From Engel’s Manchester to Global Manchester

Contents

• The Fundamental Law and the Great Divergence: The Mechanics of the “Long Decline”
• The Anatomy of a Fractured Class: The Precariat, Migration, And the Labour Aristocracy
• The Industry of Absurdity: The Productivity of Evil And “Bullshit Jobs”
• The Debt Loop: Credit as An Instrument of Moral Terror

In 1845, 24-year-old Friedrich Engels published the book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” which Lenin called «a terrible indictment of capitalism and the bourgeoisie»¹, counting it among the finest works of world socialist literature. The choice of subject for analysis was no accident: the Manchester of the XIX century was the first “laboratory” of industrial capitalism. Engels documented with meticulous precision how a system possessing an unprecedented capacity for technological innovation generated, simultaneously, absolute poverty, epidemics, and the degradation of human life. It was the reality of Charles Dickens’ suffocating, smoke-filled Coketown in “Hard Times” and the hellish depths of Émile Zola’s “Germinal”.

In the first volume of “Capital”, Karl Marx formulated the law «[…] all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital».²

A century and a half later, the apologists for capitalism claim that this law has become obsolete. We are told about the advent of “post-industrial society” and the triumph of the middle class and the knowledge economy. However, if we set aside the ideological trappings and apply a rigorous marxist political-economic analysis of contemporary reality, we find that capitalism has not changed its nature: it simply scaled up 1845 Manchester to the size of the entire planet. Modern economy is one global factory, where digital algorithms act as soulless overseers and financial bubbles work as an iron lung for a system afflicted by a chronic overproduction crisis.

The Fundamental Law and the Great Divergence: The Mechanics of the “Long Decline”

To understand why the modern programmer, the courier, and the smartphone assembler are all on the same class boat, we need to turn to the fundamental elements of marxist theory of crisis: the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The mathematics of inevitability

Capitalism is guided by only one objective: the self-appreciation of value (accumulation of capital). Profit derives exclusively from unpaid labour done by the workers (surplus value). In the Marxist paradigm, the rate of profit is expressed by the formula:

,

where m is surplus value, c is the constant capital (machines, raw material, servers, algorithms) and v is the variable capital (workers’ wages).

In the pursuit of a competitive advantage, a capitalist is forced to constantly introduce new technologies, substituting human labour with machine labour. This leads to the unstoppable growth of the organic composition of capital (the ratio c/v). But since the source of new value is solely living labour (v), the relative decline in the share of this labour in production inevitably leads to a systematic fall in the rate of profit (p’).

1973: the point of no return

In the late 1960s, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson made a series of triumphant statements. «The obsolete notion of […] “economic cycle” is no longer of great interest», said Solow. Samuelson joked that, after fifty years of operation the National Bureau of Economic Research had «deprived itself of one of its objectives – the study of the business cycle». Arthur Okun, economic advisor under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, claimed that recessions were «now […] preventable like plane crashes» and that the notion that economic fluctuations could pose a threat to the smooth functioning of the economy was «outdated». In his book “The Political Economy of Prosperity” (Washington, 1970), finished in November 1969, he wrote that in that moment «the nation had been living the one hundred fifth month of an unheard of economic growth, unprecedented and uninterrupted» declaring without hesitation the «obsolescence of the scheme of economic cycles».

The apologists for capitalism perceived the period of post-war growth in the reconstruction as the new norm of capitalism.

Robert Brenner, director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA and editorial committee member of New Left Review, shows in his book “The economics of global turbulence: the advanced capitalist economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005” that this was merely a temporary anomaly, caused by the destruction of vast amounts of capital during the Second World War.

By the late ‘60s, the economies of the US, Germany and Japan were suffering from an oversupply of production capacity. The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall had taken its toll. The crisis of 1973 (often mistakenly attributed solely to the oil embargo) marked the point at which capital could no longer guarantee profit growth whilst maintaining the post-war ‘class compromise’ (high wages).

This marks the beginning of what economists refer to as “The Great Decoupling”. In his book “Capitalism Unleashed” (Oxford University Press, 2006), Andrew Glyn³, an English economist, lecturer at the University of Oxford and scholar of capitalism, examines the mechanisms behind capitalist resurgence. His findings are backed up by research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI): since 1973, labour productivity in the US and Europe has risen by almost 110 %, whilst the real wages of the median worker have stagnated (see table and graph). All added value over the last half-century has been appropriated by capital to compensate for the falling rate of profit. The system survives solely by intensifying the degree of exploitation.

Year	Labour Productivity (Output per Hour)	Median Real Wage	Gap (Capital Appropriation)
1973	100	100	0
1990	132	103	+29
2010	185	108	+77
2022 (Est.)	210	110	+100

Data based on the EPI (Economic Policy Institute) model.

Capital, in its pursuit of profit, drives development in the Global South

Faced with falling profits and the interests of the working aristocracy in the metropolises during the 1970s, capital resorted to a strategy which the Anglo-American geographer David Harvey, one of the founders of so-called “radical geography”, described in his book “The Limits to Capital” (1982) as “spatial fix”: if in Detroit the work force costs 20 dollars an hour and the working day is limited to 8 hours, then the factory must be moved where the demands of the proletariat are much lower.

