Chapter 44 Part Two Results Chapter 11 The Working Poor 2

2 The alternative to flight and failure is rioting.When the working poor, and especially the industrial proletariat, which has become the core of the poor, are confronted with this situation, insurrection is not only possible but actually imperative. In the first half of the nineteenth century, labor and socialist movements, and indeed mass social-revolutionary upheavals, were inevitable. The Revolution of 1848 was its direct consequence. No reasonable observer can deny that the condition of the working poor in the years 1815-1848 was truly appalling, and there were plenty of them.It is generally agreed that the situation of the poor is getting worse.In Britain, Malthus's population theory was based on the assumption that the growth of population would inevitably exceed the growth needed for living, and was supported by Ricardo economists.Those who are optimistic about the prospects of the working class are a little less and less talented than those who are pessimistic.In Germany in the 1830s, at least 14 different publications discussed the growing poverty of the people.Moreover, the question of whether "complaints of growing poverty and food shortages" were substantiated was raised as a topic for a dissertation with an academic prize. Of the 16 contenders, 10 felt substantiated, and only two felt the complaints were unsubstantiated.From the overwhelming majority of such opinions, it can be seen that the poor are generally plunged into hopeless misery.

Undoubtedly, the actual poverty in the countryside is clearly the worst, especially among landless wage labourers, rural home workers, and of course poor farmers who own land, or those who live on poor land .The poor harvests of 1789, 1795, 1817, 1832, 1847 still caused actual famines, even without the intervention of additional disasters, such as the English cotton competition which destroyed the base of the Silesian domestic flax industry. in this way. The poor harvest in Lombardy in 1813 left many people subsisting on manure, hay, bean leaves, and flatbread made from wild fruits.Even in a stable country like Switzerland, a bad harvest year like 1817 would have resulted in more deaths than births.Compared with the catastrophe of the Irish famine, the starving people on the European continent in 1846-1848 also look pale, but this famine is realistic enough.In eastern and western Prussia (1847) a third of the population had no bread to eat and lived only on potatoes.Austere, poor manufacturing village in the mountains of central Germany, men and women sitting on logs and benches, few curtains or tablecloths, drinking from earthenware or tin cups for lack of glasses, residents are somewhat used to Potato diet and talk coffee.During the famine, relief workers had to teach residents to eat the peas and gruel they provided.Starvation bred typhus and typhus ravaged the Flemish and Silesian countryside, where rural linen weavers waged a doomed struggle against modern industry.

But in fact, apart from the general catastrophe of Ireland, the misery that attracts most people's attention-and many people think that it is increasing-is the misery of cities and industrial areas, where the poor do not suffer as passively as in the countryside. Hungry, and not as inconspicuous as they are.Whether their real incomes fell is still a matter of historical debate, although, as we have seen, the general situation of the urban poor has undoubtedly worsened.Wide variations between regions, among different kinds of workers, and between economic periods, combined with statistical flaws, make it difficult to answer these questions with certainty.But before 1848 (and perhaps in England before 1844) no appreciable general improvement had taken place, and the gulf between rich and poor was certainly growing wider and more pronounced.When the Countess of Rothschild wore jewels worth 1.5 million francs to the masquerade ball of the Duke of Orléans (1842), it was John Bright who described the women of Rochdale thus: "Two thousand women It was a very singular, very astonishing spectacle to walk through the streets with maidens singing hymns. This strange procession approached, they were terrible famished people, and their bread was gobbled up, in an indescribable form, even if Those breads are almost covered with dirt, and they will be eaten as a delicacy."

In fact, there may have been some degree of general deterioration in the living conditions of the working class over a wide area of ​​Europe.Not only (as we have seen) that urban facilities and social services failed to keep pace with the rash and unplanned growth of the cities, money wages (often real wages) tended to decline between 1815 and the advent of the railway age, and food Production and transportation prices have also fallen.The pessimistic arguments of the Malthusians of that era were based on this time difference.But in addition to this time difference, the mere change in eating habits from the traditional three meals of the pre-industrial period to the negligible or unaffordable purchases of urbanization and industrialization is enough to lead to nutritional deterioration, just as urban living and working conditions are likely to lead to deterioration of health.The very great differences in physical and health between the industrial and agricultural populations (and, of course, between the upper, middle and working classes) are evidently due to this cause.French and British statisticians pay special attention to this topic. In the 1840s the average life expectancy at birth of rural laborers (not necessarily a well-fed class) in Wiltshire and Rutland was twice as high as that of laborers in Manchester and Liverpool, but At that time, to take just one example, "there was no known grinder's disease in the Sheffield knife and scissor industry until the switch to steam power, that is, until the end of the eighteenth century." In 1842, the proportion of knife sharpeners suffering from this disease with vomiting was 50% in their 30s, 79% in their 40s, and 100% in their 50s.

