Capitalism and the Scientific Revolution
How capital separated workers from control over the potentials of science
[Drawing by
]The knowledge, judgement and will which, even though to a small extent, are exercised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman […] are faculties now required only for the [manufacturing] workshop as a whole. The possibility of an intelligent direction of production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others.
Karl Marx, Capital[1]
We didn’t always have such little independence in the workplace and control over the potentials of production. Despite the common reactionary view that intelligence is naturally distributed hierarchically throughout society, the Scientific Revolution was born in the workshops of artisans—not in the minds of elite scholars. The little amount of independence enjoyed by craftspeople in the early days of capitalism was essential for the Scientific Revolution, the benefits of which were nonetheless captured by and pressed into the service of capital, on a single course guided by the motive of profit.
In his 2005 A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechanicks,” Clifford D. Connor explains how modern science rests on a bed of intellectual development by masses of ordinary, usually anonymous, often illiterate people in productive and economic activity, producing science broadly defined as knowledge of nature, empirically, through trial and error.[2]
Against traditional histories of science, Connor explains that science and technology were never totally separate; that there were countless sciences that emerged with no established place in the academy, such as chemistry, metallurgy, botany, zoology, and experimental physics; that the philosophy, standards, and methods which characterize the Scientific Revolution were derived in the workshops of artisans;[3] and that the gap between academic science and artisan science was overcome when the ideas of prolific artisan-authors were disseminated in mass with the advent of the printing press.[4]
Even Rupert Hall, an historian who maintained the view that the scholar rather than the craftsman was the primary agent of the Scientific Revolution—seeing the latter as a product of the mind—explained that, “‘[t]he technological progress of Europe during the Middle Ages was due to transmission’ that ‘occurred at the level of craftsmanship rather than scholarship.’”[5]
If a natural philosopher of that era paid more attention to the processes of artisans “and [as Hall explains] less to his own consciousness and limited academic horizon, he could learn much of what the world is like. As the Middle Ages verged on the Renaissance, an increasingly rich technological experience offered ample problems for enquiry, and besides, much knowledge of facts and techniques.”[6]
Indeed, the essential stimuli for the “mechanical philosophy” that is characteristic of the Scientific Revolution was provided by a range of new technological advances by craftspeople: “most ultimately of Chinese origin—'improved methods of harnessing both saddle-horse and draft-horse, the watermill, the windmill, the mechanical saw, glazed windows, spectacles, the wheeled plow, the true rudder, lock-gates, the grandfather-clock, and finally printing.’” Since the 14th Century, clockmakers and watchmakers were to become “‘a fruitful source of ingenuity and workmanship,’” while ever-higher standards for accurate measurement were set by the development of the card and dial makers industry which emerged to meet needs for navigational instruments like compasses.[7] Finally, as regards to the origins of the methodologies associated with the Scientific Revolution, “Hall acknowledged that ‘the early exploitation of observation and experiment as methods of scientific inquiry drew heavily on straightforward workshop practice.’”[8]
In addition to these craftspeople-led advances in scientific philosophy, standards, and methods, the print industry in particular created a space uniquely suited for intellectual exchange:
it can be thought of as having created a new culture, that “brought together scholars, craftsmen, merchants, and humanists engaged in common pursuits. The proofrooms of early printshops, where proofreaders, authors, and proofreader-authors exchanged ideas and criticized each other’s works, became in sixteenth-century Europe far more important than the moribund universities as centers of creative intellectual activity—scientific and otherwise.[9]
In addition to acquiring artisan knowledge through printed publications, many of the major figures of science of these times—for example, Galileo, Leibniz, Gilbert—would venture into mines and workshops to learn from science of artisans.[10]
Although in many cases, scholars did acknowledge artisan-author sources, others published books without such acknowledgements. Andreas Vesalius’s 1543 De humani corporis fabrica, which Connor credits as an anatomical masterpiece, “often cited as one of the landmark events of the Scientific Revolution,” was found to be based on “the striking anatomical drawings of one or more anonymous draftsmen presumed to have been affiliated with the workshop of Titian,” artists who remained anonymous simply because “Vesalius did not bother to give them credit.”[11]
