Steampunk

Now there’s a word you don’t hear every day. Steampunk is a growing cultural phenomenon with different meanings depending on who you listen to. In a New York Times article the owner of the Steampunk Workshop Jake von Slatt was quoted as saying that, “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance.” Bruce Sterling, the author of the definitive Steampunk novel The Difference Engine, agrees that there is a romantic element to it. In the current issue of Steampunk Magazine he estimates that as much as 90% of the participants are primarily interested in dressing up in pseudo-Victorian clothing and reading sci-fi novels such as those by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as well as contemporary authors. But he says that there’s more to Steampunk. According to Sterling the other 10% of the phenomenon is a "counterculture arts and crafts movement in a 21st century guise" in which this minority fraction have a "determination to take the means of production away from big, mind-deadening companies who want to package and sell shrink-wrapped cultural product."

To understand this minority within Steampunk requires that one understands the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century. The goal of the Arts and Crafts Movement was essentially to humanize the means of production. They had seen how the industrial process, especially the division of labor, in the hands of capitalism had turned men and women into machines and presented a threat to the continued existence of the craftsman.

It’s Sterling’s opinion that the proposals of John Ruskin, the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, specifically his opposition to Industry, were unrealistic. Attempts to use his work or the others in the Movement as a guide for real world production are doomed to failure, according to Sterling.

I would agree that there were some elements that weren’t realistic within the Movement. Certainly the strong opposition by some to the division of labor was misplaced. That being said the Arts and Crafts Movement did have elements that were very good and need to be remembered.

Rather than focus on Ruskin it’s better to look to the leading voice of the Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris. According to E.P. Thompson in a speech to the William Morris Society in 1959 Morris,

"…had no time for noble savages, and even less for the Fabian nostrum of State bureaucracy. No amount of mechanical manipulation from above could engender the ethic of community; ‘individual men’ (he said) ‘cannot shuffle off the business of life onto the shoulders of an abstraction called the State.’ Contrary to the prevalent opinion, Morris welcomed all machinery which reduced the pain and drudgery of labour; but decentralisation both of production and of administration he believed essential. In True Society, the unit of administration must be small enough for every citizen to feel a personal responsibility."

With this information we can now see that many in the 10% “troublesome” (using Sterling’s words) fraction of the Steampunk phenomenon, being the spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement, are therefore also in keeping with the spirit of Economic Democracy.

So feel free to dress up in romanticized Victorian garb and don’t stop reading those stories of great airships, analytical engines, and fantasy adventures. Go ahead and dream of a world built on brass, steel and steam. But at the same time don’t forget the artisans and craftsmen who provide the subversive element to Steampunk.