There are two ways in which my life during my wage slave days were better than that of a pre-industrial revolution (or post industrial revolution in a backwater) peasant.
The first way is simply tech. I can communicate in the morning with people thousands of miles away and discuss this! No peasant could do that. But that is entirely due to the industrial revolution and its knock-on effects. Its pretty tangential to how society was organized. Tech was more limited in the Soviet block than in the liberal/ capitalist block during the Cold War,but it was still massively more advanced, and more available for ordinary people, then it was to Russian and East European serfs in the eighteenth and even nineteenth century. All due to the industrial revolution, not the Russian revolution.
So again it comes down to whether you have the industrial revolution. However, there is a strong argument that the industrial revolution was not worth the environmental damage, which is compounding.
The second is that I have more legal freedom and more influence on my rulers (through elections) than the peasant. This one is tricky. This is definitely true compared to slaves. It is less true compared to serfs, who had a limited, well defined set of obligations though the nobles could always abuse these. Its not true at all compared to free peasants. you have to take into account that on a day to day basis, the rulers tended to leave the peasants alone once they had met their obligations, in a way that is inconceivable today. There is a strong argument that the elections are too easily stolen or manipulated to be worth all that much.
I'm repeating myself, but again I think it comes down to the industrial revolution. You can get a dystopia by it not occurring at all, or through a super-charged industrial revolution that trashes the environment more than the IOTL one did, or is used to power up totalitarian societies as came close to happening IOTL in the early and mid twentieth century. Even just keeping things in the "satanic mills" stage where the benefits are kept from spreading to the general population would also work.
The first way is simply tech. I can communicate in the morning with people thousands of miles away and discuss this! No peasant could do that. But that is entirely due to the industrial revolution and its knock-on effects. Its pretty tangential to how society was organized. Tech was more limited in the Soviet block than in the liberal/ capitalist block during the Cold War,but it was still massively more advanced, and more available for ordinary people, then it was to Russian and East European serfs in the eighteenth and even nineteenth century. All due to the industrial revolution, not the Russian revolution.
So again it comes down to whether you have the industrial revolution. However, there is a strong argument that the industrial revolution was not worth the environmental damage, which is compounding.
The second is that I have more legal freedom and more influence on my rulers (through elections) than the peasant. This one is tricky. This is definitely true compared to slaves. It is less true compared to serfs, who had a limited, well defined set of obligations though the nobles could always abuse these. Its not true at all compared to free peasants. you have to take into account that on a day to day basis, the rulers tended to leave the peasants alone once they had met their obligations, in a way that is inconceivable today. There is a strong argument that the elections are too easily stolen or manipulated to be worth all that much.
I'm repeating myself, but again I think it comes down to the industrial revolution. You can get a dystopia by it not occurring at all, or through a super-charged industrial revolution that trashes the environment more than the IOTL one did, or is used to power up totalitarian societies as came close to happening IOTL in the early and mid twentieth century. Even just keeping things in the "satanic mills" stage where the benefits are kept from spreading to the general population would also work.