I am excited to have more children, largely because I have a lot to do, and after a certain increase in their muscle mass and spiritual faculty, a child can help me to do it. I tested this humdrum thought in my social circle, under the assumption that its busy occupants would agree. I was particularly interested in whether any of them planned on teaching their children to take dictation, translate foreign texts, lay bricks, or learn to repair socks, as these would be useful to my future plans—and perhaps we could go halfsies on the necessary schooling.
To my dismay, they were dismayed. Most seemed to think of this as some form of cold, calculated child abuse. It is true that we once abused children with labor. Now we hurl abuse at the very idea of the laboring child. “Child labor” should describe nothing more than children laboring, but we’ve been conditioned to hear the phrase in capitals—“Child Labor”—and so we think of chimney sweeps and the horrors of industrialism.
But the trouble with mechanized labor is not that the workers are children, but that they are treated like stupid children—that is, they are given a series of exhausting and repetitive motions that any child could do. The destruction of craft and hand labor, along with the glorification of the machine, allowed for child labor precisely because it disallowed adult labor: the labor fitting to free men who, using all their capacities, produce goods that bear their imprint and from which they profit. Anyone possessing half a hippocampus should reject Child Labor when it names this tyranny of childish labor—but they should do so for the dignity of the father and mother as much as for the health of the child.
Non-mechanized work tends to require skill, not just want of a paycheck. And skillful labor tends to be gradated. It is gradated for the simple reason that it has not been reduced to one repetitive task—push the button, pack the box, answer the phone—but rather, involves many tasks that all tend toward the creation of some final good. If many hands make the task light, it is also the case that many tasks make room for light hands. Once a man has bid adieu to the industrial and post-industrial economy, he may welcome little hands to help him, for his work has become the creation of goods through the husbanding of many tasks, both small and large, toward that end. His child may not be able to plow a field or place a cornice on a wall, but she can collect the eggs and spread the mortar. A six-year old may not know how to prune and tend a flower garden, but a ten-year-old might. He may also be quite able to arrange the bouquets and, at twelve, learn to sell them.
When a man is the master of his labor, from start to finish, there is much in it that can be given to the strength, size, and genius of his children. But when another man owns his labor, and his work has been reduced to a singular part, to give that singular part to a child is to simply to replace big hands with small ones, strong hands with weak ones, developed faculties with developing ones. This is, for the most part, what happened in the Industrial Revolution, in which, as historian Jane Humphries argued, “reorganization of production around a more detailed division of labour created jobs, which children could fill.”[1]
Children were the secret engine of industrial productivity as it came into its full flower in Once Jolly England. The industrial system was not simply reducible to the introduction of fossil fuels and the machines that they powered: such machines, on their own, had no power to convince people to run them. Game laws, enclosure laws, and poor laws were the legal mechanisms that turned people toward a life of tending mechanisms. These strictures destroyed what historians call the “subsistence economy,” in which most of a family’s labor went to producing things directly for their own use and consumption. When authorities banned the hunt, privatized the common land on which peasants once raised their crops and animals, and enforced a new set of laws that criminalized not being employed, families were cast into a world in which they did not have the means to produce life for themselves—and in which they faced punishment for not doing so.[2] At the behest of the industrialists, the English government effectively created the proletariat[3]—a class of people who had to work for wages (a state medieval Christendom would have classified as “poverty” alongside the condition of cripples and beggars).[4]
This creation, which should really be called a degradation, was simultaneously the creation of “useless” women and children—for what work could there be for “little hands” when a man no longer has access to the land on which to employ them? And what can a woman do when her household no longer has access to productive property? By “dis-embedding” the productive family from the land, the industrialists simultaneously produced men, women, and children with nothing to do. It was not the case that children were running around, blowing bubbles, until some squinting industrialist locked them into his factory and forced them to crawl under his looms. Rather, children worked as part of the subsistence economy until the industrialists destroyed it. Ergo, Child Labor was enabled by the destruction of child labor, in which children were shaken loose from their land and families and “freed” up for wage-labor in factory conditions. This subsidized the tremendous expense of industrial machinery, as the industrialist Andrew Ure confessed:
It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers, for trained artisans. In most of the water-twist, or throstle cotton mills, the spinning is entirely managed by females of sixteen years and upwards. The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children. The proprietor of a factory near Stockport states, in evidence to the commissioners, that by such substitution, he would save 501 a week in wages, in consequence of dispensing with nearly forty male spinners, at about 258 of wages each.[5]
Ure’s point is clear; machines make for unskilled work, and unskilled work can be performed by children—who can, at least ostensibly, be paid less. The introduction of children was especially effective in smothering what remained of the desire for skill and independence that characterized the subsistence economy. The industrial system relied on children protesting and asserting themselves less than adults:
By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity,—faculties, when concentred to one process, speedily brought to perfection in the young.[6]
Modern industrialism did not simply occasion, but relied on the loss of skilled labor and the education of very young children into the new “normal” of a world without subsistence. Thus the main difficulty of industrialism did not, to Andrew Ure’s apprehension,
lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism ... as in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one co-operative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.... Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organized, and its labor lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty ...into useful factory hands.[7]
The restoration of skill and ownership to work tends to restore to it a hierarchy of tasks. This is not the case in industrialism, in which labor becomes childish and unskilled children become better and more affordable laborers than men. But in the traditional order, tasks tend to be arranged in such a way that they are capable of being approached with greater and greater skill. One may begin as an apprentice and end as a master. One may begin by performing children’s work, and then eventually be brought up into the work of the men. The former is not useless, nor is it abusive; rather, it is fitting to the child. But the critique of child labor has lost its radical roots in the critique of mechanized labor, and is now applied to any act of making a child work. The subsistence economy is well and truly gone—and the result is that we have no idea what to do with a child.
The above is from the Overture to New Polity Magazine, Issue 4.3. Subscribe today for all our best work.
Notes
Jane Humphries, “Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 66.2 (2013): 395–418, at 399, https://vdocuments.mx/ childhood-and-child-labour-in-the-british-industrial-revo-lution-1.html.
Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
See John Medaille’s essay, “ ‘The Anonymous Society’ vs. ‘ The Great Workbench’, ” New Polity 4.2 (Spring 2023), especially pages 21–22.
Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (London, Marion Boyars: 1981), 103–4.
Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: Or, an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 23.
Ibid., 20–21.
Ibid., 15.