Chapter 43 Part Two Results Chapter Eleven The Working Poor 1

The first factory owner, who lived in his factory as the colonial plantation owners lived among their slaves, was alone against hundreds of workers, and the sabotage of Lyon, like Santo Insurrections of the kind in Mingo... The barbarians threatening society are not in the Caucasus, nor in the Mongolian steppes, but on the outskirts of our industrial cities... The middle class must recognize the nature of the situation; he must know that he is standing where. —Girardin, The Debate, December 8, 1831 want to be an official, You have to be covered with a cloak and a ribbon. We spin and weave for you great men,

After death, he was buried hastily without wrapping the shroud. We are weavers, But naked, without cover or cover. Your reign is coming to an end, Our day in power is coming. We wove the shroud of the old world, The roar of rebellion resounded out of the sky. We are weavers, From then on, he was neatly dressed, dressed and worn. ——The Ballad of the Silk Weavers of Lyons 1 For the poor who found themselves on the road of capitalist society, three possibilities were open to them, and they were no longer effectively protected in traditional social spheres that were still inaccessible at the time.The three possibilities are: they can strive to become bourgeois; or allow themselves to be tortured; or rebel.

The first way, as we have seen before, is not only difficult to practice, but rather repulsive to those who have acquired property or education without means.The purely utilitarian individualistic social behavior system adheres to the credo of capitalist society that "people are not for themselves, and heaven and earth are destroyed". different from a fornicating devil. In 1844, desperate Silesian linen weavers waged a failed uprising against their fate.Said one of the insurrectionary workers: "In our time men have devised all sorts of ingenious techniques for weakening and destroying the livelihood of others. Alas! But no one ever thought of the commandment of the seventh commandment of the Bible: You can't steal. They also remember Luther's commentary on this commandment, Luther said: We should fear God, we can't take our neighbor's money, we can't get money by counterfeit and fraudulent transactions, Instead, we should help our neighbors protect and increase their livelihoods and possessions." These words speak for all who find themselves dragged into the abyss by the forces of hell.They don't ask for much. (“The rich often gave alms to the poor, and the poor lived very simply, for in those days the lower classes had little need of ostentatious dress and adornment, as they do today.”) But even this humble position , is now also deprived.

Their resistance to capitalist society, even the most rationally planned, therefore involved acts of brutality.The "Spinhamland" system, which uses the poor tax to help low-paid laborers, is dominated by the country gentry and heavily relied on by laborers, although the objections to this system in economics are conclusive.As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity does not help, as can be seen in papal states where philanthropy is prolific.But it is popular not only among the traditionally rich, but also among the traditionally poor.The rich see it as a means of preventing evil equal rights (an idea of ​​equal rights put forward by dreamers who insist that all men are created equal by nature, and that social distinctions are to be found purely in public goods); and The poor are convinced that they have a right to the crumbs of the rich man's table.In England a gulf separates the middle-class advocates of Friendly Society, which the former regard as exclusively a form of personal self-help, and the poor, who also regard them as, and often at all, as Social associations of joyful gatherings, ceremonies, religious observances, and celebrations are detrimental to the health of a mutual aid society.

Even the bourgeoisie objected to the fact that purely free competition did him no real advantage in these respects, and this intensified that resistance.No one is more zealous of individual struggle than the dogged American farmer and factory owner, and no constitution has ever opposed anything like federal child labor legislation like the American Constitution—or so their jurists believed until our century ago. an interference with freedom.But, as we have seen, none were more committed to the "artificial" protection of their industry than they were.New machinery is one of the chief benefits of private enterprise and free competition.But it was not only the Labor Luddites who rose up to destroy the machines, local small merchants and farmers sympathized with them, for they also believed that the reformers had ruined their livelihoods, and the government had to issue a harsh circular in 1830 stating that " Machinery should be protected by law like any other form of property".Outside the confident bastion of bourgeois liberalism, new entrepreneurs embarked on their historic task of undermining the social and moral order with a wavering and doubtful mind, which reinforced the conviction of the poor.

Of course, there are workers who strive to be middle-class, or at least follow the precepts of frugality, self-help, and self-improvement.In the moral and didactic readings of middle-class radicalism, in the Temperance movement, and in the preaching of Protestantism, the kind of people who saw Smiles as their Homer were to be found everywhere, and indeed such groups attracted and perhaps encouraged Ambitious young man. The Royton Temperance Seminary (Royton Temperance Seminary, limited to young men, mostly cotton textile workers, who swore to abstain from drinking, gambling, and develop good moral sentiments) established in 1843 trained five Spinners, a teacher, two managers of Russian cotton mills, "and quite a few shopkeepers who took respectable positions as managers, overseers, foremen of mechanics, qualified schoolmasters, etc." Obviously, in This phenomenon is less common outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where the roads outside the working class (aside from immigration) are much narrower, and even in Britain such roads are not particularly wide; The moral and intellectual impact of the system is also smaller.

