It is often hard labour for him when he
wields the plough
With which he feeds all the world:
lords, townsmen and artisans. But if there were no peasant, our
lives would be in a very sad
condition.
A peasant reaping wheat, from a psalter calendar, England, circa 1250–1275
Such words may not have softened the earth through which the peasants had to drive their plough, but when considered together with the attitude underlying them, they must nevertheless have helped to foster in the peasantry a welcome sense of their own dignity.
The Limbourg Brothers, Peasants at Work on a Feudal Estate, 1400–1416
Second Story: Low Status Has No Moral Connotation
Scripture provided another comforting perspective for those of low status. The New Testament demonstrated that neither wealth nor poverty was an accurate index of moral worth. After all, Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet on earth he had been poor, ruling out any simple equation between righteousness and riches.
Insofar as Christianity ever strayed from a neutral position on money, it was in favour of poverty, for in the Christian schema, the source of all goodness was the recognition of one’s dependence on God. Anything that encouraged the belief that a contented life might be had without God’s grace was evil, and wealth fell into that category, promising both worldly pleasures and a frowned-upon sense of freedom.
The hardships to which the poor were subject, meanwhile, made them turn more naturally to God for assistance. In the soothing parables of the New Testament, they witnessed the rich failing to fit through the eyes of needles, learned that they would inherit the earth and were assured that they would be among the first through the gates of the Heavenly Kingdom.
Third Story: The Rich Are Sinful and Corrupt
and Owe Their Wealth to Their Robbery of the Poor
There was a third story available to soften the blow of poverty and a low social position. According to this narrative, which assumed its greatest influence between approximately 1754 and 1989, the poor were reminded that the rich were thieving and corrupt and had attained their privileges through plunder and deception rather than virtue or talent. Moreover, they had rigged society in such a way that the poor could never improve their lot individually, however capable and willing they might be. Their only hope lay in mass social protest and revolution.
In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave the story one of its earliest recitals: “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’”
A hundred years later, Karl Marx would take up the same cry, casting in apparently scientific terms what had in Rousseau’s hands been a cry of social protest. There was, for Marx, an inherently exploitative dynamic within the capitalist system, for employers would always try to hire workers for less than they made from selling their products, then would pocket the difference as “profit.” Such profit was invariably hailed in the capitalist press as the employers’ reward for “risk-taking” and “enterprise,” but Marx insisted that these words were mere euphemisms for theft.
The bourgeoisie, by this account, was merely the latest incarnation of a master class that had unjustly held sway over the poor since the beginning of time. However humane its members might seem, a civilized surface concealed a calculating ruthlessness. In the first volume of Capital (1887), Marx addressed the bourgeoisie in the voice of the worker: “You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and have the odour of sanctity to boot, but you are a creature with no heart in its breast.” Evidence of this callousness could be found in any nineteenth-century mill, bakery, dockyard, hotel or office. Workers were diseased and very often died young of cancer or respiratory illness; their jobs denied them any hope of a proper family life, left them no time to develop an intellectual understanding of their position and left them anxious and without security: “for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material.”So Marx urged the “human material” to rise up against its masters and reclaim what it was rightfully owed. As The Communist Manifesto (1848) thundered, “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”
Not long before the publication of the Manifesto, Marx’s associate Friedrich Engels had travelled to Manchester and seen at first hand the suffering of the poor in one of the new cities of the Industrial Revolution. Engels shared his colleague’s conviction as to why society was split into classes: the rich were rich, he believed, not because they were clever or energetic or diligent but because they were cunning and mean. And the poor were poor not because they were idle or drunk or dim but because they had been blindfolded and abused by their masters. The bourgeoisie depicted in Engels’s account of his sojourn, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845), took self-interest to sobering extremes: “It is money gain which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-people’s quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and then said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, sir.’ It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money. All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh.”
Life may not have been pleasant in the slums of Manchester in the 1840s, but for a labourer, being advised that what had landed him there was the monstrosity of his employer and the endemic corruption of the economic system (against which it was vain for the poor ever to try to act singly) would have offered a sustaining sense of his moral superiority and mitigated any shame he might have felt at his haggard condition.
3.
In their different ways, these three stories afforded consolation for low status over nearly two millennia. They were by no means the only stories in circulation, but they had power and were widely credited. They oriented the less fortunate towards three sustaining ideas: that they were the true creators of wealth in society and therefore were deserving of respect; that earthly status had no moral value in the eyes of God; and that the rich were in any case not worth honouring, for they were both unscrupulous and destined to meet a bad end in a series of imminent and just proletarian revolutions.