Jane Addams, Industrialization, and the Corporation

Reading from Jane Addams's Centennial Reader, I am struck with the harsh, lived experiences of those who did and those who are undergoing the social realities of industrialization. Addams writes and worked for a better world in the face of a despicable one, endlessly seeking that which was almost incomprehensible: A time and place where workers were allowed rights to life for themselves and their families, liberty of thought and speech, and the possibility of creative action. She joined and galvanized those who struggled in the face wealthy, politically minded, and socially connected industrialists and businesses. A mass of seemingly powerless, undereducated, displaced, and disparate peoples thrown together against the few empowered, networked, and highly educated entrepeneurs; simply put, such were unbeatable odds. All the same, through cooperation and determination, through the unification of cultural, religious, and ethnic conflicts, things change in dramatic and encouraging ways. Successes like a forty hour work week, child labor laws, safety codes, and--eventually--minimum wage are just some of the pleasures we now expect from any simple, straightforward economic system.

Those many, many peoples undergoing industrialization now, in its various difficult and uncertain manifestations, certainly have an even greater task. Though we have profound model individuals and policies that support workers' rights, the sides are even more extreme. Corporations are an entirely different beast from their forebears, the industrial business. Corporations can transcend boundaries and distance themselves from the locations of conflict, construct and reconstruct the means of production with the ebb and flow of social and economic tides, and have gained the support of pseudo-regulatory institutions like the WTO and IMF to back them up. National economic policies readily come to favor the goods of transboundary corporate imports because corporations so easily gain the ear--and the dollar--of nation-state and regional politicians.

I would like to hold that even if these odds had been so stacked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then the cosmopolitans of the urban slums, the national and ethnic hodgepodge of the factory floors, and the earnest determination of figures like Jane Addams would still have overcome the empowered industrial elites. All the same, I am greatly concerned that without a strengthened collective consciousness concerning the needs, labors, and conditions that industrialization has and continues to enforce on workers, then things won't change for the well-being of people. I cannot end on a sour note; rather, I end acknowledging the immensity of the task at hand. What is needed is the creation, nurturance, and excitement concerning that sort of cooperation and mindset. I wish for more of what was: determined individuals, cosmopolitan conversations, enlightened self-interest, community bonding, resource efficiency through sharing; I want to see guest rooms with strangers or acquaintances in need, extra seats at the table filled with those who cannot buy or grow all their food this week, the excitement of children growing food in community gardens, the ingenuity of people encouraged to be creative in their collectivity...

What I want to see is the breakdown of barriers in the construction of new identities, the identities involved in thinking, working, and living together. We easily identify the dissolution of groups, individuals, social structures, et cetera; but this affords the potential for new hybridities and reconstructions, the growth of what we never knew we could have beforehand. I look forward to our responses to the tribulations present and ahead, I am anxious for them all the more.

...

I finished White Noise by Don DeLillo. It was fantastic and I could not have expected much different of a conclusion. I worry somewhat about its validity, but its sense of humor gives me more hope all the same.