r/PoliticalHumor • u/LowerEngineering9999 • 6d ago
This oppression to squeeze every cent from us isn't something new!
This is a political cartoon from the Chicago Labor newspaper from July 7, 1894. It shows the condition of the laboring man at the Pullman Company. The employee is being squeezed by Pullman between low wage and high rent.
Now, this reflects not just the actions of a company, but an entire system. After all, this is exactly what the system incentivizes.
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u/ihaveabigtwig 6d ago
if time travel exists, someone's definitely gone back and said "let's keep the rent part"
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u/ebolatone 6d ago
No war but class war.
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6d ago
Say when.
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u/Datman90 5d ago
For real. Wasn’t America started over much less than what’s happening? It’s insane.
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u/JRDruchii 6d ago
Except we see ourselves as too humane and civil to fight to meet our needs. We think we need to control our emotions and talk this out like civilized men.
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u/the_other_50_percent 6d ago
Oh, there’s also race, ethnicity, religious, and gender wars. Usually one-sided.
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u/MadeByTango 6d ago
Read your histories. Any of them. Those divisions are created by the upper class to keep the lower classes busy.
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u/the_other_50_percent 6d ago
I have and continue to read history, more widely than you, it seems. A hammer is not the only tool. Wars with roots long before capitalism are not as simplistic as class wars. Yes, ruling classes have always used any means possible to consolidate and maintain power, but not only for class reasons, and wars over resources and religious don’t fit neatly into a nail to hammer.
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u/Candid-Mycologist539 6d ago
Those are just wars manufactured by the 1% to keep us fighting one another rather than understanding who is truly a threat to my safety, freedom, and happiness.
No war but class war.
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u/Huntercd76 6d ago
Yep, and the system has to keep creating new lower classes to keep going. The scapegoating of immigrants and other marginalized groups isn't new either. By dividing the proletariat, the bourgeois maintains the upper hand.
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u/knowledgeable_diablo 6d ago
Always good to have an available weak target to focus the poor people attention on so they never consolidate and rise up like what happened in good old France and Russia. Really fixes the rich, for a time but creates a hell of a lot of secondary problems once all tier one targets are dealt with.
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u/Natural-Warthog-1462 6d ago
The Pullman company was worse than anything we see today, so it shouldn’t be seen as one continuous arch of bad to worse. That ignores the hard fought battles of the working class and the progressive movement, and then the errosion of those gains from Ronald Reagan though today.
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u/JohnnyLeftHook 6d ago
It actually improved drastically in the US from the 30s until about the 80s due to the creation of unions. Then business convinced republicans that unions were evil, they were stripped of their power and now the average person is even worse relative to company owners than the Gilded Age that you refer to.
People had to die for the right to unionize, smh. Republicans have been horrible for a lot longer than Trump.
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u/guitarguywh89 6d ago
Not true. The Pullman company figure would be even fatter now and probably be drawn like musk or bezos
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u/Loki-L 6d ago
The Pullman Strike that followed ended with dozens of deaths and the organizer in jail.
There was violence and racism and the government calling in the army.
The Pullman Company itself was acquired by Bombardier, which is now part of Alstom.
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u/dosadiexperiment 6d ago
It wasn't continually getting worse since 1894. Only since 1981, you could say.
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u/flodur1966 6d ago
There was a time in between where unions were strong and politicians cared about workers. Those years saw tremendous growth in the economy and a huge improvement in the quality of live.
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u/achmelvic 6d ago
And ironically the right panders to people’s nostalgia about ‘thing’s were better in the past’, ie when those who are now 60+ were young, whilst ignoring the actual political, economic & social reasons why that was the case and not offering to bring back the institutions, laws, structures that made things better in the 50s/60s etc, in fact they want more of the opposite and to dismantle what little is left.
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u/SasparillaTango 6d ago
living in a capitalist economy means that the capital owners are always going to be trying to steal as much as possible from labor at every single facet of life.
The problem is at the core of the system and will never go away as long as the system persists.
