It is not a “normal pattern”. It happened *late* viz the industrial revolution, after that revolution immiserated generations, only thanks to labor militancy and postwar social democracy. You take other people’s hard work and pocket it as nature. 1/

The work is harder now, because (as Marx observed but mistook for something permanent), the particularities of 19-20c factory production were susceptible to mass worker disruption and therefore bargaining power via labor organization. That is less and less the case with contemporary production. 2/

If labor militancy won’t work, what we have left is social democracy, or something new and unexpected. Whatever it will be, there is nothing normal or natural or inevitable about it. /fin