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.
And the kicker here is that at the time, these same liberals were patting themselves on the back for supposedly abolishing slavery.
Much like the how the British pat themselves on the back for fighting the Nazis while doing the same Nazi trick of dehumanising the less fortunate.
Praise themselves for fighting the Nazis while starving 3 million Indians to death
And the "abolishment" was paying restitution to the slave owners instead of throwing them off of a cliff
Yep. The liberal obsession with respecting property rights. Even Abraham Lincoln wanted to do this but, thankfully the slave owners in the border states were too stupid to take the payout.
Abolishing slavery, while also continuing the buy unfathomable amounts of cotton from US slave plantations for the UK textile industry.
And they kept growing sugar in the Caribbean using
slavesindentured servants from India.
The British also invented the “concentration camp” during the Boer War.
Another appropriate comparison is the prison system in the southern US post-Reconstruction. Literally what libs think the gulag was. Black men would be arrested on false or trumped up charges all the time, then put into forced labor where death was common. There was one forced labor project I think in Virginia where something like 40% of the prisoners died. Overwork of black convicts to the point of death was pretty common in the southern US at that time.
Death to America.
US prisons use slave labour even today.
There are over a million slaves today in these US prisons.
I once pointed this out to a supposedly anti-capitalist coworker during lunch break, I can't remember the exact context but I think it was about modern slavery. They just responded "yeah but that's different those are criminals".
Yeah, someone of those people stole food out of desperation! They definitely deserve to be slaves and treated the same as murderers!/s
Well stealing is against the law and it is only fair that the law applies equally to everyone, if those people tried getting a job and being productive members of society instead they wouldn't be in jail
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.
What's funny is how libs will always hold anyone remotely leftwing accountable for the Gulags, as if they were personally running them. We're always taken to task over something that hasn't existed (if it ever did at all) for decades
But the moment you point out the poor houses in Britain, Irish Magdalene laundries, the brutal for-profit asylums of 19th and early 20th century America, or Canada's residential schools, libs always go "well we stopped doing those it's in the past no need to dwell on past mistakes"
Like fuck the last residential school closed in 1993 there are people who attended that school still suffering the effects now
Probably some of the worst examples to be visited upon white people in Western Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland
Btw the last one closed in 1996
Worth historicising this stuff against the backdrop of the utopian, revisionist "socialist" movement known as The Settlement Movement, which would have gone the way of all progressive reform under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (had it survived long enough); okay-ish, at first, before rapidly devolving into an engine of the exact problems that it initially sought to tackle. In my mind this movement was just a way of rehabilitating the workhouse model by adorning it with some socially-progressive ideological trappings and... vision, but without posing any challenge to the workhouse model itself.
You can read the lofty and fundamentally hamstrung vision of the founders of this movement in their work Practicable Socialism to make the materialist in your brain scream in agony as the libs, once again, ignore history as they attempt to co-opt socialism while sneering at Marxism and offering what they present as being the more realistic alternative path to achieving socialism.
Fucking Fabianist bullshit
Good post
![[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}