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European Proto-Industry and Why Microsoft Should Not Be Allowed to Buy Activision [1]

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Date: 2023-02-02  

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This is another example of an interesting convergence of history I found while researching for the novel in progress. History may not repeat, as a better writer than I said, but it does rhyme.

Proto-industries were just that -- small industries usually done in home or in small shops during the early modern period that were the precursors of the larger mechanized industries that where the hallmark of the industrial revolution. Weaving is a good example, but thy good expand to a variety of products, such as gun barrel making. Historians used to think that such industries had a universally corrosive effect on feudalism and inevitably lead to the end of traditional social institutions and the primacy of markets. The reality, unsurprisingly, was much more complex.

The traditional view did appear to be largely correct in certain parts of Europe, especially England and parts of the Low Countries. In those areas, the privileges of landlords guilds and the state did wither or contract and the power of the market, for good and ill, did become stronger. But in much of Europe, that was not the case. Existing social structures remained and held sway, keeping the market at bay and actually increased the power of the existign social strucurs.

For example, in the Black Forrest region of Germany, strong community controls wokred to prevent such disruptions:

By controlling settlement, they limitedpopulation growth and expansion of the workforce, reduced labourmobility, maintained high marriage ages and small families, and pre-vented young men without land or guild licenses from setting uphouseholds, thereby compelling them to emigrate or take militaryservice. The large numbers of women who therefore never marriedhere prohibited from working in mainstream occupations, often throughactive harassment by male citizens in the community courts. Excludedfrom alternative options, these women became a cheap source ofspinning labour for the worsted industry. By registering servants,compelling unmarried women to live in households headed by parentsor employers, monitoring popular recreations, and severely prosecutingsexual offences, Black Forest communities all but stamped out illegit-imacy, and reduced the incidence of early marriages caused by pre-marital sexual activity. By appointing guild foremen and cloth inspectors,supervising the keeping of guild accounts, and prosecuting offendersagainst guild regulations, communities played a vital role in enforcingguild privileges-not just in traditional crafts, but also (as we will see shortly) in proto-industry. Through their thoroughgoing regulation of markets in land, labour, capital, foodstuffs, and industrial products,Wurttemberg communities affected the cost of almost every decision Institutions and Economic Development in Early Modern Central Europe - 1995 - Journal Article, Ogilve

Such strong communities then lent themselves ot the creation of strong guilds and other corporation like structures that reinforced existing privileges. Those in turn restricted who could work and how they could work in these proto-industries. And that in turn mean that such industries did not have the market-driven dynamism that leads to rapid improvements that typically drive rapid growth. In fact, in some regions, the guilds were eventually so bad for the economy that the fees were so high compared to the value of the guild that they eventually voted themselves out of existence.

So, what does that have to do with a software company buying a video game company? Quite a lot, actually. the power of the guilds was a monopoly power, and it was encouraged by the power of the state. The state enforced the rules of the guilds, in part because the state benefitted, at least in the short term, financially from the arrangement. And that state-enforced monopoly led to an eeconomy that did not work for the average person:

But in early modern Europe successful economies were the exception,not the rule.89 Wiirttemberg was no anomaly. Although the preciseinstitutions might vary, the underlying pattern recurred throughoutEurope: in proto-industry, as in other sectors, overall economic well-being was constrained by the institutional privileges of corporate groups.Markets did not emerge in every proto-industry; they emerged in a fewproto-industries in societies where they were already emerging inagriculture: in England and Flanders; in parts of Switzerland, Saxonyand the Rhineland, and a few other institutional enclaves. Everywhereelse, resources continued to be allocated not through markets, butaccording to the corporate institutional privileges of landlords, com-munities, guilds and merchant companies. These did not wither awayunder the onslaught of proto-industrialisation; they co-opted it, turningproto-industry into yet another source of monopoly profits for powerfulsocial groups Ibid.

The parallels are not perfect, of course, but our economy today suffers under the weight of monopolization. Wealth is massively mis-distributed, and productivity gains have not gone to the workers, in large part because monopolies and near-monopolies control the economic high grounds, just as in the proto-industrial societies of the early moder European period. Allowing Microsoft to further consolidate one of the fastest growing industries is not that different than forcing weavers in the Balck Forrest to obey the whims of a guild.

Now, some of you may be asking why a self-professed socialist would are about the weakening of a capitalist society. First, you generally don't get people to take the path of community and mutual help if they are struggling to survive and afraid of losing everything. In times of disaster, yes, people together. But when you live in a time when of constant misery, of having to be forced to complete by the powers that be to stay in place, when your children's futures are deliberately made to look less certain than your own? Well, it's hard to get people to think about tomorrow under those conditions.

Second, and more importantly, raising the contradictions is a terribly immoral strategy. It makes the lives of real people worse. People are not game pieces, and they are not to be sacrificed for the vain hope that, in the long term, things will one day be better. In the long term, as a better writer than I once said, we are all dead. Anyone telling you otherwise is a self-satisfied, self-serving con-man looking out for themselves. (Luthen Rael can take his sunless mind and shove it someplace actually sunless.)

If you want to build a better world, you do it by making the word as good a place as you can for as many people as you can, not by playing silly eleventh-dimensional chess games and patting yourself on the back for being such a brave, truth telling hero. Yes, many time the world is hard place, and may times you cannot actually do much good, or help many people. And yes, capitalism is immoral, but it is the tool we have right now. It is incumbent upon those of us who care about a better world to use whatever tools we have a hand to make the world better as much as possible.

And for today, that means using the Justice Department to keep Microsoft form turning game industry workings into the equivalent of early modern Black Forrest weavers. It isn't perfect. It isn't even enough. But it is some small good, so it is worth the doing.

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