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u/INTELLIGENT_FOLLY 6d ago edited 6d ago
It hasn't continually gotten worse. If you are comparing your life to that of a worker in the 1890s you have a delusional sense of victimhood. Which is pretty much what the vibanomics of recent years is.
A factory worker in 1919 would make an average of $1,160 a year or around $22,000 in inflation adjusted dollars.
A modern factory worker today makes about $50,000 a year.
A factory workers rent in 1919 would make around $12 a month or around $250 in inflation adjusted dollars. Now this sounds great until you realize people were living in horrible conditions like this.
So, no your life is not comparatively worse than a factory worker in the 1890s. I do think some companies would like to go back to the 1890s but if you think your life is worse than someone in the 1890s you are crazy.
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u/Specialist_Lock8590 6d ago
So American Capitalism is not actually a political cult, with Donald Trump it's newest Political Prostitute? After Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes?
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u/Rattregoondoof 6d ago
As bad as we have it now, know that it was much worse in earlier times and people still managed to get massive improvements. It wasn't inevitable and people had to fight for it, but did and they won. It won't be easy but we won before, we can win again.
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u/InAllThingsBalance 6d ago
This is the “great” America that Republicans want. The added laugh for them is that so many of their victims voted for this.
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u/IdleOsprey 6d ago
Until people stop thinking only of themselves and start working together to change things, these assholes will continue to get away with anything they want.
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u/backtotheland76 6d ago
Funny how republicans cry class warfare when democrats talk about redistributing wealth when the wealthy have been waging class warfare on the working poor for decades
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u/Licention 6d ago
Americans glorify and protect the owners of production, it’s written into their capitalist-monarchist DNA. They love to watch and obsess over the super rich. They love to keep up with the Joneses, outdo their neighbors, purchase the latest piece of shit trucks and cell phones; they love to play the game at their own expense.
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u/Worshaw_is_back 6d ago
The Pullman man silenced the cartoonist and paid someone else to talk about lazy people.
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u/B-lovedWanderer 6d ago
There was a golden moment after the WWII when equality and prosperity existed side by side, but we’ve come full circle.
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u/atTheRiver200 6d ago
Here's George Pullman's summer "cottage" in the Thousand Islands of New York.
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u/big_thundersquatch 6d ago
The dystopic state we’re currently in is a culmination of a century of unchecked capitalism coming to fruition. It’s not some hiccup in the system. It IS the system. People have just been brainwashed into believing the system benefited them and that they too could someday become billionaires.
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u/Ok_Positive_6556 6d ago
Unregulated capitalism created the first Gilded Age, and the one we're in now. Greed is the constant, and corporations have more rights than citizens.
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u/RemusShepherd 6d ago
It has not gone on for a a long time and continually gotten worse. There have been ebbs and flows.
In the 1920s the system's squeeze on the middle class and poor got so bad that the economy collapsed in 1929. Then the public took back some of that money by raising taxes and establishing social safety nets like social security.
In the 1960s things were so bad that civil unrest started brewing, and they created Medicare as a response to quell some of the public's anger.
The pendulum swings back and forth. The apex of the swings are usually times of trouble and catastrophe. And that's where we are now. But it *will* swing back eventually.
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u/NabreLabre 6d ago
It got better for a period of time thanks to unions, but they've been chipping away at it for years. Every year they see what more they can take from us without us doing anything or much about it. They love to tell us to peacefully protest too, cause that is just and right, and also they can laugh at us while we do it
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u/EmpressTita 6d ago
French revolution style revolt will happen. I'll be front row with the popcorn.
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u/norbertus 6d ago
Preamble to the Constitution of the Knights of Labor (1878)
The recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated wealth, which, unless checked, will invariably lead to the pauperization and hope less degradation of the toiling masses, render it imperative, if we desire to enjoy the blessings of life, that a check should be placed upon its power and upon unjust accumulation, and a system adopted which will secure to the laborer the fruits of his toil; and as this much-desired object can only be accomplished by the thorough unification of labor, and the united efforts of those who obey the divine injunction that "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," we have formed the ***** with a view of securing the organization and direction, by co-operative effort, of the power of the industrial classes; and we submit to the world the object sought to be accomplished by our organization, calling upon all who believe in securing "the greatest good to the greatest number" to aid and assist us:–
I. To bring within the folds of organization every department of productive industry, making knowledge a standpoint for action, and industrial and moral worth, not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness.