According to data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) regarding the last decade, the global army of wage labour counts the unprecedented number of 3.3 - 3.5 billion people.

There has been a colossal geographic shift: the absolute majority of the world proletariat (about 1.9 billion workers) is now concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region, which has been transformed into the world’s main industrial workshop. In Africa, the salaried workforce totals about 500 million people (of whom more than 85 % in the informal sector, with no social security whatsoever) while in South America it amounts to about 300 million people. The working conditions in the Global South often literally repeat the reality of XIX century England: systematic lack of workplace safety, 10-14 hour shifts and incomes that barely cover the basic necessities of life.

On this note, it mustn’t be forgotten that marxism distinguishes between absolute impoverishment and relative impoverishment. Today, a smartphone assembler in Shenzhen not only has a bowl of rice, but also an iPhone. However, at the same time, the extent to which this worker is exploited (the relative impoverishment, i.e. the gap between what he produces and what he receives) significantly exceeds the exploitment level of a rice harvester.

As Marx wrote in “Wage Labour and Capital”: «A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.»⁴

“Global Labour Arbitration” and Imperialist Rent

Researcher John Smith, in his book “Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century” (2016) demonstrates clearly this process through the example of the production of clothing and gadgets. The economic “miracle” of multinationals is based upon their monopoly on patents, branding and finance (which remain in the North), whilst outsourcing the physical process of producing value to the Global South.

Of a smartphone’s retail price, less than 2 % goes to the workers assembling it in Foxconn factories.⁵ All the enormous surplus value squeezed out of the 12-hour shifts of Chinese, Vietnamese, or Indian workers flows, in the form of imperialist super-profits, into the accounts of corporations in California and Ireland. This allows Western economists to produce charts showing GDP growth in the imperialist metropolises, while concealing the fact that this GDP is paid for literally with the sweat and blood of workers in the countries of developing capitalism.

The bleakest aspect of this global system of exploitation is the mass use of child labour, driven by the poverty of the proletariat of the Global South. According to the latest joint estimates by the ILO and UNICEF, 160 million children worldwide are currently forced to work – nearly one in every ten children on the planet – of whom 79 million are engaged in work hazardous to their life and health. The absolute epicentre is Sub-Saharan Africa, where 23.9 % of all children in the region (86.6 million) are exploited. In the Asia-Pacific region, the share of working children stands at 5.6 % (49 million), while in Latin America and the Caribbean it is 5.3 % (8.3 million). It is precisely these children – mining cobalt for the batteries of premium electric vehicles in the Congo or sorting toxic electronic waste in Ghana – who provide the foundation for the profitability of high-tech transnational corporations.

The Law of Resistance

However, this process contains a dialectical contradiction. Beverly Silver, Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, analyses the movement of capital over the past 150 years in her study “Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870”. The textile and automobile industries fled from the strikes in England to the United States, from there to Japan, then to South Korea, China, and finally to Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Reading Silver’s book, we see the iron law already described by Marx and Engels in “The Communist Manifesto”: wherever capital goes in search of compliant labour power, it inevitably produces its own gravedigger – the proletariat. This working class is not yet fully schooled by capitalism, remains weakly organised, and does not yet sufficiently recognise its own interests. Yet the explosive growth of strikes across Asia in the 2010s and 2020s already serves as direct proof that the proletariat has not disappeared – it has merely changed its geography.

The Anatomy of a Fractured Class: The Precariat, Migration, And the Labour Aristocracy

Capitalism’s development by the twenty-first century has produced an unprecedentedly complex system of internal stratification within the proletariat, fragmenting it into strata whose interests at times come into conflict with one another. This multi-layered system of oppression constructed by capitalism is reflected in the film “Parasite” (2019) by the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, where the bourgeoisie hover above all in an abstract glass house, while those at the bottom of society, blinded by false consciousness, viciously tear each other apart in flooded basements for the right to serve their masters.

“The Internal South” and the Use of Migration

If capital cannot relocate a farm or construction site to Africa, it imports Africa itself. According to ILO data for 2024, 68.4 % of the world’s 167.7 million international migrant workers are concentrated in the countries of the imperialist core of capitalism. Migrants constitute an artificially rightless reserve army of labour. Their deprivation of political rights and the constant threat of deportation allow capital to circumvent labour legislation, depress wages, and – most importantly – channel the class anger of local workers into the reactionary politics of right-wing populist xenophobia.

Rentier Capitalism and the Illusion of Ownership

The French economist Thomas Piketty argues that inequality is increasing because the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. The economic geographer Brett Christophers, Professor at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Sweden, introduces the concept of rentier capitalism. He argues that capital has succeeded in partially integrating the upper strata of the wage-earning class – the labour aristocracy – into the system of exploitation.

Through the mechanisms of pension funds (dependent on stock-market valuations), mortgage lending, and micro-investment, wage labourers in the imperialist metropolises have become owners of fictitious capital. This gives rise to false consciousness: owners of fictitious capital begin to identify with the fortunes of Wall Street, since a market crash means a reduction in their own pensions.

