“Even Paul Krugman has defended child labor” Is that supposed to be a defense of the practice?

look I just have opinions on the age of consent for employment ok

Even if I’m over the top “fair and good faith” to this person’s point of view, they’re still wrong. They lack historical knowledge which could be gained easily… from one source. That’s right, the Bible. No, the other Bible. Das Kapital aka Capital.

Marx writes extensively and cites heavily from primary sources about child labor in England during the early-mid 1800s.

He also writes about the beginning of capitalism and the transition stage between feudalism and capitalism.

Long story short, though people should read at least that one book Capital Vol I, under feudalism and, probably all previous economies, children were expected to participate in labor. That’s true.

However, massive however, there’s more to it! A lot more, and I can’t even begin to summarize properly from memory, but, labor under feudalism wasn’t as…intense. I don’t know if it’s just in our minds or what, but tend to think of farming either purely for oneself or for oneself + additional for a lord as the dark times, far worse than anything ever. But compared to the absolute fucking objective horrors that capitalism brought to England and the world, given the choice between them 16 hours breathing in fine metal dust vs farming hard outdoors a few months a year… I’m choosing the fucking farming! (This is not to glorify feudalism, just to take a look at how much labor was “needed” and expected from everyone including kids- a lot less!)

There’s a lot more to be said on time and intensity, but, tldr is capitalism pushes capitalists to push labor towards either working longer or working more intensely, all in the forever-pursuit of profits stolen from their surplus-value production.

In England, and it’s been repeated across the world, this resulted in factories being run 24/7 and workers working 12, 14, 16 hour days. More than a few reports of people working quite literally to death. When laws were passed eventually to shorten the working day (something capitalists claimed would be the end of the world btw) capitalists forced higher work intensity. Sometimes via technology, often just by force and threat of losing the job which meant losing your home/shelter. Kinda the same as today!

Naturally there were people who either couldn’t or didn’t want to participate in such a shit-ass system. Marx has a chapter or two on these people and the very very very beginning of the giant, horror factories. I should go back and read it, but basically the capitalists hired people (kinda like early pinkertons or cops) to round these “lazy” people up and either literally force them under threat of physical violence and death to go to a factory and work or force them from the towns. Capitalists themselves made it so no one could survive without working the majority of their lives away in a hellish factory. They made rent and food costs such that one person or a couple could labor and provide for a family. It tore the mothers from the homes and forced them to work often abandoning young children to raise each other. And once the kids were “old enough” (like fucking 8 years old) they’d also be stuffed into the pits of hell. The family “needed” to earn just a little more money to survive, after all. Never mind that people had been living just fine for centuries before these benevolent factory owners came along, jacked up the price to live and forced everyone (under implied or explicit violence) into a furnace to breath in microscopic pieces of, I dunno, copper shaving until they died at the ripe age of 40 and their lungs are coated in all the shit they worked with over a lifetime.

People like that poster are the ones justifying these systems that ripped and still rip apart families and communities and shove everyone into a death hole. Forced to work their lives away doing work so intense and for so long per day that I can’t even imagine how I’d cope in their situation. But this person thinks that’s fine. Because they either don’t know or choose to not know that capitalism (which they champion) caused these conditions.

Disgusting people, disgusting outlook on the world. Child labor for profits in this way does not need to exist anywhere. Anyone defending it is soulless and a piece of shit. They can’t use history either because history doesn’t work out the way they think it does.

What has brought those conditions though?

Small flaw in the arguments… the concept of countries has not existed for a millenia… let alone centuries.

Most honest libertarian was Rothbard and so we have some fun quotes of him.

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