From Subsistence to Production - Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community - page 9

of the production enterprises has been labeled “craft production” by many modern-day ob-
servers. 7
As a system of economic production, craft-based manufacturing and agricultural enter-
prises produced a diverse array of goods for local markets. We would call this “customized
production” today. The geographic landscape of rural America, then, consisted of identifiable
conglomerations of economic activities that met local needs. Regional and national markets,
such as they existed in the early part of the nineteenth century, were small relative to the ag-
gregate demand of the local markets.
An economic revolution occurred in the mid-1800s in the United States with the advent
of mass-production techniques in manufacturing. The system of craft production that had
dominated the economic landscape for centuries began to give way to relatively large-scale
ensembles of production activities organized in one central location. As Michael Piore and
Charles Sabel note in The Second Industrial Divide, “The visionaries of mass production
foresaw a world of ever more automated factories, run by fewer and ever less skilled work-
ers.” 8 While it has been assumed that advances in technology were the driving force behind
mass production, recent historical scholarship has begun to show that at least initially the
rise of the factory system was due not to superior forms of technical efficiency but rather to
a capitalist philosophy of “so many hands, so much money.” That is, the amount of profit
was tied directly and almost exclusively to the amount of labor employed. For example, the
best-known way for a bicycle manufacturer to increase his profits would be to add more bi-
cycle makers to his factory. In strictly economic terms, early mass production increased gross
profits but did not necessarily raise the rate of profit. In a study of early factories in Indiana-
polis, Robert Robinson and Carl Briggs found “that firms with large numbers of workers and
large investments in capital had no efficiency advantage over firms with small work forces
and limited capital investments. There were no economies of scale in any industry in 1850,
1870, or 1880. Nor did the introduction of water- or steam-powered technologies—the defin-
ing characteristics of factories—result in greater output…. ”(italics added). 9
Over time, of course, technological improvements in manufacturing processes emerged.
Water, steam, and later electrical power supplanted human labor in production. Manufactur-
ing output became standardized and routinized. At the same time, efficient transportation net-
works opened up regional and national markets to local manufacturers. Mass markets artic-
ulated with mass production. Workers in factories that adopted mass-production techniques
became increasingly differentiated along task lines as capital in the form of machinery was
substituted for labor in many industries. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel make the point
well: “By World War I … industry after industry had come under the domination of giant
firms using specialized equipment to turn out previously unimagined numbers of standard-
ized goods, at prices that local producers could not meet.” 10 The culmination of this trans-
formation from craft production to mass production was most evident in the assembly lines