One of the questions I’m asking while world-building my utopian fantasy novel is, “What if we’d had no global empires?” That is, how would human history have progressed if countries and individuals hadn’t gotten land and other capital through conquest? This question leads me to wonder if the Industrial Revolution would still have happened and, if not, how would things have gone instead.
How Technological Innovation Lead to More Work
We’ve been told that the Industrial Revolution was begun by innovation, which inspired further innovation. That’s not wrong, but it is a carefully cropped image. The Industrial Revolution produced a very specific type of mechanical/technological innovation: one that required large-scale, centralized, mass production.
Look at the development of the spinning jenny — an innovation that was essential to the Industrial Revolution. This tool was a faster, semi-automated version of the spinning wheel. It spun yarn onto multiple spindles instead of the traditional single spindle. This could potentially have freed up a tremendous amount of time for people at a point in history when — in spite of an already increasing cotton trade — most spinning was still done at home.
Instead, it lead to the invention of the spinning mule; a larger, entirely automated version of the spinning jenny with even more spindles. Around the same time, large-scale weaving machines were being developed and improved, making the entire spinning and weaving process exponentially faster. And yet it didn’t lead to more leisure time, at least not for the vast majority of the population.
I want to be clear — besides speed, there were other undeniable advantages of the new machinery. In Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert points out that the yarn it created was stronger and more consistent than what had been created by hand spinning. But quality wasn’t the driving force behind its creation. Improved quality and speed were means to an end; that end being increased production.
The goal here was not to reduce the time spent spinning. It was to increase the amount of product, which resulted in an increase in buyers, and ultimately an increase in capital. The scale of spinning and weaving mills necessitated the material overabundance that followed.
An Alternative Timeline to the Industrial Revolution
But what if, instead of technology and scale that only truly benefited wealthy owners, my fictional people developed new technology that benefited their communities instead of taking from them? Would textile mills have been invented? I doubt it. There would have been no use for them.
I speculate that new technology would have been developed to create more free time, rather than more product.
And with the time needed to create yarn and weave cloth reduced so dramatically, there would be no need for each home to have such a machine. Several of them could be shared among a community, reducing the cost to something negligible for each family. It would also, of course, use fewer resources to create fewer machines.
That means everyday people would be able to:
Enjoy more leisure time
Share a minimal investment in machinery
Produce better quality yarn and cloth
Conserve natural resources
What would this look like on a practical, everyday level? Instead of going to work for twelve, ten, or even eight hours a day, five or six days per week, a few friends or neighbors could gather for a few hours and complete all the work they needed for the next few weeks. For further ‘reading’ on this concept, I highly recommend the video: "We Need a Library Economy," by Andrewism.
This arrangement makes the idea of the 30-minute work week that Fraggle Rock proposed1 sound more realistic than the 40-70 hour work week we currently have.
Why This Is a Viable Option for a Utopian Society
In our world, every time a machine is invented or improved, we end up with more work or more stuff. Computers made paperwork faster, and we have more ‘paperwork’ than ever. Looms were automated, and we ended up with more cloth than the average person ever needed. But the idea that speed = excess is a product of capitalism, not a natural cause and effect. Just because people have the means to spin yarn quickly and reliably doesn’t mean they have to start spinning more yarn. With no capital-holders searching for ways to increase their capital, there’s no need for increased productivity.
To be fair, it’s likely that consumption would increase slightly. People who had done without would soon be able to have all that they need. But then, I believe, things would level out. Without planned obsolescence and the need to continuously grow capital, there’s simply no need to start producing absurd amounts of product. Certainly not when it means selling our labor for currency to buy that product.
Something I was surprised to learn while reading Empire of Cotton2 was how strongly and for how long people all across the planet resisted taking up regular factory work. The notion that poor farmers were happy to trade thankless hours on the farm for a steady paycheck from the factory is simply not accurate. If you could spend most of your day in leisure, pursuing activities that were meaningful to you and spending time with family, friends, and pets, would you want to trade that for sixty hours a week in a factory? I can’t imagine many people would.
And so, in my novel, the population never did.
What to Expect Next
Next week, I’m going to look at what disability and accessibility would look like in a utopian society. Since we’re already eliminating capitalism by saying that captial-holders never existed, I think these things will look very different.
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Episode_105:_The_Thirty-Minute_Work_Week
Beckert, S. (2015). Empire of Cotton.
Image by https://pixabay.com/users/tama66-1032521/