A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the
Capitalist Process
Chapter VII. HISTORICAL OUTLINES
D. Some Features of the Development of Manufactures
…
In the last three Juglars, but
particularly in the last one, production of fertilizers (phosphates) made
considerable strides. The dogged survival of the use of the charcoal in the
production of iron led to the distilling of the timber and to the production of
acetates as a byproduct – an innovation of the penultimate Juglar, as was the
production of soda by the Solvay process. Manufacture of the sulphuric acid on
a large scale begins with the third. The story of American sugar refining
industry, which for the time being, culminated (1887) in the combination that controlled
90% of the production, and of the American Tobacco Company (1890), highly
interesting though they are cannot be dealt with here. Nor can developments in
the industries of glass (tank furnaces were innovation of the last Juglar),
cement (Portland cement – innovating stage in the fifth and sixth Juglar),
paper (new uses: paper collars, paper carwheels; new processes: mechanical and
sulphite pulp, successful in the eighties), and rubber (rubber boots, rubber
reclaiming; substantial consolidation in U.S. Rubber Company and Mechanical
Rubber Company, both 1892).
But we cannot pass over the
beginnings of the electrical industry. Both names and investments are too big
for that. Since, however, the former are so familiar, we can confine ourselves
to noticing, in passing, the type of entrepreneur to which they belong and of
which they are among the best instances. Since the first Morse patent was taken
out in 1840 and telegraph Unes extended as far as Pittsburg in 1847, the commercial history of
electricity actually dates from the beginning of that Kondratieff. Telephones
began their career in 1877, when A. G. Bell floated company for the
exploitation of his patent, adopting the policy similar of that of the McKay
shoe machinery concern, of leasing the instruments. Percentage increase of
telephones connected was very rapid in the prosperity of the penultimate
Juglar, than slackened in 1895. In 1897 over 500.000 were installed (as
compared with 20,200.000 in 1930). An electrical equipment industry – motors,
electric wiring, and so on; not exclusively telegraph and telephone appliances
– produced values of 2,7 millions in 1879 and 92,4 in 1899 (not including
machinery and supplies made in establishments belonging to other industries).
In the later year, kilowatt-hours produced were little over 3 billions; in 1960
– 96 billions.
Electric current for light and
power dates really from 1892, when Edison’s hydroelectric station in Appleton , Wis. , his
thermoelectric station in New York, and the one in Chigao went into operation.
By then, the Edison Electric Light company (1878) and the American Electrical
Company (later, the Thompson-Houston company; E. Thompson in 1886 patented
electric welding) were already in existence; and electric light, according to
the principle of C. S. Brush, had been installed in a few cotton mills and in
San Francisco. The arc lamp and Edison ’s
incandescent lamp then competed each other. In 1886 W.
Stanley constructed the first station using alternating current.
Problems of transmission were being solved. In manufacture, electric power was
coming into use, especially in cotton mills, from 1882. This established all
the fundaments of the technique, bore down resistance, and prepared the great
development that was to follow and to turn revival into a Kondratieff
prosperity.
But quantitatively, it did not
signify. Only traction did. After a number of more or less experimental
ventures, an electric tram service was installed at Richmond in 1887; than this innovation spread
rapidly. In Massachusetts ,
for instance, 1,400 miles of overhead trolley street railways were constructed
from 1890 to 1897.
Not only the technological, but
also the financial and organizational bases were laid during the last two
Juglars. The Edison Electric Light and Edison General Electric (1899) were
successful and had a number of subsidiaries, some of them abroad. Then they
were the Westinghouse and the Thompson-Houston concerns. When the later
coalesced with the Edison General Electric (General Electric, 1892, capital 50
million dollars), which by that time, at Schenectady and elsewhere, employed
over 6.000 hands, a concern emerged that controlled practically all the more
important patents, supplied 1.277 stations, and 435 traction companies
operating nearly 5.000 miles – in itself a powerful engine of economic
revolution.
