On Wednesday, 3 May 2017 17:15:44 UTC-5, Nancy2 wrote:
> I found it kinda silly, being set in a busy metro area. How do the producers expect to
> keep up the charade? At least in the Pioneer House, the homesteads were pretty
> much isolated from any urban centers, and the homesteads didn't have to depend on
> masses of modern-day public to make a living, so to speak.
>
> And the accents were difficult for me to understand at times.
>
> Like I said, a silly unrealistic portrayal. I don't know how they expect this to accurately
> portray the period and the slum-dwellers.


It seemed not to get all the hoopla of the earlier "xxxx House" shows...

I could see where Marx' initial philosophy was formed, e.g. that the world was formerly feudal, now it was in a capitalist stage, and eventually socialism/communism would be the penultimate stage of human development...

Slowly, the lot of these common people would improve, and more people would be lifted out of that dire poverty. Eventually, reforms such as labor laws, unionization, minimum wages, social security, pensions, health insurance and the like would be commonplace in most of the developed world by the 1950's. Wilhelmine Germany actually led the way in these reforms around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century...

Marx predicted that "The Revolution" would first occur in the advanced capitalist states, especially Germany and Britain. Instead, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in 1917 Russia - where the vast majority of the population lived at, or even below, what we saw on this TV show.

The Soviets still held this view of old - fashioned brutal Victorian capitalism into the 1950's. When Soviet leaders starting visiting the West - especially Khrushchev - they saw that ordinary workers had cars, homes, a decent standard of life, good food, much abundance was available to the "common man". When Khrushchev and others first encountered things like an American auto plant, he was shocked, saying, "Whose cars are these parked around the plant? You can't have this many managers!" He was flabbergasted when told that they were the worker's cars, an auto worker in the West could afford to buy the products that they built - this was not true in the USSR, where only the managers could have cars.

Anyways, history lecture over for now...


--
Best
Greg