Comparison of the characteristics of industrial and agricultural civilizations

Compared with the industrial society, labor in the agricultural society has the following characteristics:

The vast majority of the labor is manual; the vast majority of the labor deals directly with the objects that are the objects of labor and less with human beings; the more complex, i.e., the manual labor that contains an intellectual element, is highly specialized, especially in handicrafts, and the complexity and artistry of this kind of labor and its products require The complexity and artistry of this type of work and its products require long training and skill on the part of the laborer. Therefore, the knowledge necessary for workers in agricultural societies is mainly special knowledge about particular objects as objects of direct labor and particular techniques as processes of direct labor. The fact that education in agricultural societies belongs to the private rather than the public * * * sphere is directly related to this characteristic of agricultural labor. In industrial societies, the physical and intellectual qualities of labor similar to those in agricultural societies are increasingly dissolved by machines as a result of technological progress. It is the worker who operates the machine, and it is the machine that acts directly on the object of production. As machines become more and more automated, the physical element of labor becomes less and less important, and the intellectual element that characterizes industrial labor becomes more and more important. In the case of the latter, it is not primarily knowledge of the machine and its control, but the ability to adapt to the working environment and to communicate with others. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, the frequent changes of occupation; secondly, because of the social nature of the industrial economy in all its aspects before, during and after production, most of the work in industrial society cannot be done without communication with others. In short, labor in industrial society is primarily and increasingly communicative and semantic, inseparable from dealing with people and meanings rather than with concrete things, and only very few specialists require truly specialized knowledge. In other words, the more developed specialization of industrial civilization than of agricultural civilization is found only in specialists and materialized specialists, i.e., machines, and the vast majority of people in industrial society are required to be merely literate.