In France, the authorities shot down the Russian soldiers who refused to defend the financial interests of the French bankers. In the United States, the bourgeoisie lynched the internationalists, sentenced many of the best proletarians to twenty years’ imprisonment and shot down workers on strike.”
The capitalist system was breaking down. The anarchy of production had led to the war, and this had induced an enormous accentuation of the class conflict. Thus the war led to the revolution. Capitalism was beginning to disintegrate in two fundamental ways. (Refer to § 18.) The era of the collapse of capitalism had set in. Let us examine this collapse more closely.
Capitalist society was constructed upon one model throughout. A factory was organised just like a government office or like a division of the imperial army. At the top were the rich who commanded; at the bottom were the poor, the workers and the salariat, who obeyed; in between were the superintending engineers, the “non-commissioned officers” [the foremen], the higher