It's almost like people are trained to accept capitalist slavery as normal and hate poor people.

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Is that a Soviet breadline? Nope, that's the poor's being rounded up into slave labour in capitalist Britain.

By the way, many widows and children were sent to workhouses. Unable to support themselves after the man of the house died from war or tuberculosis or some shit.

Gee, I wonder why women fought so hard for the right to enter the male workforce and vote.

The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilising the free labour of their inmates. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bones to produce fertiliser, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.

>Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree top,
When you grow old, your wages will stop,
When you have spent the little you made
First to the Poorhouse and then to the grave

The Poor Law was not designed to address the issue of poverty, which was considered to be the inevitable lot for most people; rather it was concerned with pauperism, "the inability of an individual to support himself". Writing in 1806 Patrick Colquhoun commented that:

"Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth."

Monstrous.

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This all happened under capitalism.

And the kicker?

US prisons use slave labour even today.

There are over a million slaves today in these US prisons.

And even Western countries today that provide relief to the poor operate on the same principal of Less Eligibility as the British capitalists did in the 18 and 1900s.

Make no mistake, the ruling class know where their wealth comes from and will leech you dry, one way or another.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]
    ·
    5 months ago

    Probably some of the worst examples to be visited upon white people in Western Europe:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland

    Btw the last one closed in 1996

    Worth historicising this stuff against the backdrop of the utopian, revisionist "socialist" movement known as The Settlement Movement, which would have gone the way of all progressive reform under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (had it survived long enough); okay-ish, at first, before rapidly devolving into an engine of the exact problems that it initially sought to tackle. In my mind this movement was just a way of rehabilitating the workhouse model by adorning it with some socially-progressive ideological trappings and... vision, but without posing any challenge to the workhouse model itself.

    You can read the lofty and fundamentally hamstrung vision of the founders of this movement in their work Practicable Socialism to make the materialist in your brain scream in agony as the libs, once again, ignore history as they attempt to co-opt socialism while sneering at Marxism and offering what they present as being the more realistic alternative path to achieving socialism.

    Fucking Fabianist bullshit