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At best, they're blind to it. Their education never really got into how awful it was to be a worker in the industrial revolution. Or they think it was all exaggerated for books.
At worst, they're entirely aware of it, but insist it was a better quality of life than what working-class people had before the industrial revolution, thereby justifying the horrifying conditions.
edit: same thing if you talk about labor conditions in the global south tbh
As someone that went to public school in New York before national standardized testing changed the curriculum, I remember being taught in middle school history class the following:
Holy shit, based New York?
The catch is, it’s usually presented as “well that was in the past, capitalism is perfectly fine now”. It’s like when libs who are actually familiar with Marx agree with what he says about capitalism, but then say the analysis is no longer relevant since we made capitalism a lot better since then. Or highlighting racism in the past but implying that racism stopped being a problem after 1965, when racism was defeated legislatively (hooray for liberalism!)
Capitalism defenders think that every capitalist state should have a standard of living like the west and those that don't are just doing capitalism wrong. The idea that the suffering of the Bangladeshi clothes factory worker and the Guatemalan banana plantation farmer and the Congolese cobalt miner are necessary for capitalism doesn't cross their minds.
Or, they think what Bangladesh et al are experiencing is their “bad” phase of capitalism, and eventually living conditions will rise and all the suffering will be worth it. “The US/UK had to go through that phase, but so does every capitalist economy. Eventually you get to where we are now”. They say something similar about the former USSR - the socialist economy was so warped that they had to go through the horror of the 90s in order to reap all the wonderful benefits of capitalism.
They ignore the fact that the British working class had to fight for some of those improvements. But really, it was when British imperialism got supercharged in the late 19th c. that things actually did get better for the English working class.
good life is when technological gizmos
bad life is when ~~peasant~~ ~~agriculture~~ vaguely rural
no, they don't forget, they just pretend that it's completely natural.
they insist that private property is natural, and so the proletariat is natural, as if people are born into a state of abject poverty rather than poverty being imposed upon them.
forgetting that before enclosure most people had a right to access and use productive land for subsistence.
As someone that has been learning how to grow food, I find the idea of common land very interesting. However I do wonder how farmers that were using common land would update agriculture practices.
Like let's say someone wanted to dig swales and direct water into a pond so more diverse plants could be grown on some land, would there need to be a big debate about it? If so then with who? If the land is not owned then who forms a consensus about it's use. If the users of the land are the ones that help make those decisions, wouldn't they naturally form some type of farm user association to schedule and hold these debates? Would at some point it become harder for new land users to change land use practices after such an association is established with seniority?
Are there any books on there s subject for someone like me to read?
In midieval times there was a LOT of meetings, contracts etc between essentially city council members to settle very similar issues in regards to use of the commons.
I don't think most people have a very good grip on history.
I feel like for the average American, history goes
Given that level of knowledge, I wouldn't expect much nuance or even accuracy from people.
On the other hand, I just made this up. I bet there's polls and stuff that tell us how much people actually know, but I bet those are super depressing.
capitalism is when I drive a 3-ton pickup truck to my business casual attire office job where I cold-call people to sell penis enlarger cream that doesn't work and I eat mcdodnal and drink budlite
Can't forget something that was never known to begin with
They just assume the preceding eras were worse
they dont know to begin with
they didn't pay attention in school that day, if it was talked about at all
Horrific for the losers!! I would have been living in one of the hard to maintain mansions with ornate wood work and multiple fireplaces and servants living in the crawlspaces. When I bite the apple the worm better watch out.
: "Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs!"
short answer yes
They basically view the Industrial Revolution as their own "transitory period". Things sucked while capitalism was getting its footing but once it was established it was all burgers and Xboxes for all!
Ignores the west largely just exported all the nasty parts of industrialism via colonialism to get out of that phase.
Hey now, there's one exception. In the US and now the UK, the population there masochistically demands to bear the brunt of said nasty parts of industrialism to prove how tough they are.
Thinking through things isn’t exactly their specialty
CHUDs like to forget about the protracted people's war waged by Sascha Konietzko and Trent Reznor against the hair metal bourgeoisie. So many mesh lycra onesies met their demise in the pits.
Dunno how it is for other folks in other countries but we Yankees don't learn shit about anything after the civil war.
Nothing about the industrial revolution, nothing about the development and lead-up to the world wars, the cold war, the modern world, nothing.
The most you may get is being forced to read 1984 and animal farm or if youre lucky grapes of wrath.
Also AP nerd classes barely touch the stuff as well. I only got a chance to begin my studies on Russia purely by chance in the fact the teacher that used to run AP European history was a former college professor social Democrat euro-phile that specialized in the industrial revolution to ww1 period. We learned more than the average student, but there was a bare handful of us that took the class that wouldn't even count as a fraction of a single percent of the total student population in the state.
College was similar as well up until you start getting into your higher classes and your specializations. Of course this can wildly vary between regions as the choice of materials college professors can use to teach can wildly vary based off of the professor themselves. But I have my doubts.
Long story short, we have a nation of people here who's historical education ends with the american civil war.
They have their treats now, so they don't care.
Yes. There are frequent reports of lead inside of our food and everyone just keeps chugging along. The only difference between us and a Victorian youth eating sawdust is that most people are more comfortable than him, so they accept the sawdust in their food because they’re unable to imagine a better future
This. In the words of Mark Fischer: “Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.”
This is why corporate rule is so....comfortable for people. Sure, they can make life shitty, but at least no one is being told what to do. Restricting THEIR freedom in any way leads to apocalyptic consequences, but enshittification is neutral or sometimes beneficial.