How Capitalism Saved the Working Class

Chun Zhang
Professor Taylor
U.S. Labor and Work
1 May 2020
How Capitalism Saved the Working Class
The end of the civil war in the 18th century came with many changes that shaped the world, including capitalism. Every country came up with their way of coping and getting back on their feet. The South needed to industrialize, and this led leasing convicts to be casual laborers. Douglas Blackmon argues that industrialization brought back slavery in the form of industrialized forced labor. Instead of convicts getting freedom, they experienced slavery, and others leased to avoid building the prison. The construction of the Railroad to connect America to other places also came with its impacts. Gordon Chang tells an exciting story of the Chinese workers and their experiences while constructing. Thomas DiLorenzo is out to demystify the myth that capitalism exploits the working class and has led to improvement contrary to critics. He argues that capitalism led to better wages, improved working hours, elimination of child labor, and reasonable working hours. The three authors uniquely represent their views on the period after the civil war. The essay seeks to evaluate observations made by Thomas DiLorenzo; and how they relate to the experiences of convict laborers in the South and the Chinese railroad workers in the West.
DiLorenzo claims that capitalism brought improvement in the working conditions of the convict laborers in the South and the Chinese railroad workers in the West which is not the case. He argues that people voluntarily went into the factories because they knew they would improve their living standards by doing so. Capitalism saved the working class from impoverished existence (DiLorenzo, 94). Records of Milner's various mines and slave mines in southern Alabama owned by one of his business partners, a cousin to an investor in Bibb Steam Mill, tells a story of black women stripped naked and whipped, of hundreds of men starved, chained, beaten, of workers perpetually lice-ridden and barely clothed (Blackmon, 52). The experiences do not support DiLorenzo's view. Works by Blackmon provide evidence of poor working conditions of black laborers. Under Corner, the Eureka Iron Works thrived on a rough mix of primitive excavation techniques and relentless, atavistic physical force (Blackmon, 70). However, evaluating Chang's work gives mixed experiences on the working conditions of the Chinese railroad makers. In the beginning, the workers introduced are having a rough time doing the impossible to contrast the Railroad. For them to reach those heights, the workers of the CPRR had to blast and dig their way through expanses of solid granite and brave some of the most dangerous working conditions imaginable (Chang, 3). There is a contradiction where they had a change of clothes, leather boots to protect their feet and cotton hats to protect them from the sun. There cotton tunics and baggy pants and blousy were designed for physical labor in oven-like heat (Chang, 5). Evaluating these three views, which refer to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is clear to see how conflicting they are. DiLorenzo's observations do not support the experiences of the convict but, to some extent, support the railroad workers.
Capitalization saw the improvement of wages for the working class. In the early days of industrialization in America, as capitalism grew, there was more capital investment; workers became progressively more productive, and therefore better paid (DiLorenzo 95). His observations show that with improvement in all aspects of industrialization came increased wages. He goes further to state that "From 1820 to 1860, wages grew by about a 1.6 annual rate, and during this period, the purchasing power of an average worker's paycheck increased between 60 to 90 percent, depending on the region of the country the worker resided in (DiLorenzo 95). Chang speaks of the Chinese glamor for better pay that led to several strikes and transfers to other jobs. In the legendary strike of 1867, the Chinese grievances earned them an increase in wages from thirty to forty dollars. Crocker's account makes clear that the Railroad Chinese were neither tractable or bound, but independent and free to take advantage of options more attractive to them than work on the Railroad (Chang, 138). Change emphasizes that even if the wages were a bit fair, the racial factor still contributed, and the Chinese got lesser than whites did in the same working group. From the view...