On the other hand, there are clearly many more people facing social disasters beyond their comprehension, impoverished and exploited, congregating in desolate and squalid slums or expanding small-scale industrial complexes, and thus sinking into moral decay.After losing the traditional system and behavior guidelines, how can people not fall into the abyss of making a temporary living with expediency?Many families had to pawn their blankets before the weekly payday (in 1855 60 per cent of all goods pawned to Liverpool pawnbrokers were worth less than five shillings, 27 per cent at two shillings and sixpence below); and alcohol is the shortest way out of industrial cities like Manchester, Lille or Borinage.The alcoholic masses had become almost a concomitant phenomenon of reckless and runaway industrialization and urbanization, and the "alcoholic plague" began to spread across Europe.Perhaps the countless men of that age who lamented the increasing intoxication of alcohol, the increasing immorality of whores or sexual immorality, were somewhat exaggerated.However, the sudden surge in planned abstinence propaganda, both middle- and working-class, in England, Ireland, and Germany around 1840 shows that fears of decline were neither academic nor exclusive. Not limited to any single class.Its immediate achievements were brief, but the distaste for spirits remained common to both enlightened employers and the labor movement for the rest of the century. (This distaste does not apply to beer, wine, or other beverages that have become part of the daily diet. The movement is dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestants.)

But contemporaries who bemoaned the decline of the boomtown and industrial poor were certainly not exaggerating.And these events add up to make the situation even worse.Towns and industrial areas grew rapidly without planning and regulation, and some of the most basic services of urban life, such as street cleaning, drinking water supply, sanitation, not to mention housing for the working class, could not keep up with the city pace of development.The most obvious consequence of this deterioration of urban conditions was the reemergence and widespread prevalence of communicable diseases (mainly waterborne), especially cholera.Cholera conquered Europe again in 1831, swept across the continent from Marseilles to St. Petersburg in 1832, and broke out again later.In Glasgow, for example, "typhus was not noticed as an epidemic until 1818".Since then, the incidence of typhus has continued to increase.The city had two major epidemics (typhus and cholera) by the 1830s, three (typhus, cholera, and relapsing fever) in the 1840s, two in the first half of the 1850s, and until a Entire generations neglect urban sanitation until the situation improves.The dire consequences of ignoring urban sanitation are all the more acute because the middle and ruling classes have not experienced them firsthand.The urban development of the period discussed in this book separated different classes at a rapid rate, and the emerging working poor were pushed outside the government, commercial centers and newly created bourgeois exclusive residential areas, drowning in the dark abyss of misery .The major European cities that developed during this period were almost universally divided into the "luxury" West End and the "poor" East End. ("The forced removal of the workers from the center of Paris, in general, has had a lamentable effect on their manners and morals. In old times they usually lived on the upper floors of buildings, the lower floors of which were occupied by merchants and relatively Occupied by other members of the well-to-do class. People who rent houses in the same building have a spirit of solidarity and friendship. Neighbors help each other with small things. When workers are sick or unemployed, they can also be found in the neighbors in the building Helping hands. On the other hand, a sense of human dignity has always governed the behavior of the working class.”) In addition to the facilities established by the workers themselves, in these emerging labor ghettos, in addition to pubs, there may be small Churches, and otherwise no public facilities at all.Not until after 1848, when new epidemics emerged from the slums and began to kill the rich; and the desperate masses raised in the slums, terrified those in power with social revolution, planned urban reconstruction and improvements have just begun.

Alcoholism was not the only symptom of the decline. Social phenomena such as infanticide, prostitution, suicide, and insanity were all associated with this social and economic catastrophe.This discovery is largely thanks to the pioneering work of our contemporaries on what we know today as social medicine. (We owe much of what we know about that era [and subsequent improvements] to the multitude of physicians who stood in stark contrast to the general complacency and hardliness of bourgeois public opinion. Furthermore, Villemer and the Annals of Public Health English contributors to [Annales d'Hygiene Publique, 1829]—Kay, Thackrah, Simon, Gaskell, and Farr, and German for the same reasons that criminal crime and the increasing and often aimless violence that is a personal response to a force that threatens to consume the tame Blind catharsis.The apocalyptic, occult, and other superstitions of every description (see Chapter 12), which prevailed at this time, show everywhere a similar inability to do anything about the social shocks that would destroy humanity.A cholera epidemic, for example, led to a religious revival in both Catholic Marseilles and Protestant Wales.

There is one thing in common between the various distorted forms of social behavior, and it happens to all have to do with "self-help action."These forms are all attempts to escape the fate of poor laborers, or at best to accept or forget poverty and humiliation.Those who believe in an afterlife, drunkards, petty thieves, psychopaths, homeless beggars, or ambitious small business owners are all blind to their collective condition and (except small business owners) indifferent to their capacity for collective action.This mass indifference played a much greater role in the history of this period than is often given credit.It is no accident that the poorest, least skilled, least educated, least organized, and therefore least hopeful, were then and later the most politically indifferent.In the 1848 election in Halle, Prussia, 81% of independent craftsmen and 71% of stonemasons, carpenters and other skilled construction workers voted, while among factory and railway workers, hired labor and domestic foundries, Only 46% turned out to vote.