Artisans - that is, urban and semi-urban workers typically labouring in small pre-industrial facilities shaped by guild practices - should be a 9th interest group, separate to the Petite Bourgeoisie (as they are blue-collar rather than white-collar workers), Rural Folk (as they represent an urban population) and Trade Unions (as they vastly predate the emergence of trade unions themselves, reflect pre-industrial working conditions, and are not generally part of the emergence of proletarian socialism that the TUs kinda-sorta represent).
They were a major part of the Jacobin and neo-Jacobin movements in France, and effectively the working-class participants Marxists accuse liberals of having sold-out during the 1848 Revolutions.
Their preferences should focus on restricting access to employment to conventional professions, to keep their own wages high, and opposing automisation, as well as guaranteeing a stable supply of food, as artisan urban populations particularly suffered during the "hungry 40s".
Some proposed law traits should be:
They should pull principally from laborers and shopkeepers, but clergymen and soldiers should also be able to participate.
I think it's important as part of the vision that the player has economic levers to interact with each of the IGs, and I support that vision (though I will point out that it doesn't seem to apply to the Devout and Intellectual IGs, which is a shame). I've been pretty critical elsewhere of the materialist historiographical lens V3 takes to politics, and I want to clarify that I think it's a perfectly good historiographic lens, but really has to be used in conjunction with other lenses like identity and ideology to make sense (and that the V3 implementation is pretty weird). Because V3's framework is basically that everyone works in an industrial centre, a plantation or a subsistence farm, there isn't a natural space to have a building slot for artisans, unless something like a "subsistence industrial building" is added to cities. Given that that's the case, I suggest that attraction should be based on use of old-school PMs, with attractional bonuses for:
They were a major part of the Jacobin and neo-Jacobin movements in France, and effectively the working-class participants Marxists accuse liberals of having sold-out during the 1848 Revolutions.
Their preferences should focus on restricting access to employment to conventional professions, to keep their own wages high, and opposing automisation, as well as guaranteeing a stable supply of food, as artisan urban populations particularly suffered during the "hungry 40s".
Some proposed law traits should be:
- Opposition to laissez-faire, free-trade and mercantilism (as export-focused economies raise the price of staple foods - e.g. in Britain in the 1840s and the USSR in the 1930s).
- Support for protectionism and isolationism
- Maybe some general support for progressive taxation, though I don't know the degree to which this was an animating issue in a pre-income tax world
- Support for basic social-welfare institutions like charity hospitals, poor laws, wage subsidies
- Support for advanced labour rights (opposition to serfdom, support for worker's protections)
- Opposition to women in the workplace but support for child labour (as often small workshops relied on informal labour to stay profitable as industrial processes raised competition)
- Support for exclusionary racial and migration policies, in order to stop foreign labour. Opposition to slavery, as a wage-drag on their work.
- Tepid support for an authoritarian presidential model of democracy, though with limited censorship and broad-base suffrage. This was a group that wanted their voice heard, but was far more interested in getting their stomachs full.
- I sort of want them to be pro national guard as a model of civic militias before they come into effect, and then oppose them once they do (as, in 1848, these ended up staffed by middle class liberals who eventually turned their guns against artisan populations)
They should pull principally from laborers and shopkeepers, but clergymen and soldiers should also be able to participate.
I think it's important as part of the vision that the player has economic levers to interact with each of the IGs, and I support that vision (though I will point out that it doesn't seem to apply to the Devout and Intellectual IGs, which is a shame). I've been pretty critical elsewhere of the materialist historiographical lens V3 takes to politics, and I want to clarify that I think it's a perfectly good historiographic lens, but really has to be used in conjunction with other lenses like identity and ideology to make sense (and that the V3 implementation is pretty weird). Because V3's framework is basically that everyone works in an industrial centre, a plantation or a subsistence farm, there isn't a natural space to have a building slot for artisans, unless something like a "subsistence industrial building" is added to cities. Given that that's the case, I suggest that attraction should be based on use of old-school PMs, with attractional bonuses for:
- Merchant guilds
- Early construction and urban-centre PMs
- Handcrafted furniture
- Hand assembly
- Forest glass, manual glassblowing
- Craftsman sewing
- 4