The modern labour aristocracy has a clear geographical and economic concentration. In the countries of the imperialist centre (the United States and Western Europe), this layer comprises roughly 20–30 % of all wage labourers, including top management and highly paid specialists in the IT and financial sectors. By contrast, in the countries of the Global South, the share of the labour aristocracy is negligible and rarely exceeds 2–5 %, serving primarily the logistics and infrastructure of transnational corporations.

According to the World Inequality Database (WID), the character of this stratum in the West has changed radically: it has been bourgeoisified through mechanisms of ownership. Among the “asset-burdened” strata of wage labourers, the share of income derived from various forms of property – imputed rent from mortgaged home ownership, share dividends, interest income, and the capitalisation of private pension accounts – can now amount to between 15 and 25 % of total disposable income. By contrast, among the bottom 50 % of wage labourers, the share of property income is statistically zero: this is precisely the classic proletariat with nothing to lose but its chains.

It is precisely this material umbilical cord linking the incomes of the upper strata of workers in the imperialist metropolises to their “own” imperialist bourgeoisie that constitutes the economic basis of their political opportunism.

Yet we should not forget that under the conditions of the 2020s – inflation, rising central-bank interest rates, and rising living costs – the fictitious capital of the labour aristocracy is steadily evaporating. It is losing both savings and assets. The social base of capitalism is narrowing even within the metropolises themselves.

Institutional Co-Optation: The Collapse of Social Democracy and The Yellow Trade Unions

On the political level, the most important factor in the demoralisation of the proletariat was the betrayal by its historic organisations – trade unions and left-wing parties. This process, which began with the revisionism of the Second International, reached its logical conclusion in the era of advanced imperialism: social democracy became fully integrated into the structures of global capitalism.

Contemporary systemic left-wing parties – whether Labour in Britain or the Social Democrats in Germany – have long ceased to function as the political vanguard of the working class. Beginning in the 1990s, during the era of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder’s “Third Way”, they abandoned even the rhetoric of overcoming capitalism, transforming themselves into efficient managers of capitalist reform. It was precisely these pseudo-workers’ parties that carried out privatisations, dismantled social protections, and advanced policies of austerity, thereby destroying the last remnants of the post-war class compromise.

A clear example of this was the so-called “Agenda 2010” and the Hartz reforms carried out in the early 2000s by Schröder’s Social Democratic government in Germany. It was precisely these reforms that created Europe’s largest sector of low-paid precarious labour (“mini-jobs”) and brutally slashed unemployment benefits.

At the same time, the trade-union movement underwent profound bureaucratisation and degeneration. Having become an integrated component of corporate governance – the phenomenon known as trade-unionism – the upper layers of the official trade unions became catastrophically detached from the rank and file members. Trade-union leaders, sitting on the boards of directors and receiving executive-level salaries, are far more interested in preserving “social partnership” and corporate profitability than in uncompromising class struggle. The trade union was transformed from a school of communism and a militant organ of solidarity into a service bureaucracy providing legal assistance in exchange for monthly membership dues.

This opportunism had devastating consequences for class consciousness. The working class of imperialist metropolises, betrayed by its own political and trade-union “elites”, found itself in a state of profound political disorientation and cynicism. Having lost faith in the possibility of a genuinely left-wing alternative, the atomised proletariat became easy prey for right-wing populism, which today skilfully channels the anger of a significant section of workers against the establishment into the dead end of xenophobia and chauvinism.

The Absence of Influential Marxist Organisations as An Objective Mirror of The Class

The inevitable outcome of all the processes described above has been the profound political disorganisation of the proletariat. One often hears the question: why is there still no mass, influential Marxist International or powerful communist parties in the world today?

The Marxist answer is that the political superstructure – the party – always reflects the economic base and the material condition of the class. The absence of influential Marxist organisations today is not merely the result of “leadership mistakes”, a lack of charismatic leaders, or theoretical weakness. It is a direct, objective reflection of the actual condition of the global working class itself. As Marx wrote, the proletariat must transform itself from a fragmented “class in itself” – objectively existing but lacking consciousness – into a politically conscious “class for itself”.

Today’s global working class remains paralysed precisely as a “class in itself”. Its most exploited layers have been physically displaced to the Global South, where any form of workers’ self-organisation is ruthlessly suppressed by the armed apparatus of local bourgeois dictatorships and transnational capital. At the same time, in the countries of the imperialist core, the proletariat is trapped in debt, fragmented by the gig economy, isolated in suburbia, and blinded by digital illusions.

The creation of a genuinely revolutionary mass Marxist party cannot be artificially decreed from above or assembled on the internet. Such a party can emerge only organically, as the political and intellectual expression of real, cohesive resistance by the proletarian masses from below. In the absence of this foundational cohesion and experience of collective struggle, the left-wing political field inevitably disintegrates into marginal academic circles, activist sects detached from production, or reformist NGOs that pose not the slightest threat to the hegemony of capital. The weakness of Marxist organisations is an exact mirror of the structural weakness and fragmentation of the modern proletariat.

