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Working-Class Culture And Rebellion Summary

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Money, or the equivalent thereof, has often caused divides amongst people everywhere. It has for all of history caused many rebellions and conflicts and will continue likely forever. For the working-class culture and politics surrounding the Industrial Revolution, these divides and conflicts were made very public as employer and employee clashed and complied throughout the nineteenth century America. Not only did this divide them this way, it divided the employees amongst separate views on employers and the value of their work as a whole. Throughout the article, Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion, the authors discuss these bonds and divisions as they progress from early nineteenth …show more content…

They differed in terms of values and views of their employer. For example, it divided them into traditionalists, those who valued their casual attitudes toward working and the joys of gaming and drinking, and modernist, those who resembled their employers and joined them in the shunning of “the very things traditionalists cherished-the warm sociability of the drinking club” (78). Traditionalists stuck to the old ways viewing employers as their social betters where modernists viewed them as equals. This difference shapes the great majority of the century as it changes politics and cultural understanding. It established the workers’ voice and votes to be heard and not just simply ignored. Next, there was a subdivision in the modernist arena into rebels and loyalists. Rebels and loyalists “shared the same underlying moral character” and thus divided on the issue of political economy (79). The rebel view of the work structure was that “capital and labor stood in direct opposition” that is capital was out to get as much work out of labor for as little as possible (79). Loyalists on the other hand carried the ideology that labor deserved a fair wage as the entrepreneur a fair profit. These start to define the latter half of the nineteenth century shaping political and economic reform from 1860 to

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