They knew, as did everyone else, that work for the mass of people was their only means to acquire goods, the rest was secondary. Only a comfortable middle class intellectual could suggest that work as a 'creative' activity could have any meaning in such societies. Where labour's productivity is low so are living standards. Extremely long hours engaged in monotonous labour have to be endured to obtain, by our consumerist standards, even the most meagre of goods. This is the case of every workman I have ever know . . .
Monopolies exist where the state owns the firm or protects a firm from competition.
The same goes for financiers. Patterson completely ignores the fact that the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented rise in living standards. This was a period in which real wages quadrupled, even though the workforce grew by 400 per cent, and the output of consumer goods expanded by 1600 per cent. However nineteenth century conditions compare with today's, they became an incredible improvement on anything that had previously prevailed. For the first time in history production was for the masses and not the elites.