Can the Working Class Change the World? by Michael D. Yates

Author:Michael D. Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2018-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

LABOR UNIONS, LABOR POLITICAL parties, and peasant organizations have, indeed, changed the world. Yet they have not succeeded in defeating capital and moving the world on to a radically democratic and fully egalitarian trajectory. Capital is still firmly in control of production, distribution, and politics. Most of the world’s income and wealth is monopolized by a small number of persons and global corporations. The advances made by the working class, broadly conceived, have proven short-lived and vulnerable to capital’s power. The Soviet Union is no more, and China has moved rapidly toward a full embrace of capitalism. Social democracy is on the ropes in the Global North and has been thoroughly defeated in Great Britain and the United States. Even at its peak, social democracy did little to help workers and peasants gain control of their workplaces and land or to force a much greater equalization in the distribution of wealth. Greater income equality happened, but it is wealth that matters most.

If social democracy has never led to a full-scale assault on capitalism, what reason is there to believe that it ever could? Today, it is impossible to believe that there will be a recovery of even the modest political and economic project that labor unions and political parties once embraced and helped bring to fruition. This leaves a stark choice. Either continue to accept capitalism as a given and try to squeeze whatever crumbs capital might be willing to let fall from its table or radically change direction and begin to build a global movement that can transcend capitalism once and for all.

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/10/2018 9:38 PM via MCGILL UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

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