Rather than representing an enlargement of the human spirit, modern factory giants often seem to symbolize its diminishment. Images of Chinese factories typically do not celebrate machinery or man’s mastery of nature but instead document bland, boring structures or portray repetitiveness—size as endless replication.72 What makes Burtynsky’s photographs of Chinese factories so extraordinary is not the extension of human power through the mastery of materials and machines or the beauty of the machinery itself, themes of so many earlier factory portrayals, but the shrunken scale of people, regimented in lines and grids within the vast confines of factory sheds. Burtynsky, like Andreas Gursky, also known for his spectacular photographs of factories and public spaces in Vietnam and China, generally takes large-format pictures from a distance, showing humans in almost abstract patterns, rarely focusing on any individual, the way earlier factory photographers like Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans did, at least occasionally.73
Foxconn, Yue Yuen, and the other modern giants of Asian manufacturing represent a culmination of the history of industrial giantism. They build on the past, incorporating all the lessons about assembling and coordinating masses of workers, the detailed division of labor, externally powered equipment, mechanical transfer of components and pacing of production, economies of scale, and shaping every aspect of workers’ lives. All of the past lives in the present. But the future does not, except in the most limited, technical way. The giant factory no longer represents a vision of a new and different world a-coming, of a utopian future or a new kind of nightmare existence. Modernity, Foxconn-style, may be associated with higher living standards and innovative technology but not with a new phase of human history, as giant factories once were, whether it be the coming of a new type of class society in England and the United States or a new type of classless society in the Soviet Union and Poland. The future has already arrived, and we seem to be stuck with it.
CONCLUSION
OUTSIZED FACTORIES HAVE BEEN WITH US FOR THREE centuries. But no individual factory has lasted anywhere nearly that long. The Lombes’ Derby Silk Mill, the first modern, large factory, also proved one of the longest lasting; with ups and downs, workers continued to produce silk thread in the mill until 1890, a run of 169 years. By contrast, Awkright’s first cotton mill in Cromford all but shut down within seventy years. The first mill complex in Lowell, Massachusetts, built by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, outlasted its successors, producing textiles for 134 years. Amoskeag, once the largest textile complex in the world, closed after barely a century. The pioneering Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, operated until 1992, a total of 140 years, thirty-five years longer than the Homestead Steel Works, the scene of epic labor battles.1
Some landmark factory giants have kept going. Though Dodge Main, the Chevy complex in Flint, and FIAT’s Lingotto plant all shut down decades ago, River Rouge remains part of Ford’s now decentralized production system, with some six thousand workers pouring out F-150 trucks, the best-selling vehicle in the United States.2 The Stalingrad Tractorstroi, Magnitogorsk, and Nowa Huta likewise continue to operate.
One hundred or one hundred-and-fifty years might seem like a long time, but many other institutions routinely function in their original buildings for far longer: parliaments, prisons, hospitals, churches, mosques, colleges, prep schools, even opera companies, to name a few. Seen from a distance of time, giant factories lose the solidity, the air of permanence, that so impressed contemporaries. Few last more than a lifetime or two.
The very dynamism of modernity that creates the giant factory leads to its demise. Giant factories have a natural life cycle. They arrive with explosive force, transforming not only production methods but whole societies. Their success generally rests at least in part on the exploitation of workers previously outside the labor market—children and adolescents, small farmers and peasants, nomads, prisoners, and wards of the state. During a period of primitive accumulation, workers could be exploited, sometimes brutally, through long hours, low pay, and harsh conditions, because they lacked the freedom of movement, legal rights, or ready alternatives.
Radical factory innovations have been followed by periods of incremental improvement or stagnation. The vast amounts of capital tied up in existing buildings and machinery promotes institutional conservatism, allowing new competitors using more advanced methods and technology to become more efficient producers. Meanwhile, worker protest and pressure from reformers pushes up labor costs. Some companies succeed in extending the high profits of primitive accumulation by repeatedly recruiting new workforces, new waves of young workers or immigrants from afar. But at some point, a combination of archaic technology, aging buildings, and rising labor costs forces a decision about whether to modernize, start over elsewhere, or milk a property and then shut it down.
The owners of the Boott mills in Lowell were typical. In 1902, a consultant they hired reported, “Your old buildings have perhaps served well their purpose in the past, but they were long ago out of date, and are of no value now. . . . I therefore recommend the entire demolition of the present structures, or at least so much of them as are dangerous to work in, or would in any way interfere with the best arrangement and construction of a first-class new mill.” But at a time when many New England mill owners were investing in factories in the lower-wage South, Boott’s owners decided, instead of building a “first-class new mill,” to limp along using their dangerous old facility, where workers kept making textiles and profits for investors for another half century.3
In the socialist world, cost calculations played out differently, because workers had greater ideological and political standing and big factories were more central to social welfare systems. Closing factories, or even downsizing them, presented huge social and political risks that states shied away from, instead keeping bloated workforces at increasingly uncompetitive plants. Even today, the Chinese government moves gingerly in its prolonged effort to shut down unneeded or inefficient state-owned factory giants. But the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the move of most of what remains of the communist world toward market economies has brought a convergence in industrial practices between the once-socialist and always-capitalist spheres.
