The best example of how hated capitalism was can be seen by the rise and spread of the socialist movement, in all its many forms, across the world. It is no coincidence that the development of capitalism also saw the rise of socialist theories. However, in order to fully understand how different capitalism was from previous economic systems, we will consider early capitalism in the US, which for many "Libertarians" is the example of the "capitalism-equals-freedom" argument.
Early America was pervaded by artisan production — individual ownership of the means of production. Unlike capitalism, this system is not marked by the separation of the worker from the means of life. Most people did not have to work for another, and so did not. As Jeremy Brecher notes, in 1831 the "great majority of Americans were farmers working their own land, primarily for their own needs. Most of the rest were self-employed artisans, merchants, traders, and professionals. Other classes - employees and industrialists in the North, slaves and planters in the South - were relatively small. The great majority of Americans were independent and free from anybody's command." [Strike!, p. xxi] These conditions created the high cost of combined (wage) labour which ensured the practice of slavery existed.
However, toward the middle of the 19th century the economy began to change. Capitalism began to be imported into American society as the infrastructure was improved, which allowed markets for manufactured goods to grow. Soon, due to (state-supported) capitalist competition, artisan production was replaced by wage labour. Thus "evolved" modern capitalism. Many workers understood, resented, and opposed their increasing subjugation to their employers ("the masters", to use Adam Smith's expression), which could not be reconciled with the principles of freedom and economic independence that had marked American life and sunk deeply into mass consciousness during the days of the early economy. In 1854, for example, a group of skilled piano makers wrote that "the day is far distant when they [wage earners] will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced upon them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect. May the piano trade be spared such exhibitions of the degrading power of the day [wage] system." [quoted by Brecher and Costello, Common Sense for Hard Times, p. 26]
Clearly the working class did not consider working for a daily wage, in contrast to working for themselves and selling their own product, to be a step forward for liberty or individual dignity. The difference between selling the product of one's labour and selling one's labour (i.e. oneself) was seen and condemned ("[w]hen the producer . . . sold his product, he retained himself. But when he came to sell his labour, he sold himself . . . the extension [of wage labour] to the skilled worker was regarded by him as a symbol of a deeper change" [Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860, p. xiv]). Indeed, one group of workers argued that they were "slaves in the strictest sense of the word" as they had "to toil from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same for our masters - aye, masters, and for our daily bread" [Quoted by Ware, Op. Cit., p. 42] and another argued that "the factory system contains in itself the elements of slavery, we think no sound reasoning can deny, and everyday continues to add power to its incorporate sovereignty, while the sovereignty of the working people decreases in the same degree." [quoted by Brecher and Costello, Op. Cit., p. 29]
Almost as soon as there were wage workers, there were strikes, machine breaking, riots, unions and many other forms of resistance. John Zerzan's argument that there was a "relentless assault on the worker's historical rights to free time, self-education, craftsmanship, and play was at the heart of the rise of the factory system" is extremely accurate [Elements of Refusal, p. 105]. And it was an assault that workers resisted with all their might. In response to being subjected to the "law of value," workers rebelled and tried to organise themselves to fight the powers that be and to replace the system with a co-operative one. As the printer's union argued, "[we] regard such an organisation [a union] not only as an agent of immediate relief, but also as an essential to the ultimate destruction of those unnatural relations at present subsisting between the interests of the employing and the employed classes. . . .[W]hen labour determines to sell itself no longer to speculators, but to become its own employer, to own and enjoy itself and the fruit thereof, the necessity for scales of prices will have passed away and labour will be forever rescued from the control of the capitalist." [quoted by Brecher and Costello, Op. Cit., pp. 27-28]
Little wonder, then, why wage labourers considered capitalism as a form of "slavery" and why the term "wage slavery" became so popular in the anarchist movement. It was just reflecting the feelings of those who experienced the wages system at first hand and joined the socialist and anarchist movements. As labour historian Norman Ware notes, the "term 'wage slave' had a much better standing in the forties [of the 19th century] than it has today. It was not then regarded as an empty shibboleth of the soap-box orator. This would suggest that it has suffered only the normal degradation of language, has become a cliche, not that it is a grossly misleading characterisation." [Op. Cit., p. xvf]
These responses of workers to the experience of wage labour is important to show that capitalism is by no means "natural." The fact is the first generation of workers tried to avoid wage labour is at all possible as they hated the restrictions of freedom it imposed upon them. They were perfectly aware that wage labour was wage slavery — that they were decidedly unfree during working hours and subjected to the will of another. While many working people now are accustomed to wage labour (while often hating their job) the actual process of resistance to the development of capitalism indicates well its inherently authoritarian nature. Only once other options were closed off and capitalists given an edge in the "free" market by state action did people accept and become accustomed to wage labour.
Opposition to wage labour and factory fascism was/is widespread and seems to occur wherever it is encountered. "Research has shown", summarises William Lazonick, "that the 'free-born Englishman' of the eighteenth century - even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural wage labour - tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop." [Business Organisation and the Myth of the Market Economy, p. 37] British workers shared the dislike of wage labour of their American cousins. A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the trade unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other; labour and capital will no longer be separate but will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women." [quoted by Geoffrey Ostergaard, The Tradition of Workers' Control, p. 133] This is unsurprising, for as Ostergaard notes, "the workers then, who had not been swallowed up whole by the industrial revolution, could make critical comparisons between the factory system and what preceded it." [Op. Cit., p. 134] While wage slavery may seem "natural" today, the first generation of wage labourers saw the transformation of the social relationships they experienced in work, from a situation in which they controlled their own work (and so themselves) to one in which others controlled them, and they did not like it. However, while many modern workers instinctively hate wage labour and having bosses, without the awareness of some other method of working, many put up with it as "inevitable." The first generation of wage labourers had the awareness of something else (although, of course, a flawed something else) and this gave then a deep insight into the nature of capitalism and produced a deeply radical response to it and its authoritarian structures.
Far from being a "natural" development, then, capitalism was imposed on a society of free and independent people by state action. Those workers alive at the time viewed it as "unnatural relations" and organised to overcome it. These feelings and hopes still exist, and will continue to exist until such time as we organise and "abolish the wage system" (to quote the IWW preamble) and the state that supports it.