The Rochdale Canal, Manchester. This was where raw cotton was shipped to local mills, W. explains. Coal too – they needed it for the boilers that fed the mill steam engines.
Few things interest W. more than industrial history. Military history, perhaps; Jewish messianic thought – that too. But the history of industry; the history of the industrial city and the history of what happens after industry: W. says we can discover in such accounts great truths about our age.
We admire the row of warehouses, each from a different period. That's Murray's Mill, W. says, reading from our guidebook. We admire the four multi-story blocks. It was a cotton spinning mill. Actually, they're all cotton spinning mills on the Rochdale Canal, each from a different period.
Before the 1790s, the mills were water-powered or horse driven, W. reads. Murray Mill, like its neighbour, New Mill, was steam powered. The use of steam-power in the cotton industry meant it remained profitable for Mancunion merchants to import cotton, spin it, and then transport it for sale to the London market.
Profit! Free trade! And so Manchester became a new kind of city, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. Das Manchestertum: that was the word the Germans coined for this new kind of economic individualism. And wasn't it because the city was turned almost entirely to profit and free trade that Marx looked to it for the chance of revolution? Wasn't it because of the terrible poverty and unemployment that it saw mass movements of protest?
But Mancunion industry saw off the rebellion of workers, we read. By the 1850s, corporations became stable, and employment increased. It was all due to new models of internal organisation, we learn, which the Manchester men, the new merchants, borrowed from the military. Bureaucracy: that's what they discovered. The chain of command. Each worker was assigned a place, and hence a function in the institutional whole.
In the end, it was all about time, W. says. The worker was encouraged to take the long term view – to understand his life in terms of his service to a firm. Time was predictable, certain. Deferred gratification … Long-term goals … Self-discipline, in view of future rewards: that's how the men of Manchester saved the city from revolution. The prestige of work.
They've converted the mills now, of course, W. says. They've become shopping outlets and museums. They're part of the new heritage tourism. My God, who would have believed it: that tourists would come here, to Manchester? Who are these tourists, anyway?
Tourism, leisure, that's what the city's all about. Leisure! Who has any time for leisure! There isn't any time, not anymore. There isn't any steadiness of purpose. Oh for the unemployed, there's time. For the sick, the early-retired, plenty of time! But for the rest of them, working in the creative industries? For the others, in their business start-ups?
Ah, there's no long-term, not now. No deferred gratification. For the new elite, it's all about contacts, about their network, not about the firm. Self-discipline without dependency: that's what they show, the editors of the new media, the advertising creatives, living in converted warehouses. Free wheeling initiative: that's what they exhibit, the floor traders in brokerage firms, the internet entrepreneurs who buy apartments redeveloped byUrban Splash.
And for the rest of them, the non-elite, around whom their firms are constantly changing? For those for whom work means constant insecurity, the constant re-engineering and restructuring of their workplaces, constant delayering and outsourcing, constant downsizing and networkisation? Labour has become almost entirely casualised. That's what the consultants recommend. It's what the market wants, they tell their clients: labour flexibility impresses the investors.
Where now the prestige of work? Where the long-term? But there is no long term. Work tasks have become fragmentary and ill defined. There is no solidarity; the team with whom I work this week will be different from the one with whom I work the next. And I might be let go at any moment, I might become one of the sick or the unemployed …
We stop to read some graffiti. Happy hour is now enforced by law. And then, Just Blag It, the first two words in black, the middle one in orange. And then, I hate Lorraine Kelly and underneath it, in different writing, Davina McCall. W. reminds me of his favourite piece of graffiti, which he saw in the Northern Quarter: The rich and powerful piss on us and the media tell us it's raining.
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