It is very easy to see how Trades Unionism and Communism could have developed in England under these circumstances. And it is also easy to see how Southern Americans could act righteous and claim that fleeing blacks would face harder conditions in the North than they did on the Southern farm, or that blacks in slavery fared better than white Northern factory workers.
Very good points, especially comparing the plight of northern sweatshop workers to slavery...
Nonsens. The industrial revolution was a difficult period compared to today but it wa a boon to workers, compared to the pre-capitalist era. Not surprisingly, many of pro-slavery southerners, such as George Fitzhugh, were explicitly socialist because of their disdaine for thrifty free laborers (who they insulted by calling "wage slaves").
Look at specific records in the "South" and you will see how few whites, even the top citizens, owned any slaves. Read M.J.Cash's classic work called "The Mind of the South" and you will see the whites fared no better than the blacks , excepting the gentry as is the case in all societies in all periods in all places. My grandmother worked 12+ hours a day at age 9 along with her parents and siblings in the Dan River Cotton Mills, owned and operated and $$$$ flowing to absentee carpetbaggers and their scion in Manhattan, just to put food on the table. I have photographs of good middle-class ( for the South!) land-owning white farming citizens of Pittsylvania County Virginia in the 1930s at a "laying out" of a dead child, no casket, no shoes, no suit, torn 'overhauls' and worn out shirt only, on the taken down door of their 3 room log home as the only board they owned, set on stumps. Among 10 people in the picture there is only two pair of shoes, and only one has laces and intact tops.
Want to look at slavery? Look at whites in the South from 1865 until the beginning of WWII.
In the 1950s a full time working man at Dan River Cotton Mills, proudly the largest single unit cotton mills in the world, made $15 to max $35 a week. In the 1970s that same man made $65 to $80 a week. At the same time, as a first year at Washington and Lee Univ., all members of my fraternity were offered $11-$18 an hour plus room and board outside of Pittsburgh as totally new and unskilled workers in custodial type jobs in the various industries there ; 5-10 times what a skilled man made in Virginia after years of service! This is fact. I was there! And that same working man in the South didn't want a damned thing the Washington Gubbimint could "give" ( return loot) to him and still doesn't! And today here is one more proud and highly educated and successful Southerner who still doesn't want a damned thing from the disgraceful, filthy and vagrant strewn Washington DC. Now let's talk more about "victims".
Don't rant in my presence of the beneficent and kind "Nawth" . I know both what white poverty and the whining leftist hypocrisy of leftists and black victim mentality looks like in reality and the total rape of a whole region of native whites for a hundred years by the whining bleeding hearts. Their hypocrisy seems also to be rooted in Britain of the past and lives well in the socialist mantra of today.