Plenty of parallels between then and now. Divide and conquer tactics from the wealthy elite. Self-stratification and in fighting by working people, often based around specific trades seeing themselves as better than others. Big identity divisions between people from rural vs urban backgrounds. Philanthropy by elites offered up as a better model than government doing the job. Plenty of deliberately fermented racism and xenophobia. Bloody Irish navvies coming over here taking our jobs and bringing their religion with them too; fleeing from starvation my arse they're all just economic migrants.
As for the idea that there are not two main groups of people, I think we're increasingly returning to that it's just not recognised to be the case by enough people yet and some that do recognise it have had their heads turned by charlatans.
The labour movements didn't easily coalesce and rise up, plenty of false starts, failed attempts and decades of work. The biggest problematic difference between then and now imo is the rate of pace of charge. We don't have decades for us to get our shit in a pile