Wherever man has moved into the stage of slavery and private property there has been some group which has held power and sought to maintain and increase it. This group has set the standards of behavior and belief for the community, and if you wish to understand the government and religion, the manners and morals, the philosophy and literature and art of that community, the first thing you have to do is to understand the dominant group and its methods of keeping itself on top. This statement applies, not merely to those cultural forms which are established and ordained by the ruling class; it applies equally well to the revolutionary forms, the behavior and beliefs of those who oppose the ruling class. For men do not revolt in a vacuum, they revolt against certain conditions, and the form of their revolt is determined by the conditions. Take, for example, primitive Christianity, which was certainly an effort to be unworldly, if ever such an effort was made by man. But you cannot understand anything about primitive Christianity unless you see it as a new form of slave revolt against Roman imperialism and capitalism.
The theory of the class struggle is the master key to the bewilderments and confusions of history. Always there is a dominant class, holding the power of the state, and always there are subject classes; and sooner or later the subject classes begin protesting and struggling for wider rights. When they think they are strong enough, they attempt a revolt, and sometimes they succeed. If they do, they write the histories of the revolt, and their leaders become heroes and statesmen. If they fail, the histories are written by their oppressors, and the rebels are portrayed as criminals.
One of the commonest of popular assumptions is that if the rebels have justice on their side, they are bound to succeed in the long run; but this is merely the sentimental nonsense that is made out of history. It is perfectly possible for a just revolt to be crushed, and to be crushed again and again; just as it is possible for a child which is ready to be born to fail to be born, and to perish miserably. The fact that the Huguenots had most of the virtue and industry and intelligence of France did not keep them from being slaughtered by Catholic bigots, and reaction riveted upon the French people for a couple of hundred years. The fact that the Moors had most of the industry of Spain did not keep them from being driven into exile by the Inquisition, and the intellectual life of the Spanish people strangled for three hundred or four hundred years.
Some eight hundred years ago our ancestors in England brought a cruel and despotic king to battle, and conquered him, and on the field of Runnymede forced him to sign a grant of rights to Englishmen. That document is known as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter, and everyone who writes political history today recognizes it as one of the greatest of man's achievements, the beginning of a process which we hope will bring freedom and equality before the law to every human being on earth.
And now we have come to the stage in our industrial affairs, when the organized workers seek to bring the monarchs of industry into the council chamber, and force them to sign a similar Great Charter, which will grant freedom and self-government to the workers. Just as King John was forced to admit that the power to tax and spend the public revenue belonged to the people of England, and not to the ruler; just so the workers will establish the principle that the finances of industry are a public concern, that the books are to be opened, and prices fixed and wages paid by the democratic vote of the citizens of industry. If that change is accomplished, the historian of the future will recognize it as another momentous step in progress; and he will heed the protests of the lords of industry, that they are being deprived of their freedom to do business, and of their sacred legal rights to their profits, as little as he heeded the protests of King John against the "treason" and "usurpation" and infringement of "divine right" by the rebellious barons.
CHAPTER LV
THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM
(Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and the effect of this system upon the minds of the workers.)
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.