It is common for leftists to blame “capitalism” for social inequality. But the world was much more unequal before capitalism. In pre-industrial times, most people were poor and worked long hours with their hands. Those hard-working people were viewed with contempt by the tiny ruling elite, notes the Danish historian Patricia Crone:
Although we might romanticize the work ethic of pre-industrial people, such an attitude would be alien to them. “All those who had to work with their hands were despised, pre-industrial elites all over the world being united in their contempt for the ‘vile and mechanical world of labour.’ … One Thalassius was refused entry to the Senate in fourth-century Constantinople on the grounds that he owned a knife factory and was suspected of having worked in it himself.” Contrast that open contempt with how today’s political leaders on the campaign trail pay lip service to the virtues of “everyday, hard-working people” and modern factory-workers in a bid for their votes, to get a sense of how dramatically rhetoric surrounding work has transformed. Pre-industrial people derived no sense of pride from their unending backbreaking toil, because for all their efforts, workers were objects of disgust, and they knew it….
the human experience worldwide was united by pervasive poverty. The people of the past spent a great deal of their time engaged in work but had little to show for it, for “all pre-industrial societies were dominated by scarcity.”….
“The low output of agriculture meant that the vast majority of people had to be peasants.”
“In some societies, practically everyone was a peasant apart from the ruling elite, typically less than 2 per cent of the population. More commonly, some 10 per cent of the population were able to leave the production of food. But western Europe is believed to have supported no less than 15 per cent of its population in occupations other than agriculture as early as c. 1300, the proportion having risen to about 20 per cent by c. 1500; and it is said to have risen to some 20 per cent in sixteenth-century Japan.”
