologist Georges Friedmann mentions in his Traité de Sociologie du Travail the following authors and books: G. Navel, Travaux (1945); D. Mothé, Journal d’un Ouvrier 1956–1958 (1958), and A. Andrieux & J. Lignon, L’Ouvrier d’Aujourd’hui (1960) (Friedmann & Naville, 1962, pp. 384, 423, 425, vol. 2). Other notable proletarian writers include Eugene Dabit, Henry Polaile, André Philippe, Maurice Lime, and Jean Pallu (Friedmann, 1947, p. 90).

It is in particular Georges Navel's novel that may be considered among the first post-war neo-realist French industrial novels. As Simone Weil did in a more analytical and philosophical way in La Condition Ouvrière, Navel expressed in his novel Travaux his personal experiences as a worker. It is remarkable that in France the genre of the Modernist industrial novel remained popular in the decades thereafter.

Introduction

In this chapter I will compare the five country cases described in this book. The main question is, can or do Modernist industrial novels written in different countries in various time periods (mostly between 1900 and the 1980s) spanning the so-called ‘American Century’, offer new or additional insights to academic industrial sociology? In other words, does it make sense to bring together the fields of literature and (industrial) sociology? When taking the dual transnational and longitudinal perspective, one development stands out that influenced both industrial sociology and Modernist industrial novels more or less equally. That is the Americanization of production processes by introducing scientific management and Fordist work methods, first in the United States and then in more or less adapted forms in the other countries. This implied a focus on the content of the modernist industrial novels dealt with, set in diverse national and time-specific contexts. Apart from that, the ways the underlying empirical research for the novels was carried out by its authors are also relevant, as too are the various ways the results are processed in these novels (See Table 1, Chapter 1).

Cross-country comparison

The flowering of the Modernist industrial novel covers more or less a century between 1900 and the 1980s. In the background of this long period there existed a successive tension in these novels between utopian and dystopian elements. In the first decades of the century utopian view prevailed, perhaps most importantly the shared belief – among entrepreneurs, managers, and workers – in the benefits of efficiency or the Americanization of production processes.

The idea for this study was born while writing a book on capitalist workingmen's paradises in different countries in the golden age of capitalism. That book was published in 2016 by Amsterdam University Press (AUP) (De Gier, 2016). In the golden age of capitalism, generally spanning the decades between 1880–1930, major fiction writers also dealt with welfare capitalism in industrial novels in these countries. Well-known examples include Charles Dickens's Hard Times (first published in 1854) in Great Britain and Émile Zola's Germinal (first published in 1885) in France (Dickens, 1854/1993; Zola, 1885/1991). In the same context, it was obvious that the writing of industrial novels continued in modern times, after the turn of the 19th century. In literary writing naturalism was succeeded by realism. In general, this implied more systematic attention by authors to reinforcing the empirical underpinnings of these novels. For this reason, the distinction between realist or modernist industrial novels and academic sociology blurred to some extent. Nevertheless, until today industrial sociology has neglected entirely the twentieth-century industrial novel as a meaningful research source. This book tries to bridge that gap. It is based largely on synthesizing and analysing a significant number of 20th-century modernist industrial novels in five countries. All these novels are based on empirical fundamentals, and will be compared in successive time periods, from about 1900 until today. Any remaining omissions and inaccuracies in the book remain the author's responsibility.

Introduction

Modernist 20th-century (documentary) industrial novels, partially or completely based on empirical facts and statistical data, constitute a typical 20th-century phenomenon. Before that time, starting with the first industrial revolution, a substantial number of industrial novels had already been written in various countries. But with some exceptions, such as Friedrich Engels's non-fictional reportage The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 1845/1993) and Emile Zola's mineworker novel Germinal (Zola, 1885/1991), these were not intentionally based on empirical facts, but were fiction. One of the most renowned examples of a narrative industrial novel is Charles Dickens's Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993). In this novel Dickens questioned working conditions and labour relations in his fictional ‘Coketown’ (Manchester). Dickens was not unique. In the middle of the 19th century there were several other renowned British and American authors who published remarkable industrial novels. British literary critic and art historian Raymond Williams summarized a number of these novels in his seminal book Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Williams, 1958/1963). Williams considered mid-19th-century British authors of industrial novels as expressions of ‘industrialism’ – a new collective system composed of manufacturing and productive institutions and their general activities. In his view industrial novels such as Looking Backward (Bellamy, 1888), Mary Barton (Gaskell, 1854/2008), North and South (Gaskell, 1854–1855/1996), Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993), Sybil (Disraeli, 1845), Anton Locke (Kingsley, 1892/2016), and Felix Holt (George Eliot, 1866) ‘provide vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain common assumptions within which direct response was undertaken’ (Williams, 1958/1963, pp. 13, 99).

