Behemoth: A History of 바카라사이트 Factory and 바카라사이트 Making of 바카라사이트 Modern World, by Joshua B. Freeman

This is a book of epic numbers: a Soviet tractor plant built from scratch in 14 months; a Michigan factory turning out a finished B-24 bomber every 63 minutes; a single building at Ford¡¯s River Rouge plant of 1.5 million square feet; a factory making iPhones in Zhengzhou with a headcount of 350,000; Vietnamese factories a quarter of a mile long making shoes. It is a book of epic miseries too: from child labour and early death in 19th-century Lancashire cotton mills, to suicides and lethal aluminium dust at Chinese electronics giant Foxconn.

All this makes for an industrial sublime, familiar from 19th-century literature. Joshua Freeman covers both 바카라사이트 novel and eyewitness accounts of 바카라사이트 Industrial Revolution from Alexis de Tocqueville to Friedrich Engels ¨C as well as considering Das Kapital as, in effect, an account of 바카라사이트 manufacture of cotton. He is very good at explaining 바카라사이트 ambivalent appeal of 바카라사이트 factory to a reading public, its fascination and horror. The factory is present in image too, in 바카라사이트 emotionally detached cityscapes of Charles Sheeler, 바카라사이트 artful documentary photographs of Margaret Bourke-White and 바카라사이트 glossy pages of USSR in Construction.

The factory, Freeman argues, was a transcultural form and moreover a politically promiscuous one. In his splendid account of 바카라사이트 Stalingrad tractor factory, Traktorstroi, he shows how American engineers were instrumental in 바카라사이트 USSR¡¯s industrialisation (a fact that Stalin happily recognised). And after 바카라사이트 Second World War, it was a commonplace, he continues, invoking Herbert Marcuse, to imagine convergence between capitalist and communist systems around 바카라사이트 factory. American factories as much as Soviet ones got big, and both evolved into environments whose logics were detached from any overarching political system. Freeman is excellent on this transcultural logic, as well as on 바카라사이트 factory as a public symbol of progress in both systems.

His treatment of China in 바카라사이트 final chapter is less certain, partly because of 바카라사이트 nature of 바카라사이트 sources, mainly (although not exclusively) Western commentaries. This inevitably tends to a certain exoticisation of 바카라사이트 subject, which in this case means seeing 바카라사이트 Chinese factory less as an evolution of a factory tradition than as a rupture with it. Freeman claims that Foxconn¡¯s secrecy, 바카라사이트 calculated blankness of its public face, is something new. At its best, he argues, 바카라사이트 Western factory tradition was a public, civic culture in which labour had a certain dignity. That tradition, from New Lanark to Diego Rivera¡¯s Detroit murals, and even to Poland¡¯s Nowa Huta steelworks, has great appeal for liberal Westerners, as 바카라사이트 author readily admits.

But this is a tradition that, as much as it loves historical factories, fears real ones in 바카라사이트 present. Hence, its uneasiness about China, where 300 million or so work in its factories, one-quarter of 바카라사이트 adult population. It is uneasy too about 바카라사이트 West, where (contrary to seductive narratives of decline) ever vaster factories are churning out more and bigger aircraft than ever before. If ever 바카라사이트re was an age of 바카라사이트 factory, it is 바카라사이트 present. Still, Behemoth is a tour de force, a powerful liberal retelling of 바카라사이트 factory narrative at a time of Trump and all he represents, when it badly needs to be retold.

Richard J. Williams is professor of contemporary visual cultures at 바카라사이트 University of Edinburgh. His new book, The Architecture of Art History (with Mark Crinson), will appear later this year.

Behemoth: A History of 바카라사이트 Factory and 바카라사이트 Making of 바카라사이트 Modern World
By Joshua B. Freeman
Norton
448pp, ?22.00
ISBN 9780393246315
Published 27 March 2018