Rural life was worse not because rural feudal tenancy was worse than urban factory servitude, but because the technology advances which made it possible to support the latter also simultaneously produced a population boom and reduced the total (not just per capita) quantity of rural labor demanded, producing a whole lot of surplus rural labor.
>also simultaneously produced a population boom
You think subsistence living was great before technological progress? Why do you think there was a population boom? How do you think population size was controlled before technological advances?
Maybe through:
- high child mortality
- famine, starvation and malnutrition
- war, crime and violence
- disease and injury
... all of the above!
Some?
>the dependence on an employer was much greater than the old dependence on your lord.
I'm not sure that's actually true.
I'm not sure the dependence was much greater, but it was less likely to be honored restart than mercilessly abused by the employer, because capitalism arose in the context of a huge labor surplus created by agricultural productivity revolutions, whereas feudal tenancy arose in tighter labor conditions and had grown traditions (and in some cases legal structures) based on that. Which is not too say that feudalism was without massive abuses of dependent relationships, itself.
No it didn't. This Roussaunian idealization of rural subsistence living must really die. People aren't idiots, you don't move to urban factory work (as bad as it was compared to modern day) unless rural life was much worse.