New Lanark: Humanitarian Dystopia?
Was the New World Order partly modelled on a small Scottish mill town?
Nestled in a valley, sharply rising on one side of the split made by the dark, fast flowing River Clyde, while on the other lies a flat enclave of land, before it too rises upward to a height affording views of the basin and the farmland that reaches out to the horizon, dotted by a few hamlets and villages, sits the former mill town of New Lanark.
It is no longer a working mill. It slowly declined over the one hundred and fifty years of its existence, in step with manufacturing in Scotland, until it was completely closed in 1968. Threatened with demolition, New Lanark Trust was created by concerned locals and historians. It preserved the site, the buildings and what machinery remained; restoring the facings, roofs and renovating the site in order to provide housing in the form of flats, and a tourist location, comprising a hotel, a visitor centre, cafe and roof garden.
At the mill’s perimeter, the dark, foamy Clyde, like Guinness, flows rapidly, tumultuously churning to a triumvirate of falls, pouring over each of their rocks, and then remains a fast running torrent, past the settlement’s buildings, until the waters spread wider and the rapidity drops to a still hurried yet less torpid current. It was this feature, alongside the inviting plateau on the northern bank which attracted David Dale, a self-made industrialist from Glasgow and son of a poor tenant farmer, to found his mill town, New Lanark, at this spot, blessed as it was with such natural conveniences to facilitate the economies of cotton weaving.
Dale may be the Founder, however, the name of New Lanark will forever be associated with Dale’s son-in-law, Robert Owen, who became the manager in 1800 and, although his father-in-law had run the mill on general principles of humanity, he extended and rationalised these precepts with the intention of showing the entire industrialising world that a system of production that respected workers and their families as human beings was possible, and, further than that, was more profitable too. (An essential feature of any organising proposition at the time which, if lacking, would have stymied any chance of reform.)
Owen was born in the midst of the First Industrial Revolution, a shop boy from central Wales who left school at nine years old to be apprenticed. At eighteen, after a miscellany of lowly positions, Owen borrowed a hundred pounds and set-up as a cotton manufacturer. He was successful enough in this venture, but a greater opportunity came along when, before he was twenty, he sought and was given management of a more established mill in Lancashire, where, his skills saw him offered a partnership by the owner within two years. The offer was refused in favour of starting out with two other entrepreneurs in the business of making yarn, giving him sole control of a mill, and adding further to his accomplishments and reputation as the industrial system gained ascendancy and power in Britain. With triumphant advancement and increased turnover besides, Owen, on behalf of the company, purchased from David Dale the enterprise which would be weaved into his legacy and that would become the workshop of his social experiments and the ever-referenced topic of his best writings, the mills at New Lanark.
Presently, people are disparaging of communism and socialism yet they forget what gave birth to these ideologies. Industrial Britain had little compunction about setting six year olds to work in dusty, unsafe factories, condemning them to a malformed life and an early grave. Not content with deforming youth, the vanguard of mechanised production laid waste to the system of local production whilst simultaneously clearing the land of workers to cram them into squalid conditions in cities or towns to have them work at a subsistence level, fear for their livelihoods and families continually, exhaust and wear them down by long relentless hours and days slaving in dangerous, unhealthy conditions, until the time they became economically unprofitable and were abandoned to the vagaries of life unprotected. From today’s vantage of relative material well-being, the control aspect of communism and socialism is troublesome, however, from perspective of those suffering the oppression of capital and the reduction of man to a mere appendage of a machine, the promise of justice these ideologies held were deeply attractive, if, even then, their realisation was viewed more sceptically.
As a working class man himself who became, for a brief time, a leading citizen in the nation with access to government ministers and influential thinkers, Owen was appalled by the ‘vice and misery’ industrial capitalism encouraged and the army of Malignants it formed. Nonetheless, he was no socialist or communist, aware as he must have been of the opportunities available to a person of energy and resources, regardless of background; he was a reformer, a meritocrat and a type of humanitarian. He sought to find a path to reconcile improved circumstances for the labourer and his dependants, yet, at the same time, he desired to retain the system of industrialism and profitability for the individual owners of the factories. To do this he formulated a simple theory that a happy, healthy worker was a better, more productive worker, and, to pique the interest of captains of capital, furthermore, a highly profitable worker. New Lanark was his test case and his proof of concept.
In the manufacturing towns and cities across Britain, the workforce of a mill was open to all the temptations and vices such large congregations of humanity could offer, including, to the chagrin of the ‘Master’ class, higher wages and scope for improvement at other employers. In the stand alone mill, cast off from the general conclaves of factories, erected in the countryside, the mill owner was a sort of tyrant, who had control over housing, schooling, provisions as well as work. The owner in these circumstances could be magnanimous or misanthropic as his philosophy of character swayed him and his workers would prosper or suffer in the wake of his actions accordingly. New Lanark, being isolated and self-contained, was unusually privileged as a lab for this type of experimentation. Owen intended to alloy his generous moral principles and feelings with soundly efficient commercial ones. Thus, in this petrie dish of economic organisation, Owen watched with microscopic attention to the unfolding of his spliced ideas.