The Digital Conveyor Belt and Precarisation

Those who have not entered the ranks of the labour aristocracy are condemned to precarisation. British economist Guy Standing describes the precariat as a layer of the working class deprived of even the slightest certainty about the future. The gig economy – Uber, platform-based delivery services, and similar forms of labour – has shifted the risks and costs of the reproduction of labour power entirely onto the worker.

In her book “The Making of a Cybertariat” (2003), the British researcher Ursula Huws, who specialises in the sociology of labour, the digital economy, and gender issues, demolishes the myth of the IT sector’s “exceptional” status. The labour of programmers, copywriters, and designers is subjected to digital Taylorism: it is fragmented into primitive tasks, standardised, and algorithmically managed.

For decades, Silicon Valley’s apologists have sold us the idea of the “sharing economy” and the gig economy as an era of independent creators and free entrepreneurs. However, if we arm ourselves with the analytical lens of Marx’s “Capital”, we can see that platform capitalism does not overcome capitalist contradictions – it pushes them to their absolute, chemically pure limit.

Marx could not have foreseen the emergence of the smartphone, but he described with remarkable precision the very mechanics of what Uber, Yandex, Amazon, and Glovo are doing today. Modern digital platforms can be understood through the basic concepts of Marxist political economy in the following way: whereas under classical capitalism the bourgeoisie were the owners of factories, newspapers, and steamships, in the gig economy platform owners claim that they are merely “information intermediaries” connecting the client and the worker. Yet from the standpoint of Marxism, the platform itself – the algorithm, servers, and databases – constitutes the modern means of production.

By monopolising digital infrastructure, capital places itself in the position of an absolute controller. The worker cannot find clients outside the algorithm. The platform extracts an enormous rent in the form of commissions for access to this digital “machine”, dictating prices to both sides.

In Chapter XIII of the first volume of “Capital”, Marx quotes the factory inspector Leonard Horner: «[…] the operative paid by piecework, would exert himself to the utmost consistent with the power of continuing at the same rate»⁶. And in Chapter XIX, Marx draws the following conclusion: «[…] piece-wage is the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production. Although by no means new […] it only conquers a larger field for action during the period of manufacture, properly so-called. In the stormy youth of modern industry, especially from 1797 to 1815, it served as a lever for the lengthening of the working-day, and the lowering of wages»⁷.

The gig economy has elevated this principle to an absolute. A courier or taxi driver is not paid for working time – they are paid for a specific order or transaction. On the psychological level, piece-wage labour creates the illusion of freedom and of working “for oneself” (after all, formally speaking, there is no foreman standing over the worker with a stopwatch). It compels the worker to intensify their own labour independently – working 12–14 hours a day, sacrificing sleep, and violating safety regulations – in order to earn a subsistence wage. Capital no longer needs to drive the proletarian onward – the worker extracts surplus value from himself.

The ingenious cruelty of platform capitalism lies in the fact that it has forced the proletarian to bear part of the costs of constant capital (c) personally. A taxi driver uses their own car; a courier uses their own bicycle and smartphone. They themselves pay for petrol, repairs, internet access, and the depreciation of their equipment. The platform extracts pure surplus value (m), having almost completely freed itself from the burden of maintaining and repairing the physical means of production.

And this is still not all. Marx wrote of capital’s need to maintain a relative surplus population, or reserve army of labour. The unemployed are necessary to the system in order to exert pressure on those still employed and prevent wages from rising. A smartphone application is the ideal reservoir for such an army. Millions of people are registered within the system. If a courier is dissatisfied with the rate and switches off the application, the algorithm instantly passes the order to another member of the endless reserve army of migrants, students, or people who have lost permanent employment. This enables the platforms to keep wages (v) at the very bottom of the social minimum.

In “Capital”, Marx also describes how machines – “dead labour” – begin to subordinate human beings – “living labour” – imposing their own mechanical rhythm upon them. Platform algorithms are the perfect, sleepless overseers. They implement total digital Taylorism: counting every second of a delivery, tracking GPS coordinates, penalising workers for the slightest deviation from the route, and dismissing them automatically – by blocking their accounts – on the basis of falling ratings, without any right to trade-union protection or legal appeal. The living human being is transformed into a biological appendage to the smartphone, whose sole task is physically to move goods from point A to point B while executing the commands of mathematical code.

The gig economy is the realised dream of the nineteenth-century capitalist. It is a system in which the extraction of surplus value is maximised, while all social obligations – sick pay, holidays, pensions, responsibility for workplace injuries – are completely nullified through a legal fiction: «you are not our employees, you are independent contractors».

Platform capitalism does not abolish Marx’s laws – it strips away the compromises of the twentieth century, returning us to the brutal realities of the Manchester factories, only now with GPS trackers and the gamification of labour. The platform algorithm is the perfect overseer: it never sleeps and measures labour efficiency every second, transforming intellectual labour into a routine factory conveyor belt.

