Serfdom had been gradually dying long before, but Queen Elizabeth abolished it completely. But years later...

Yes, it's a lot of work, but don't compare with 12-16 hour workdays of the industrial revolution where you have to living in cramped apartments and kids are working in mine shafts and as chimney sweeps.

Farming is hard, but it won't kill you.

Your problem is thinking a stable status quo has to do with the system and not the economic conditions.

This is wrong. Before the advent of any agricultural technology, agriculture routinely did kill people, or at least shortened their lifespan by several decades.

If you think working the field for 10 hours a day, and eating 10000 calories worth of wheat and meat is healthy, you're delusional.

But that's beside the point really, we are talking about quality of life, and labor-saving devices most certainly increase people's quality of life, and only a neo-Luddite would think it doesn't.

>I told you I was right

But he's clearly left

Agricultural work wasn't ten hours a day, it was eight at most, six in many areas.

The industrialist revolution, of course, should have lead to MUCH LESS labor logically, but it didn't, it lead to a dramatic increase in labor. This is because, with enclosure, employers had complete bargaining power, and they used it to make the workers turn a greater profit at the expense of leisure time.

>Agricultural work wasn't ten hours a day, it was eight at most, six in many areas.
And this isn't even counting the far greater number of labor free holidays prior to industrial revolution.

>as history has shown that democracy trends towards a more stable status quo

When this will meme end? History has never shown that. Democracy is the opposite of promoting a stable status quo (unless it's a fake democracy that chats and chats about the rule of the people when it's in fact the rule of the upper classes and the cuckold of the masses) and about well being and economics, there are like x10 time more Haiti-tier democracies than Swiss-tier.

These are two different things that don't go and never have gone hand in hand.

>but this could have been remedied by higher compensation to bring workers; certainly employers through the period of urbanization, up to the industrial revolution, could have afforded drastically better standards of living for their employees.

The profits of industrialists weren't really all that great before the industrial revolution, it was the landholders who made the most dosh thanks to increased productivity from better crop rotation and lower costs triggered by the lesser need for labor in animal-based agriculture. As far as urban overcrowding, the colonies served as a safety valve.

>For the nobles who did, and gained from it, they surely would have invested in urban development and industrialization as much as the bourgeoisie, but the workers here would have had better lifestyles, and technology would not be oriented as much toward populism, but toward improving the quality of society.

The nobles would've strangled industrialization in its cradle if they could have, it was totally culturally repugnant to them. Urban living was associated with the unwashed masses, great fires, sewage, and plagues. But even if they didn't, restricting capital ownership to the nobility would've severely impeded the growth of the English economy and made everyone poorer due to the drastic under-utilization of talent.

It's true that people worked longer for a period of time during the Industrial Revolution, but people's quality of life clearly didn't go down, it almost certainly went up.

Romantization of farm-life is the mark of an uneducated imbecile FYI.

Then why should I favour being ruled by Charles the second of Spain?

The backbreaking part of agriculture is not year round, unlike those of urbanized labor or miner.

It's dangerous when you open an untouched jungle or doing a corvee for the landlord.

>The backbreaking part of agriculture is not year round, unlike those of urbanized labor or miner.

That's true, but the urbanized laborer or miner makes more money, and thus has more purchasing power, which increases quality of life.

They didn't even have any land and public parks cost money to use, how do you call that a rise in quality of life?

>The profits of industrialists weren't really all that great before the industrial revolution
Professional workshops did pretty well.

>Urban living was associated with
It's where Buckingham Palace and Shakespeare's plays were, not to mention cathedrals and most institutes of higher learning

Laborers of the industrial revolution generally lived hand-to-mouth

>Laborers of the industrial revolution generally lived hand-to-mouth

So did most farmers, because as you know, most farming throughout history has been subsistence, not commercial.

Right, but they worked much shorter hours were entitled to feasts provided by their lords on feast days, enjoy open land, and had the benefits of a gift economy.

