The Industrial Revolution Took Tools, Not Skill

Introduction: A Period Piece That Is Still Running

What happened during the industrial revolution, as a sequence of events, is already well documented. What this article takes up is that the same event is still repeating in the same form.

The spread of machinery gets described; what exactly the artisans lost tends to be handled loosely. It compresses into the machines took their jobs and stops there.

Here is the conclusion first. What artisans lost was not their skill. They kept the skill and lost the means by which it could be exercised. Mistake that distinction and you will get the current change wrong in the same place.

Artisans Held Both Craft and Tools

Pre-industrial Europe held a great many skilled artisans. Shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, smiths, weavers — they possessed a high craft for making particular things, and they possessed their own tools and a small workshop.

Holding both gave them a degree of economic autonomy. A commission came, they made it in their own workshop, and the price was settled between them and the client. Not employed by anyone but making value with their own hands and their own tools, and selling it.

Poor as they often were, there was autonomy in it: working to a standard of their own.

What the Machines Separated

The industrial revolution changed that structure at its base.

Take cotton spinning. Work once done by hand by skilled spinners was displaced by the spinning machine. Owners of machinery employed many unskilled workers at low wages and had them repeat simple stages, producing faster, cheaper and in greater quantity than an artisan working alone.

The point to notice is that the artisans’ skill did not deteriorate.

The skilled spinner remained skilled. That skill simply stopped carrying the economic value it had. Because equivalent or better quality could now be produced in volume by a system.

Stated precisely: the moment the craft became a craft existing without means of production, its price collapsed. The value of a craft is not settled by the craft alone. It is settled by the structure the craft sits on.

What the Luddites Were Actually Reacting To

The reaction took shape in the machine-breaking of early nineteenth-century England — the Luddite movement.

It is usually painted as hostility to machinery. Its substance was a reaction to the loss of the means of production. Not hatred of machines as such, but a response to those means passing from their hands into the hands of owners.

What the workers of the period carried was not only we lost to the machines. It was my craft still functions, and I have lost the economic position in which to exercise it.

The craft is there. The means by which it could be exercised has left their hands. So even with the craft, working in someone else’s factory is what remains.

In the Same Period, Others Took a Different Route

There is a fact here that is easily missed.

Machine-breaking did not, in the long run, stop mechanisation. But in the same period there were artisans who bought a small machine, set up a workshop, and functioned as small-scale owners. Rather than trying to stop the change, they took the technology in as their own means of production.

The same technological change split into a losing side and an absorbing side. What decided the difference was not their attitude to the technology but their position with respect to the means of production.

That fork exists now in the same form. It is treated in leverage is not a multiplier borrowed from finance.

What the Term “Means of Production” Contains

Karl Marx analysed this change systematically in Das Kapital, published in 1867 [Marx, 1867]. At the core of the analysis sits the concept of means of production.

Means of production are the assets required to generate economic value: land, machinery, factories, raw materials — and, read into the present, relationships with customers and informational infrastructure.

The question Marx put was simple. Who holds the means of production?

Those who hold them produce goods with them and take the return. Those who do not sell their labour power to those who do. That asymmetry is the basic structure of an industrial society.

Picture it concretely. For a baker, the means of production are the oven and the premises. For a farmer, the land and the implements. What these share is the property that value produced flows to whoever holds them.

Two people with the same skill at baking — one renting the oven, one owning it — are left with entirely different things. Not the craft but the oven decides the position.

A note on why Marx is cited here: as an instrument for describing a structure. Not to argue a political position or adjudicate a system.

Translating the Question Into the Present

Seen through where the value flows, the present landscape looks different too.

Two people with the same skill at writing — one writing on someone else’s foundation, one writing to their own list of readers — accumulate different things. Value written by the first flows to the foundation; value written by the second becomes their own asset. Same craft, opposite direction of flow.

Some will feel the question of means of production was settled long ago. In the late twentieth-century developed economies, improved conditions and the move to a knowledge economy made the asymmetry appear to soften.

But was that softening a dissolution of the structure? While workers in developed economies appeared released from factory machinery, much of that machinery moved to factories elsewhere. While the move to knowledge work appeared to make the question recede, the foundations supporting knowledge work were accumulating as a new concentration of means of production.

The structure did not disappear. It became harder to see.

Conclusion: The Question Is Not What You Can Do but What You Hold

What the industrial revolution took from artisans was not skill. It was the ground on which skill could be exercised. Keeping the craft and losing the position — that form is repeating now among people who hold intellectual competences.

If so, the question to put is not which competence should I acquire. It is do I hold means of production, or am I working inside someone else’s?

And the question has a sequel. In the industrial period, buying a small machine required capital. The cost of entry today is the lowest it has been in history.

The whole picture is gathered in why generative AI fluency does not settle next month; the framework that systematised this structure in what capitalism’s double freedom actually means. How the price of labour comes to be set is taken up in the difference between labour value and utility value.

References

Books

• Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867)