Many of what are today entire fields of science were advanced by artisans and tradespeople as practices that were secondary to their primary field of work. The Renaissance artists’ drive to achieve an accurate depiction of nature stimulated growth in several fields. These artists “emerged from the ranks of manual labourers,” often apprenticing under goldsmiths.[12] They made massive contributions to botany, “when artists began to execute finely detailed realistic drawings of plants based on their own careful observations.”[13] Through that “collective determination to depict nature realistically,” Renaissance artists also developed the mathematics of linear perspective.[14] Finally, “[i]t was really the painters […] and not the doctors,” who advanced the science of anatomy by performing dissections on human cadavers, “for purposes of exploration rather than demonstration.”[15] Meanwhile, from the second through sixteenth centuries, surgery was a field of medical knowledge best maintained by “lowly barbers,” who, by the sixteenth century, “had themselves gathered enough strength and sophistication to enable them to contribute some of the greatest surgeons of history.’”[16] And after many elite scientists tried and failed to make a useful enough microscope, a linen draper, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, developed microscopy as a major scientific field after using magnifying lenses to examine threads of fabrics.[17]
A Royalist reaction
Movements aiming at the reform of knowledge emerged in these contexts, most notably the rivalry between “Baconian” sciences, those associated with Francis Bacon, and the “Paracelsian challenge,” a movement “which instigated revolutionary change in the chemical and medical sciences.”[18]
Whereas Bacon coveted craft knowledge as a raw material to be usurped by scholars, Paracelsus: ‘took the methods of the artisan to be the ideal mode of proceeding in the acquisition of all knowledge, for the artisan worked directly with the objects of nature. Paracelsus considered this unmediated labor in and experience of nature as elevating the artisan both spiritually and intellectually above the scholar.[19]
While “Paracelsus saw himself as a man of the people, crusading against an entrenched oligarchy of wealthy mammon-worshiping physicians who were defrauding the public,”[20] in the eyes of Bacon, the Paracelsian movement was a subversive, dangerous political subculture. Bacon’s own “proposed reform of science,” Connor explains “was essentially ‘a Royalist reaction’ against efforts to establish independent forms of science that were not subject to royal control.”[21] Bacon was witnessing an explosion in scientific knowledge, about which he was certainly excited, but “he was also deeply concerned—even alarmed—by the social implications that accompanied the discrediting of traditional learning: ‘A huge potential existed for social instability and political rebellion.’”[22]
The Paracelsians’ medical and social views were strongly conditioned by their hero’s lifelong association with mines and miners [which exposed him to the most advanced metallurgical knowledge of the day]. It was a two-way relationship: a great deal of Paracelsus’s knowledge of nature was gained from miners, and in return, he concerned himself with their ailments. One particular work, his [On the Minors’ Sickness and Other Minors’ Diseases] testifies to that concern on his part. It is of particular interest as the first example of what would later be called occupational medicine.[23]
The field of occupational medicine inaugurated by Paracelsus would become relevant for Marx in his analysis in Capital of the conditions of the division of labor under manufacture—which also happens to be the site at and the process by which the scientific potentials of production, once enjoyed by craftspeople, were separated from labor.
Subsumed into the factory system
Despite their knowledge and methods placing them “in the vanguard of the Scientific Revolution in its initial stages,” craftspeople did not emerge as “the masters or beneficiaries of the new science.” On the one hand, there emerged in the latter half of the 17th Century, “on the basis of the artisanal knowledge they had exploited,” a new scientific elite, “consisting of gentlemen who looked to Bacon, Boyle and Galileo as their ideal and inspiration.” On the other hand, industrial capitalists emerged whose factory systems subsumed the former trade secrets of craftspeople and who “applied the mechanical philosophy to the ‘rationalization’ of production processes, ushering in the Industrial Revolution and its mechanized factory system.” The lives of the Scientific Revolution’s vanguard of craftspeople worsened as the rise of the factory system would coerce them into becoming wageworkers:
There were individual exceptions, of course, but for the most part the artisans and tradesmen who revolutionized science found themselves worse off than before. As their trade secrets entered the public domain and their crafts were subsumed into the factory system, they lost their economic independence. Those fortunate enough to find employment in the new economy became wageworkers and were “deskilled” by interchangeable assembly line Jobs, while the others were left behind as human detritus.[24]
By having their trade secrets subsumed by the factories and being coerced to enter those mechanized factories, the craftspeople who inaugurated the Scientific Revolution—via the modest level of independence they had in their workshops—found themselves with less independence.