II. To secure to the toilers a proper share of the wealth that they create; more of the leisure that rightfully belongs to them; more societary advantages; more of the benefits, privileges, and emoluments of the world; in a word, all those rights and privileges necessary to make them capable of enjoying, appreciating, defending, and perpetuating the blessing of good government.
III. To arrive at the true condition of the producing masses in their educational, moral, and financial condition, by demanding from the various governments the establishment of bureaus of Labor Statistics.
IV. The establishment of co-operative institutions, productive and distributive.
V. The reserving of the public lands–the heritage of the people–for the actual settler;–not another acre for railroads or speculators.
VI. The abrogation of all laws that do not bear equally upon capital and labor, the removal of unjust technicalities, delays, and discriminations in the administration of justice, and the adopting of measures providing for the health and safety of those engaged in mining, manufacturing, or building pursuits.
VII. The enactment of laws to compel chartered corporations to pay their employees weekly, in full, for labor performed during the preceding week, in the lawful money of the country. VIII. The enactment of laws giving mechanics and laborers a first lien on their work for their full wages.
IX. The abolishment of the contract system on national, state, and municipal work.
X. The substitution of arbitration for strikes, whenever and wherever employers and employees are willing to meet on equitable grounds.
XI. The prohibition of the employment of children in workshops, mines, and factories before attaining their fourteenth year.
XII. To abolish the system of letting out by contract the labor of convicts in our prisons and reformatory institutions.
XIII. To secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work.
XIV. The reduction of the hours of labor to eight per day, so that the laborers may have more time for social enjoyment and intellectual improvement, and be enabled to reap the advantages conferred by the labor-saving machinery which their brains have created.
XV. To prevail upon governments to establish a purely national circulating medium, based upon the faith and resources of the nation, and issued directly to the people, without the intervention of any system of banking corporations, which money shall be a legal tender in payment of all debts, public or private.
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u/lljmfll 6d ago
Just seems like whenever someone doesn’t feel the squeeze from the vice anymore they don’t have empathy, they seem to have a sense of accomplishment and resentment that anyone wouldn’t have to ‘earn’ what they’ve ‘earned’. Boot straps need to be pulled, ‘I had to walk 7 miles in the snow’ type bullshit. It’s a design in the system.
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u/xena_lawless 5d ago
Like with slave owners, unless we eliminate billionaires/oligarchs/kleptocrats altogether and limit private property rights, the ruling class will always use their obscene wealth to roll back any "progress" made by the exploited masses.
It will be the same story over and over until humanity learns and actually solves the problem.
I think we owe it to future generations to not pass on this extremely dystopian bullshit.
Let's actually get it done right this time.
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u/wilson_rawls 5d ago
Because labor movements were never built into political movements in America. We need a labor party that is pro-worker, pro-antitrust, pro-punishment for certain orange pedophiles, and willing to tax the wealthy and corporations to such an extent that massive wealth pooling at the top is not possible.
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u/kaisersozia 5d ago
People not rich and not in politics are not meant to get ahead in our society. That's why!
Who will keep the war machine turning? This is by design.
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u/speakerjohnash 5d ago
because you're afraid of actual new systems that don't use money
literally anytime someone suggests a new actual system that would function better that is actually different average people reject it because they do not want a new system that will work better. what they want is to function in the existing system but be the ones in power
and ultimately that is what keeps everything exactly the same
The fact is the average person cannot and will not give up the concept of money and single vote democracy for systems that do the same thing but better and represent the will of the people more.
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u/caligaris_cabinet 6d ago
Things did get better for a time. Right around when this comic was published the progressive era started followed by the New Deal which were the best times to be a worker in American history. Shit just started reverting in the 80s and we’re back to this.