MECANISMOS DE SOLUCIÓN

When textbooks refer to production they generally mean positive production, but human societies, by combining labor, capital, and natural resources, also give rise to negative production. There are essentially two types of negative production:

a. the deliberate destruction of men and wealth b. pollution and the destruction of the environment.

Let us analyze these two types of negative production separately. In all human societies there are perverse people who destroy human lives and wealth, for one reason or another. Some of these persons place their acts in the framework of political ideology or religious doctrine, but in essence they are nevertheless agents of destruction. The assassin is “labor” which by the use of “capital” (say, a gun) brings about a negative production by destroying human capital. The arsonist is “labor” which, in combination with “capital”

(often, a match and a gasoline can) destroys physical capital. The bomb-thrower is “labor” which, making use of “capital” (dynamite), destroys human and physical capital at the same time. The mass of those who, with one excuse or another, or without any excuse whatever, destroy instead of build varies from society to society and from period to period. Their potential number is, however, always higher than their actual number because society defends itself, devoting resources—labor and capital—in an effort to control the phenomenon.

At a macroscopic level, the negative production of major significance is war. The first victim of every war is truth. There is no war that has not been cloaked in lies and specious arguments designed to convince people of its timeliness or necessity, in the same way as there is no bomb-thrower who does not try to convince himself and others of the need or worth of his criminal action. In the course of human history, men have been massacred and riches have been destroyed continually, and the most absurd and cruel crimes have been committed, always in the name of some remote ideal, at times religious, at times political, at times social and economic. Whatever the ultimate motivation, war remains essentially the organization of “labor”

(the military) and “capital” (weaponry) with the avowed intention of destroying the maximum quantity and quality of the labor and capital of the so-called enemy. In the animal world, only man and the ant have developed mass organization for the destruction of their own kind.

We have seen that man’s productive capacity is a function of the quality and quantity of labor and capital, of the state of the arts, and of a certain collective psychological climate. The same can be said of man’s destructive capacity. Capital, technology, and the organizational skills which assist him in his productive activities also help him in his destructive activities. Consequently, a criminal in an industrial society has a destructive potential infinitely superior to that of his counterpart in a preindustrial society. In the same way, an industrial-era army has a destructive power infinitely greater than that of an army in

preindustrial times. A battalion of any contemporary Central American republic would destroy the armies of imperial Rome in the course of a few hours.

These considerations must be borne in mind when one speaks of wars of the past. It has been written that

“some thousand fighters, some hundred dead” was the balance sheet of most conflicts of the preindustrial era. Nevertheless, if the wars of bygone days were hardly murderous in a direct sense, they could cause serious destruction of physical capital and could cause high mortality via famine and disease. Armies on the move killed or confiscated livestock, burned or confiscated food reserves, and destroyed houses, mills, barns, and other agricultural buildings. Since the armies of the past inflicted the worst damage on rural areas, the predominantly agricultural societies in question were struck at the very foundation of their economic structure. From a purely economic point of view, war was a much greater evil than the plague, and all the more evil as the societies in question suffered from a relative scarcity of capital in relation to existing population. Plague destroyed men, but not capital, and those who survived the onslaught of the disease usually found themselves in more favorable economic conditions. War, on the other hand, hit capital above all, and those who survived found themselves in conditions of the most abject misery. In the chronicles and documents of the time, descriptions abound of countrysides and towns reduced to flaming wastes and of children who, crying and begging for bread, died of hunger in the streets. Phrases such as “the whole area was turned into a desert” or “where men lived there are now only savage animals” recur frequently in the documents of those times.²⁷ They were not rhetorical exaggerations. The historian often can replace the prose with figures and confirm the dismal, anguished accounts of the time with factual data.

In Cheshire (England) out of a total of 264 villages, 52 were wholly or partly devastated in the Norman invasion in 1066. By 1070, as a result of William’s campaign of 1069–70, this figure had increased to 162.²⁸ About the middle of the fourteenth century, the armies engaged in the Hundred Years’ War ravaged, among innumerable others, the possessions of the Abbey du Lys (near Melun, France). In 1384, fifteen years after the most recent pillage, the estate was in the following condition.

forest: 460 arpents of which 300 were burned vineyards: 32 arpents of which 22 were destroyed arable land: 190 arpents of which 90 were laid waste.²⁹

In the early fifteenth century, at la Bastide des Jourdans in Haute-Provence (France), 336 of the 346 acres of good arable land belonging to the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem were laid waste, and a vineyard of 178 acres was completely destroyed. Near Grambois, a vineyard of 74 acres was destroyed, and most of the 618 acres of arable land were abandoned. At Montegut, “where there used to be a beautiful farm there is now neither a man, nor a woman, nor a chicken.”³⁰ The effects of the various campaigns of the Hundred Years’

War (1337–1453) on the volume of trade in northern France are reflected in the dramatic fluctuations of the revenues from the toll at the Port de Neuilly, in the valley of Paris:³¹

1301: 250 livres

In the territory of Saarburg (Germany) during the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 48), the livestock was drastically depleted as shown in Table 3.7. Such destructions were particularly disastrous because the available resources and productivity normally ruled out rapid recovery.