Taken together, the overlapping cycles of giant factory development, spread across time and space, represents continuity and progress, with ever bigger and more efficient manufacturing operations appearing, which nonetheless retain a clear genetic heritage going back to the Derwent Valley three hundred years ago. Imitation, licensing, and theft have allowed each wave of factory developers to incorporate past innovations, as industrial giantism leapt across oceans and political divides. But if resilient and durable as a totality, industrial giantism in any given place has proven unsustainable. Specific communities have experienced the giant factory not as a continuity of progress but as an arc of disruptive innovation, growth, decline, and abandonment. As historians Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott wrote in a book about American deindustrialization, “the industrial culture forged in the furnace of fixed capital investment was itself a temporary condition. What millions of working men and women might have experienced as solid, dependable, decently waged work really only lasted for a brief moment.”4 Especially in areas dominated by a single industry, when the cycle of factory giantism moved on, prolonged devastation resulted, even as somewhere else on the globe giant factories were creating new possibilities and wealth.
The current cycle of industrial giantism shares much with earlier iterations, but it also differs in important ways. For one thing, the arc from development to decline has become shorter. Just thirty years after Foxconn built its first factory in Shenzhen, the region has passed its peak as a center of large-scale manufacturing, as companies, including Foxconn, move on to other areas of China and elsewhere for cheaper land and labor. For another thing, many workers in the new giant factories do not share the illusion of permanence that workers in earlier plants might have had, expecting to spend most of their live
s elsewhere, back where they came from or in some other, better situation.
Though still seen as vehicles for profit and national economic development, giant factories are far less likely these days to be celebrated or held up as models for the larger society than they once were. Often, they are all but unknown to the purchasers of the goods they make, who are likely to be many miles and national borders away. Once, a buyer of a Singer sewing machine or a Ford Model T knew precisely where it was made. Today, the purchaser of a sneaker or a refrigerator or even an automobile probably has no idea what country it was manufactured in, let alone what factory. Production—work—once proudly associated with the physical goods we need and cherish is now largely hidden away.
As a global phenomenon, the giant factory may have reached its apogee. While very big factories continue to be built, many manufacturers have moved in other directions, seeking to lower labor costs and avoid the possibility that—as has happened in the past—their workers will take advantage of the concentration of production to assert their power. Continuing mechanization and automation is one path, the cause in the United States of much greater loss of factory employment than the movement of plants abroad. Even Foxconn, the world’s largest employer of factory workers, is experimenting with greater automation. At its smartphone factory in Kunshan, China, not far from Shanghai, the company has invested heavily in robots, allowing it to reduce its number of employees from 110,000 to 50,000, still a very large workforce but no longer near the top of the list of the world’s largest factories.5 Other companies have turned to many small and midsize factories in very low wage regions, like Bangladesh, seemingly turning back the clock, as young women, freshly arrived from rural villages, make goods for global giants like Wal-Mart and H&M in low-tech, crowded, and often extraordinarily dangerous factories that more resemble late-nineteenth-century American sweatshops than modern Chinese factory giants.6
But if the giant factory has lost some of its allure, there still are entrepreneurs eager to begin the cycle again in fresh territory, unsullied by a history of labor activism or environmental spoilage. Huajian Shoes, a Chinese firm that manufactures footwear for international brands like Guess, in 2012 opened a factory in Ethiopia, where in 2014 the basic after-tax minimum wage was $30 a month, compared to an average manufacturing wage in China of $560. Within two years it had 3,500 workers. But the company had far grander plans, centered on a proposed new complex near Addis Ababa that would employ 30,000 workers and include worker dormitories, a resort, a technical university, a hotel, and a hospital, all on a site ringed by a replica of the Great Wall of China and shaped like a woman’s shoe. In October 2016, Huajian announced plans to move its production of shoes for Ivanka Trump’s line from its factory in Dongguan to Ethiopia.7
Whatever the future of the giant factory might prove to be, it already has left behind a transformed world. In some ways, industrial giants have fulfilled the dreams of their promoters, having been part and parcel of an extraordinarily rapid and large improvement in social well-being, comfort, longevity, material possession, and security, one without precedent in human history. The Industrial Revolution, which the giant factory pushed forward, contributed to not only higher living standards but also the creation of the modern state, urbanized society, and a transformed face of the planet.
It also helped create a “new man.” Perhaps not exactly a new man at one with the automatic machinery and industrial processes of the giant factory as envisioned, in their own ways, by Henry Ford, Alexei Gastev, and Antonio Gramsci. But a new man and a new woman nonetheless, with a time sense dictated by the needs of mass, coordinated activity and the rhythms of machinery; with a commitment to the idea of progress through technical innovation and increasing efficiency; worshiping factory products and an industrial aesthetic; and taking for granted the idea of sacrifice for future gain.
