Non-Integrated Industrial Production
The View from Oregon — 315: Friday 15 November 2024
I have a long standing fascination with civilizational collapse. Recently in Comparative Literatures of the Apocalypse (also available in a written version) I mentioned some of the books I read as a child about civilizational collapse; many of my earliest newsletters were concerned with the same. This fascination with civilizational collapse extends to the collapse of spacefaring empires, which was always one of my favorite themes in science fiction. A few years ago I listened to H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking, which was one of my favorite science fiction books. Listening to it all those years after having initially read it, I was surprised by the explicit, almost didactic, passages on “de-civilization” which described the different modes of civilizational failure. I guess it’s a chicken-and-egg question as to whether this sort of thing (which I had forgotten in the intervening decades) spurred my interest in civilization, or whether I was already interested in it, and I was drawn to books like this because they spoke to that interest. Science fiction novels were, in any case, the mid-wife for my later scholarly interest in civilization.
I have long speculated that the failure of civilization at its present stage of development would result in industrialized relicts in which technology, or some fragment of technology, would be maintained, even as it is lost elsewhere. The general principle here is that civilizational collapse is uneven, and some geographical regions are harder hit than others. This seems to have been true in the past, and I assume it will continue to hold good in the future. I once called ancient Egypt a “bridge” civilization because it bridged the gap in history created by the Late Bronze Age (LBA) collapse. Of the several civilizations around the eastern end of the Mediterranean discussed by Eric Cline in his 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, only Egyptian civilization survived; in this way it served as a bridge between the LBA and the civilizations that would flourish later. Egypt was hit hard by the LBA collapse, but it survived, and in surviving it retained technologies and traditions that might have been lost had all the civilizations of the time collapsed without exception.
I’ve thought of a concept that is applicable in the case of industrialized relicts, and this is non-integrated industrialism. The rise of industrialized economies in the nineteenth century took place in a time of unprecedented planetary-scale integration, which integration was accelerated and facilitated by the very industrial technologies of the steam locomotive and the steamboat. The first transatlantic steamship crossing was in 1818 by the SS Savannah. This was a hybrid ship that made most of the passage under sail, but we can see from this example how early in the nineteenth century the steamboat was already facilitating commerce and communication. The globally connected world of the nineteenth century meant that the great industrial concerns growing at the same time had this planetary-scale transportation infrastructure available to it. This in turn meant that industrialized economies where, from their origins, planetary in scale. The degree of freedom with which raw materials, finished goods, capital, and labor have been able to move has changed over time, and has also varied according to geographical distribution, but the point remains that industrialized economies were born twin with planetary transportation infrastructure.
This planetary transportation infrastructure at the service of industrialized economies I will call integrated. To more precise, I should speak in terms of planetary integration of industry, since there can also be geographically regional integration (as with the several civilizations around the Mediterranean both before the LBA collapse, and later when the area was re-integrated in classical antiquity), and, further to my above mention of spacefaring empires, there could also be trans-planetary integration. However, planetary integration has a certain naturalness to it, as a kind telos of civilization that evolves on a planetary surface.
This is something I have had in the back of my mind for many years. Indeed, I have a couple of essays on planetary-scale civilization from several years ago that I never finished because my ideas on civilization were changing so rapidly. The natural telos of civilization to expand to the extent of the planet upon which it appears could be nicely described by the Aristotelian term entelechy (or, if you prefer, enteléchia), which F. E. Peters’ Greek Philosophical Terms defines as “state of completion or perfection, actuality.” This definition doesn’t quite do justice to the work that this term does in Aristotle, where it carries the connotation of the convergence of something upon a form intrinsic to itself. The acorn that grows into an oak tree has the oak tree as its entelechy. We could formulate this as a distinction between development and evolution. An individual — whether an acorn or a human being — experiences ontogenic development, while a clade experiences phylogenic evolution. An individual of a given species has a natural teleology in which it develops from an immature form into a mature form, and the mature form is defined in terms of the natural history of the species. The species, by contrast, has no natural teleology, and its evolution may result in speciation or extinction.
It is easy to see how this holds for biological species, and we are in a position to define with great precision how an immature body develops into a mature body; this has been a particular focus of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), which research has given us surprising results in deep (molecular) homology (which I mentioned last week). Can we apply the development/evolution distinction to social formations or to any cognitive phenomena? How the individual acquires language seems to be an ontogenic process, where the infant slowly acquires the rudiments of his native tongue and builds toward linguistic proficiency that can be defined in terms of mastery of his mother tongue. That is a developmental convergence on a mature state, although the individual may innovate with language and perhaps even contribute to linguistic evolution. However, it could be argued that this isn’t anything to do with language itself, but only the development of an individual of a biological species. It does not seem to be the case that there are linguistic individuals that converge on a mature form, while only language on the whole (not its individual instances) evolves. But, again, if we want to adopt a sufficiently abstract perspective, we certainly can see the individual’s linguistic mastery as an abstract individual that supervenes upon a biological individual. I will have to think more about this.
