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Industrial revolution and its impacts on slavery
Industrial revolution and its impacts on slavery
Slavery and the industrial revolution
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Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” captures the nature of capitalism, documenting its inner workings and how a capitalist enterprise—in the context of the story, the factory—gains a consciousness. Davis also explores the nature of this enterprise consciousness, whether it’s something human or an anonymous god-like consciousness. In exploring the nature of a capitalist enterprise gaining consciousness, Davis speaks to the objectification and emotional deprivation of the workers, while giving emotional qualities to the machines. The similarities between the workers’ likely emotions and the machines’ emotions indicate the nature of capitalism to take individual consciousness and give it to the capitalist enterprise (the factory system), …show more content…
and Davis describes the nature of this factory consciousness as partially anonymous. In the factory system, the worker is dehumanized and objectified, reduced to their usefulness per the labor needs of the factory system, and this objectification—by turning the workers into things—reduces their consciousness. Davis conveys this objectification through synecdoche: “The hands of each mill are divided into watches” (6). It’s the worker’s hands, their labor, that’s most important in the factory, and any artistic or mental qualities are useless. When Davis says the workers, “are divided into watches” that signals a loss of agency that is part of this objectification. This objectification is further present Davis’ diction. She mentions, “the vast machinery system by which the bodies of workmen are governed” (6). In specifically mentioning the “bodies of the workmen” Davis highlights their pure physical form (their role as stuff) while depriving the workers of emotion and consciousness. In the eyes of the factory system and capitalism the physical labor, the body, takes precedence. Another component of the workers’ objectification is their disposability and loss of individuality in the factory system. The workers, “relieve each other as regularly as the sentinels of an army” (6). Davis’ diction in the word “relieve” points to the drudgery of the work, and the comparison of the workers to “sentinels of an army” deprives the workers of individuality making them disposable. Davis creates a sonic landscape that expands this drudgery and disposability. She says that the manufacturing goes, “Unceasingly from year to year” (6), and, “By night and day the work goes on” (6). The rhythm of these two lines—especially in describing time—stretches time, creating a sound like that of soldiers trudging, and this trudging further shows the drudgery of the factory work and expands the comparison of the factory workers to soldiers, highlighting their loss of individuality, and an individual consciousness. While the workers are being dehumanized, the factory system and the machines are given a consciousness through their sovereignty over the workers.
Davis writes, “not many even of the inhabitants of the manufacturing town know the vast machinery system by which the bodies of workmen are governed” (6). Davis’ diction—in using the word “governed”—gives the factory system a sovereignty over the people. The factory system uses people like objects. It has the consciousness to use the workers. The use of passive voice in the quote weakens the clause containing the workers, further demonstrating the factory system’s dominance over the workers and ability to control them as objects. While giving the factory system agency, dominance, and sovereignty, Davis takes these characteristics away from the people. The people are ignorant of the system that controls them. Most of the workers don’t completely comprehend the nature of their objectification. The worker’s sovereignty over their own bodies is lost and given to the factory …show more content…
system. Davis further gives the factory a consciousness through emotion, but these emotions are what we’d expect the workers’ emotions to be.
