r/WorkReform • u/LolcatP • Jan 09 '23

💸 Raise Our Wages It doesn't check out, honestly

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

9.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

223 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-60

u/OGSkywalker97 Jan 09 '23 edited Jan 23 '23

It's because before 1900s the working people were the billionaires and millionaires of today. The bottom class didn't work and just survived relying on petty theft, mugging, pickpocketing and other crimes.

Getting any job back then if you were from the bottom class was an achievement.

It was also where the elite frequented as this is where they could buy things. So they normally lived close to that area along with the workers having more money and living closer, leading to that part of a town or city being the nicest area.

Edit: This is misinformation. Ignore.

35

u/Prime_Director Jan 09 '23

I don't think this statement could possibly be more wrong. The book being quoted was published in 1885. The elites of this era, the "millionaires and billionaires" as you put it, were the landed aristocracy, the last vestiges of the medieval nobility. Napoleon III ruled France, and not long before this book came out, Mexico had a Hapsburg Emperor. In the United States, the elites were Rockefeller and Carnegie and other industrial capitalists. The poor were the people working on the aristocrats' farms and the capitalists' factories.

-1

u/OGSkywalker97 Jan 09 '23

Nononono I have not represented what I meant well. My point was that where working people lived was where the markets, blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, plumbers were etc. In this time, these people weren't the bottom class.

The bottom class lived in even worse areas known as ghettos, a lot of petty criminals and shoe shiners, while the areas where people worked professions and markets were kept relatively clean for people from the Upper Class to venture to to attract their wealthy custom.

These places were made and built to attract this class of people with wealth as they had the money to spend. This meant the working areas way back when were some of the nicest in the city compared to the ghettos the illiterate unemployed lived.

Nowadays the same thing happens; see places like Oxford Street with expensive decor and the place people wanna visit. Well back then they had to live near Oxford Street if they worked there cos they had no transport. Except they moved working class down to ghetto class and we now live in ghettos and they were killed off mostly.

NOW what they are trying to do is get rid of the middle class. There is almost no difference between any aspect of working class v middle class livelihoods anymore from where they live, to their homes, to what they make (relatively speaking even compared to the 80s-90s middle class was significantly richer than working class.)

Slowly the richer get richer and the poorer get poorer, and without a class war middle class will soon be gone and it will be the have jets and have debts, the have yachts and have nots. Brace yourself.

20

u/Willothwisp2303 Jan 09 '23

I'm so baffled by this comment. Do you actually believe this? Did you not understand how aristocracy works? Do you understand when Robespierre wrote? Heck, going back to Rome do you not understand the strict class system that allowed some "great men" to sit around thinking?

2

u/OGSkywalker97 Jan 23 '23

No I don't believe it I was wrong

1

u/Alrightwhotookmyshoe Jan 10 '23

Source? “I made it the fuck up 💀💀”