![[CW: Child slavery and abuse of the poor] Funny how libs are quick to mention gulags but never mention British workhouses (or probably don't even know about them)](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/3187d500-77a8-4a3e-b046-573855ba7069.jpeg){kind=link}
It's almost like people are trained to accept capitalist slavery as normal and hate poor people.
By the way, many widows and children were sent to workhouses. Unable to support themselves after the man of the house died from war or tuberculosis or some shit.
Gee, I wonder why women fought so hard for the right to enter the male workforce and vote.
The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilising the free labour of their inmates. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bones to produce fertiliser, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.
>Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree top,
When you grow old, your wages will stop,
When you have spent the little you made
First to the Poorhouse and then to the grave
The Poor Law was not designed to address the issue of poverty, which was considered to be the inevitable lot for most people; rather it was concerned with pauperism, "the inability of an individual to support himself". Writing in 1806 Patrick Colquhoun commented that:
"Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth."
Monstrous.
This all happened under capitalism.
And the kicker?
US prisons use slave labour even today.
There are over a million slaves today in these US prisons.
And even Western countries today that provide relief to the poor operate on the same principal of Less Eligibility as the British capitalists did in the 18 and 1900s.
Make no mistake, the ruling class know where their wealth comes from and will leech you dry, one way or another.
I like to compare the levels of abject, unspeakable misery during the industrial revolution in the capitalist countries, drawn out over hundreds and hundreds of years, with the industrialization of the Soviet Union or China.
Oh, some places in China had bad air for a couple of decades? There's a region of the UK called the 'Black Country' cause of the coal smoke fully pervading the area for most of the 19th century. The actually literal textbook example of evolution by natural selection, as in the example I learned from my actual biology textbook, was the peppered moth, a moth species that was mostly white but gradually evolved to be mostly black, because that gave it better camouflage on trees that were completely covered in soot.
Ah, but then again, one must consider: China bad.