Difference Between Peasants And Proletariats

The difference found between the peasants and the proletariats lies in their status and workplace. The peasants, even with their varying ranks within the peasantry were poor and provided their yield of harvest to the bourgeoise, manually working in villages far from the city. The proletariats however, were not all poor. Many of them weren’t farmers either. They predominantly occupied jobs in factories and mines, working in cities rather than in villages. While the poor peasants occupied home industries, the proletariats were forced to give up their skilled labor and resort to easy manual labor that is often present in mass production. When looking at the workplace, the differences that are apparent between the peasants and proletariats lies …show more content…
Similarly, in Europe a small class of the population who held the majority of the wealth emerged. When looking at Huppert’s fictional village of Sennely, we see that these wealthy folks were the nobles and the clergy. Men who owned property such as notaries, business agents, and estate managers acted as absentee landlords (Huppert 4). Their status and wealth came from owning land. This upper class lived a comfortable life style, profiting off the hard work of the peasantry and were excused from taxes. These urban elite, as they came to be known, ruled over the peasants. The bourgeoise that Marx mentions on the contrary were wealthy men who owned capital and profited off it. They controlled major industries and companies during the industrial age of Europe. According to Marx, the bourgeoise class was initially created by the serfs from the middle ages who later went on to become the chartered burghers. Huppert similarly theorized that the rentiers he mentioned early on, who were merchants that later found it profitable to collect rents from the peasants and engage in tax-farming (Huppert 47), may have formed a new middle class later on in history that is present in Marx’s version of the bourgeoise. They were similar to the bourgeoise that Huppert mentioned because they both lived comfortable lifestyles and exploited the lower class. They both maximized profit and paid little to no taxes. They were both so powerful because they created and reinforced a social structure that made the poor peasants and proletariat’s largely dependent on them for survival and work. Furthermore, the urban elite wealth as Huppert mentioned came largely from how much land they owned. Whereas the Bourgeoise’s wealth was defined by their production and industries. This illustrates the point made earlier about the gradual disappearance of a feudal society into a more industrialized one that is present in