Farm life was superior to urban living before the advent of proper sewer systems, IMO

If we're talking antebellum US I'd choose the life of a yeoman over that of an immigrant worker any day. Farmers didn't have to put in 10 hour days year-round, they had more political rights up until Jackson, they didn't have to share flea-ridden cramped tenements with other poor people and their kids, didn't have to share diseases with thousands of other people, and they also had more access to fresh unadulterated meat and vegetables while cities routinely suffered from additives thrown in by unscrupulous assholes like during the Swill Milk scandal that killed 8000 infants.

Because it's better than being ruled by Maduro, democratically elected president of Venezuela.

Or Adolf Hitler, btw.

I mean if we go down to compare the list of shitty democratically elected leaders with that of shitty autocrats, we'd actually end up making a good damn case for Autocracy over Democracy.

Besides, you wouldn't be ruled by Charles the Inbred, as he was just a non-governing figurehead, but by his ministers and a cohort of other people representing the variety of class and state interests. Which doesn't make it as different as in any modern democracy except the fact that you get to elect the faces of those representing the same variety of class and state interests from pool A or pool B once every 4 years in this things called Elections.

What really makes the difference in a modern democracy is protection of minority from the will of the majority thanks to Constitutional rights and Civil Rights from the discretion of the Government.

Well at least in those democracies that haven't yet thrown Liberty into the trash in the name of Security.

>Or Adolf Hitler, btw.

Wasn't put in democratically.

It actually very clearly went down before it started going up half a century later. And I'm talking about England here.

If we talk about extra-european societies, then I'm not really sure it's ever gone up at all in many cases.

So what is your estimation then?

That the current way of life in the West, which is in large part, a result of the Industrialization, which yes I agree is not a good way to live; worse than being a serf in Russia anno 1840?

I think maybe you need to read my OP again.

I'm not objecting to industrialization, I'm objecting to the conditions under which it happened, which allowed workers to be so astoundingly exploited.

>Charles the second
A pretty decent king. He stabilized and fixed some of the shit that his predecesors did. He was probably the scond best Spanish Habsburg after Phillip the II

>It's where Buckingham Palace and Shakespeare's plays were, not to mention cathedrals and most institutes of higher learning

This is what Buckingham Palace and the area around it looked like in 1703. Shakespeare's plays were lowest-common denominator pop entertainment. They had very nice cathedrals in the countryside too, like Salisbury Cathedral. St Andrews and Trinity College were considered two of the best-run schools in the British Isles during the 17th century.

>I'm objecting to the conditions under which it happened

Yeah, but could it happen under any other circumstances?

Do you really think that the Chinese that work 12 hours a day in a factory, can have the same work conditions and pay as you?

oh and to add to this, the Great Fire and the Great Plague really fucked London up, with the latter killing off a quarter of the city's population.

>Shakespeare's plays were lowest-common denominator pop entertainment

Your distinction between "pop" and "highbrow" barely existed then. Shakespeare had considerable popular appeal. He also was greatly loved by Queen Elizabeth and King James, he wrote The Tempest specifically for King James, and it was first performed at Whitehall Palace

>This is what Buckingham Palace and the area around it looked like in 1703.
Whitehall Palace, then

>They had very nice cathedrals in the countryside too,
But most are and were in cities, because those are going to be the major population areas.

> St Andrews and Trinity College were considered two of the best-run schools in the British Isles during the 17th century.
But most higher education was still in cities, or at least very close to them.

>Yeah, but could it happen under any other circumstances?
Yes. Without enclosure, workers would not have been forced to look en masse for urban employment, and consequently would have held much greater bargaining power.

>Do you really think that the Chinese that work 12 hours a day in a factory, can have the same work conditions and pay as you?
Yep, it would just require their employers to be less greedy.

