From Trade Capitalism to Industrial Capitalism

Abstract

We have presented a description of the proclivity for machine production emanating from Calvinist Protestantism. Whether one accepts Weber’s thesis on this is not crucial to our theorizing in this treatise. The fact that machine-production began to be developed, expanded, and innovated is all that is necessary for us. Whatever its origin, machine production, and then the factory assembly line system that emerged surrounding it, became more successful than artisan production or slave production. If the products were not as perfect as those produced by the artisan master-craftsman, the sheer number of products that could be produced by machines was infinite in comparison. And, machine production, with wage-laborers tending the machines, evolved as less costly than slave or serf labor. Adam Smith’s description of the “pin factory” in The Wealth of Nations already glows with the improvement in productivity resulting from even this simple assembly line process.