Extract from The Pentagon of Power
Mining originally set the pattern for later modes of mechanization by its callous disregard for human factors, by its indifference to the pollution and destruction of the neighboring environment, by its concentration upon the physico-chemical processes for obtaining the desired metal or fuel, and above all by its topographic and mental isolation from the organic world of the farmer and the craftsman, and the spiritual world of the Church, the University, and the City.
In its destruction of the environment and its indifference to the risks to human life, mining closely resembles warfare though likewise it often, through its confrontation of danger and death, brings into existence a tough, self-respecting personality, with capacities for heroism and self-sacrifice, not unlike that of the soldier at his best. But the destructive animus of mining and its punishing routine of work, along with its environmental poverty and disorder, were passed on to the new industries that used its products. These negative social results offset the mechanical gains.
If mining involved speculative economic risks, it also brought huge returns; and this, too, served as a pattern for both capitalist enterprise itself and later mechanization. The readiness to make heavy investments in mining was stimulated by this possibility of making extraordinary profits. Agricola took pains to point out the chances for easy gains in mining, as compared with normal commerce; and Werner Sombart in Der Modern Kapitalismus calculated that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries German mining earned as much in ten years as trade in the old style was able to in a hundred. In the capitalist attack upon polytechnics, war was the spearhead and mining the shaft: both were inured to methodical destruction, both sought to get something for nothing, both placed physical power above any other human need. In the traditional industries, the older concepts of the just price, based on time and skill, normalized by use and wont, still held: but in mining, as in the wholesale trades and long-distance commercial adventures, the highest price possible, regardless of justice or equity what the traffic will bear was the object. Let the worker cringe, let the buyer beware!
As capital gains increased, more capital was available for investment in mines, ships, and factories, as well as in the costly machinery that, from the eighteenth century on, competed with hand labor and drove it out of the market. This general movement was in turn abetted by two other inventions, both social, which gave the advantage to machine operations over the small surviving workshops that utilized local materials and local hand labor. I refer to the patent system, first established in England, which bestowed on the inventor, or, rather, the exploiter, of a new invention, an effective temporary monopoly; and the other was the joint stock company, with limited liability, which widened the number of possible investors and relieved them of the burden of individual responsibility for bankruptcy that single ownership or partnership entailed. These changes completed the depersonalization of the whole industrial process. After the seventeenth century an increasing number of anonymous workers were exploited for the benefit of equally anonymous and invisible and morally indifferent absentee owners.
Thus the various components of mechanized industry conspired to remove the traditional valuations and the human aims that had kept the economy under control and caused it to pursue other goals than power. Absentee ownership, the cash nexus, managerial organization, military discipline, were from the beginning the social accompaniments of large-scale mechanization. This removal of limits had the effect of undermining by now almost totally destroying the earlier forms of polytechnics, and of replacing it with a monotechnics based on maximizing physical power, contracting or expanding or diverting human needs to those that are required to keep such an economy in operation. Warfare, the activity that had first made such heavy demands on the mine, in turn contributed further to mechanization by reverting in industry to a military discipline and daily drill, in order to ensure uniform operations and uniform results. This reciprocal interplay between warfare, mining, and mechanization was ultimately responsible for some of the most vexatious problems that must now be faced.
extract from The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford, 1964
[Emphasis added BL]