>"Marx argued in Capital that enclosure played a constitutive role in the revolutionary transformation of feudalism into capitalism, both by transforming land from a means of subsistence into a means to realize profit on commodity markets (primarily wool in the English case), and by creating the conditions for the modern labour market by transforming small peasant proprietors and serfs into agricultural wage-labourers, whose opportunities to exit the market declined as the common lands were enclosed.[10]"

So what you're essentially saying, is that we should've spare ourselves the benefits of modern living simply because you have a hard-on for feudalism specifically for religious reasons.

No, what I'm essentially saying is that Marx is full of shit. There was a large urban labor force long before enclosure, they were called craftsmen. And the urban labor force could have certainly been expanded with industrialization, the only difference is the employers would have to offer more to their workers.

>craftsmen
>large urban labor force

Stop shitposting.

They were certainly a large force in every urbanized area. Who do you think made ships and pots and shoes?

Do you think supply and demand didn't function before economic liberalism or something? Do you think it didn't apply to labor?

>But most are and were in cities, because those are going to be the major population areas.

That's definitely not correct for the time frame we're discussing. In 1801 only 17% of the English and Welsh population was living in urban settlements of 20,000 or more. Before the industrial revolution kicked into full gear the vast majority of the population remained in the countryside and in market towns, even moreso in the 17th century. Further, the majority of nice cathedrals in existence at the time would have been those built during the medieval period.

And in the Medieval period, they would still be built in populous areas and in well established settlements, which would be the sort that would turn into cities later. A cathedral is nearly always built in the largest settlement of the diocese.

>Yep, it would just require their employers to be less greedy.

You are vastly overestimating the profits of an average employer.

Not the sort that have their product made in China. They have it made in China specifically to make a higher profit than they could by making it in America, not because they can't afford to make it in America.

Well the majority of cathedrals obviously aren't going to be built in the middle of nowhere (except for Durham, where the city formed around the cathedral). But these "populous areas" and settlements can hardly be called urbanized when the vast majority had populations in the low thousands and low population density up until the 19th century. In 1750 London was the only city with a population greater than 50,000, and there were only 6 urban areas total in England with more than 12,000 people living in them.

Back to the main point, London was big but it was just one city and most of the nobility put far more resources into their country houses than town houses because the countryside was where you did all your traditional noble things like hunting, horse racing, playing tennis, hosting concerts, throwing parties, etc. London was just shitty during the 17th century: there were constant religious riots, the Puritans shut down all the theaters, it suffered from repeated fires and disease outbreaks, entertainment consisted of public executions and bear baiting, and the sanitation was predictably terrible for a city that tripled in population over a century and used their river as an open sewer. William and Mary hated the city and preferred to reside outside its limits at Kensington.

>Not the sort that have their product made in China.

Tons of small businesses rely on Chinese manufacturing due to the higher costs of domestic labor. The lower cost of foreign labor allows more American entrepreneurs to experiment with ideas thanks to the much smaller amount of capital required to get started.

>not because they can't afford to make it in America.

All it takes is one company making stuff in China to undersell the rest of the competition. Labor is the most expensive factor of production across nearly all industries. For domestic manufacturing US businesses have to worry about more environmental costs, more workers comp, more safety standards, maintaining a "positive work environment," unions, and lawsuits.

Those machines invented during industrialization made craftsmen obsolete.That's a key and immutable part of industrialization. It made time-consuming processes done by hand, many times by trained artisans, into something simple that could be done much much faster by little boys & girls (and as a result, be much much cheaper for consumers, thus improving their quality of life).

That's the edge of industrialization, It's not 'greed' on a part of factory owners. The idea that you could just put Artisans into factories and achieve the same result is bogus.

>Less greedy
>Implying the productivity of the average Chinese worker is equal to that of a Western worker

Some employers are dickheads, but not all.

They start with a higher profit, then more companies invest in China competing for wages bringing up the wage. Or the supply of labour increases, as people move in from the countryside, wages are more or less fixed (but higher than the alternatives), until all of the excess labour is used and then wages spike up. Either way you get higher wages, or more people with initially lower wages which then go up.