
A Not So Distant Mirror: Jack London's Political Writings - samclemens
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/tharsing_sp17.html
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PeterWhittaker
Great read. Among the more telling paragraphs: _I had the sense that the
twentieth century might as well not have happened. In the first part of the
century, labor won the right to unionize, and through the middle of the
century labor got the government to establish the minimum wage and the eight-
hour day, to end piece-work, to outlaw child labor, and to create the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. With the exception of child
labor and minimum wage, most of these accomplishments were largely undone in
the last part of the century, as government came to be seen as the servant of
business, not of the people._

~~~
bbctol
It's startling how much the current era reminds me of the late 1800s/early
1900s, as well as how little that era was focused on in my history classes. We
jumped from the Civil War to World War 1 pretty quickly, with scarce attention
paid to the social upheaval and long, often violent struggles between workers,
governments, and the upper classes. Nowadays, we act as if the Industrial
Revolution evolved into shared prosperity naturally; we mock the Luddites, the
utopians, the Communists for being unable to see how the disruption caused by
technology would lead to positive outcomes. But these outcomes took a long
time, were not inevitable, and they did not come from capitalism alone; they
were fought for, every step of the way, in a long, complicated, morally
ambiguous struggle to shape the new world. We seem to be entering another age
of disruption, and would do well to look back on the previous one to
understand what was fought for and why.

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TheAdamAndChe
In a global economy, governments don't have the leverage required to keep the
capitalists in check. The US still has its environmental and labor laws, but
because corporations can ship the work over to countries whose people are
willing to work for $0.40/hr, our labor laws don't mean a thing.

We really need to take a good hard look at globalism.

~~~
gnaritas
> We really need to take a good hard look at globalism.

Or capitalism in a global economy.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Capitalism can exist without exploiting foreign labor.

~~~
gnaritas
Not without shutting down free trade agreements and becoming protectionist,
which virtually everyone agrees is a bad idea.

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FuNe
HN algorithm magic. You submit a leftist story (that is no propaganda but it
just paints the world in its factual colors). The story gets upvoted quickly
so it makes it to the front page (which will get it up voted even more). Then
the magic invisible hand of the market appears and the story gets lost in HN
underbelly.

Note to self: Why am I still bothering with HN? It is exactly like the general
IT crowd. Anything worth discussing is not.

