Spencer Heath Archive

Item 801

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

February 2, 1956

White envelope has items 801 & 802

All this academic twaddle about the industrial revolution changing the whole relationship between employers and employes is intellectually nauseating. The substance of the whole matter is this: Before the revolution, an employee shoveled dirt with a hand shovel, and mighty little of it per diem. He did not own the shovel. After the ‘revolution,’ so-called (I’d like to put revolution in quotes), he shoveled dirt with a steam shovel, and a hell of a lot of it. Of course he didn’t own the steam shovel any more than he owned the hand shovel. The only difference is in the cost of the shovel and the amount of dirt moved. The employee was a lot less wage slave with the steam shovel than he was with the hand shovel. He got more pay, lived better and lasted longer. Anyhow, who ever heard of slaves getting wages?

That’s the academic bunk. They preach it everlastingly — ever since I was grown, ever since I was about twenty — wheezing and drooling about the poor working man who became “enslaved” because his employer was able to provide him with more efficient tools. Then they say, what about technological unemployment? Of course some men had to give up hand shovels and learn to do something else. The logic of the professors would seem to be that we should never abandon inferior tools for better ones lest the workman should have to learn something more efficient and new. Progress should be tied to his lack of enterprise, forsooth.

The industrial ‘revolution’ was no revolution at all in the sense of introducing anything qualitatively different. — Neither was the French Revolution!