In the beginning man got his living by hunting and fishing. Then he took to keeping flocks and herds, and later by slow stages he settled down to agriculture. With the introduction of slavery and the ownership of the land by ruling classes, there came to be a subject class of workers, who toiled on the land from dawn to dark, year in and year out, and got, if they were fortunate, an existence for themselves and their families. Whether these workers were called slaves or serfs or peasants, whether their product was taken from them in the form of taxes by the king, or of rent by the landlord, made no difference; the workers were bound to the soil, like the beasts with which they lived in intimate contact. They were drafted into armies, and made to fight for their lords and masters; they suffered pestilence and famine, fire and slaughter; but with infinite patience they would rebuild their huts, and dig and plant again, whether for the old master or for a new one.

In the early days these workers made their own crude tools and weapons; but very early there must have been some who specialized in such arts, and with the growth of towns and communications came a new kind of labor, based upon a new system. Some enterprising man would buy slaves, or hire labor, and obtain a supply of raw material, and manufacture goods to be bartered or sold. He would pay his workers enough to draw them from the land, and would sell the product for what he could get, and the difference would be his profit. That was capitalism, and at first it was a thing of no importance, and the men who engaged in it had no social standing. But princes and lords needed weapons and supplies for their armies, and the men who could furnish these things became more and more necessary, and the states which encouraged them were the ones which rose to power. Merchants and sea-traders became the intimates of kings, and by the time of the Roman empire, capitalism was a great world power, dominating the state, using the armies of the state for its purposes. It went down with the rest of Roman civilization, but in the Middle Ages it began once more to revive, and by the end of the eighteenth century the merchants and money lenders of France, with their retainers, the lawyers and journalists, were powerful enough to take the control of society.

Then, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, came the invention of machinery and of the power process. Capitalism began to grow like a young giant among pygmies. In the course of a century it has ousted all other methods of production, and all other forms of social activity. A hundred years ago the British House of Commons was a parliament of landlords; today it is a Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association. Out of the 707 members of the British House of Commons, 361 are members of the "Federation of British Industries," the labor-smashing organization of British "big business." And the same is true of every other parliament and congress in the modern capitalist state. Practically all the wealth of the world today is produced by the capitalist method, and distributed under capitalist supervision, and therefore capitalist ideas prevail in our society, to the practical exclusion of all other ideas. I have shown in "The Profits of Religion" how these ideas dominate the modern church, and in "The Brass Check" how they dominate the modern press. I plan to write two books, to show how they dominate education and literature.

A hundred years ago an industry consisted of a half a dozen or a dozen men, working under the personal supervision of an owner, and using crude hand tools. Today it consists of a gigantic trust, owning and managing scores and perhaps hundreds of mills and factories, each employing thousands of workers. A corporation like the Steel Trust owns enough of the sources of its raw material to give it practical monopoly; it owns a fleet of vessels especially designed for ore-carrying; it owns its private railroads, to deliver the ore to the mills. Through its system of dummy directorates it has practical control of the main railroads over which it distributes its products; also of banks and trust companies and insurance companies, to gather the money of the public to finance its undertakings. It owns huge office buildings, and vast tracts of land upon which the homes of its workers are built. It has a private army for the defense of its property—a complete army of cavalry, infantry and artillery, including a large and highly efficient secret service department, with a host of informers and spies. It has newspapers for the purpose of propaganda, and it controls the government of every village, town and city in which it has important interests. If you will take the trouble to visit a "steel town," and make inquiries among public officials, newspaper men, and others who are "on the inside," you will discover that those in authority consider it necessary and proper that "steel" should control, and are unable to conceive any other condition of affairs. If you go to other parts of the country, where other great industries are located, you find it taken for granted that "copper" should control, or "lumber," or "coal," or "oil," or whatever it may be.

Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress was requested to pass a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world capitalism. Congress passed a law, very carefully worded so that no one could be sure what it meant, and a few years later the Supreme Court nullified the law. But all through this political and legal controversy the status of labor remained exactly the same; there was a "labor market," consisting of those members of the community who, in the formula of Marx, had nothing but their labor power to sell. These competed for recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled foremen selected those who offered the largest quantity of labor power for the stated wage.