Introduction

Italy underwent a remarkable economic boom in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s marked by a forceful industrialization (Ginsborg, 1989, 283–343). Italians themselves speak of a ‘second industrial revolution’ after the first one between the end of the 19th century and the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. In a quick pace and relatively short time the country made a transition from a still mainly agricultural nation towards one of the most important industrial economies of the world of that time. This transition required the recruiting of many new industrial workers from the ranks of agricultural workers and artisans in a rather brief timespan. This caused large migrant streams from the south of Italy to the north, as well as a rapid urbanization of the north. The majority of important industrial enterprises such as Fiat, Pirelli, and Olivetti were concentrated in the so-called industrial triangle between Milan, Turin, and Genoa. Another relevant factor in this context was the broadly supported will in the country to overcome the political and moral deficit of the Fascist regime of Mussolini (1922–1943). This, among other things, motivated a limited number of enlightened and reformist entrepreneurs to experiment with modern American production techniques, industrial democracy and extensive social policies inside their companies. One of the most remarkable reformist entrepreneurs in this respect was Adriano Olivetti, the owner of the eponymous typewriter and office machinery company, first in its main factory at Ivrea near Milan, and then also in the new factory in Pozzuoli near Naples.

Introduction

Like the United States and Weimar Germany, the Soviet Union was at the forefront of writing Modernist industrial novels in the 1920s and 1930s. But as has been argued, in contrast to the US and European countries, the primary goal of Soviet documentary literature was propagandistic. This implied denying the existence of a class-struggle in the Soviet Union between capital and labour, as well as ‘highlighting the great progress being achieved across the vast nation’ (Freeman, 2019, p. 211). The monthly large-format magazine USSR in Construction, published between 1930 and 1941 in Russian, English, German, French, and partly also in Spanish, combined photography and journalism. Its illustrative issues were devoted to dams, canals, hydroelectric plants, railroads, car and tractor factories such as the Gorky Automobile Works (called the ‘Soviet Detroit’) and the gigantic Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. Famous photographers such as Alexander Rodchenko were involved, as well as ‘the number one’ writer of the Stalin Era, Maxim Gorky. Next to this monthly magazine, comparable documentary books were published, such as, for example, the seven-volume work Heavy Industry (1935). In 1931 Maxim Gorky initiated a big documentary project on the History of Factories and Plants. By 1938 this project had resulted in the publication of 30 volumes. Another notable documentary work of the 1930s was Those who Built Stalingrad, as Told by Themselves. This was an oral history of the Soviet and foreign workers who built the Tractorstroi (tractor factory) of Stalingrad. Renowned western industrial photographers and cinematographers went to the Soviet Union to picture the main industrial sites of the First Five-Year Plan.

Introduction

This chapter deals with a selection of exemplary modernist American industrial novels published in the first decades of the 20th century. These are Upton Sinclair's novels about working and living conditions in Chicago's meatpacking houses (1906), American coal mining (1917), and Henry Ford and his motor company (1937) as well as a major industrial novel, U.S.A. (1938), written in the middle of the Great Depression by John Dos Passos. They were not the only writers of industrial novels in the United States in this period, but in my opinion they are by far the most important and influential, and are representative of the broader context of American industrial relations as they developed over the decades. Also, at the time of the Great Depression a substantial stream of so-called ‘proletarian’ literature evolved. One remarkable exponent of this stream of literature is Jack Conroy's The Disinherited (1931/1991), about working conditions in a Missouri coal mine. Conroy was a young working-class author who pictured his life as a boy in a coal-mining town (Denning, 1997/2010, pp. 200–229; Basset, 2014). According to Denning, proletarian literature was not simply literature by workers, on behalf of workers, or about workers. It was more like a literary formation or movement marked by an alliance of writers, editors, agents, publishers, reviewers, political activists and readers. They met each other in formal and informal clubs, magazines, contests, conferences, schools, public lectures, political rallies, May Day parades, and picket lines. Well-known assembling points at the time were so-called local John Reed Clubs, which spread across the country.

Well before the invention of the lightning rod, the phenomenon of electricity, including atmospheric electricity, was already a subject of growing interest among natural philosophers – both scholars and amateurs alike. Their experimental, Newtonian brand of physics yielded practical results in the Netherlands and elsewhere. An important milestone was reached in 1746 when Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692-1761) invented the “Leyden jar”. This “condenser”, or capacitor, made it possible to store electricity, more specifically the static electricity produced by an electrostatic generator. And when several jars were connected in series (which Benjamin Franklin did in 1748), they could even produce very large discharges similar to those of atmospheric electricity. It was seen that when the Leyden jars were charged they gave off sparks that closely resembled tiny bolts of lightning. Many natural philosophers of the time found it easy to imagine that those two phenomena were similar – or perhaps fundamentally identical. In 1749 the Bordeaux Academy of Arts and Sciences made the analogy the subject of its annual competition.