anarchyequalsorder:

taxidermygirl:

anarchyequalsorder:

taxidermygirl:

freebroccoli:

Libertarianism fails to acknowledge that hunger is a gun to your head.

And who would be holding that gun?

Whoever offers starvation wages knowing there is nothing better out there, like we tried your thing it was called the 19th century, it sucked

Offering someone a better opportunity than any other currently available to him equals holding a gun to his head?  LOL

The system that creates the situation of “no offer better than slower starvation” is evil

I think you are confused as to what system creates no better option.
What do you imagine?  That prior to the industrial revolution everyone lived in the garden of Eden and then evil capitalists ripped them from their homes and forced them into “wage slavery”?  The situation you refer to was a preexisting condition, people (yes even the children) were already working long hard hours just to stay alive, and they left their agrarian or home based manufacturing lifestyles to take jobs made possible by the “evil” industrialists.  Since people don’t have a natural proclivity to make themselves worse off, it’s safe to assume they considered “wage slavery” a significant improvement on their previous conditions.  You are pointing to the poverty and hard living conditions of the 19th century and screaming “evil” while completely ignoring the rise of the middle class that resulted from having the opportunity to work for so called “slave wages”.

I am not advocating a return to pre-capitalist mercantalism, I am advocating a post-capitalist system.  Do you think that mercantilist monarchy is communism?  DO YOU REALLY FUCKING THINK THAT? Opposing capitalism doesn’t mean I’m in favor of going back to the thing we had right before capitalism.  

WHY DO YOU THINK I’M IN FAVOR OF MERCANTILISM?  WHY?  WHY? WHY?  All that said, living conditions worsened for the working class during the pre-labor movement industrial revolution because they were unable to compete with large scale farms that had more advanced machinery which they could not afford, forcing many small farmers to leave their land and go to the city.  It was because capitalism destroyed their previous way of life.  Luddites wouldn’t have existed otherwise, dickhead.  But I’m guessing you don’t know what a luddite is because the only shit you’ve ever read is objectivist propagandistic bullshit and free market rah-rah ballyhoo.  You’ve also probably never heard of the enclosure movement, go look it the fuck up.

http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook/IndustrialRevolution/IREffects.html 

Note the “enclosing village land” meaning pushing out tenant farmers, meaning they did not take factory work by choice. 

“Many of the unemployed or underemployed were skilled workers, such as hand weavers, whose talents and experience became useless because they could not compete with the efficiency of the new textile machines. In 1832, one observer saw how the skilled hand weavers had lost their way and were reduced to starvation. “It is truly lamentable to behold so many thousands of men who formerly earned 20 to 30 shillings per week, now compelled to live on 5, 4, or even less”  

Yeah, the industrial revolution fantastic man.

That said, mercantilism (which is what was going on before capitalism) in terms of long term economic effect: shitty.  I’m a communist, not a mercantilist, mercantilist theory has long been disproven, and frankly, yes monarchy sucks, what the fuck, why would I be advocating monarchy?  What’s wrong with you?  But just because mercantilism sucked, it doesn’t make capitalism good, the existence of Vlad the impaler does not make Charles Manson a nice guy.

However, improved living standards were ONLY achieved through the sustained and often bloody union struggles.

http://past.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/91/1/28

http://www.amazon.com/The-Women-Incendiaries-Edith-Thomas/dp/1931859469

http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook/IndustrialRevolution/PSLizBently.html

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5

• Phelps Brown, Henry (1951). A Course in Applied Economics. I. Pitman. OCLC 11634867.
• Phelps Brown, Henry (1959). The Growth of British Industrial Relations. Macmillan.
• Engels, Friedrich (1892). The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. pp. 45, 48–53.
• Phelps Brown, Henry (1962). The Economics of Labour. Macmillan.
• Fogel, Robert W. (2004). The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-80878-2.
• Webb, Sidney; Webb, Beatrice (1920). History of Trade Unionism. Longmans and Co. London. ch. I
• Harrison. The Common People. pp. 249–253
• Thomis, Malcolm (1970). The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England. Shocken.
• “Mercantilism,” Laura LaHaye The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2008)
• David Onnekink; Gijs Rommelse (2011), Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe (1650–1750), Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., p. 257, ISBN 9781409419143
• Magnusson, Lars G. (2003), “Mercantilism”, in Samuels, Warren J.; Biddle, Jeff E.; Davis, Jon B., A Companion to the History of Economic Thought, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 0-631-22573-0
• Meaker, Gerald H. (1974). The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923. Stanford University Press. p. 159 ff. ISBN 0-8047-0845-2.
• Bookchin, Murray (1996). The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era. London: Cassell. ISBN 978-0-304-33594-7.
• Beckett, J. V. (1991). “The Disappearance of the Cottager and the Squatter from the English Countryside: The Hammonds Revisited.”.
•  In Holderness, B. A.; Turner, Michael. Land, Labour and Agriculture, 1700 1920. London: Hambledon Press.
• Dahlman, Carl J (1980). The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution. Cambridge University Press.Everitt, Alan (2000). “Common Land”. 
• In Thirsk, Joan. The English Rural Landscape. Oxford University Press.Gonner,
•  E. C. K (1912). Common Land and Inclosure. London: Macmillan & Co. 
• Humphries, J. (1990). “Enclosures, commons rights, and women.”. Journal of Economic History 50 (1): 17–42.doi:10.1017/s0022050700035701.

You wanna talk the history of economics, motherfucker?  Cite some fucking sources and learn something… ANYTHING about the history of economic thought.  Asshat.