The 2024 US election returns revealed that a significant portion of the working class including black people, Latinos and women had voted for Donald Trump for President of the United States. Liberal Democratic Party regulars were left wringing their hands and shaking their heads after taking such a beating. And think pieces about the Trump victory have been coming out of any number of political currents. Furthermore, the existence of a fascist-oriented right wing is growing and strengthening in the United States, but more importantly in nations around the world. All of this made me think of my late friend and comrade, Loren Goldner and his 1980 essay The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Re-composition of Class Terrain. The essay was in part a polemic against what Loren called “official Marxism.” Loren’s alternative formulation helped to explain why large segments of the working class, both in the United States and in Great Britain, embraced Reagan and Thatcher in the elections in those two countries.
I first met Loren in 1984 at a Marxism study group held in a friend’s apartment in Chicago. He brought with him a number of copies of a very thick document that had been reproduced by mimeograph machine (the prevailing technology available to people with little money to burn). In that meeting Loren assailed what he called “official Marxism” that included the “monopoly capital theory” of the Marxist publication Monthly Review and all of those who adhered to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. He also referred to liberals and trade unions in league with the United States government as the “left wing of devalorization.” All of this was new to me. I bought one of the copies of The Remaking of the American Working Class he brought with him to the meeting. It had a very great impact on my thinking then and now.1
Re-reading this book, 40 years later, it is clear that the ideas developed by Loren in 1980 served as a guide to much of his thinking and writing throughout his life. In Remaking…Loren utilizes Marx’s three volumes of Capital to analyze the recent history of capitalism itself including class struggles and capitalism’s adaptation to ongoing crises. Each volume of Capital has a separate sub title that Loren used to explain Marx’s methodology: Volume 1 A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production; Volume 2 The Process of Circulation of Capital; Volume 3 The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. It was volume 3 that Loren emphasized in his analysis of the process of capitalist production in 1980. The Marxist concept of total capital—that is capitalism as a world-wide system was the orientation of Loren’s Remaking… And today it is critical to understanding why we are seeing such a global rise in neo-fascist ideas and action throughout the world today.
What is meant by “the system?”
We often hear today’s revolutionaries talk about “the system” without much clarity about what is meant by that. I am not going to try to summarize Loren’s body of work or even Remaking. But I will try to explain his concept of what “the system” is with a few of the concepts he uses to describe the functioning of global capitalism. Loren’s work defines “the system” in great detail using Marx’s categories to analyze how capitalism has worked historically and throughout Loren’s lifetime. Capitalism works by exploiting labor—taking some of the surplus value workers create in the form of profits and reproducing this system on an ever-expanding basis. This means that with an initial amount of money capital the capitalists force the workers to produce commodities whose sale results in more money than the capitalist had to start with. A key concept, valorization, means turning the production of goods and services needed for the reproduction of both the workers and the capitalist system into money capital that workers can use to live on (food, clothing, shelter, education and health care) and that capitalists can use to reproduce the system.
But where do capitalists get the necessary money capital to get the valorization process going to begin with? In its earliest form, capitalists had to get people to work for wages. In England this happened by taking away land needed by peasants to live on and forcing them into wage labor while increasing land that could be used for capitalist production. That primitive accumulation continued as capitalism spread around the world. Historically, colonialism brought peasants and land in the colonies into the capitalist system. Slavery and genocide were the building blocks for primitive accumulation in the United States Loren argues that such primitive accumulation continues perpetually and is a vital part of expanded reproduction today.
In the early development of capitalism in the United States, European peasants were brought here to serve as cheap labor and Africans were forced to perform slave labor. Genocide and slavery against native peoples enabled US capital to seize lands and expand the system to the West. In the late 20th Century capitalist production was subjected to a process of deindustrialization in industrial nations and moved to Asia and Latin America where displaced peasants took up wage labor at a fraction of the cost. The building of dams, mines and infrastructure around the world is displacing more people who are forced into wage labor and providing lands to capitalists to expand industrial capitalist development.
