Comment by piva00
1 day ago
> Tech progress and GDP growth has meant that the world's poor live better lives, decade after decade, for many centuries now.
Every single time during the leaps of technology that brought tech progress and GDP growth there needed to be some kind of workers' revolt or the threat of it to actualise poors living better lives. Every leap in progress of systemic quality of life for workers came through class war: revolts, general strikes, mass protest, organized labour, etc.
Why do you think now it's different?
Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".
It's when we regard one another as evil that we start to pursue ideology over pragmatism and end up cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
I object to my original parent comment's characterizing of everyone with any form of wealth and power as being a sociopath. It's not only untrue (which is disqualification enough), but this kind of attitude doesn't serve anyone.
> Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".
Yes, the workers' demands were reasonable, but they were met with warfare by the upper class who did not want to accept reasonable demands. The most extreme example is the Battle of Blair Mountain, but there are countless records of strike breakers beating and killing workers for striking and unionizing.
There was no workers' revolt in the 19th century US, but the lives of the poor across the board pulled scores of millions in poverty into the middle class and beyond.
The common thread of workers' lives improving is free markets, not revolts.
That is not accurate. There were many strikes in the industrial part of the US during the 1800's. That's how working conditions were improved in the mills. The free market would have crushed the working people had they not banded together and revolted to improve safety, reduce working hours, and increase pay.
Wikipedia has articles on the larger actions like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1835_Philadelphia_general_stri...
The rest of the US was primarily agricultural, and did not have major strikes until later, but the improvement in the lives of those people who lived there was not because of free markets. Their lives improved because of the immense natural resources that were literally being given away free to people to cultivate and exploit, after the Native Americans were subjugated and removed.
Strikes are not revolts.
> The rest of the US was primarily agricultural, and did not have major strikes until later, but the improvement in the lives of those people who lived there was not because of free markets. Their lives improved because of the immense natural resources that were literally being given away free to people to cultivate and exploit, after the Native Americans were subjugated and removed.
The same thing at the same time happened in Central and South America, yet prosperity and uplift never happened.
What's the difference? Free markets in the US. Unfree markets in Central and South America.
Japan, S Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong have no natural resources, but when they turned to free markets, it's boom time for their economies.
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There was the Homestead Strike in 1892, during which 9 people died. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which "handled" the strike for Carnegie, is notorious for violently busting strikes in the 19th century US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
And how many workers did that affect vs the population of the country?
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There were quite a few slave revolts in the 19th century.
All the ones in the US were quite unsuccessful. Prosperity didn't happen in the slave states, either.
> The common thread of workers' lives improving is free markets, not revolts.
The common thread is both, not one or the other.
How did that French Revolution work out? The Communist revolution in Russia? The Cuban revolution?
Free markets always result in prosperity. Worker revolts never have.
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There were plenty of worker revolts in the 19th century which laid the groundwork for the modern labor movement.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/themine...
The overwhelming majority of workers in the 19th century were not part of unions, yet they moved into the middle class anyway.
The war has never stopped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S...