Mary Harrington Still at Work

What we know today as ‘feminism’ can also be read as a campaign for women to enter the market, under industrial modernity, on the same terms as men. Me at @AmericanAffrs on why this approach to women’s interests, though once justified, is now failing us https://t.co/P7tsa9rqvI

— Mary Harrington (@moveincircles) August 20, 2021

Post-Industrial Bourgeois Christianity(TM) Can't Die Soon Enough.

How many of these women will be writing in 5 to 10 years that they can't find a good man?

CNA: Forum forms women in leadership, dignity, faith

2019 GIVEN Catholic Young Women's Leadership Forum

George Scialabba Reviews

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser and The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America and The Moral Origins of the Great Recession by David Bosworth - Damage: In our new Gilded Age, the worst are not only full of passionate conviction. They are also damnably clever. (via FPR)

Related:
The Deliberate Agrarian: Noam Chomsky on Wage Slavery and Scott Nearing on Wage Slavery

TEOTWAWKI

The End of the World as We Know It - The end of the Industrial Revolution by Paul Gilding (EB)

Hang on, you’re thinking. The industrial revolution? With its belching smokestacks, dirty industry and steam engines? You thought we left that behind long ago, right? You look at your smart phone, robots on Mars, the rise of Facebook and Google and think ‘we’re well past all that’. Isn’t this the age of knowledge, when we’re all hyper-connected in a 24/7 information rich economy? Think again.

Hiding behind those entertaining devices, information overload and exciting new companies, the real bulk of the economy is still being driven by those dirty belching smokestacks and is still being shaped by those who inherited the economic momentum of 19th century England – the coal, oil and gas industries. Look at any list of the world’s 20 largest companies by turnover and you’ll see around three quarters are either producing fossil fuels, trading them or converting them into transport or energy. So I’m afraid the proverbial belching smokestacks still underpin our economy. But they are now in terminal decline. Yes, after 250 years, their time is coming to an end – and faster than you, or they, think.

Too bad Danny Boyle didn't include this in his opening ceremony show - no 20th century socialism/welfare programs if there is nothing to support them.

Related: The latest from John Michael Greer, The monkeywrench wars (EB)

Austin Bramwell, Gregory Clark Slips Down the Memory Hole Already

First came Gregory Clark’s blockbuster, A Farewell to Alms, which offered a novel theory why the Industrial Revolution happened in England. (Short answer: superior breeding, in the words of the Cato Institute’s Jason Kuznicki.) Then came Clark’s fellow economic historian, Joel Mokyr, with his own magisterial history of the Industrial Revolution, The Enlightened Economy. Trevor Butterworth reviews it for the Wall Street Journal today here. This stuff is hot hot hot!

For good reason. The Industrial Revolution may be the singular event in the history of our species – or any species for that matter. Until 200 years ago, you either struggled to get enough to survive or worried about getting killed for it if you succeeded. Now, thanks to the material abundance produced by the Industrial Revolution, humans are free to think on loftier things. (You know, Eat, Pray, Love.) How it happened is one of the most important riddles the social sciences can solve.

What of the availability of cheap high-energy resources being a necessary condition of the Industrial Revolution? (I believe that this is the position that John Michael Greer takes, that without such energy, the technical innovation that took place during the Industrial Revolution would not have happened and spread.)

If manufacturers could make their factories fully automated, would there be enough of a popular backlash to prevent them from doing so?

Who controls the capital? And for what do they use it?