Marx was struck by the inequalities created by the capitalist system. Although in earlier times aristocrats lived a life of luxury completely different from that of the peasantry, agrarian societies were relatively poor. Even if there had been no aristocracy, standards of living would inevitably have been meagre. With the development of modern industry, however wealth is produced on a scale far beyond anything seen before, but workers have little access to the wealth that their labour creates.They remain relatively poor, while the wealth accumulated by the propertied class grows.Marx used the term pauperization to describe the process by which the working class grow increasingly impoverished in relation to the capitalist class. Even if workers become more affluent in absolute terms, the gap separating them from the capitalist class continues to stretch ever wider.These inequalities between the capitalist and the working class were not strictly economic in nature. Marx noted how the development of modem factories and the mechanization of production means that work frequently becomes dull and oppressive in the extreme. The labour