Do you dream of a world where everyone has what they need? Where work is creative and meaningful? Where people care for each other? Where we all protect the environment?

Are you disgusted by a capitalist system that values only profit? You are not alone.

Most of us suffer under capitalism, yet our collective labour keeps it going. If we worked together, we could stop producing for profit and start producing for need. We could free ourselves from capitalism.

Three principles essential to working-class liberation are self-emancipation, working-class solidarity, and working-class independence.

• Self-Emancipation is the right of individuals and groups to decide for themselves how they live and relate to each other.
• Working-Class Solidarity is workers of all nations standing up for each other.
• Working-Class Independence protects workers’ demands from being dismissed or compromised by those who refuse to abandon capitalism.

Let’s take a closer look.

Self-Emancipation

A people can be held in subjection most effectively not by brute force but by gutting them of the capacity to fight for themselves. – Hal Draper (1971)

Capitalism uses authoritarian rule, social divisions, and ideology to block us from fighting for ourselves.

Authoritarian rule: Throughout life, workers are trained to submit to parents, teachers, bosses, bureaucrats, deities, monarchs, and politicians. Every aspect of life is controlled by authorities who dictate what is and is not acceptable to say, do, be, or have. Even protest must be authorized. For example, labour laws limit when and how workers may strike.

Social divisions: Most of humanity are workers with similar problems and needs. To prevent us from uniting for mutual benefit, workers are divided into rival nations, ‘races,’ genders, religions, languages, cultures, ages, abilities, unions, etc.

Ideology: The ideas that dominate society are those that serve the ruling class. Every social institution including the mass media deliver the same lies: There’s nothing wrong with society. All problems are caused by bad choices, bad people, or human nature. Change must be delivered from the top of society and not from the base, from the rescuing hero and not from the masses.

These social pressures make the ordinary person feel isolated, powerless, and afraid to step out of line. Seeing no way to fight for ourselves, we fall victim to the savior-ruler.

Avoid the Savior-Ruler

When freeing ourselves seems impossible, we look for a beneficial authority to replace the harmful one, a good guy to dislodge the bad guy. We embrace the liberal fantasy that putting a Good Person in power will save us, sparing us the trouble of having to save ourselves.

Wannabe savior-rulers play on the longing for change. Promising a better life for the common person, they mobilize the masses to propel themselves into power. Once in charge, they continue the same policies as their predecessors, leaving disillusioned workers to seek another savior-ruler to ease their burden.

A variation of the savior-ruler is the inspired individual who, filled with compassion for the suffering masses, offers to lead the flock to a new and better sheepfold.

Those who offer freedom can also take it away. The only freedom we can count on is the freedom we secure for ourselves.

Self-emancipation rejects all forms of deliverance from above. It invites workers to use their class power to construct the society they want. Class power is based on class solidarity.

Class Solidarity

Working-class solidarity is based on the understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all. It means reaching across social divisions to support ALL workers’ struggles because:

• All workers would benefit from ending a social system that profits off our labor.
• No group of workers benefits from the oppression of any other group of workers, regardless of short-term bribery.
• Only by standing together can workers win our liberation from capitalism.

Working-Class Independence

Workers cannot count on bosses, managers, or the capitalist state to meet their needs.

Bosses profit by exploiting workers’ labor. They reject all reforms that would limit their power to extract those profits. When workers side with their bosses, as many do in war, they remain servants of capital, working every day to build the dehumanizing prison of waged-labor that traps them.

The middle or manager class benefit from a capitalist system that allows them some social power but not enough to deliver meaningful change. This leads some sections of the middle class to join or even lead social movements — up to a point. When pressed to choose between bosses’ interests and workers’ interests, they choose compromise. A manager class that exists to control the working class cannot imagine workers running society without bosses.

Only the working class gain no benefit from capitalism. On the contrary, profit is possible only by robbing workers of what they produce and of the life-energy they exhaust to produce it. Consider these eye-popping profits:

In 2018, Facebook made $15 billion in profit in Ireland — the equivalent of about $10 million for each of its employees there. That same year, Bristol Myers Squibb recorded close to $5 billion in profit in the Emerald Isle, or roughly $7.5 million per employee.

It’s obvious why workers would organize separately from bosses. It’s less obvious why they should organize independent of a manager or professional class that claim to want the same things. In reality, the two classes have different goals. The manager class want to:

• reduce the misery that capitalism creates, not end the system that creates misery.
• stop this or that particular war, not end the system that creates war.
• end racist discrimination, not the system that divides people into races.
• ensure every woman has the right to abortion without putting the power to exercise that right in every woman’s hands.
• improve the conditions under which workers enrich their bosses without ending the wage system that forces them to do so.

The manager class and the working class also have different strategies. Managers look to authorities to deliver justice. Workers can only count on the justice delivered by their class.

Being fewer in numbers than the working class, the manager class recruit workers into cross-class alliances or coalitions (also called common or popular fronts) to fight for the common good. However, there is no common good under capitalism. Workers and bosses have opposite interests. What benefits the one hurts the other.

All cross-class alliances are crippled by compromise. Their demands for social change never exceed what the ruling class will accept. They patronizingly defer the goal of liberation to some future date in favor of what is ‘realistically possible’ today.

Subterranean Fire

Working-class liberation is so threatening to capitalism that it does everything possible to prevent it. However, it cannot succeed because, as Marx and Engels observed, capitalism creates its own grave-diggers.

Capitalism connects billions of workers in global production and supply chains, puts their hands on the wheels of production, makes immense fortunes off their labor, deprives them of a decent life, and forces them to compete against each other instead of challenging their masters. Such conditions make class rebellion inevitable.

In 1886, August Spies was sentenced to death for fighting for the 8-hour workday. He responded with this warning,

If you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement – the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery – the wage slaves – expect salvation – if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.

Revolutionary Organization

Capitalism is structured to prevent worker self-emancipation, class solidarity, and class independence. As a result, these principles can only be developed in revolutionary organizations committed to working-class liberation.

As Marx and Engels wrote,

The revolution is necessary, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but because only in a revolution can the working class shed the muck of ages and become fit to build a new society. (p.52-53)

They did not mean that workers will magically shed the muck of ages on the day of insurrection. As they emphasized, “the alteration of people on a mass scale can only take place in a revolutionary movement.”

That movement must reject the social relations of capitalism — hierarchical boss-worker relationships and the worker-to-worker competition that breeds bigotry — and embrace the egalitarian traditions of worker solidarity.

The revolutionary movement must serve as a bridge between this society and the next, between who we are now and who we must become to liberate ourselves from capitalism.