The question of the degree to which enclosure was responsible for the supply of factory workers is one people have debated for a century. The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this.
There were in practice a bunch of forces that drove people to work in factories. The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one.
> Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this.
Agreed. To restate in less argumentative terms, the claim made that:
>the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh.
to be convincing must show that:
(1). there was a real alternative between peasant life and industrial life,
(2). that peasants made the choice with at least a decent understanding of what factory life was like.
1 is, as you state, debatable which weakens the claim (it certainly is not evidence in the affirmative). On 2 I don't have the expertise or the citations to state one way or the other, but I would love to see some evidence on either side before placing faith in the claim.
To generalize, I would say that any argument that "A is better than B, because lots of people from B prefer A" must at minimum meet the test that: it is a true choice, and that the people making the choice have enough information (informed consent). Additionally, I do not consider such arguments truly convincing, in and of themselves, even if they meet both tests because populations can make poor choices (cigarettes, electing bad politicians, buying an inferior product, etc).
> The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course.
Then why do you make this quip? It reads as if you are only including it to sow doubt about the claim by association. Maybe I'm overly cynical, if so I apologize.
> The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one.
The idea that productivity of Europe was challenged by international trade was/is also wildly popular with Marxist historians - the rise of well-developed international capitalism as a pre-requisite to reaching the productivity levels required for a socialist revolution to be successful is a key part of Marx ideas. The rising competition from increasingly efficient US agriculture and industrialization was even explicitly called out for its effects on Europe in at least one of the prefaces Marx and Engels wrote to translations of the Communist Manifesto.
I don't think it's a quip. That it fits a popular narrative is evidence that motivated cognition was going on when evidence for the claim was gathered.
But if they're not hired for some idea that they're Marxist, whoever rejects them are looking for the wrong things. In years of associating with various marxists, I've never seen any of them wearing Che Guevara shirts. Most of the people I see wearing Che shirts seem to have little to no understanding of the political signal it might send.
Frankly, I'd think you'd be more likely to find a marxist wearing a suit than a Che t-shirt.
Agree that there were multiple forces driving people into the factories. But there is a period of time between medivial peasants and the industrial revolution, and during that time a lot of things changed, economicaly and social.
There were in practice a bunch of forces that drove people to work in factories. The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one.