The Myth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Ian Moll

The Myth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Ian Moll Abstract: This article argues that there is no such phenomenon as a Fourth Industrial Revolution. It derives a framework for the analysis of any industrial revolution from a careful historical account of the archetypal First Industrial Revolution. The suggested criteria for any socio- economic transformation to be considered an industrial revolution are that it must encompass a technological revolution; a transformation of the labour process; a fundamental change in workplace relations; new forms of community and social relationships; and global socio-economic transformations. These transformations indeed characterise the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. The aggregate of technical innovations in the latter is carefully examined, because this is a crucial part of determining whether we can meaningfully claim that a Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway. The article demonstrates that we cannot. Keywords: Africa, colonisation, Fourth Industrial Revolution, informa- tion technology, labour process, social change, Third Industrial Revo- lution, workplace relations The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is all the rage these days. Enthusiasts point to an apparently staggering array of ‘new’ technologies – usually digital – that sound smart and make us feel outdated and in awe of the future: technologies like blockchain, big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and fully autonomous killer robots. They declare that these technologies are converging in unprecedented ways, and predict changes that will transform every part of our lives. But are these dramatic new entrants really revolu- tionising our world in the way that we are told? Theoria, Issue 167, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 2021): 1-38 © Author(s) doi:10.3167/th.2021.6816701 • ISSN 0040-5817 (Print) • ISSN 1558-5816 (Online) 2 Ian Moll The argument in this article is that a 4IR is not yet upon us, and that there is little evidence that it is on the horizon. A careful analysis of the First, Second and Third Industrial Revolutions will demonstrate that an industrial revolution encompasses a complex, mutually generative range of economic, social and political transformations. The First Industrial Revolution (1IR) was a period of fundamental, transcontinental change characterised by the complex conjunction of socio-economic practices and innovations. As the archetypal industrial revolution, it provides historians a framework of analysis that can be used to determine whether any period of substantial development can be considered to be an industrial revolution. The key features of the Second and Third Industrial Revolu- tions clearly meet the criteria in this framework, demonstrating that the socio-economic transformations that occurred during these peri- ods were, indeed, industrial revolutions. However, the argument here is that the same cannot be said about the alleged 4IR. Changes in the twenty-first century are generally the continued evolution of the Third Industrial Revolution (3IR). The First Industrial Revolution: 1760–1850 Two contrasting narratives of the 1IR predominate in the popular imagination.1 The first tells a triumphant story of Britain’s rise to prosperity and global dominance through rapid industrialisation and increased productivity made possible by a sudden explosion of technological innovation. It invokes the fantastical image of George Stephenson driving ‘Rocket’, the first operational steam locomo- tive, down a railway line through crowds of cheering, top-hatted men. In this story, the 1IR was ‘fundamentally a technological revolution [focused on] the sources of invention’ (Allen 2006: 2). The second narrative highlights the degradation of the working class and the appalling working and living conditions associated with the rise of large factories and crowded cities. In this picture, ‘an exploited and dispirited army of men, women and children is engaged for starvation wages in a seemingly endless round of drudgery . the sole beneficiary of their efforts is the grasping, tyrannical, licen- tious factory master’ (Bythell 1983: 17). The Myth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution 3 While both of these narratives are obviously oversimplified, together they capture the rise of the factory and the tension between the massively increased economic production and massively degraded social structures that characterised the 1IR. While technological innovations contributed to this revolution, it was driven by socio-economic forces. The interaction between the economic, political, social and technological changes that took place during this period, locally and globally, brought about the kind of fundamental and sustained transformation that historians term a ‘revolution’. The dramatic rise of the merchant bourgeoisie underlies the over- turning of social and political norms during the 1IR. While political power in Britain up to the 1700s had been concentrated in the hands of a small, landed aristocracy driving a feudal economy, over sev- eral decades a system of proto-industries began developing which supplied goods to Britain’s rapidly expanding colonial markets. It was not the aristocracy that benefitted most from this ‘domestic cottage system’, however, but a rising class of increasingly wealthy merchants. As demand from British consumers and colonies in India, North America and the Caribbean increased, cottage industries simply could not make enough quickly enough. As large-scale factories arose to meet the demand of Britain’s global market, the cottage industries collapsed. Duncan Bythell (1983) notes that the same merchant-manufacturers who had profited from the organised cottage industry system turned their backs on it and became the new factory owners of the rising capitalist order. Enabling this industrial transformation was a fleet of technological innovations. Jeremy Greenwood (1999) notes that ‘for the economy as a whole to switch from manual techniques to mechanised production required hundreds of inventors, thousands of innovat- ing entrepreneurs, and tens of thousands of mechanics, technicians, and dexterous rank and file workers’ (1999: 8). In 1871, James Watt’s innovative steam engine, which could be harnessed to power machines in factories, was an iconic invention of this period, as was Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ in 1830. John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule and other new machines dramatically increased productivity in the textile 4 Ian Moll industry: in 1800, for example, a cotton spinner could spin 200 times as much in a day as they could in 1700 (BBC n.d.). In America, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a machine that separated cotton fibres from their seeds. Other technologies developed rapidly across industries – notably, machinery and metal-working procedures for factories (Greenwood 1999). Paul Kennedy proposes that ‘no earlier technological breakthroughs produced anything like the rise in out- put that flowed from the Industrial Revolution’ (1993: 8). However, this rapid development of the technologies of production brought with it the appalling labour processes characteristic of the 1IR factory. Kennedy describes the plight of British workers at the end of the eighteenth century: ‘Suffering under awful conditions in factories and mines, they were organised alongside their machines in a strict, time-driven system of labour unlike anything known previously’ (1993: 8). In contrast to work in the pre- industrial cottage system, factory workers lost autonomy in the work process. Children, too, often worked in the most exploitative conditions possible; they were paid the least and forced to work in the most dangerous situations (Humphries 2013). Friedrich Engels (1845) aptly summed up the workers’ plight thus: ‘The industrial revolution has simply carried this [the exploitation of workers] out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of independent activity’. The clear hierarchy of workers and bosses – whose interests dif- fered fundamentally – became the crucible in which new social classes began to form. E. P. Thompson suggests that ‘the outstand- ing fact’ of the 1IR was the ‘formation of the working class’ (1963: 194). Bythell notes that ‘because ownership of these machines, of the building which houses them and the engine which drives them, rests with the private capitalist, there exists an unbridgeable gulf between him and his property-less, wage-earning employees’ (1983: 17–18). It is no wonder that the issues surrounding labour in the factories of the 1IR provided fertile ground for the rallying call of the Communist Manifesto in 1848: The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has . simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat. (Marx and Engels 1848: 14–15) The Myth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution 5 Figure 1. Increase in Number of Families and Income per Capita for Three Classes in British Society: 1759–1846 (Statistics are from Allen 2019) Despite economic growth, this social cleavage permeated and consolidated itself in British society. As C. Grove Haines and Warren B. Walsh put it, ‘poverty stalked in the midst of plenty. While statistics revealed steadily mounting material welfare and the growth of national and per capita wealth, hundreds

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