I'm not sure the tons of 18th-19th century working poor brought in from their rural towns and farms to industrial London (by laws that purposefully made their old trades deprecated), working and living under hellish dickensian conditions would agree...
Edwardian-era mansions employed whole teams of butlers whose sole job was replacing candles.
Not everyone is in a position to make a discernible impact on society. 20% of society will always drive 80% of progress. Think hard how you want the remaining 80% to support their families.
Not the businessman, really; the _normal_ man. If we were back in the Victorian age, it's likely that you and I would be doomed to labor every day for meager sustenance, supporting the occasional noble and their leisure.
If by modern you mean common for the lower middle class in 1850 sure:
>And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time demands.
If we're going to go historical, we'll have to include company towns (which Facebook is revisiting as a concept, incidentally) and debt slavery, the Pinkertons machine gunning strikers...
As it happens, I bought yesterday a volume of Anthony Trollope's _North America_ (1862) in a used book store yesterday and noticed the passage
"There is, I think, no task-master over free labor so exacting as an American. He knows nothing of hours, and seems to have that idea of a man which a lady always has of a horse. He thinks that he will go forever. I wish those masons in London who strike for nine hours' work with ten hours' pay could be driven to the labor market of Western America for a spell. And moreover, which astonished me, I
have seen men driven and hurried, as it were forced forward at their work, in a manner which, to an English workman, would be intolerable.... The complaint that wages are held back, and not even ultimately paid, is very common. There is no fixed rule for satisfying all such claims once a week, and thus debts to laborers are contracted, and when contracted are ignored."
As for intellectual property, the textile industry of New England got its start with English designs in something of an underhand way, I recall.
Absolutely. I recommend GP reads some Thomas Hardy to get a sense of what you mean. Back before the industrial revolution the lower classes would work 'enough' to sustain themselves.
> Yet, not everyone viewed this profession as the key cog it was in industrial Britain—including celebrated social reformer Helen Dendy. Dendy referred to this class of people brought to the forefront during the Industrial Revolution as “the Residuum,” and grouped knocker-uppers with “the girl who cleans steps [and] the old woman who minds babies.” Her view of this class was entirely negative.
I paused at "old woman who minds babies". I would say that this is an important profession close to the center of national debate.
Anybody who studied how British dock workers were hired in the late 19th Century could have told you this.
Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.
Never believe the hype about extreme individualism. You will always certainly make far more money if you team up with others and make your case politically.
Well, there was also post-slavery forms of indentured servitude, no labour laws (i.e. shoot strikers), no worker protections, no social security, barely such a thing as healthcare.
And no pesky female or non-landed male voters ...
So if you're in the capital class, it must have been a 'golden time', yes!
David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, a Theory, around page 524 or so.
> The mechanics and tradesmen who became the foot soldiers of the American War of Independence represented themselves as producers of the wealth that they saw the British crown as looting, and after the Revolution, many turned the same language against would-be capitalists.
> When US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress in 1861, for instance, he included the following lines, which, radical though they seem to a contemporary ear, where really just a reflection of the common sense of the time:[189] “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
> In 1880 a Protestant “home missionary” who had spent some years traveling along the Western frontier reported that: “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx”
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