Workers at New Lanark did not live in luxury but they and their children had a bed each and a couple of rooms with fires and essentials for dining and living. There were communal facilities for washing - hygiene was of the utmost importance at New Lanark and there were routine inspections to ensure that standards of living were being maintained. A free school for the workers’ children educated them to the age of ten, twelve - as a part-time pupil - if they were bright and their family could afford it. Provisions were supplied by shops on site where the foodstuff was of a higher and healthier quality than that found elsewhere for factory workers. The factory itself limited hours - although still long by our standards - and workers could improve themselves by night classes at the school.
The model was intended to exemplify Owen’s maxim, “Any general character, from the best to the worse, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.” Today, it seems naive and paternalistic for numerous reasons, however, there was an obvious truth in Owen’s words: grinding the mass of the population down under intensive, never-ending labour for poverty wages did not assist the formation of noble, cheerful personalities; and a goodwill in his undertaking. Relieving, at the incipient moment of global industrialisation, the cruelty of mechanical production, to inspire ideals and change the course of automation, was Robert Owen’s worthy intent.
How does this relate to the New World Order and the threat of Bio-Tech-Neo-Feudalism that we face in this age? It is interesting to heed the parallels of Owen’s arrangements, some of which straddle in rudimentary form the proposals set out in faux-humane blurb of endless UN, government and local council documents, supplemented by corporate paens to optimistic outcomes and shareholder gains for policies and developments that are nothing less than demonic. Our techno-fascistic feudalists have, some of them, the same strengths, and all of them have the weaknesses of Owen’s attitude and methods.
Many mills would pay their workers in tokens redeemable at only certain shops, where the mill owners also had a financial interest if not possessing it outright. Owen did the same, but, to his credit, he also paid money. However, the token system utilised by New Lanark, although not unique there, does foreshadow the programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies that place the possibility of limiting what we buy, where we buy and how much we buy at the discretion of an authority, just like yesteryear’s mill owners, although lacking the conspicuousness of knowing who is applying the restrictions.
The banning of alcohol at the mill would be applauded by the formative Temperance Societies who had, putting the cart before the horse, assigned alcohol as the temptation and ruination of many a working man and the family he pulled down with him in his descent to the hell of impecuniousness, poverty and dissolution. Like our aspiring Over-Lords who intend to remove our indulgences and impose good health via ordered governance, Owen did not conceive that the prospect of ten hour days, six days a week, filled with the same repetitive function, conscious of the certainty the same day will be repeated without variation until death, might actually be something one requires relief from. Similarly, we might look for escape from a bland AI governed world suppressing our heart’s inclination for all our days.
The site itself had an in-built limitation: its separation by several miles from other dwellings, places of sale and amusement. It was a literal two-minute city: school, infant school, factory, vendors and home all within a few seconds brisk walk. This concentration of people allowed services to be provided efficiently, cheaply and enforced not only a community but community monitoring as well where members would observe each others’ standards and apply a form of regulation on one another’s practices. It created a communitarian identity where everyone worked ‘for the mill’ and the transcendent goals of increased productivity at lower costs, so making the community good the object of the individual’s good. Here, in our day, we can see the attempted shift by lawmakers aligned with the NWO to steer us towards an acceptance of communitarian law where what is judged is not the guilt or innocence of an individual, instead rather, the punishment is measured in terms of its impact on the community and its goals.
It would be contrived to always see in Robert Owen’s idealism something malefic. No doubt, he often had honourable aims - his paying his workers for four months when there was a ban on cotton exports in 1806 is a good instance of his magnanimity - unfortunately, the Neo-Feudalists have learned from him and others how to placate as a means to dominate the labouring class. Owen’s ‘employment engagement strategies’, to use modern parlance, were revolutionary. Education, the Janus-faced social good, was prioritised to give workers richer lives; wrap-around health care was obtainable, such as it was; Owen actively intervened in employees’ lives to assist; and there was, as previously mentioned, a stringent application of cleanliness and hygienic standards, maintained by regular inspections. All so familiar to those of us who have witnessed the compact with the World Economic Forum, left-wing parties and the trade union movement across the developed world, ‘captured’ by the promise of a rewarding covenant between capital and labour, although the quo not being quite clear for the quid being given. If it seems workers have to give up a little more without a concomitant sacrifice by the wealthy who already profit outrageously from exploitation, then the institutions created for and charged with their protection seem willing to accede in the name of ‘good relations’.
