Writing during the Great Depression, William Z. Foster describes burning injustices in the economic orthodoxy, and predicts the gradual emergence of socialism in the United States.

By the time the Depression struck in 1929, Foster was already a veteran campaigner and organizer of labor, having a prominent role in the great steel strike of 1919. At the time he published this book in 1932, Foster was leader of the United States Communist Party, and had developed a comprehensive policy platform based upon the Soviet Union. The USA's fraught economic situation at the time led many disillusioned and impoverished citizens to consider socialism and communism as an alternative.

Foster begins by describing various aspects of decay in capitalist society, identifying its proclivity to indulge in war, its worsening cyclical economic crises, the impoverishment and neglect of vast numbers in the labor force, and so on.