The Revolution No One Noticed

Letter from C to E:

We have changed role entirely from mainly producers to consumers with all kind of interesting consequences of governmenting. common folk were viewed throughout history, dark ages, rinascimento and much of the industrial revolution up to my own youth mainly as labourers, manpower, producers . To be profitable man of burden had to be kept only as a marginal consumer, as marginal as possible as a matter of fact. As a consumer of some import it was thought, a labourer would require higher wages thus by the same token undermining his profitability just as a horse might do if it required expensive food maintenance or even expensive amenities. ( it turned out as we will see, that what was necessary for industry and commerce to increase consumership and profit exponentially, all the world needed was a major crisis and a maqjor shift in the direction of commerce from vertical to lateral, but lets follow the event qs I witnessed them ) Over time (2000 years or so) all kinds of social , bureaucratic and financial obstacles were implemented with the aim of keeping man's wage labour ( as inexpensive as possible. Custom levies and new taxes were constantly contrived to make workers unable to consume more than the minimum necessary. Commerce even between adjoining towns was discouraged by levies taxing the movement of goods. In France Windows were taxed and once on returning from Italy to Canada a customs officer went through all the labels on my clothes and considered charging me tax on a sweater that my mother had hand knit for me from wool recicled from old sweaters which i had bought in Canada. it was incredibly hard for Honeymooners- even in the fifties to acquire anything superfluous... And look at the households now! the hoarding phenomenon an epidemic! A garbage collector in Italy in the fifties , would come to via Mascia Scala once a week with a linen bag the size of a mailbag, walk up to the fourth floor and start collecting the garbage of fourteen families. When he was done the bag , about the size of a regular garbage bag, was not quite full. I figure from that that i produce at least 25 times the waste I was producing in the 50s and waste is our number one industry. I think that up to the fifties mass production was far from reaching its potential and preventing labourer from sharing in the benefits because all those historical controls aimed at keeing labour cheap were still in effect. .. I overlooked many details, but one thing is evident when you go to Europe now you are not bothered by customs Here, in north America they are slack but still hanging on to a now ridiculous practice. Ridiculous and counterproductive it was even sixty years ago. For example goods were taxed purportedly to protect local industry, even on goods that where not produced in these countries.
More: You had to apply for permits for almost anything, people were really under the thumbs, Italians who (like Braceros) migrated seasonally to France, had a percentage of their wages deducted for the Vatican, and for the Italian government among a dozen other deductions. It was really impossible to get ahead of the game, and people who worked in factories, mines, and mills at first, were kept on starvation wages. 16 tons and what have you got?! The fear of communism started loosening up things, then, big ships and containers really got it going. I was on a train going through the south of France mid fifties, it was moonless night, farms and villages rolling by hardly visible not one light bulb burning in the night. Even fair size towns were completely immersed in darkness. Me with my head leaning against the window with just a night light in the cabin barely enough to make a feeble reflection of me and the cabin on the glass through which i wasobserving the landscape rolling ny ghostlike, less substantial then the reflections on the glass. Houses seemed strangely blind. Towns were so weirdly absent and desolidified. I was watching another town go by ... =it is funny because a dog sleeping is a still a dog, and so a man, but a house or a town sleeping is something strange... anyway was going by another ghostly town and then I bolted! there was light at one window! ONE ROOM WAS LIT UP!!!

Just to fill the insomniac wee hours, am thinking more about the evolution of mass transport and commerce. Cheap oil and then the Suez canal crisis caused ships to grow to immense size and these immense size ships engendered containers. , and what originally was commerce that moved products as much as possible only upwards, from the lower level labour classes upwards to higher classes and higher wage earner with as little as possible lateral distance. With the exception of such goods as spices silk, luxury items and of essential durable goods such as salt and grains the industrial revolution was idling.. We still measure grains by the bushel, and I saw in late 40s in Salerno a small freighter being loaded by the bushel, up on the run they trudged on springy planks which inclined less and less as the vessel slowly and painfully sank deeper. Transport increased a lot after the second war thanks to a plethora of ex navy transport ships, The oil fields had expanded too by the war and kept on going so that now- shortly after WW2, a low wage earner in japan and could pay for his expensive necessary imported goods by producing very cheaply whatever they could and exporting transversely to higher wage earners across the ocean. I, for instance, tried to save a tin toy car made in japan from KP ration tin cans of Campbell chicken nodule soup. You could peer inside the little windows and see it printed on the tin which was therefore turned inside out for the use. Campbell chicken noodle soup interior. Movement of goods was primarily upward and secondarily sideways. . , so that now we have fresh fruit from Chile while once we only got bananas and citrus fruits in the winter. So really the watershed for commerce was the Suez Crisis. Before that if Ford built a plant for cars and trucks in Trieste, the intended market was strictly local,,,, and for cars and large equipment I imagine it is still so, but the basic material may now come from across the ocean and the finished product return there. I suppose some commerce may have been circular in between the two wars, but now it runs to enormous volume on oil and supertankers and ships, so much so that commerce now is primarily lateral. That is a revolution (in its true sense) that has affected all kinds of old customs and bureaucracies. When politician are forced to deal with this enormous shift and they talk of protecting their constituents vanishing jobs with protective tariffs, they are pissing against the wind. So there, but anyways I am sure this material (of which we are the shiny nice smelling tattooed and ear ringed product is available from expert sources. these here above was just the product of insomnia and an old man that learned to figure out things as much as possible in his own elementary way.
Good night.