Human perversity is the source of certain forms of negative production. Ignorance and individual selfishness are sources of other ills. In this respect one must distinguish between (a) destruction of natural resources, (b) pol

Table 3.7 Livestock losses in Saarburg territory (Germany) during the Thirty Years’ War Number of head

Livestock Before the war After the war

Horses 2,651 116

Oxen 5,077 36

Hogs 5,927 10

Sheep 18,267

Goats 2,749

Source: Franz, Dreissigjährige Krieg, p. 45.

lution of the environment with the waste products of consumption, (c) pollution of the environment with undesirable by-products of productive activities, (d) damage to the health of those engaged in production.

From all these points of view, the capacity for negative production of European preindustrial societies was infinitely lower than that of industrial societies. First of all, the population was small and per-capita production limited. Moreover, pervasive poverty compelled people to reduce waste to a minimum, and durable goods were continually re-used. Lastly, there was no widespread use of many products such as petroleum and coal, which are largely responsible for pollution of the environment in the contemporary world.

Considerations of this kind recently led an economic historian to assert:

Pollution, loss of natural environment, traffic congestion and accidents have clearly resulted from industrialization and modern technology and have no obviously important analogues in preindustrial societies. Moreover, the more work that is done on traditional peasant societies the clearer does it become that these societies have often achieved an almost miraculous accommodation with nature, balancing present use and preservation for the future with a degree of success which the modern economic machine has rarely approached.³²

Unfortunately, however, things were not so rosy in preindustrial Europe. Undoubtedly the capacity of preindustrial societies for disturbing ecological equilibria was infinitely smaller than that of industrial societies. But, this limitation aside, even preindustrial societies managed to mismanage. The following story, reported by Dr Ramazzini in his celebrated book, published in 1713, is good evidence that certain evils which afflict industrial societies were well known, though on a smaller scale, in preindustrial Europe:

A few years ago a violent dispute arose between a citizen of Finale, a town in the dominion of Modena, northern Italy, and a certain business man who owned a huge laboratory at Finale where he manufactured sublimate. The citizen of Finale brought a lawsuit against the manufacturer and demanded that he should move his workshop outside the town or to some other place, on the ground

that he poisoned the whole neighborhood whenever his workmen roasted vitriol in the furnace to make sublimate. To prove the truth of his accusation the citizen produced the sworn testimony of the doctor of Finale and also the parish register of deaths, from which it appeared that many more persons died annually in that quarter and in the immediate neighborhood of the laboratory than in other localities. Moreover, the doctor gave evidence that the residents of that neighborhood usually died of wasting disease and diseases of the chest; this he ascribed to the fumes given off by the vitriol, which so tainted the air near by that it was rendered unhealthy and dangerous for the lungs.³³

Another common example of shortsighted behavior was the destruction of forests. It meant not only the direct destruction of rich capital, but also the deterioration of the environment in the plains below, facilitating floods and the accumulation of stagnant waters, which became the breeding grounds of malaria.

Within the city walls, one ought not to be dazzled by the presence of magnificent structures, such as the cathedrals, the large palazzi of the rich, or the palace of the Commune. As Robert Dallington wrote about Tuscany at the beginning of the seventeenth century:

All is not gold in Italy, though many travellers gazing onelly at the beautie of their cities and the painted surface of their houses, thinke it the only Paradise of Europe.³⁴

In order to remain within the shelter of the walls, people crowded into relatively small areas, creating dangerously high population densities. Water wells were unsafe. The almost complete lack of hygienic facilities created serious problems in relation to the disposal of human wastes. People used streets and squares as public latrines and threw everything out of the window without care for passersby.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the mother of the Regent of France wrote:

Paris is a horrible place and ill smelling. The streets are so mephitic that one cannot linger there because of the stench of rotting meat and fish and because of a crowd of people who urinate in the streets.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the English diplomat John Barrow remarked that Peking “enjoys one important advantage, which is rarely found in capitals out of England: no kind of filth or nastiness, creating offensive smells, is thrown out into the streets.”³⁵

To human was added animal refuse. Automobile exhaust fumes are toxic. The dung of numerous horses in the narrow and airless streets of preindustrial towns was, perhaps, not as harmful to health, but it was no more pleasant.

