ABSTRACT
The working-classes are at bottom in excellent health—so the pastoral descriptions run—in better health than other classes; rough and unpolished perhaps, but diamonds nevertheless; rugged, but 'of sterling worth'. Related to it is a more positive over-expectation which one frequently finds among middle-class intellectuals with strong social consciences. Some people of this kind have for a long time tended to see every second working-class man as a Felix Holt or a Jude the Obscure. To isolate the working-classes in the rough way is not to forget the great number of differences, the subtle shades, the class distinctions, within the working-classes themselves. A middle-class Marxist's view of the working-classes often includes something of each of the foregoing errors. He pities the betrayed and debased worker, whose faults he sees as almost entirely the result of the grinding system which controls him.
