The drive to maximize profit has always governed the development of capitalism. It was what gradually replaced the coerced obligation to produce with the no less imperative duty to consume. Whereas the production of goods and the extraction of raw materials had since the nineteenth century constituted the main sector of the economy and the chief source of revenue, the 1950s saw the emergence of a new emphasis that precipitated a considerable disordering of customs and attitudes.
The necessity of production had created a working class whose intensive labor and wretched wages enriched the bosses and the bourgeoisie. These new slaves differed from serfs under the ancien régime in but one respect: their growing consciousness of the unjust fate that condemned them to poverty even as they produced the wealth of a nation. In consequence they arrogated to themselves the right to contest the bourgeoisie’s lies and oppression. They felt that they had a historical mission in the sense that their emancipation would entail the end of class society and lay the foundations of an egalitarian regime.
To arm itself, the working class drew on the same Enlightenment philosophy which had helped the bourgeoisie overthrow the tyranny of the ancien régime and proceed to set up its own despotism. The authoritarian and patriarchal power of the monarchist and theocratic order against which thinkers of bourgeois background had rebelled was thus encountered by the proletariat in a secularized form, divested of God but just as ferociously repressive as ever.