The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

In London skilled artisans looked down on the unskilled; and among the latter, shipworkers looked down on shore workers, and the permanently employed despised the casually hired. English workers felt superior to the Irish, just as in the Ruhr German workers looked down on Italians and Poles. These differences often reflected differences in earnings. In France in the late nineteenth century, glassblowers earned around 10 francs a day, whereas weavers only earned 1 franc 65 centimes. Yet such differences paled beside the gulf that existed between all these manual, waged workers on the one hand, and the far smaller number of the better off and the wealthy in the middle and upper classes on the other. The experience of poverty, oppression, social disadvantage and, in much of Europe for most of the period, lack of basic rights was common to all these workers and helped bind them together into a single social class, much as Marx had predicted.

Was Marx right here?