I’ve received permission from the author – Kevin Carson – to serialize a small section of his book on Home Based Businesses. You can read all his work here:
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto Kevin Carson (Amazon link)
How have things evolved to reach the situation we find ourselves in today? From Chapter 1:
The original technological revolution of the late Middle Ages, the eotechnic, was associated with the skilled craftsmen of the free towns, and eventually incorporated the fruits of investigation by the early scientists. It began with agricultural innovations like the horse collar, horseshoe and crop rotation. It achieved great advances in the use of wood and glass, masonry, and paper (the latter including the printing press). The agricultural advances of the early second millennium were further built on by the innovations of market gardeners in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries—like, for example, raised bed horticulture, composting and intensive soil development, and the hotbeds and greenhouses made possible by advances in cheap production of glass.In mechanics, in particular, its greatest achievements were clockwork machinery and the intensive application of water and wind power. The first and most important prerequisite of machine production was the transmission of power and control of movement by use of meshed gears.
With the use of clockwork to harness the power of prime movers and transmit it to machine production processes, eotechnic industry proliferated wherever wind or running water was abundant. The heartland of eotechnic industry was the river country of the Rhineland and northern Italy, and the windy areas of the North and Baltic seas.
The eotechnic phase was supplanted or crowded out in the early modern period by the paleotechnic—or what is referred to, wrongly, in most conventional histories simply as “the Industrial Revolution.”
Paleotechnic had its origins in the new centralized state and the industries closely associated with it (most notably mining and armaments), and centered on mining, iron, coal, and steam power. To give some indication of the loci of the paleotechnic institutional complex, the steam engine was first introduced for pumping water out of mines, and its need for fuel in turn reinforced the significance of the coal industry1; the first appearance of large‐scale factory production was in the armaments industry. The paleotechnic culminated in the “dark satanic mills” of the nineteenth century and the giant corporations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth.
The so‐called “Industrial Revolution,” in conventional parlance, conflates two distinct phenomena: the development of mechanized processes for specific kinds of production (spinning and weaving, in particular), and the harnessing of the steam engine as a prime mover. The former was a direct outgrowth of the mechanical science of the eotechnic phase, and would have been fully compatible with production in the small shop if not for the practical issues raised by steam power. The imperative to concentrate machine production in large factories resulted, not from the requirements of machine production as such, but from the need to economize on steam power. Although the paleotechnic incorporated some contributions from the eotechnic period, it was a fundamental departure in direction, and involved the abandonment of a rival path of development. Technology was developed in the interests of the new royal absolutists, mercantilist industry and the factory system that grew out of it, and the new capitalist agriculturists (especially the Whig oligarchy of England); it incorporated only those eotechnic contributions that were compatible with the new tyrannies, and abandoned the rest.
But its successor, the neotechnic, is what concerns us here.
Read it all here… (Amazon link)
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