The Shift of Economic Sectors: From the Factory Whistle to The Logistics Algorithm

At the time of Engels and Marx, the vanguard of the proletariat consisted of factory workers – textile workers, miners, and metalworkers – directly engaged in industrial production. Their concentration in the thousands within workshops and mines created the objective conditions for rapid self-organisation. The process of exploitation was completely transparent: the worker saw the machine, saw the foreman with his stopwatch, and understood that the factory owner was appropriating the fruits of his physical labour.

Today, the global labour market has undergone a radical structural transformation. While industrial production has been relocated to the Global South, between 70 and 80 % of the workforce in the countries of the imperialist core – the United States and the European Union – is now employed in services, logistics, retail, and IT. This has fundamentally transformed class consciousness.

Firstly, fragmentation and dispersal have taken place: a significant share of today’s proletariat works not in gigantic factory workshops, but is scattered across small cafés, Amazon warehouses, call centres, or entirely isolated behind computer screens – the “remote workers”. Organising a strike becomes incomparably more difficult when workers are physically unacquainted with their colleagues.

Secondly, the very object of exploitation has changed. As the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild demonstrated in her concept of “emotional labour”⁸, capital in the service sector began to exploit not only physical labour, but the worker’s personality itself – their smiles, empathy, and ability to smooth over conflicts with customers.

Thirdly, a sophisticated concealment of class antagonism has emerged. Capitalists in the service sector prefer to describe proletarians as “partners”, “independent contractors”, or even “members of the family”, thereby concealing the very existence of wage labour. A delivery courier is de facto a classic proletarian selling their labour power – the ability to pedal and carry a thermal delivery bag – yet de jure, and in their own consciousness, they often imagine themselves to be “small entrepreneurs”. The absence of a direct, visible oppressor – replaced instead by an impersonal algorithmic application – disorients the worker, directing their frustration towards customers, colleagues, or their own “failure”, rather than towards the system of profit extraction itself.

This is the horrifying “freedom” of millions of proletarians trapped in a permanent race, spending their last money on a van in order to begin “working for themselves” – delivering parcels for a courier company for 14 hours a day, while raising children in whatever time remains. This is the reality depicted in the film “Sorry We Missed You” by the British director Ken Loach.

The Urbanism of Alienation: The Destruction of Working-Class Districts and Spatial Atomisation

An important instrument in the transformation of the working class in developed metropolises was the restructuring of the very spatial organisation of the capitalist city. Classical industrial capitalism concentrated the proletariat in dense factory districts and working-class neighbourhoods. Despite the appalling living conditions – described by Friedrich Engels in “The Housing Question” – this monstrous overcrowding paradoxically forged class solidarity. Shared courtyards, proletarian taverns, mutual-aid funds, and constant close social contact produced a unified political identity capable of rapid mobilisation for strikes and street confrontation.

Having recognised this political threat, capital launched a large-scale process of urban restructuring. Drawing upon the logic already embedded by Baron Haussmann during the reconstruction of Paris in the nineteenth century – the destruction of narrow streets suitable for barricades in favour of broad boulevards – modern capitalism reshaped the metropolises through processes of deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, and gentrification. As David Harvey notes, the “right to the city” has been definitively usurped by financial capital.⁹

Historic working-class districts in the centres of Western cities were systematically destroyed or gentrified – transformed into luxury real estate, fashionable lofts, and office clusters. The working class was pushed out towards distant economic peripheries or dispersed across isolated suburbs. This spatial segregation had catastrophic consequences for the labour movement: it physically destroyed the centres of reproduction of proletarian culture. Collective everyday life was replaced by total atomisation within uniform concrete housing estates or individualised mortgaged homes. And it matters little that the son of a modern Charlotte – an inhabitant of Ballard’s «High-Rise» – no longer listens to Margaret Thatcher’s speeches on the radio, but instead consumes 15-second compilations of clips and memes: he remains just as much a prisoner of the insane capitalist Metropolis.

Moreover, the growing distances between home and work – daily commuting – rob the wage labourer of hours of free time every day, exhausting them and depriving them of the physical possibility of participating in political self-organisation.

The Feminisation of The Proletariat and The Crisis of Social Reproduction

Historically, capitalism relied upon the patriarchal family as a free factory for the production and reproduction of labour power. The classical industrial model rested upon the assumption of a “family wage” for the male breadwinner, while women’s unpaid domestic labour ensured the social reproduction of capital.

However, with the onset of capital’s offensive in the 1970s and the stagnation of real incomes, this model collapsed. Capital mobilised colossal reserves of women’s labour, throwing their lives into the furnace of global production. On the one hand, this process possessed a progressive dimension: economic independence dealt a crushing blow to the traditional patriarchal family, granting women an unprecedented degree of freedom from the dictates of the “head of the household”. On the other hand, the integration of women into the labour market took place entirely on capitalist terms.

Capital used the mass employment of women to depress wages across the board and reduce the value of labour power. Now, in order for the family to survive, both partners must sell their labour power. This gave rise to the phenomenon of the “double burden”: having been freed from exclusive confinement to the household, the proletarian woman acquired a second, unpaid shift at home after completing her paid shift at the factory or in the office.

