A Not So Distant Mirror: Jack London's Political Writings | Hacker News Reader

A Not So Distant Mirror: Jack London's Political Writings

threepennyreview.com

56 pointssamclemens10 comments

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.

Many people work for less than the minimum wage, so I'm not sure if that counts.

It's interesting that one of the main changesin the last few years is many of my friends are now working for Instacart or Uber. This means that many lower class people are again being paid using a piece-work system.

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.

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.

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

Or capitalism in a global economy.

Capitalism can exist without exploiting foreign labor.

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

The omission of OSHA from the list of yet-to-be-undone accomplishments is interesting, as is the fact that the 8 hour workday is enshrined in law for categories of employment considered "working class." Both are fairly important, and neither is under attack as far as I know.

This underscores my main problem with lowkey socialist manifestos, such as this appears to be; they rely heavily on emotional manipulation to bolster their points. That's not generally a good sign about the argument being presented.

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.

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