Back to 1821

Jean Tinguely, the Swiss artist (1925-1991), famously created kinetic sculptures built from the carcasses of industry, including cogs, conveyor belts, motors, and crankshafts. His absurd, often self-destructive machines produced nothing but noise and smoke – a satire of modern society based on production, consumption, and obsolescence.

A visit to the ‘Grand Palais’ in Paris to see the Tinguely and de Saint Phalle exhibition is a must for those in the neighborhood. Behind the show stands a contrast between two competing ideologies.

According to one perspective, industrial production alienates humans, as Tinguely and many others suggested or argued. Machinery, the ‘technical foundation of the capitalist revolution’ according to Karl Marx, led to dehumanizing regression rather than societal progress. From this angle, a trade deficit in goods can be pursued as a liberating strategy enabling a nation to utilize its resources for higher-value (or less destructive) activities such as services and the virtual economy.

The counter-view sees the factory as the crucible of modern nationhood, thereby enabling a human-transcending purpose to emerge. The Industrial Revolution is long credited as the driving force behind the power of nations, starting with Britain. Through that lens, factories symbolize innovation, productivity, military strength, and economic independence. It follows that a trade deficit is an ignominy, and that competitive industrialization is a patriotic endeavor.

In 1821, David Ricardo, the English economist, sought to illustrate the tension between the two perspectives in a famous section called ‘The Machine Question’ in ‘On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.’

‘The opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy.’

And yet, ‘The employment of machinery could never be safely discouraged in a State, for if a capital is not allowed to get the greatest net revenue that the use of machinery will afford here, it will be carried abroad, and this must be a much more serious discouragement to the demand for labour, than the most extensive employment of machinery.’

With US reindustrialization trends on one side and the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence-driven robotics on the other, the man versus machine debate is resurfacing with a vengeance two centuries later.

Considering the dramatic evolution of society, the economy, politics, and geopolitics in the 19th and 20th centuries, the world’s transformation ahead is subject to impenetrable uncertainty. One can only imagine what a piece of art à la Tinguely would look like in 2050.