In short, the giant factory helped produce modernity, the now we inhabit still, even if it no longer has the awe-inspiring novelty it once had. And it is a modernity that transcends particular political and economic systems. Usually, the large-scale factory is portrayed as a product of capitalism, a stage in its historic development. Yet, as this study shows, to portray the giant factory as strictly a capitalist institution requires eliding much of its history, including some of the largest factories ever built. The giant factory was central to both capitalist and socialist development, not only economically but socially, culturally, and politically as well. The factory is never just the same within different cultures and social systems, but its essential features have proved remarkably stable and enduring, as it has roamed the world, setting down in places seemingly utterly different from one another. The giant factory, rather than a feature of capitalism, turns out to be a feature of modernity, in all its variations.8
The giant factory has made dreams reality, but it has rendered nightmares real, too. In every society, the great productivity of the giant factory has rested on great sacrifices, almost always unevenly shared. In the capitalist world, it was the workers in the factory itself who most obviously suffered, exploited to produce rivers of products and profits. But the workers who produced the raw materials for the factory, including, at various times, the slave growers of cotton, coal miners, iron miners, rubber harvesters, and today miners of rare-earth elements needed for electronic components, suffered, too. So did workers using older methods, forced to compete with factory production.
In the socialist world, factory workers toiled hard, but often held a relatively privileged place in society, with better housing, food, and benefits than other citizens. The greatest sacrifices in the Soviet Union and Maoist China came distant from the factory itself, in the countryside, where peasants were squeezed hard, sometimes to the point of death, to generate the resources needed to build industrial giants.
For a few decades after World War II, in Europe and the United States, the giant factory became a vehicle for an extraordinary improvement in the pay, benefits, and security of workers (though the actual work remained physically draining, monotonous, and alienating). Largely because of unionization, workers shared the great productivity gains of large-scale industry, a moment of relative equality and democracy in the long history of capitalist society. In the light of the past four decades of stagnating working-class income and growing insecurity, the post–World War II era in retrospect looks golden, and the critiques of the factory during it all but forgotten. But the ugly residue of the giant factory is difficult to ignore.
Just as the costs of creating and operating the giant factory were unevenly shared, so has been the environmental and social wreckage it has left behind. No place better symbolizes the nightmarish afterlife of industrial giantism than Flint, Michigan, once the center of the great General Motors empire, now a shrunken, deeply impoverished community, given so little respect that state and local officials poisoned the population with lead-contaminated water to save money during a state-imposed administratorship. The toxic fate of Flint can be found with variations around the globe, in the depressed former industrial centers of the American Midwest, northern England, northern France, Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and northern China, with their plagues of unemployment, poverty, contaminated earth and water, drug and alcohol use, and despair.
What comes next? It is too soon to declare the giant factory over as a global institution. But in many cities, areas, and nations, its import has vastly shrunk or all but disappeared. Cities deserted by industry have tried to reinvent themselves, frequently hoping to use depressed land prices and abandoned industrial structures as the basis for reemergence as cultural and entrepreneurial centers, a strategy that has yielded, at best, modest returns.9 On a national level, capital in Great Britain, the United States, and other pioneer industrial countries has increasingly shifted from production to finance, enabling continued economic gains from the factory system, but now through financing the system and its many ancillary activities rather than through actual operation, a strategy that has yielded g
reat wealth for a few, growing economic inequality, and deep social fissures.
If the coming of the giant factory was associated with visions of utopia (along with dystopian fears), its passing has been associated with social malaise and shriveled imagination. The Industrial Revolution and the giant factory have left in their wake a continuing belief in a teleology of progress and techno-determinism. But for many, the future has already come and gone, perhaps leaving them with sneakers and a smartphone, but with little hope or belief in their ability to create a new world, a post-factory world that builds on the extraordinary advances of the giant factory to forge a new and different kind of modernity, one more democratic and more sustainable, socially, economically, and, perhaps most important, ecologically.
We are all in this, all implicated. In 2016, the second-largest holder of stock in Hon Hai Precision Industry, the major owner of Foxconn Technology Company, was The Vanguard Group, Inc., a mutual fund company with a benign image that holds the savings and retirement accounts of more than twenty million people (including this author). Very few of them were aware that they owned a piece of a factory from the roof of which workers jumped to their deaths in despair. (Vanguard also was the third-largest holder of stock in Pegatron Corporation, Foxconn’s biggest rival, and the ninth-largest holder of stock in footwear maker Yue Yuen.) Even funds that claim to be socially responsible have dirty hands; the largest holding of Calvert Investments, “founded on the belief that investment capital, properly stewarded, could improve the world for its less powerful inhabitants,” is Apple, Foxconn’s partner and biggest customer.10 And of course, even if you do not own a tiny piece of a giant factory through a retirement fund or a savings account, it is almost certain that you own a product made in one.
Behemoth Page 35