Moreover, economic changes have displaced or displaced large segments of the working class, sometimes to their advantage and more often to their sorrow.The mass of the population, not being absorbed by the new branches of industry or the cities, remains forever in a poverty-stricken bottom, and even more masses are driven into the abyss of unemployment by periodic crises which are hardly recognized , they are both transient and recurring.A depression like this could put two-thirds of the textile workers in Bolton (1842) or Roubaix (Roubaix, 1847) out of work. Twenty per cent of Nottingham residents, and a third of Paisley's population, may actually be poor.Movements such as British Chartism, because of their political weakness, will suffer defeat after defeat; but severe famine after famine—an unbearable burden on millions of It comes back to life again and again.

To these general shocks are added the specific calamities faced by particular types of the working poor.As we have seen, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, not all labor was pushed into mechanized factories.On the contrary, around the few areas that have been mechanized and mass-produced, many pre-industrial artisans, some kinds of skilled workers, and the family and workshop labor force have been added, whose situation has often been improved by the Industrial Revolution, especially During wars with chronic labor shortages. The relentless development of machinery and markets in the 1820s and 30s began to brush them aside.In such a process, the independent person becomes the dependent, and the person becomes the "hand".Conditions, often severe, produced disenfranchised, impoverished, and starving masses—hand weavers, net-weavers, and the like—whose conditions made even the majority Hard-hearted economists are terrified.These are not unskilled or ignorant inferiors.Like the dismantled Norwich and Dunfermline weavers of the 1830s, London furniture-making whose negotiated 'price lists' used to be reduced to scraps of paper The artisans of Continental Europe who have sunk into sweat and factory mire, become vagabond proletarians, and the artisans who have lost their independence, etc., were once the most skilled, best educated, most self-sufficient workers , is the elite of the working people. (In 1840, of 195 adult Gloucestershire weavers, only 15 could neither read nor write; but in 1842, among rioters arrested in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Staffordshire , only 13 percent can read and write well, and 32 percent can't read and write well.) They don't know what's going on around them.Naturally, they will seek a way out, and even more naturally, they will protest. ("About one-third of our working population--are weavers and hirelings, whose average earnings, without parish grants, are not at all sufficient to support their families. This group, for the greater part of their lives, Decent, respectable, now suffering from falling wages and the difficulties of the times. Especially for this group of poor partners, I would like to recommend this cooperative system." F. Baker, First Lecture on Co-operation , Bolton 1830.)

Materially, the emerging industrial proletariat may have improved somewhat.But at the same time they are not free. They have to endure extremely strict discipline under the strong control of bosses or overseers. They have no legal aid to deal with bosses and overseers, because public protection has only just begun.They have to work the hours and shifts set by their bosses, and accept the penalties and fines imposed by their bosses to enhance or increase profits.In some closed areas and industries, they have to shop in the boss's store, and are often forced to receive wages in kind (which allows the unscrupulous employer to make more profits), or live in the house provided by the boss.Undoubtedly, rural lads may think that this kind of life may be less dependent and better than their parents' generation; while in industries with strong patriarchal traditions on the Continent, the boss's domineering is at least partly recognized. Security, education, and sometimes welfare facilities are offset.But for free people, entering such a factory as a "hand" is tantamount to falling into a state of slavery, so unless they are about to starve to death, they would rather stay away.Even in factories, they are far more tenacious than female and child laborers in resisting harsh discipline.So factory owners tended mostly to recruit women and children, and of course even the material conditions of the proletariat in the factories tended to deteriorate during part of the 1830s and 1840s.

Whatever the actual situation of the working poor, there can be no doubt that every thoughtful person among them--those who do not accept that the poor deserve to suffer, that fate cannot be changed--believes that labor is The exploitation of people makes them poor, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the poor suffer because the rich benefit.The social mechanism of the bourgeoisie is fundamentally cruel, unfair and inhumane. The Lancashire Co-operator writes: "There is no wealth without labor. The worker is the source of all wealth. Who grows and raises the source of all food? Poor labourers, half-fed Who built the houses, storehouses, and palaces that were occupied by rich men who did not work and did not produce? The workers. Who spun all the yarn and wove all the cloth? The spinners and weavers workers.” However, “workers have always been poor and destitute, and those who do not work are rich and overabundant.” And desperate rural laborers (even today, black soul singers are Sentence-by-sentence repetition), less clearly, but perhaps more profoundly:

If life could be bought with money, Then the rich can live, and the poor deserve to die.