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But capitalism also proved to be a disruptive force on an equally gigantic scale. It subjected humanity to the psychological shock of living with continuous and accelerating technological and social change. The Industrial Revolution covered Europe and America with what Smith's contemporary, Poet William Blake, called "dark Satanic mills," wiping out cottage industry and jamming workers into ugly new factory towns. Though the purchasing power of factory workers began to rise slowly, a father's earnings were often insufficient to support a family. Children as young as eight worked as much as 14 hours a day in the mills and mines.
Exploitation of labor continued for generations. As late as the 1890s, Henry C. Frick, after breaking a strike at the Carnegie Steel Works in Homestead, Pa., reduced wages and re-established an 84-hour work week. At the other end of the scale, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and other capitalists accumulated immense fortunes, in part because they proved Adam Smith wrong in thinking that an unregulated market could not be monopolized. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson, no radical, lamented that "we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless."
Some of the thinkers who followed Adam Smith had made capitalism seem heartless indeed. The Rev. Thomas Malthus grimly announced that no person has any claim on society for a "right to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it." David Ricardo worked out what became known as the "iron law of wages." His thesis: workers in the long run would get only the bare minimum necessary to keep themselves and their families alive. If they temporarily should earn more, they would breed so many children that competition for jobs eventually would drive wages down again. Ricardo did not think that this state of affairs was desirable—only inevitable. Nonetheless, he and Malthus earned for capitalist economics a name that it has never shaken; Thomas Carlyle had them in mind when he referred to "Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science."
The science seemed especially dismal to Karl Marx, who damned capitalism as an inhuman system in which "all that is holy is profaned." He charged that it tended to "mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of appendage of a machine." In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Frederick Engels conceded that capitalism "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." Nonetheless, Marx prophesied that capitalism would destroy itself: "Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation."
Capitalism, Marx reckoned, would pour out more goods than workers could buy