Returning to the idea of non-integrated industry, I have described above how integrated industry is how industrialized economies originally formed. This means that we have not seen non-integrated industry on a large scale, but this is part of what I implicitly meant when I previously wrote about industrialized relicts. Here we need to make a distinction between what are commonly called appropriate technologies and non-integrated technologies. The distinction is necessitated by the context, because both would play an important role in local economies following a collapse of planetary-scale infrastructure. Appropriate technologies have been defined as follows:
“Appropriate technology is defined as any object, process, ideas, or practice that enhances human fulfillment through satisfaction of human needs. A technology is deemed to be appropriate when it is compatible with local, cultural, and economic conditions (i.e., the human, material and cultural resources of the economy), and utilizes locally available materials and energy resources, with tools and processes maintained and operationally controlled by the local population.”
As with the case of entelechy, the above doesn’t quite capture what’s going on with the appropriate technology movement, which seeks to employ robust technologies that don’t require a lot of sophisticated maintenance or spare parts, instead using a level of technology that gets the job done with a reasonably degree of efficiency, even if it’s not the latest and greatest of its kind to be produced. Appropriate technologies are technologies that would probably continue to function in the event of a catastrophic failure of planetary industrial supply chains, so there is a relationship between appropriate technologies and non-integrated technologies. However, an individual or an organization might well seek to construct a planetary-scale supply chain of appropriate technologies; in fact, such supply chains do exist. With non-integrated technologies, the emphasis falls upon what technologies can be built, operated, and maintained without access to a planetary-scale industrial infrastructure. Thus the two categories of technology — appropriate and non-integrated — largely overlap but do not precisely coincide.
An example of this that I was discussing with a friend this past week is the arms industry of the Khyber pass, where, for more than a century, local gunsmiths have obtained examples of firearms mass produced in Western factories, and have reverse engineered them and produce them locally from materials available. Many of these “Khyber Pass copies” are poor substitutes for the originals, although there are some good copies as well. The arms bazaars of the Khyber pass have the existence proof of firearms produced by integrated industries (the AK-47 is especially popular for copying), and with this existence proof they have created a non-integrated industry producing copies of varying quality.
This is a little different form the idea of industrialized relicts, since this is an industry that has appeared in a geographical region that was never industrialized in the conventional sense, so it’s not the remnant of a formerly integrated industry, but rather an industry that arose as a non-integrated industry. We can look to Khyber Pass copies as a template for the development of non-integrated industries in the aftermath of a catastrophic civilizational failure.
Since Khyber Pass copies are made for local consumption, and the region is poor, the copies are mostly poor, but bespoke manufacturing can be of high quality if the resources and the motivation are present. In newsletter 82 I discussed the work of Japanese watchmaker Masahiro Kikuno, who single-handedly produces unique watches of great precision. Kikuno has his own shop with advanced machine tools, and in this way is dependent upon an industrialized infrastructure, but even this kind of high-precision bespoke manufacturing could be pursued as a non-integrated industry — again, if the resources and the motivation were present. And, in the past, resources were usually found to produce at least a few items of outstanding quality. Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation wrote:
“It is arguable that western civilisation was saved by its craftsmen. The wanderers could take their craftsmen with them. Since the smiths made princely weapons as well as ornaments, they were as necessary to a chieftain’s status as were the bards whose calypsos celebrated his courage.”
A single precision manufacturing operation couldn’t turn out masses of guns to equip an army, but it could produce a small number of precision copies of firearms (and other weapons) produced by integrated industries. These high quality copies would be like the Ulfberht swords of the early Middle Ages, which I discussed in newsletter 193. There were, of course, a great many swords produced and used during the early Middle Ages, and only a small number of these were Ulfberht swords. They were, then, luxury and prestige goods. The arms manufacturing industries on the Middle Ages produced a range of weapons and armor of varying quality, with a mass of low quality copies and a small number of prestige weapons. We could generalize this principle to non-integrated industry, so that the products of such an industry typically consist of a mass of low quality manufactures, only just capable of doing the task for which they are made, and a few high quality manufactures, reserved either for prestige purposes, or for when a job absolutely, positively has to be done right.
We can also observe that, while the economy of classical antiquity at its height wasn’t industrialized (in the modern sense), it was integrated, and its many industries were characterized by what Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk called round about production processes, which is probably the best way to describe an industrially integrated economy. If round about production processes define integrated economies, we could call non-integrated industrialism non-round about production, which is awkward, so we could just call it direct production. The economy of the early Middle Ages, which followed upon the collapse of integrated industry in the former western half of the Roman Empire, can then be seen as a rough template of direct, local production (non-integrated industry), which we are now in a position to imagine implemented with post-industrial revolution technologies.
