English artisans spent fifty years resisting proletarianization itself

Evidence

It is easy enough to say that this culture was backward-looking or conservative. True enough, one direction of the great agitations of the artisans and outworkers, continued over 50 years, was to resist being turned into a proletariat. When they knew that this cause was lost, yet they reached out again, in the Thirties and Forties, and sought to achieve new and only imagined forms of social control. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 238