When giant factories ruled the economy: My review of ‘Behemoth’

Donald Trump is hardly the first person to be entranced by the production of steel, whether of the American variety or otherwise. There’s a mythopoetic, Promethean quality about metalworking as man uses the divine gift of fire to transmute rock into rail and girder and gun. There’s a case that modernity was forged in the great steel mills. If the first Industrial Revolution was the Age of Cotton, then the second was the Age of Iron and Steel. In the excellent “Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World“ (published last February), labor historian Joshua Freeman highlights a 1940s quote by journalist John Gunther, one with which few contemporaries would have probably disagreed: “The basic power determinant of any country is its steel production.” So very Trumpy.

Few contemporaries disagreed“The basic power determinant of any country is its steel production” in the 1940s, but today’s economic nostalgia for the age of the industrial giganticism is misplaced in the most advanced economy in the world. Image via REUTERS/Yves Herman

But the story of steel is only one narrative in Freeman’s sweeping and lively account of the rise and fall of the megafactories which changed the world — whether First, Second, or Third — serving as “the carriers of dreams and nightmares associated with industrialization and social change.” Not that the behemoths are only a feature of times past to be replaced by Amazon’s ginormous warehouses. The book concludes with a survey of giant factories of Asia that emerged after its economic opening to the West. Freeman notes that Longhua Science and Technology Park in Shenzhen, China — known better as Foxconn City — is the largest factory in history, at least in the number of employees. Like the first American cotton mills in Lowell, Mass. — politicians of the era used to visit there like today’s tour Silicon Valley — Foxxconn houses its massive workforce on site and regiments the lives of workers.  

Unlike those first factories, however, Foxxconn doesn’t mark the beginning of large-scale manufacturing in a developing nation but rather a well-along process that reminds China of how much catching up it needs to do to match South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Nor do Asia’s factories symbolize the world-conquering aspirations of rising America or the early Soviet Union as famously captured by photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Freeman: “Rather than representing an enlargement of the human spirit, modern factory giants often symbolize its diminishment. Images of Chinese factories do not celebrate machinery or man’s mastery of nature but instead document bland, boring structures or portray repetitiveness  — size as endless replication.”

Which helps explain why economic nostalgia for the age of the industrial giganticism really has no place in the most advanced economy in the world. It represents a lack of vision and creativity about what work can be. Again, Freeman: “If the coming of the giant factory was associated with visions of utopia (along with dystopian fears), its passing has been associated with social malaise and shriveled imagination.” Indeed, part of the lack of imagination can be seen in the fear of technological unemployment from advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. Transitions may be extraordinarily difficult, but they don’t last forever. As power weaving in the early 19th century pushed aside handwork, Karl Marx wrote that “History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers.”