Since we sketched the course of
Juglars when describing railroad developments, and since we have so framed the
above comments on American industrial history, as to make it easy for the
reader to insert innovations in their proper places, we need not now add a
detailed survey, but only a bald calendar. With the qualification mentioned, we
take 1843 as the first year of the first Juglar, in prosperity lasting until
the middle of 1845, its recession until the end of 1847, its depression
covering 1848, and its revival – 1849, 1850 and 1851. The prosperity and
recession phases of the second (1852 to 186) ran from the beginning of 1852 to
the middle of 1856 (irregularities making it difficult to distinguish between them);
depression lasted to the end of 1858; and 1859 and 1860 make up the recovery
phase. The rise of the third Juglar is blurred by, and uncertain because of,
political events, and so is its course. We simply count it from 1861 to 1869,
on the strength of the aspects of the period 1867 to 1869, which seems to
conform to our idea of revival as modified by those external factors. The
prosperity phase of the fourth Juglar (1870 to middle of 1879) covers 1870,
1871, and the first half of 1872; the recession phase, the second half of 1872
and 1873, the next three years form the depression; and 1877, 1878 and the
first half of 1879 – the recovery phase, the beginning of which is still under
the clouds of the preceding storm. The fifth Juglar covers the period from the
middle of 1879 to the end of 1888. It prosperity lasted to the middle of 1881;
recession from the middle of 1881 to the end of 1883; depression covered 1884
and the greater part of 1885, and was followed by more that three years of
recovery. The sixth Juglar (1889 to 1897) illustrates our proposition about the
irregularities of panic and crises. The course of things in the last quarter of
1890 and the first half of 1891 interrupted and distorted what, nevertheless,
we consider as the prosperity phase of that Juglar. The rest of 1891, 1892 and
the first half of 1893 make up the recession; the second half of 1893, 1894 and
the first half of 1895 – depression. Revival then set in – and symptoms shaded
off, by the end of 1897, into a new prosperity – but 1896 interrupted its
course, though in a way which can be satisfactory accounted for.
E. The First Sixteen Years of the Third Kondratieff (1893 – 1913)
1. For want of more adequate
label, we will speak of the Neo-Mercantilist Kondratieff. Few will deny the
social atmosphere characteristically changed about the late nineties, though
not everyone who recognizes that change will be ready to grant the claims we
make for the “symbolic” year 1897, and the most people will also agree with the
proposition that those changes were of two kinds – the one represented by such
symptoms as the recrudescence of protection and the increase in expenditure on
armaments, the other by such symptoms as the new spirit in fiscal and social
legislation, the rising tide of political radicalism and socialism, the growth
and changing attitudes of trade unionism, and so on. In America (Dingley tariff, 1897) protectionism
menat little more than another victory of a tendency that had been present from
the first; in England ,
no more than a slow change of public opinion on the subject of free trade. In Germany , the social insurance item rose to 1.1
billion marks in 1913, while in America
there was little of this beyond social legislation in some states (Wisconsin ) and a general
hostility of “big business”, satisfied for the time being with prosecutions
under the Sherman Act and regulation of utilities. Whatever we may thing of the
importance of immediate economic effects, looking back today, it is impossible
to mistake the significance of these symptoms of a changing attitude toward
capitalism.
The deepest problem of the
economic sociology of our epoch is whether those tendencies grew out of the
very logic of capitalist evolution, or were distortion of it traceable to
extra-capitalistic influences. Those tendencies, whatever their nature, sources
and relation to each other, hardly asserted themselves strongly enough in
prewar America to have to be listed among the main factors that shaped American
economic history. The Cuban war – and what Europeans love to call American
imperialism, in general – conditioned not important innovations, but it is here
assumed to have had no great influence in distorting any cycles.
2.
…
(прво изд. Joseph A. Schumpeter BUSINESS CYCLES; McGraw – Hill
company, 1939 – New York – Toronto
– London )
No comments:
Post a Comment