This was the world in which Marx and Engels began their labor. Direct action was at its zenith, and the struggle of the classes was ferocious. Indeed, all Europe was soon to see barricades in every city, and thrones and governments tumbling into apparent ruin. Yet in the midst of all this wild confusion, and even touching elbows with the leaders of these revolutionary storms, Marx and Engels outlined in clear, simple, and powerful language the nature of capitalism--what it was, how it came into being, and what it was yet destined to become. They pointed out that it was not individual employers or individual statesmen or the Government or even kings and princes who were responsible for the evils of society, but that unemployment, misery, and oppression were due to an economic system, and that so long as capitalism existed the mass of humanity would be sunk in poverty. They called attention to the long evolutionary processes that had been necessary to change the entire world from a state of feudalism into a state of capitalism; and how it was not due to man's will-power that the great industrial revolution occurred, but to the growth of machines, of steam, and of electrical power; and that it was these that have made the modern world, with its intense and terrible contrasts of riches and of poverty. They also pointed out that little individual owners of property were giving way to joint-stock companies, and that these would in turn give way to even greater aggregations of capital. An economic law was driving the big capitalists to eat up the little capitalists. It was forcing them to take from the workers their hand tools and to drive them out of their home workshops; it was forcing them also to take from the small property owners their little properties and to appropriate the wealth of the world into their own hands. As a result of this economic process, "private property," they said, "is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population."[5] But they also pointed out that capitalism had within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, that it was creating a new class, made up of the overwhelming majority, that was destined in time to overthrow capitalism. "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers."[6] In the interest of society the nine-tenths would force the one-tenth to yield up its private property, that is to say, its "power to subjugate the labor of others."[7]