It is common to point to all the advantages brought about by the Industrial Revolution for the common person, and these are probably not hard for you to imagine. The standard of living for the average person rose during the Industrial Revolution; the typical wage of the typical unskilled labourer increased. With the modernization that came along with industry, there was an increase in life expectancy. In the Middle Ages when most Europeans worked farming and raising livestock the average life expectancy in England had been around 35 years!
So with modernization and its benefits life expectancy increased. As industry boomed, many people fled the countryside to work in the cities. The jobs that were lost in agriculture could be made up for in factories. Although the conditions in those factories were often dreadful throughout the 19th century – with long working hours, bad air, few safety standards, child labour, and so forth – many effects we have come to think of as positive arose with the urbanization most of us consider normal now.
Unlike earlier agricultural workers, factory workers didn't depend on the whim of nature for their livelihood; they could go to the factory and work even when it was snowing outside, and so forth. So they could work all year. They had greater freedom of mobility and in some cases could even amass some excess capital to invest or to leave to their children. With the cities and machines came possibilities of social mobility that had not existed in the agricultural society before industrialization. A person could, at least in theory, start out at the bottom and wind up as a powerful foreman of the factory, rising from a lower class to a middle class existence, which could then be inherited by his children. If we are thinking strictly in terms of buying power and social mobility, the era of industrialization seems to have been a positive period for the common person in many ways.
But of course, there is more to life than buying power and social mobility. We'll take a close look to the spiritual costs of mechanized labour shortly. There are also the health and sustainability issues. We are beginning to take seriously how industrialization has not just polluted our cities, but has also led to a situation where our whole ecosystem is desperately at risk. The seeds of our current climate crisis can be found in the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of production. The environmental critique of mechanization may ultimately be the most fundamental one.
The combination of capitalism and industrial mechanization have been and can still be criticized from a large number of social, moral, and political perspectives. For instance, from a feminist point of view. In 1981, Angela Davis published a groundbreaking intersectional critical history of Women, Race and Class. In a fascinating chapter on the history of housework, she discussed the scandalous gradual degradation of women's labour into unpaid housework and drew attention to the fact - already pointed out in the 19th century by Karl Marx's collaborator Engels - that women's status had actually continued to go down after the Renaissance, with the development of industrialization coupled with capitalism:
As Frederick Engels argued in his classic work on the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [1884], sexual inequality as we know it today did not exist before the advent of private property. During early eras of human history the sexual division of labour within the system of economic production was complementary as opposed to hierarchical. In societies where men may have been responsible for hunting wild animals and women, in turn, for gathering wild vegetables and fruits, both sexes performed economic tasks that were equally essential to their community’s survival. Because the community, during those eras, was essentially an extended family, women’s central role in domestic affairs meant that they were accordingly valued and respected members of the community. (Davis 1981)
Many women worked alongside men in the mechanized factories of the 19th century, but as general wealth increased, ironically women began to lose status and became unpaid home workers supported by men. By 1950, this was the model in America, and people tended to think it had been like that forever. On the whole it is probably fair to say that as things "improved" for the average white man (more social mobility, more personal wealth) under capitalism+mechanization, most of the people we are familiar with today as members of a marginalized underclass lost status or freedom as part of the cost. Historically, and to some extent still, capitalism has often relied upon or encouraged various forms of deeply inhuman and exploitative activity, including human slavery, colonialism, and cultural imperialism. It is hard to say what the mechanization of human work would have looked like if it had not gone hand in hand with the rise of the Capitalist world view, European white supremacy, and the (in this case mostly Christian) partriarchal system we still face today.