October 14, 2026

Working-Class Poverty

The extreme poverty of the first industrial workers was also due to the fact that this was a new field of production, where no rules yet existed. Such rules were subsequently introduced by the state, beginning with Bismarck’s Prussia.

Marx believed that the lower middle class would disappear and that the poor would become increasingly poorer until, inevitably, revolution would break out: proletarians against capitalists, as it was said.

Today’s reality is not what Marx predicted; instead, it has taken a direction opposite to his forecasts. There are no longer two distinct classes, but rather a continuum of incomes, and the middle class, instead of disappearing, represents the vast majority of the population. The poor are a small minority, and there are no longer any starving people.

Reality is no longer that of the 1848 revolution in Paris or the Paris Commune of 1871 (or perhaps that of General Bava Beccaris’s repression in Italy in 1898). To think that things are still the same would be like talking about feudal lords and serfs.