The industrial revolution led to a profound social reorganization with respect to the previous predominantly agricultural economy. Economic power, very concentrated, conditioned the political power. In the USA the so called robber barons, thanks to their control over steel and oil, strengthened their economic power by controlling the economy and society to a great extent. The working class of salaried workers was born, and, with it, the conflict with the capitalists who owned the means of production. The market pressure was discharged on the workers who often lived at the limits of subsistence, and the social conflicts, that sometimes resulted in violent movements, were intensified. The rich oligarchs conditioned information, political power and the judiciary.
Thanks to the power they had, not mitigated by institutions and protecting regulation, added value was accumulated by capital, to the detriment of workers.
From the mid-nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century the world divided on the basis of alternative solutions to the conflict in the distribution of the value between capital and labor.
The paradigm of this conflict was summarized in the final words of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels which ended with the famous phrase “Workers of the world, unite!”.
An answer from the socialist states were state companies, disconnected from the market in order to isolate the pressure on wages, together with a strict regulation of labor relations mediated by the Party. In the West there prevailed a more articulated model of regulation that saw the emergence of institutions such as the unions with their right to strike; legislative interventions that defined minimum and incompressible rights for workers in matters of work, retirement and health; the progressive possibility of worker participation in the widespread ownership of companies; the birth of the Antitrust Authority to mitigate economic power and with it the influence of economic powers on politics. The Western model that emerged victorious after the end of the Soviet utopia is however put on the ropes by the Digital Revolution and needs a rethinking or, at least, some significant interventions.