In the Global South, the feminisation of labour assumed the form of super-exploitation in export-oriented zones – the maquiladoras of Mexico and the garment factories of Bangladesh – where capital prefers to hire young women, cynically regarding them as a more “docile” and cheaper labour force. At the same time, “global care chains”¹⁰ emerged in the metropolises: migrant women from the South are forced to leave their own families behind in order to perform reproductive labour – caring for children and the elderly, cleaning – for miserable wages in the service of the bourgeoisie and the labour aristocracy of the North. This further atomises and fragments the global working class, shifting the costs of social reproduction onto its most vulnerable layers.

The Industry of Absurdity: The Productivity of Evil And “Bullshit Jobs”

If capitalism is so efficient, why do millions of people experience total alienation and regard their labour as meaningless? Here Marxist theory exposes the fundamental irrationality of the system: capitalism does not care about use-value (real utility) – all that matters to it is exchange-value and the circulation of capital.

Karl Marx And the Capitalisation of Destruction

In “Apologist Conception of the Productivity of All Professions”¹¹, Karl Marx, through a brilliant satirical device – reduction to absurdity – demolishes bourgeois political economy and its conception of what constitutes “useful” and “productive” labour:

« The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc. […]. The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation, and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted. […] While crime takes a part of the superfluous population off the labour market and thus reduces competition among the labourers – up to a certain point preventing wages from falling below the minimum – the struggle against crime absorbs another part of this population».¹²

The bourgeois economists contemporary to Marx argued that any activity which generates demand, creates jobs, and sets money in motion is economically “productive” and beneficial to society.

Marx takes this logic and applies it to the destructive social figure of the criminal: if capitalism measures usefulness solely through the circulation of money and the creation of jobs, then the criminal becomes a genuine engine of progress and a benefactor of humanity.

Through this sarcasm, Marx exposes the fundamental contradiction between use-value (the real usefulness of a thing or action for human beings) and exchange-value (the capacity to generate profit). Capitalism is utterly indifferent to whether labour creates something constructive or merely eliminates the consequences of artificially generated chaos. For capital, the only thing that matters is the circulation of money itself.

Thus, under capitalism, destruction becomes profitable: this mode of production is capable of capitalising catastrophe itself. Illness, crime, war, and ecological crises are not tragedies for the bourgeois economy, but excellent drivers of GDP growth.

Apologists for capital often justify any destructive industry with the phrase: «But it creates jobs». Marx demonstrates the bankruptcy of this argument: prisons also create jobs, but this does not make them engines of human happiness.

Capitalism is a society of universal alienation. In bourgeois society, the distinction between the production of bread and the production of an antidote to an artificially created poison disappears. Both simply generate surplus value.

This nineteenth-century fragment sounds frighteningly relevant today. The modern economy is full of examples of the “productivity of the criminal”: the trillion-dollar cybersecurity industry grows only thanks to hackers; the total psychological burnout of the proletariat sustains an entire army of corporate psychologists and the pharmaceutical industry; while the clean-up of ecological disasters caused by corporations is becoming a new profitable market for “green technologies” and carbon-emissions trading. Capital has transformed destruction into one of the principal mechanisms of its own self-expansion. Capitalism survives by parasitising the catastrophes that it itself produces.

David Graeber’s “Managerial Feudalism”

In 1930, in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, J. M. Keynes predicted that technological development would lead to a 15-hour working week. Technologically, humanity reached this threshold decades ago. But why are we working more and more?

The American anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, in his book “Bullshit Jobs”, offers the following answer: a reduction of working time poses a mortal danger to the political stability of capital.

According to this conception, the capitalist system took the path of artificially inflating the service sector and bureaucracy. Millions of PR specialists, telemarketers, administrators, and corporate lawyers secretly understand that their labour brings absolutely no benefit to the world. This is the existential dead end of Tyler Durden from Chuck Palahniuk’s cult novel “Fight Club”: «We go to jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need».

Will a wage labourer, exhausted by eight hours of meaningless manipulation of digital paperwork, take to the barricades?

Despite the sharpness of his observations, Graeber misses the essential point: capital does nothing merely in order to “wear people down”. It is always driven by the imperative of valorisation. The bloated service sector – advertising, marketing, lawyers, HR – constitutes part of the costs of circulation of capital. Capitalism is compelled to expend colossal resources not on production itself, but on forcing consumers to purchase commodities amid ferocious competition and a crisis of overproduction. This is an economic necessity for the survival of corporations, not simply a conspiracy designed to deprive people of free time.

Cognitive Alienation: The Crisis of Education and The Dictatorship of the “Clip”

An indispensable condition for the survival of the capitalist system is the suppression of class consciousness. Today, this task is jointly carried out by the modern education system and the Internet monopolised by corporations. In his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), the French philosopher Louis Althusser defined schools as the principal «ideological state apparatus». Modern mass education has been definitively transformed from an instrument of enlightenment into a conveyor belt for producing functionally literate yet critically unthinking functionaries. It is geared towards drilling students for standardised testing and cultivating the narrow competencies demanded by the market, methodically erasing any aspiration towards a fundamental, dialectical understanding of the world.