In Capital, Marx describes the same historical process of the transfer of scientific knowledge and potential from craftspeople who then faced those potentials in the factories they entered as “deskilled” wageworkers:
What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them [in manufacturing]. It is the result of division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. The process of separation starts in simple cooperation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labour. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.[25]
For Marx, the manufacturing worker is modified through division of labour into an appendage of the system, operating with machinic regularity, such that the small degree of independence in “knowledge, judgement and will” exercised by independent peasants or handicraftsman or even by “the savage” in “art of war” become “faculties now required only for the workshop as a whole.”[26]
An act of robbery
Many craftspeople were understandably secretive about their trade knowledge. As Connor explains,
Their knowledge of natural processes had been gained by hard work and years of apprenticeship; it was the source of their income, the basis of their ability to make a living and support themselves and their families. When well-off gentlemen who could afford to be magnanimous exposed the lore of the craftsman to public view, it was, from the standpoint of artisans’ interests, an act of robbery.[27]
As easily understandable as their motive is, such craft secrecy is typically condemned as “backward” by historians who, on the other hand, praise the well-off gentlemen who publicized such secrets. At the time, Baconian gentlemen like Robert Boyle tried to justify such appropriations of knowledge “by arguing that it would be repaid eventually with interest” by “‘improvement of the trades;” however, Boyle wrongly assumed that such improvements to the trades would necessarily result in better working conditions for tradespeople. So too, the “so-called labor-saving machinery” of the 19th Century “did not serve to ease the labor of the laborers but to reduce the labor costs of the of their employers.”
in the context of a nascent capitalist economy, the benefits of increased productivity went not to the producers, but to a privileged few whose access to capital allowed them to gain control of the production process. The artisans who forfeited their knowledge were, for the most part, eventually forced into dependency as wage workers. […] no matter how socially progressive it may have been in the long run, the immediate effect [of so-called labor-saving machinery] was that displaced workers lost their livelihoods while factory owners enriched themselves.[28]
This is a familiar story, isn’t it? Still today the benefits of increased productivity generally do not go to the producers but to the privileged few “whose access to capital allowed them to gain control of the production process.” This is a process which not only further enriches the few with access to capital but keeps the wageworkers in the state of dependency by which the whole labor-capital relation operates. And to this day, the threat of increased automation in production (A.I., robotics, etc.) threatens the livelihoods of vast portions of the working class with potential displacement.
A master-servant relationship
The relation between capital and science has always been one of dominance by capital—“a master-servant relationship,” as Connor writes, “with capital as the dominant partner.”[29] Thus, in the first quarter of the 21st Century, with science remaining within this master-servant relationship with capital, scientific knowledge production has continued to be shaped by the profit motive rather than by consideration of human needs.
But how long will our society’s vast range of potential be limited to the direction of the profit motive? Who ought to decide whether increased automation results in increased profits at the expense of displaced workers, rather than a decrease of the workweek or the retirement age? Who ought to decide whether society’s scientific and technical resources are prioritized for curbing the effects of climate disaster vs., say, colonizing Mars? Who ought to decide whether we build “hyperloops” instead of high-speed rails, as billionaire Elon Musk did (for the worse), or when and how we restructure public education, as billionaire Bill Gates did (for the worse), and as Musk is attempting to do now? How long will our imaginations be held hostage by the false promises of billionaires?
Notes
[1]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (1990 [1867]). trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books), 482.
[2]. Connor, A People’s History of Science (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 18.
[3]. Ibid, 279-80.
[4]. Ibid, 293-5.
[5]. Ibid, 279.
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. Ibid, 279-80.
[8]. Ibid, 280.
[9]. Ibid, 294.
[10]. Ibid, 285; 433-4; 287-9.
[11]. Ibid, 271-2.
[12]. Ibid, 262.
[13]. Ibid, 272.
[14]. Ibid, 267.
[15]. Ibid, 270-71.
[16]. Ibid, 150-1.
[17]. Ibid, 327.
[18]. Ibid, 301.
[19]. Ibid, 301-2.
[20]. Ibid, 303.
[21]. Ibid, 302-3; 362.
[22]. Ibid, 362.
[23]. Ibid, 305, 307.
[24]. Ibid, 349-50
[25]. Marx, Capital, 482.
[26]. Ibid.
[27] Connor, 21.
[28]. Ibid, 22.
[29]. Ibid, 423.