Davis writes, “Unsleeping engines groan and shriek” (6) and, “the great furnaces break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins with fresh, breathless vigor” (6). Davis’ diction—the use of the words “groan”, “shriek”, and “fury”— grant the engines and the furnaces the emotion absent in the workers, emotion we’d expect from the workers. We’d expect the workers to groan and shriek. Instead, the engines are expressing the emotion of the objectified worker. The pain, the suffering of the worker all comes out through the machine. On the other hand, the machines aren’t characterized as exploitive. They’re not characterized as greedy or malicious. It’s as if the worker’s emotion, unable to be expressed individually, seeps through as the consciousness of the
factory. Davis characterizes the factory system’s consciousness as partially inhuman. The combination of human qualities (“groaning” and “shrieking”) and inhuman qualities (“unsleeping” and “breathless”) show the factory isn’t completely humanized. This half-humanization characterizes the partial anonymity of the factory system’s consciousness. It’s faceless; it’s spectral; it’s something human but not entirely human. Davis expands the anonymity and nature of the factory by comparing the engines to gods: “The engines sob and shriek ‘like gods in pain”” (6). The emotion and consciousness of the worker are present in the sobbing and shrieking, but the comparison to gods gives the factory a half-humanity and an anonymity. Like the factory, a god is a larger consciousness but a god also possesses an anonymity, a facelessness. Davis makes the claim that the consciousness of a capitalist company is taken from its constituent people, turned into a larger consciousness, and characterized as anonymous. In the passage, Davis describes a nature of capitalism: the nature of a capitalist enterprise to adopt the worker’s consciousness with an anonymous face. A capitalist enterprise, like a factory or a corporation, appears to have a faceless consciousness. They appear in our society as masked giants, being anonymous and somewhat conscious, but this consciousness must come from somewhere. It must come from the people who make up the factory or the corporation. By demonstrating how this consciousness is created, and how it adopts a mask, Davis shows how capitalism can emotionally exploit workers, and how the apparent consciousness of an enterprise as the expression of the workers. That a corporation’s personhood comes from the emotional exploitation of its workers.
...es those who diverge from the norm and would quickly separate itself from them. Bromden’s description of the workers implies that society prefers order and efficiency over anything else even individual freedom. The furnace would symbolize society’s method of removing the different and the pace and rhythm of factory would symbolize society’s obsession with order and a uniform identity.
Nineteenth century industrialism presented the United States with a unique and unprecedented set of problems, as illustrated through the works of Rebecca Harding Davis and Horatio Alger Jr. Although both authors felt compelled to address these problems in their writing, Rebecca Harding Davis’s grasp on the realities faced by the working poor and women was clearly stronger than Alger’s. Not only did Alger possess a naïve view on exactly how much control an individual has over their own circumstances, but he failed to address the struggles of women entirely. As a result, Alger conceived a rather romantic world where the old-fashioned American ideals of hard work, determination, and self-sacrifice enable a young boy to lift himself from poverty.
Coming from an “unconventional” background, George Saunders is readily able to relate to the circumstances the everyday working laborer goes through (Wylie). However, Saunders has an advantage to spread out his ideas and concerns about life in the U.S. via his short stories and novellas. Because of neoliberalism and capitalism and its correlation to the huge wealth gap in the U.S. Saunders focuses his protagonists’ view from a proletariat standpoint, allowing the reader to see the life of consumerism has impacted our society. Saunders does not use conventional methods to portray this reality. Instead, Saunders emphasizes on the “absence” of certain moral human characteristics in order to take the reader away from viewing into a hero’s looking glass— to set a foundation of a world where our morals become lost to our materialistic and inherent need of money (Wylie).
Modern industry has replaced the privately owned workshop with the corporate factory. Laborers file into factories like soldiers. Throughout the day they are under the strict supervision of a hierarchy of seemingly militant command. Not only are their actions controlled by the government, they are controlled by the machines they are operating or working with, the bourgeois supervisors, and the bourgeois manufacturer. The more open the bourgeois are in professing gain as their ultimate goal, the more it condemns the proletariat.
Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those who desire it.
The factory workers are stuck in a complicated position where they are taken advantage of and exploited. While “exploitation occurs on any level” these factory workers do not have the opportunity to exploit others because they are the ones being exploited (Timmerman 7). Tension is created between the corporations, factory owners and workers, because the factory owners force the workers into harsh labor and intense working conditions that they were told
While this is a dramatized statement regarding the plight of the worker under the new machine driven industrial system, rhetoric such as this did represent the fears of the working class. Over time as industrialization appeared more commonly there emerged more heated debates between the working class and business owners.
Machines have no place in this relationship. They act as a barrier between men and the land. They are dangerous because they perform the function of men with greater efficiency, but they lack the spiritual element that makes the land so valuable. Chapter five uses imagery to detail the evil inherent in the plowing of land by a machine:
Since the worker’s product is owned by someone else, the worker regards this person, the capitalist, as alien and hostile. The worker feels alienated from and antagonistic toward the entire system of private property through which the capitalist appropriates both the objects of production for his own enrichment at the expense of the worker and the worker’s sense of identity and wholeness as a human being.