From the thirteenth century onward, town administrations made numerous provisions to deal with such inconveniences. How effective these measures were is hard to say, but the fact that prohibitions and threats were continually repeated makes one suspect that people took little notice of the ordinances and that penalties were not enforced strictly enough. On occasion the municipal authorities took positive measures.

In Siena, toward the end of the thirteenth century, the town administration was concerned with the garbage and filth accumulating daily in the Piazza del Campo. So it entrusted the cleaning of the square to Giovannino di Ventura, who kept a sow and four piglets in the Piazza to eat the abundant supply of refuse.³⁶ Even traffic congestion is not an altogether new problem. Early in the fourteenth century, traffic had become so congested in Florence that the statutes of the Capitano del Popolo of 1322–25 (lib. V, rub. XXII, c. 86) prohibited the circulation of carts carrying timber in the center of the city on Saturdays.

With the sixteenth century, the increased use of coal in England, first for domestic and then for industrial purposes, opened the doors to the Industrial Revolution but also to our pollution problems. By the

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seventeenth century, that eminent physician, Thomas Sydenham (1624–89), advised living in the country because “the town air is full of vapors.” In 1661 John Evelyn wrote his famous pamphlet Fumifugium in which, among other things, one reads:

in London we see people walk and converse pursued and haunted by that infernal smoake. The inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies, so that catharrs, phtisicks, coughs and consumption rage more in that one City than in the whole Earth besides.

Many activities damaged not only the environment, but also the health of the men who took part in them.

The founder of industrial medicine was Bernardino Ramazzini of Bologna, professor of practical medicine at the University of Modena from 1682 to 1700 and at the University of Padua from 1700 to 1714. It is sufficient to open at random his masterpiece De Morbis Artificum Diatriba to find innumerable examples of the fatal consequences of many activities:³⁷

miners: they come up into the untainted open air looking as ghastly as the retinue of the god of the underworld because of their stay in those foul dark places. Whatever metal they mine, they invite dreadful diseases which too often mock at every remedy…. But it is from mercury mines that there issues the most cruel bane of all that deal death and destruction to miners…. In the mines of Meissen where black pompholyx is found, the hands and legs of the miners are eaten away to the bone.

gilders: we all know what terrible maladies are contracted from mercury by goldsmiths, especially by those employed in gilding silver and copper objects. This work cannot be done without the use of amalgam, and when they later drive off the mercury by fire they cannot avoid receiving the poisonous fumes into their mouth, even though they turn away their faces. Hence craftsmen of this sort very soon become subject to vertigo, asthma, and paralysis. Very few of them reach old age, and even when they do not die young their health is so terribly undermined that they pray for death.

potters: they need roasted or calcined lead for glazing their pots… their mouths, nostrils, and the whole body take in the lead poison, hence they are soon attacked by grievous maladies. First their hands become palsied, then they become paralytic, splenetic, lethargic, cachectic, and toothless, so that one rarely sees a potter whose face is not cadaverous and the color of lead.

sulfur workers: among the minerals that are in daily use, sulfur is employed for many purposes and does serious harm to those who roast and liquefy it or use it in their manufactures. Those who deal with burning or liquefied sulfur contract coughs, dyspnoea, hoarseness, and sore eyes.

tanners: they steep the hides of animals in pits with lime and gallnuts, tread them with their feet, wash and clean them, and smear them with tallow for various purposes; I mean that they are distressed in the same way by the incessant stink and foul exhalations; one can see them with cadaverous complexions, swollen bodies, ghastly looks, and oppressed breathing; they are nearly all splenic. I have observed many cases of dropsy in workers who follow this trade.

glass-workers: during the process of making glass vessels the men stand continually half-naked in freezing winter weather near very hot furnaces…they are liable to diseases of the chest…. Pleurisy, asthma, and a chronic cough are the natural result. But a far worse fate awaits those who make colored glass for bracelets and other ornaments for women. In order to color the crystal, they use calcinated borax, antimony, and a certain amount of gold; these they pound together to an impalpable powder and mix it with glass to make the paste needed for this process, and however much they cover and

avert their faces while they do this they cannot help breathing in the noxious fumes. Hence it often happens that some of them fall senseless, and sometimes they are suffocated; or in the course of time they suffer from ulcers in the mouth, oesophagus, and trachea. In the end they join the ranks of consumptives, since their lungs become ulcerated, as has been clearly shown by the dissection of their corpses.

More than two centuries were to pass before Dr Ramazzini’s concern for the working condition of labor became public concern and found expression in preventive legislation.

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Part II