Can the Working Class Change the World?

Author: Yates, Michael D An analysis of how the working class can mobilize as a force for change in the present day.One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of "free commerce" - where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as "equals" - lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties - sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the