So entirely impersonal is this process that there are great industries in America in which ninety per cent of the common labor force is hired and fired all over again in the course of a year. These men are put to work in gangs, under a system which enables one picked man to set the pace, and compel all the others to keep up with him, under penalty of being discharged. This process is known as "speeding up," and its purpose is to obtain from each worker the greatest quantity of energy in exchange for his daily wage. In the steel industry men work twelve hours a day for six days in the week, and then finish with a twenty-four-hour day. If they do not work so long in other industries, it is because experience has proven that the greatest quantity of energy can be obtained from them in a shorter time. There are very few men who can stand this pace for long. Those who are not crippled or killed in accidents are broken down at forty, and all the great corporations recognize this fact. Their foremen pick out the younger men, and practically all concerns have an age rule, and never hire men above forty or forty-five.

I shall not in this book go into details concerning the fate of the worker under the profit system. I have written two novels, "The Jungle" and "King Coal," in which the facts are portrayed in detail, and it seems the part of common sense to refer the reader to these text-books. It will suffice here to set forth the main outlines of the situation. In every capitalist country of the world the masses of the people are herded into industries, in whose profits they have no share, and in whose welfare they have no interest. They do not know the people for whom they work; they have no human relationship, either with their work or with their employers. They see the surplus of their product drawn off to maintain a class of idlers, whose activities they know only through the scandals of the divorce courts and the luxury-love of the moving picture screen. They compete with one another for jobs, and bid down one another's wages; and if they attempt to organize and end this competition, their efforts are broken by newspaper propaganda and policemen's clubs. At the same time they know that monopoly, open or secret, prevails in the fixing of prices, and so they find the struggle to "get ahead" a losing one. In America it used to be possible for the young and energetic to "go West"; but now the wave of capitalism has reached the Pacific coast and been thrown back, and there is no more frontier.

The man who works on the land has been through all the ages a solitary man. He is better friends with his horse and his cow than with his fellow humans. He is brutalized by incessant toil, he lives amid dirt and the filth of animals, he is, in the words of Edwin Markham:

He is a victim of natural forces which he does not understand, and inevitably therefore he is superstitious. Being alone, he is helpless against his masters, and only utter desperation drives him to revolt.

But consider the capitalist system—how different the conditions of its workers! Here they are gathered into city slums, and their wits are sharpened by continual contact with their fellows. The printing press makes cheap the spread of information, and the soap-box makes it even cheaper. Any man with a grievance can shout aloud, and be sure of an audience to listen, and he can get a great deal said before the company watchman or the policeman can throttle him. Moreover, the modern worker is not struggling with drought and tempest and hail; he does not see his labors wiped out by volcanic eruption or lightning stroke; he is dealing with machinery, something that he himself has made, and that he fully understands. If a machine gets out of order, he does not fall down upon his knees and pray to God to fix it. All the training of his life teaches him the relationship of cause and effect, the adjustment of means to ends. So the modern worker, as a necessary consequence of his daily work, is practical, skeptical, and unsentimental in his psychology. And what is more, he is making all the rest of society of the same temperament. He is building roads out into the country, and building machines to roll over them; he is running telephone lines and sending newspapers and magazines and moving picture shows to the peasant and the farmer; so the young peasants and farmers hunger for the city, and they learn to fix machinery instead of praying to God.

Such is the psychology of the modern working class; and the supreme achievement of their sharpened wits is an understanding of the capitalist process. As a matter of fact they did not make this discovery for themselves; it was made for them by middle-class men, lawyers and teachers and writers—Fourier, Owen, Marx, Lassalle. The modern doctrine is called by various names: Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism, Collectivism. Later on I shall define these various terms, and point out the distinctions between them. For the moment I emphasize the factor they all have in common, and which is fundamental: they wish to break the power of class ownership and control of the instruments and means of production; they wish to replace private capitalism by some system under which the instruments and means of production are collectively owned and operated; and they look to the non-owning class, the proletarian, as the motive power by which this change is to be compelled. I shall in future refer to this as the "social revolutionary" doctrine; taking pains to explain that the word "revolutionary" is to be divested of its popular meaning of physical violence. It is perfectly conceivable that the change may be brought about peaceably, and I shall try to show before long that in modern capitalist states the decision as to whether it is brought about peaceably or by violence rests with the present masters of industry.