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Reddit mentions of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Sentiment score: 2
Reddit mentions: 6

We found 6 Reddit mentions of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Here are the top ones.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
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Found 6 comments on The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes:

u/Guomindang · 15 pointsr/slatestarcodex

You are a socialist, right? Now I may be a reactionary, but I can say that one admirable feature of historical socialist movements was their belief in the capacity of poor people to uplift themselves culturally even amidst conditions of toil and poverty. I can't imagine any of those socialists saying that the poor have no recourse but to sedate themselves with intoxicants and distractions. And how strange that a life of hopeless drudgery, malnourishment, a crippling shortage of "mental bandwith", or whatever, didn't prevent turn-of-the-century miners from becoming far more well-read and cultured than most middle-class people are today, all in a world without Google Books.

u/G96Saber · 4 pointsr/ukpolitics

> You would be surprised how powerful an argument based on non-judgement is to a group of people whom have been brought up with the idea of "may he who is without sin cast the first stone".

You're such an ameteur. Jesus did not tell people not to judge.

> Your hedonism, which you so decry, does not seem to be having a notable effect on the human species other than to make weekends more enjoyable.

If you were to read this book, you would learn that the working-class of the 19th century were far more educated than those today. Hedonism and anti-intellectualism are bound tightly, like two rotten peas in a pod. I'm sure you've lamented the dreadful level of political discourse... Well, you indirectly support it.

Moreover, it is well known that people are generally less happy than they used to be, despite huge increases of personal wealth. Huh, I wonder why that is... Certainly nothing to do with the fact that we live in a spiritual wasteland.

> In those societies where the protestant ethic was not so brutally imposed on the populace and they have a far more balanced idea of hedonism - surprise surprise - they do not have this problem.

You don't appear to even understand what the Protestant Work Ethic is. A country with a Protestant Work Ethic would have no problems with hedonism; work itself would be pleasing.

u/tadom91 · 2 pointsr/C_S_T

I remember reading this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intellectual-Life-British-Working-Classes/dp/0300153651 a few years ago and i honestly think it's still roughly the same but getting worse. That's why I'm leaning more towards the theory that bots are leading the most gullible down this road. Things don't just flip around from autodidactism to complete idiocy without a BIG push.
My little sister watched The Truman Show in Religious Education at school the other day. I think we haven't seen anything yet... but i remember at school we didn't even have R.E. most of the time and when we did we watched rubbish TV shows, shouts to the Vicar of Dibley.

u/peter-says-so · 1 pointr/history

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale, 2010) is excellent. As the title suggests, it isn't primarily about what people's bodies did day to day but about what their minds did: "This landmark book provides an intellectual history of the British working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers' memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, Jonathan Rose discovers which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew."

u/Mullero · 1 pointr/CapitalismVSocialism

Nice reply. I really would stress the technical definition of capitalism (private ownership of the means of production, with the goal of profit), because it allows a lot of useful investigation. Still, i like your thinking that capitalism is about the weekends, and it got me curious.

I was taught in school that the two-day weekend was invented by Henry Ford, along with a whole raft of worker benefits, and that we have him to thank for every free Saturday. I found this Politifact article that lays out a more detailed picture, and suggests that Ford was simply responding to the pressure of a decades-long campaign by workers. Also, it points out that the now-standard work week (8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, Saturday and Sunday off) was not formalised in the US until 1940, well after Henry Ford’s time.
This suggests that we owe our weekends of luxury not necessarily to generous employers, but to the organised struggle of workers.

If we look further back in history, we might see that industrial capitalism has a history of very long work days, with very little holiday. I actually work on the grounds of a mansion in an old mill town. The employer and their family lived in the grand house, on top of a hill, with a view down to the river where the mills ran. The slope is terraced by small houses, built to house the mill workers, and which used to be slums. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was very little legal protection, and the workers endured shifts up to 14 hours a day. Child labour was employed in some parts, and there are accounts of beds ‘never getting warm’ because, as soon as the father would get home, the mother would get up to work. Wages were generally very poor, and children would often suffer from malnutrition.

Some really good info on this:

Very good book

An overview of working conditions

It’s vitally important to note that the factories, the mills, the looms, were all privately owned, and operated for profit. It was in the interest of profit that wages were low and the work day was long. This powerful motive is still present today.