From farmer to factory-hand

By the mid-18th century, as the Industrial Revolution got underway in Europe, the feudal system was unravelling, soon to be replaced by a completely different system for solving the economic problem.

In Britain, just one of the changes was that common land, once shared by all, was progressively enclosed for the exclusive use of those with a higher rank in the system. With these enclosures of the commons, villagers lost access to pastures for the few animals they kept to supplement their crops and provide enough to live on. 
Those who could no longer survive in a village as a result of change, drifted towards ever-growing cities. 

In the cities, workers became increasingly alienated from what they were producing; little of what they made was for their own personal use, and they made little of what they did use.

Before moving from a village to a city, a person might 

• plant wheat in a field
• harvest it 
• see a miller produce flour from the same wheat
• make their own dough from the flour, and 
• see the dough turned into bread by a baker.

With the drift to the cities, people might know how to find a baker but have no part in the wheat growing, harvesting, milling or baking processes. They might eventually not even know what steps were involved in producing bread.

This alienation of labour from a finished product carried with it no system of obligations about the distribution of what was made. People unable to swap their labour for money were faced with the prospect of starvation or homelessness.

Where once people believed ‘If you do the right thing you will survive’, privileged people came to believe ‘If you cannot survive it's because you are not doing the right thing.’

However hard village life had been, it had once provided some sense of security, purpose and responsibility. In the cities, there were no systems in place to guarantee anyone a living or a sense of purpose. For the lowest classes, work had changed from a necessarily cooperative endeavour to a competitive one. 

One need not be a lefty, pinko, communist radical to see that the drift to the cities and the beginnings of industrialisation created an underclass – a pool of spare labour from which entrepreneurs could hire or fire at will.

The chains of reciprocity; the mutual obligations which had once ensured everyone would survive, had been broken.