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In the famous 'standard of living' debate over the impact of the
industrial revolution on the standard of living of the British worker,
Hobsbawm and others argued that the actual standard of living of the
average worker declined as they were forced to relocate from rural
agriculture to accept, against their will, the horrors of the satanic
mills. Others, names escape me at the moment, argued that though the
level of real wages may have declined, the population increased
indicating that output increased in total, though per capita income may
have declined. This would mean that, for the average worker,
capitalism was a negative sum game despite the increase in income for
capital and for an expanding working, though impoverished, working
class. The suggestion that this was a voluntary migration is, of
course, nonsense. Workers did not voluntarily enter the factories as
wage labour unless forced to do so by lack of alternative sources of
income. This has been so often demonstrated that I find it curious
that the suggestion on this list that this was a choice is unreal.
Assuming Hosbawms' data is correct, capitalism in the 19th C was, for
the workers, a zero sum game at least until the gains from imperialism
in the second half of the century filtered down to the working class.
Then it became a positive sum game for the British workingclass, but, I
expect, a negative sum game for the Indian workers and the rest of the
British empire, with the exception of the settler dominions such as
Canada and Australia -- but not for the aboriginal peoples for whom
capitalism has been a negative sum game to this day. Paul Phillips Ulhas Joglekar wrote: Gil Skillman wrote: |
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