I'm in American manufacturing and it's not at all new to me that the overeducated bureaucrat hive sneer at us while also subsisting entirely on a service/convenience economy.
@BFSOM
"the party of the working class"
@gummywurms226
Remember these are the same people that say "Without migrant labor who will pick our vegetables?" Then in the same breath tell you to check your privilege.
@DenKonZenith
I am a 130 IQ Anglo; I WANT that sort of job, I'm so tired of office politics and non-tangible "products" and policies.
@acameron207
Some of my strongly left wing colleagues were laughing at these videos last week, seemingly oblivious to the "mask off" nature of their behaviour.
@derangedhermit7981
I’ve been a factory worker for decades now, and honestly? It’s great. I clock in, work twelve-hour shifts three days a week, and just weld or run a CNC machine. The work isn’t complicated, which means I can knock out two or three audiobooks a day—on physics, paleontology, psychology, sociology, whatever I feel like. Meanwhile, I’m building things that are actually useful. The day flies by. Half the time, I don’t even hear the buzzer—someone has to tap me and say it’s break time.
And I take pride in what I do. I can weld nearly 4.5 times faster than a robot, with cleaner results and almost no smoke—something the machines still struggle with. Honestly, we lose more time cleaning up after the robot than if I’d just done the job myself. Then I get four days off to do whatever I want.
It’s not that I can’t be one of the academic elites. I just don’t want to be. Too many of them are stuck-up assholes who’ve never done anything actually useful for society. What baffles me is how people with ten times the education can be so out of touch with reality. I used to respect guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now he goes on Real Time and acts like we suddenly can’t define basic biological terms; then treats anyone who disagrees like they’re just too dumb to understand.
That kind of smug dishonesty frustrates me more than being wrong ever could. You’re not educating anymore, you’re just posturing. Oh wow, you spent $100K on a degree and wrote a shitty paper about how the best way to end racism is by being racist yourself. Amazing. Groundbreaking. Maybe try rolling up your sleeves and actually doing something for a change.
Howard Zinn’s "A People’s History of the United States" highlights the intense struggles between labor and capital during the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Zinn exposes how rapid industrialization enriched factory owners while workers endured brutal conditions: long hours, child labor, and deadly workplaces. Workers fought back through strikes and unions, but faced violent repression from capitalists backed by police, militias, and courts. Key conflicts like the Great Railroad Strike (1877), the Homestead Strike (1892), and the Ludlow Massacre (1914) revealed the extreme measures taken to crush labor movements.
Radical unions like the IWW "Wobblies" organized across racial and ethnic lines, challenging the exploitative system, while government and business elites used legal and military force to suppress them. By the 1930s, mass labor uprisings, such as the Flint sit-down strikes, forced concessions like the Wagner Act, proving worker power. Yet Zinn shows how post-WWII corporate strategies; such as union busting, automation, and anti-communist purges, weakened labor’s gains. Throughout, Zinn emphasizes that progress came not from elite benevolence but from relentless worker resistance, framing industrial history as an ongoing, often bloody, class war.
