It's almost like people are trained to accept capitalist slavery as normal and hate poor people.
Is that a Soviet breadline? Nope, that's the poor's being rounded up into slave labour in capitalist Britain.
By the way, many widows and children were sent to workhouses. Unable to support themselves after the man of the house died from war or tuberculosis or some shit.
Gee, I wonder why women fought so hard for the right to enter the male workforce and vote.
The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilising the free labour of their inmates. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bones to produce fertiliser, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.
>Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree top,
When you grow old, your wages will stop,
When you have spent the little you made
First to the Poorhouse and then to the grave
The Poor Law was not designed to address the issue of poverty, which was considered to be the inevitable lot for most people; rather it was concerned with pauperism, "the inability of an individual to support himself". Writing in 1806 Patrick Colquhoun commented that:
"Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth."
Monstrous.
This all happened under capitalism.
And the kicker?
US prisons use slave labour even today.
There are over a million slaves today in these US prisons.
And even Western countries today that provide relief to the poor operate on the same principal of Less Eligibility as the British capitalists did in the 18 and 1900s.
Make no mistake, the ruling class know where their wealth comes from and will leech you dry, one way or another.
The British also invented the “concentration camp” during the Boer War.
Another appropriate comparison is the prison system in the southern US post-Reconstruction. Literally what libs think the gulag was. Black men would be arrested on false or trumped up charges all the time, then put into forced labor where death was common. There was one forced labor project I think in Virginia where something like 40% of the prisoners died. Overwork of black convicts to the point of death was pretty common in the southern US at that time.
Death to America.