What would the labor activists from 100 years ago say/do about the current system and high COL we just put up with?
What would the labor activists from 100 years ago say/do about the current system and high COL we just put up with?
I think they'd bring guns to their strike. Completely serious.
The strikers began to fight back, killing four mine guards and firing into a separate camp where strikebreakers lived. When the body of a strikebreaker was found nearby, the National Guard's General Chase ordered the tent colony destroyed in retaliation.
47Yup, and this is what every single protest needs to be doing.
You can be nonviolent, but if you want change, there has to be a very real threat to the status quo.
23I think they'd also be disappointed or shocked we let them continue to screw us over.
18
So you're telling me that you can just press a few buttons and learn how to make a bomb? How are your landlords and bosses still alive?
29Law enforcement is militarized.
4
They'd be overjoyed that their fight was won. The 40 hour work week is what they were fighting for, as are OSHA, overtime, benefits, and unemployment. They were working 16 hours per day, 6-7 days per week, in absolutely awful conditions, at the ripe old age of 12, just to live in a shack, eat bread, and own one pair of clothes. I highly suggest that anyone here who thinks things are worse now than they were 100 years ago should go read The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. Read it right now! That doesn't mean that we can't keep improving, especially with productivity at all-time highs, along with rampant price gouging. The corporations are trying to get back to where we were 100 years ago, it's up to us to keep pushing in the right direction.
23No source to hand but I heard a rumour that:
This is first generation since 100 years ago that is worse off (in terms of health outcomes & ability to save) than their parents. I'm not so sure about wealth inequality but that's pretty high in many countries right now.
Its interesting that it happens at times of fast technological change.
Edit: I agree about things being better than 100 years ago.
6
They would be horrified at how bad it's got and they'd start figuring out how the bourgeoisie managed so well to subdue the working classes.
Then they'd tell us they're not mad at us, just disappointed.
Then we'd get drunk and I'd help teach them the wonders of the internet, and they'd be far more disappointed in us, because we have literally uncensorable global communications and could actually organise almost the entire planet if there really was the will.
16They would be horrified at how bad it's got
I'm curious what you think factory working conditions were like in 1924.
7Societal apathy and low wages snd poor rights, were what I wss thinking about.
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I'm not mad, but disappointed. Remember how history is all about the proletariat being a sucker for the bourgoisie. We were promised heaven in the afterlife for the whole middle ages.
In the new world an honest day's work for an honest day's pay was the American dream.
Then the California gold rush promised us we could get rich quick with luck and pluck.
By the great depression (about a century ago) what we noticed was this is how the industrialists like it and they resented FDR's New Deal. (A lot of us were thinking that whatever Lenin was doing in USSR was better than the cardboard + paint can shelters we were living in and eating flour paste.) It was a stopgap to let capitalism have another chance. One it didn't deserve.
So when they'd see our homeless crisis and fast food swamps, they'd nod, knowingly. We should have socialized then.
The GOP thought it had the upper hand when it pushed Reagan in and started killing unions and rolling back regulations. Reagan won with a landslide due to the Moral Majority, hopped up on anti-abortion rhetoric. It taught campaign managers the public could be manipulated.
Then George W. Bush took the White House with a procedural couo d'etat. Then Trump showed us the only way the GOP can win is by shennanigans.
It's harder for the masses to organize. But there are more of us than them by orders of magnitude. When we see the police killing the public, more people move from bystander to sympathist, from sympathist to activist. From activist to rebel.
This isn't our first rodeo. And our ancestors would recognize the same dirty tricks used to keep them from a new revolution have gotten better. But then insurgency tricks are better as well.
Harris is at that precipice moment when she has to get more radical than FDR to hold society together. Because we know Trump and company are the baddies. We know we can justly resort to violence against a Trump administration because they've already declared the public illegal.
3
Well Gompers would be all in on the anti-china thing going on right now, he's part of why the AFL supported the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Mother Jones would probably die a second time from a heart attack when she finds out that republicans are rolling back child labor protections.
IWW members would probably be organizing service, retail, and contract workers.
The men from Blair mountain and Harlan county probably wouldn't lay their arms down this time.
8All of this.
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They'd say "you have microwaves and cars. Just keep laboring. Things are great for you"
Lol jk
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