This essay will compare Marx’s understanding of the relationship between laborers and capitalists and Wollstonecraft’s understanding of the relationship between women and men. Both Marx and Wollstonecraft’s conception of these groups of people show a large gap between their treatment and status in society. Marx argues that capitalism is not created by nature and the unequal relationship between laborers and capitalists is not humane. In other words, it is actually the cause of social and economic problems during that time period. On a similar note, Wollstonecraft believes that the oppressive relationship between men and women is also unnatural. The standards for men and women are placed by society, not by biological facts. Society and how people
According to Raymond Williams, “In a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes …” (Rice and Waugh 122). His work titled, Marxism and Literature expounded on the conflict between social classes to bridge the political ideals of Marxism with the implicit comments rendered through the text of a novel. “For the practical links,” he states “between ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’ and the ‘production of real life’ are all in this material social process of signification itself” (133). Williams asserts that a Marxist approach to literature introduces a cross-cultural universality, ensuingly adding a timeless value to text by connecting creative and artistic processes with the material products that result. Like Williams, Don DeLillo calls attention to the economic and material relations behind universal abstractions such as aesthetics, love, and death. DeLillo’s White Noise brings modern-day capitalist societies’ incessant lifestyle disparity between active consumerists and those without the means to the forefront of the story’s plot. DeLillo’s setting uses a life altering man-made disaster in the suburban small-town of Blacksmith to shed light on the class conflict between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the working poor (proletariat). After a tank car is punctured, an ominous cloud begins to loom over Jack Gladney and his family. No longer a feathery plume or a black billowing cloud, but the airborne toxic event—an event that even after its conclusion Jack cannot escape the prophecy of his encroaching death. Through a Marxist reading of the characterization of Jack Gladney, a middle-aged suburban college professor, it is clear that the overarching obsession with death operates as an...
While Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the scrivener” and Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” have unrelated plots, they both contain Marxist undertones that address alienation in the workplace as a result of capitalism. The protagonists, Gregor and Bartleby, are examples of how the working class is treated when they do not conform to the conventions of capitalism. Gregor and Bartleby alike are working class men who, through some turn of events, stop working and are deemed useless to those around them. Both of these stories end in the death of the protagonists, as these men are seen as unproductive and discarded by their capitalistic societies.
For centuries, machines have fueled the functioning of our society by being the foundations of business and labor. This all started in Britain, due to the island’s abundant natural resources of coal and the country’s booming cotton industry. Although the Industrial Revolution sparked a successful economy, it lowered the quality of life for many people. Because of the Industrial Revolution, children had to labor in the factories, poor people felt they were not treated properly by the factory owners, and living spaces were polluted and taken away for the purposes of mechanization. Children were expected to work in factories in order to help provide for their families; this meant that their childhoods were taken away from them, as they had to work more than ten hours a day in the factories.
Many Americans choose to forget the past brutalities of child labor. Unfortunately, the past does not disappear. Child labor did take place in the U.S. and the Carolina Cotton Mill photograph is a prominent witness. Lewis Wickes Hine is the artist behind this powerful photo, which was taken in the early 1900s (Dimock). Hine’s Carolina Cotton Mill embodies the struggle of child labor through the incorporation of situational information, artistic elements such as lines and space, and cultural values.
Producing goods or services are dictated not by employees but by their employers. If profits exist, employers are the ones that benefit more so than the regular worker. “Even when working people experience absolute gains in their standard of living, their position, relative to that of capitalists, deteriorates.” (Rinehart, Pg. 14). The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Hard work wears down the employee leaving them frustrated in their spare time. Workers are estranged from the products they produce. At the end of the day, they get paid for a day’s work but they have no control over the final product that was produced or sold. To them, productivity does not equal satisfaction. The products are left behind for the employer to sell and make a profit. In discussions with many relatives and friends that have worked on an assembly line, they knew they would not be ...