Digital platforms, in turn, complete the process of cognitive alienation. Social-media algorithms, operating within the framework of the so-called “attention economy”, deliberately fragment human perception. What the French philosopher Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle” (“La Société du spectacle”, 1967) has, in the era of platform capitalism, mutated into an industry of endless dopamine-driven consumption¹³ of short-form content. The culture of deep reading – which requires intellectual effort and concentration, precisely the effort necessary for mastering political economy, philosophy, and an understanding of the historical process – is being physiologically and psychologically destroyed by “clip culture”¹⁴. At the same time, it must be understood that this is not the result of a consciously coordinated strategy on the part of the bourgeoisie. Rather, it is driven by the imperative of profit maximisation, which inflates advertising and marketing within societies of mature imperialism. In other words, the same process is at work here as in the case of “Bullshit Jobs”.

The proletariat is plunged into a condition of permanent information overload and what the English philosopher Mark Fisher called “reflexive impotence”¹⁵: the abundance of superficial information creates the illusion of omniscience while making any systematic analysis of the causes of one’s own poverty impossible. Capital has expropriated not only labour, but also the very time necessary for reflection, replacing genuine knowledge with algorithmic rubbish.

Modern capitalism is not an Orwellian dystopia of direct physical coercion, but rather the reality of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Today, the adherents of capital no longer need to burn the books of Marx or Lenin; they simply drown the atomised proletariat in an ocean of informational noise and the digital “soma”¹⁶ of short-form videos, extinguishing the very desire for complex reflection.

The Debt Loop: Credit as An Instrument of Moral Terror

Since real wages have stagnated from the 1970s onwards, while consumption has had to continue growing in order to realise the commodities produced, capital replaced the growth of incomes with the growth of debt.

Expropriation Through Finance

The Greek economist Costas Lapavitsas¹⁷, Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, demonstrates in his book “Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All” (2013) that modern financialisation is not merely stock-market speculation. It represents a return to usury on an industrial scale. Financial capital extracts profit directly from workers’ incomes through mortgages, consumer credit, bank charges, and microloans. The proletarian is subjected to double exploitation: first in the workplace, where surplus value is extracted, and then in the sphere of consumption, where banks extract the remnants of wages in the form of interest payments.

In 1978, the American economist Charles Kindleberger, in his classic work of economic history “Manias, Panics, and Crashes”, convincingly demonstrated that such credit expansion inevitably produces speculative manias and financial collapses. Yet every collapse – as in 2008 – ends with the state rescuing the banks at the expense of the population, imposing regimes of austerity upon the working class.

Debt As a Moral Weapon

In his study “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” (2011), David Graeber exposes the most terrifying function of credit. Debt is an instrument of profound moral coercion and a way of shifting systemic guilt onto the individual:

«Why debt? What makes the concept so strangely powerful? Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation-states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.

The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt – above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they “owe them their lives” (a telling phrase) because they haven’t been killed».

Capitalism has instilled in the proletariat a false ethic: you are poor not because this is how the capitalist system is structured, but because you have “failed to invest in yourself”. This gives rise to a “Squid Game” mentality – the desire to escape poverty individually – which ultimately paralyses class solidarity.

Promethean Fire for The Global Proletariat

In the autumn of 1895, in an obituary written on the occasion of Friedrich Engels’s death, Lenin drew a lesson for the world proletariat from Marx’s friend and comrade’s book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”:

«Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of the proletariat and had pointed to the necessity of helping it. Engels was the first to say that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat will help itself. The political movement of the working class will inevitably lead the workers to realise that their only salvation lies in socialism. On the other hand, socialism will become a force only when it becomes the aim of the political struggle of the working class».¹⁸

We do not know when this will happen, but we are certain that today the proletariat and humanity as a whole stand before an inexorable alternative: communism or barbarism. Capitalism cannot be corrected, improved, or reformed. It must be destroyed, thereby creating the preliminary conditions for the withering away of private property and the state. Our class must arrive at this understanding through struggle and through the development of its own organisation. The task of the vanguard of the class today is to help the proletariat traverse this path as rapidly as possible. The daily practice of exposing capitalism, Marxist propaganda, and assistance in grassroots self-organisation – these are the means that will contribute to preparing the soil from which the revolutionary party of the proletariat will grow.

Technology within the capitalist system is not neutral. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and algorithms are used today not to liberate humanity from drudgery, but to intensify labour, impose total digital control, and expand the reserve army of the unemployed. Capitalism has exhausted its progressive historical role. It has become a system that sustains itself through the destruction of nature, the creation of meaningless jobs, and the confinement of millions of wage labourers within debt bondage.

We must overcome the illusion of atomised society. The proletariat has not died – it has become global, uniting within its ranks a courier from Mumbai, a miner from the Congo, an assembly worker from Shenzhen, and a programmer in the Silicon Valley whose labour will tomorrow be devalued by neural networks. We are links in a single chain of surplus-value production.

Anger without rigorous scientific theory is a powerless revolt, which will be easily absorbed by the system of capital itself. Our task today is to return Marxist analysis to everyday reality. To bring a scientific understanding of the laws of profit to the robotised warehouse, the developers’ chat, and the university lecture hall. Only by recognising ourselves as a single class within this vast global factory will we be capable of breaking the machine that produces poverty and direct technology towards the creation of a genuinely human future.

