Talk:Steam mill

Poetic nonsense aside
Could someone who has knowledge of Steam mills be so kind as to indicate when these things started being built and when they eventually got replaced by Electric/Gas/Carrot & stick ??? The article as it stands is a waste of space because it says nothing useful.


 * A history of steam mills in relation to the lumber industry is outlined in the book Technics and Architecture: The Development of Materials and Systems for Buildings by Cecil B. Elliott and published by the MIT Press. Could sources like this help to get this article back on track? --Drabaverna (talk) 05:49, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Misquote and Clarification
The article quotes Marx, "The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."

That is a misquote, Marx wrote, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."

The article says. "Some interpret Marx as advocating technological determinism, with such statements as "The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist",[1] but others argue that he was not."

Marx was quite specific that technological determinism was the cause for new societies. Marx wrote (in response to Proudhon's objection that an already advanced division of labour existed before the steam-mill, that labour creating the numerous parts that constitute a steam-mill), "Thus it is slapping history in the face to want to begin by the division of labour in general, in order to get subsequently to a specific instrument of production, machinery.

Machinery is no more an economic category than the bullock that drags the plough. Machinery is merely a [material] productive force. The modern workshop, which depends on the application of machinery, is a social production relation, an economic category."

Marx further clarifies "[material] productive force", "It must be carefully noted that competition always becomes the more destructive for bourgeois relations in proportion as it urges on a feverish creation of new productive forces, that is, of the material conditions of a new society."

In other words, the steam-mill began the process for the new industrial capitalist society.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy173.73.131.126 (talk) 20:10, 14 June 2013 (UTC)