Treated as animals, Black American slaves provided the labor that contributed mightily to the exponential growth of a rapidly emerging economic juggernaut. Yet even when the abolition of slavery deprived the blue bloods of four million unpaid laborers, the pecuniary gods continued to smile upon them.
The advent of the Industrial Revolution spawned large scale mechanization, the urbanization of a once largely agrarian society, the rise of the corporation to the status of legal personhood, and a serious decline in the number of skilled artisans and self-sufficient farmers. Rife with opportunities to exploit the working class, the United States continued its ascent to economic supremacy.
Rewarding the pathologically greedy and selfish, Capitalism in the United States thrived like a tape worm in glutton's intestines as it morphed into a bloated and grotesque perversion.
Mirthless human beings living on slave wages toiled in filthy, perilous environments until their health was wrecked and ruined. Robber barons amassed outrageous fortunes on the backs of dehumanized and broken men, women and children. Transcending the political freedoms they had begrudgingly given "We the People" in the Constitution, the power elite imposed a post-Feudal form of economic serfdom.
Bleak visages of children whose impoverishment forced them to abandon school and seek employment in textile mills and coal mines revealed the truly merciless and despotic nature of Capitalism in the United States. Morally bankrupt men had raised Adam Smith's brainchild to be a merciless and brutish soul crusher.
Consider this excerpt from progressive reformer John Spargo's The Bitter Cry of the Children he wrote in 1906:
"The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners' consumption."
"I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid [clear], and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed."
Even as early as 1795, Thomas Paine witnessed economic forces of inequality and oppression savaging the humanitarian principles woven into the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution. Principles for which so many had sacrificed so much.
Paine wrote of the abuse of economic power prior to the maturation of rapacious Capitalism. "Agrarian Justice", his final pamphlet of wide acclaim, included his observations on the gross injustice of people suffering the affliction of poverty in a society with ample resources to provide for all of its members:
"...On one side, the spectator is dazzled by splendid appearances; on the other, he is shocked by extremes of wretchedness; both of which it has erected. The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized."
Paine decried the brutality of governments that caused or allowed its citizens to experience indigence:
"Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation."
Exposing the sophistry that persists to this day, Paine advanced a convincing argument against the contention by predacious capitalists that those possessing wealth are somehow exempt from the interdependence to which "ordinary" mortals owe their very survival:
"Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally."
"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."
The advent of the Industrial Revolution spawned large scale mechanization, the urbanization of a once largely agrarian society, the rise of the corporation to the status of legal personhood, and a serious decline in the number of skilled artisans and self-sufficient farmers. Rife with opportunities to exploit the working class, the United States continued its ascent to economic supremacy.
Rewarding the pathologically greedy and selfish, Capitalism in the United States thrived like a tape worm in glutton's intestines as it morphed into a bloated and grotesque perversion.
Mirthless human beings living on slave wages toiled in filthy, perilous environments until their health was wrecked and ruined. Robber barons amassed outrageous fortunes on the backs of dehumanized and broken men, women and children. Transcending the political freedoms they had begrudgingly given "We the People" in the Constitution, the power elite imposed a post-Feudal form of economic serfdom.
Consider this excerpt from progressive reformer John Spargo's The Bitter Cry of the Children he wrote in 1906:
"The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners' consumption."
"I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid [clear], and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed."
Even as early as 1795, Thomas Paine witnessed economic forces of inequality and oppression savaging the humanitarian principles woven into the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution. Principles for which so many had sacrificed so much.
Paine wrote of the abuse of economic power prior to the maturation of rapacious Capitalism. "Agrarian Justice", his final pamphlet of wide acclaim, included his observations on the gross injustice of people suffering the affliction of poverty in a society with ample resources to provide for all of its members:
"...On one side, the spectator is dazzled by splendid appearances; on the other, he is shocked by extremes of wretchedness; both of which it has erected. The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized."
Paine decried the brutality of governments that caused or allowed its citizens to experience indigence:
"Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation."
Exposing the sophistry that persists to this day, Paine advanced a convincing argument against the contention by predacious capitalists that those possessing wealth are somehow exempt from the interdependence to which "ordinary" mortals owe their very survival:
"Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally."
"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."
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