The workplaces of the Industrial Revolution could be scenes of violence and abusive punishment for transgressors: the idle, the shirkers and the rebellious. Robert Owen stopped all that in New Lanark. He introduced a monitoring system. A four-sided wooden block hung above each individual’s head, one side painted black, one blue, one yellow and one white. Respectively, each indicated ‘bad behaviour’, ‘indifferent’, ‘good’ and ‘excellent’. Owen called it the Silent Monitor and it acted as a check on workers’ attitudes and actions as, once more, the public nature of the humiliation caused the community to regulate and this was only reinforced by the supervisor’s judgement and the black looks Owen would give to under-performing individuals on his regular rounds of the machines (he lived on site).
An improvement on physical discipline, there is a certain psychological insidiousness about the method of turning your fellow workers against one another through public remonstrance and recognition. It is unclear whether redress extended further than communal and management chiding; nonetheless, in our world, littered with safe spaces and mealy mouths pandering to all the well-worn maxims of ‘human rights’, Owen’s system, updated and expanded with the panopticon surveillance system that has direct access to bank accounts and money, could easily silently monitor an individual and apply punitive measures of varying degrees to them, in full sight of family, friends and colleagues, under the name of ‘transparency’, provoking an unwanted conformity in them…which is good, isn’t it?
Robert Owen is not to be blamed for our current problems, of course. As a man and a mill owner, Owen did more than the many who made their profits on the mountain of broken lives the factory system engendered. George Coombe, an educationalist of the time who was out of sympathy with Owen’s ideas, when he visited New Lanark and was struck by Owen’s generosity to the children’s play and education, commented that the lesson Owen wanted the children to learn was ‘that life may be enjoyed, and that each may make his own happiness consistent with that of all the others’. A fine sentiment and one that seems to be in keeping with the thrust of Robert Owen’s disposition which is seen throughout a life devoted to increasing the well-being of humanity.
Nonetheless, as sure as the Bio-Tech-Feudalists have many naive, paternalists in their rank believing that they are designing a ‘beautiful world’ for the masses to live in (those that are left to live in it), and just as we can criticise them for a hypocrisy and narrowness that is both unappealing as it is revealing, so too is Owen not free from a more nuanced or shaded assessment. A journalist of the period, Thomas Wooler, makes this criticism of Robert Owen’s utopian efforts:
"Let [Owen] abandon the labourer to his own protection; cease to oppress him, and the poor man would scorn to hold any fictitious dependence upon the rich. Give him a fair price for his labour, and do not take two-thirds of a depreciated remuneration back from him again in the shape of taxes. Lower the extravagance of the great. Tax those real luxuries, enormous fortunes obtained without merit. Reduce the herd of locusts that prey upon the honey of the hive, and think they do the bees a most essential service by robbing them. The working bee can always find a hive. Do not take from them what they can earn, to supply the wants of those who will earn nothing. Do this; and the poor will not want your splendid erections for the cultivation of misery and the subjugation of the mind."
Our New World Order wants to safely ensconce its families and its capital at the top of the bio-tech-feudalist pyramid at the cost of our economic, physical and mental freedoms. The People’s rights are negotiable but the rights of capital and hierarchy are as incessant and expansionist as its demands. The freedom of any individual below the apex is of no concern and will be allocated on the merit of the insufferably humiliating ability to please the person one level above. This is the ‘beautiful world’ the WEF wishes to create, doubtlessly coupled with, if not our moral improvement, then our moral compliance with their rigged system.
Is it ourselves that have to be more moral? Perhaps. Yet, from two hundred years ago, the radical Thomas Wooler says it most succinctly and eloquently:
“It is very amusing to hear Mr Owen talk of re-moralizing the poor. Does he not think that the rich are a little more in want of re-moralizing; and particularly that class of them that has contributed to demoralize the poor, if they are demoralized, by supporting measures which have made them poor, and which now continue them poor and wretched? Talk of the poor being demoralized! It is their would-be masters that create all the evils that afflict the poor, and all the depravity that pretended philanthropists pretend to regret.”
Perhaps Robert Owen, the apprenticed shop boy who worked himself to the position of benign industrialist in an age of unprecedented transformation, does not deserve such scathing words. New Lanark is a testament to his humanity. Let us remember that, nonetheless, let us reject his system of high-handed munificence that comes at the price of our humiliation, our individuality and our autonomy.
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Very interesting, thanks.
At its founding, New Lanark seems to offer a vast improvement for workers over contemporary industrial enterprises, but I wonder if in practice this kindly-intended paternalistic model quickly morphed to its evil, oppressive twin? Such a transformation is, after all, a common outcome of good intentions wedded to big plans. Are contemporary accounts able to throw light on this question – or were the workers too scared to say?
A second thought: I am not sure that your comparison between the 19th century industrial capitalists and our 21st century klepto-parasitic overlords is valid. Dale and Owen (and like-minded other British entrepreneurs) share a common ethnicity and cultural outlook with their workers, and through this (for want of a better term!) ‘blood and soil’ link had an organic concern for their ‘inferiors’ welfare (even if this was to be expressed as pity and tough love). In contrast, I do not believe this is the case at all with their modern equivalents, whose true heart is located far from our shores and who actually hate us to death.