Craft Production Is Fun

21 May 2007 at 12:13 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

Thank goodness for the factory system and mass production, which makes us wealthy enough to do things by hand. Naturally I thought of Budweiser’s critics when reading this piece in The Onion, “Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman.” (They forgot to include knitting, the latest craze among wealthy suburbanites.) Craft production sure is fun — unless you have to do it to survive, of course. (HT: Ryan McMaken.)

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Ephemera.

Economizing and Strategizing Varieties of Institutionalism

2 Comments Add your own

1. jonfernquest | 22 May 2007 at 6:34 am

A lot of crafts production was done out the home (cottage industries). This is still going on in rural Asia. I know of one very successful sweater manufacturer in northern Thailand who provides work for a large community.

Working at home might have been funner than working in one of those industrial revolution era factories, tied to a loom for instance.
2. Kevin Carson | 24 May 2007 at 11:55 pm

I think you’re conflating two different dichotomies: that between factory and home manufacture, and that between machine and hand manufacture.

As Ralph Borsodi observed, household production with small-scale machinery can often be done at lower cost (including the value of labor-time) than production on large-scale machinery in a factory. The unit costs of production are slightly higher, but these are more than offset by the fact that (because production takes place near the point of consumption) there is virtually no distribution cost.

Kropotkin noted over a century ago that electrical power was making small-scale machine production feasible and putting such production on a level playing field with the factory system, opening up the possibility of a radically decentralized economic system.

Lewis Mumford referred to this third wave of technology as the “neotechnic phase.” In Mumford’s view, the neotechnic was in many ways a continuation of the path of development of the High Middle Ages (which he called eotechnic). The paleotechnic interlude, which included coal power and the factory system, had its origins in the absolute states and the mercantilist industry attached to them (including mining and military production). Mumford argued that, absent the suppression of the free cities by the new absolute states, the enclosures of land, and all the other associated centralist revolutions from above, the eotechnic methods of the High Middle Ages might have evolved directly into the decentralized forms of the neotechnic, without any need for the ugliness of the paleotechnic and its “dark satanic mills.”