As Marx wrote in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: «the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically»¹⁹. Only after completing this preparatory labour will the proletariat rise and, triumphantly, repeat Marx’s words: «Well burrowed, old mole!». The communist revolution has not died. It has merely gone underground and continues its invisible subterranean labour – undermining the foundations of bourgeois society from within, like a mole.

March 2026

Footnotes

1. - V. Lenin. Frederick Engels // Marxists Internet Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1895/misc/engels-bio.htm ↩

2. - K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 25 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm ↩

3. - In the 1970s and 1980s, Glyn was an activist with the Trotskyist Committee for a Workers’ International, as well as an adviser to the National Union of Mineworkers (UK) and the International Labour Organisation. ↩

4. - K. Marx. Wage Labour and Capital // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm ↩

5. - Dedrick J., Kraemer K. L., Linden G. The distribution of value in the mobile phone supply chain // ​Telecommunications Policy, 2011. Vol. 35. Issue 6, pp. 505–521. ↩

6. - K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 15 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm ↩

7. - K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 21 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch21.htm ↩

8. - The term was first introduced by the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her work “The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling” (1983) ↩

9. - Harvey develops the thesis of the usurpation of the “right to the city” by financial capital in his book “Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution” (2012), drawing upon ideas formulated in “Le Droit à la ville” (1968) by the French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who is recognised as one of the pioneers in the critique of everyday life, as well as in the critique of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. ↩

10. - The terms “double burden” and “global care chains” were first introduced by Arlie Hochschild in her article “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value” (2000). The concept also constitutes a cornerstone of contemporary left-wing feminism, particularly in the work of Nancy Fraser and Silvia Federici. ↩

11. - We are publishing this exceptional essay by Marx after this article. ↩

12. - K. Marx. Theories of Surplus Value, Marx 1861-3 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/add1.htm#s11 ↩

13. - The word “dopamine-driven” is derived from the name of the hormone and neurotransmitter dopamine. In neuroscience, dopamine is a chemical substance that forms a crucial part of the brain’s “reward system”. It generates feelings of pleasure – or the anticipation of pleasure – as well as motivation. The brain produces dopamine when we receive rapid pleasurable stimuli or new information. In the context of this article, the concept describes how modern digital corporations literally exploit our neurobiology. A “dopamine loop” – a form of addiction – is created. The algorithms of social-media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are technologically designed to stimulate constant micro-doses of dopamine release. You swipe through the feed, receiving a bright image, a joke, or shock content every 15 seconds – the brain experiences pleasure and immediately demands repetition. A chemical dependency emerges, comparable to addiction to slot machines. To derive dopamine stimulation from reading a complex text, one must exert serious intellectual and volitional effort. The brain has to strain itself. Short-form videos provide the brain with an instant “hit” requiring virtually no effort whatsoever. Naturally, the overwhelming majority choose this easier path. From the standpoint of political economy, the use of this term demonstrates that modern platform capitalism has learned to extract profit directly from the most basic chemical reactions of the human organism. By addicting the atomised worker to cheap digital dopamine, the system not only steals their free time in order to bombard them with advertising, but also destroys the very motivation for deep reflection that is indispensable for the formation of class consciousness. ↩

14. - The term “clip culture” was first introduced by the American futurist Alvin Toffler, who used it to describe the growing role of media and communications technologies within the information society. ↩

15. - The term was introduced in Mark Fisher’s seminal book “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” (2009). ↩

16. - The word “soma” is a direct reference to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel “Brave New World” (1932). In the novel, the world government controls society not through fear, torture, or secret police repression – as in George Orwell’s “1984” – but through total and uninterrupted pleasure. The state legally and systematically distributes to its citizens an ideal synthetic drug called “soma”. If a person begins to feel sadness, reflect upon the injustice of the social order, or experience even the slightest discomfort, they simply take a dose of soma and sink into a state of serene, artificial happiness. The motto of this society is: «A gramme is better than a damn». The drug renders people completely submissive and content with their servile condition. Like the drug in the novel, digital content alleviates the symptoms of stress and existential emptiness without overcoming their real cause. It fills the brain with informational noise, leaving no physiological capacity for reading Marx, for example. The principal horror of Huxley’s system – and of platform capitalism – lies in the fact that the oppressed classes themselves voluntarily and enthusiastically consume this drug, while simultaneously generating enormous profits for the corporations of the “attention economy”. Thus, “digital soma” is a technologically engineered informational tranquilliser. It paralyses the political will of the working class, replacing real resistance and class solidarity with cheap virtual escapism. ↩

17. - Lapavitsas was elected to the Greek Parliament in the January 2015 general election as a representative of SYRIZA, but following the party split he joined “Popular Unity” in August 2015. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, he stood as a candidate for Yanis Varoufakis’s party ΜέΡΑ25. ↩

18. - V. Lenin. Frederick Engels // Marxists Internet Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1895/misc/engels-bio.htm ↩

19. - K. Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte // Marxists Internet Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm ↩