In early capitalism, increased accumulation was also achieved by increasing the length of the working day. This resulted in fierce class struggle to place limits on how long a worker had to work. Primitive accumulation through slavery and native genocide resulted in slave and native rebellions and, in the United States, a Civil War that ultimately abolished slavery. Native resistance to the theft of their lands was ultimately suppressed through brutal genocide.
Resistance to both primitive accumulation and efforts to lengthen the working day throughout the developed world and in the colonies led capital to alter the basic method of accumulation. Technology was used to lower the total wage bill and increase profits. And workers struggles took the form of resistance to job destroying machinery and to the intensification of work on the shop floor.
But this led to an adaptation by capital that was analyzed by Marx primarily in Volume 3 of Capital and stressed by Loren in his writing. Value created by workers had to be expanded in a process of self expanding valorization as capitalists turned money capital into more commodities resulting in greater money capital. Expansion therefore needed an ever-expanding amount of money—especially as the global capitalist class continued to engage in primitive accumulation and use technological innovation. For this reason, from the very beginning of capitalism money took on a specific form that involved a banking system and credit.
This money capital is termed fictitious capital because it has no value produced by living labor behind it. In fact it represents a claim on value not yet generated by living labor. And it is living labor that enables the valorization process. Fictitious capital has been used to replace human beings with machines and to move capital to areas of the world where wages are lowest. It has been used in places like China to build industrial cities and bring peasants from the countryside to these cities as wage labor, accelerating primitive accumulation.
Workers in industrial nations who are either displaced by machines or by movement of capital to lower wage areas of the globe are often forced into unproductive segments of the economy—that is jobs that do not contribute to the valorization process. All jobs in government, fast food and restaurant work, retail store clerks, and a variety of other service sector jobs are examples. To say such jobs are not productive in this sense does not demean the jobs or the people who work them. It simply means that they don’t contribute to the fundamental need of the capitalist system to reproduce the system. Unproductive labor can only exist if living workers pay taxes and purchase services with the wages they get for producing needed goods and services (like health care and education). One of the biggest segments of unproductive labor is the military. The function of the military is to protect the capitalist system but it does not contribute to the reproduction of capital in the valorization process.
Loren gives an important example of productive and unproductive labor. “The steelworker making steel for private cars is productive; the same steelworker making steel for (military) tanks is unproductive…(Also) consider the production of jet transport planes. A jet sold to a capitalist electronics firm flies components from Silicon Valley to Taiwan for assembly; then flies the final product to Spain for sale inside the Common Market. This plane sold from Capitalist A to Capitalist B continues to function as capital, as value valorizing itself. The same plane sold to the Saudi government for troop transport, absolutely ceases to be capital (because it no longer is used to reproduce the capitalist system).”
The prior discussion summarizes Loren’s detailed answer to the question “what is the system?”
So if revolutionaries wish to overthrow the system, what does that mean specifically? It means the abolition of wage labor, destroying the basis of social classes in the process. It means the elimination of classes, races, and other categories of oppression and exploitation. It means an end to the capitalist form of money. It means that labor power is no longer a commodity to be bought, exploited and sold. Rather labor becomes a process of self development where each worker is involved in producing goods and services that enable all to live a decent life. It means the elimination of government functions like police, prisons and even the courts that are designed to protect the system and replacing them with institutions designed to protect the health and security of everyone. In such a society, there is no need for national boundaries. In short, we want a system, as Marx writes, whose very purpose is the full and free development of every being. It is a society in which the needs, capacities and enjoyment of all are the true definition of wealth and the very point of society itself. And it is a system that no longer exploits and destroys nature and the entire eco-system.2
Crisis and Devalorization
In The Remaking of the American Working Class, Loren traces ongoing periods of global capitalist crisis along with the response of the working class—both class struggle and at times support for leaders like Reagan, Thatcher (and now Trump). He also traces the adaptations made by the Capitalist class that has allowed the system to continue. Crisis in our capitalist system has been ongoing. While many leftist analysts contend that crisis is due to either “overproduction” or “under consumption,” Loren argues vigorously that the root of crisis is not in the process of production at all. Rather crisis stems from the “periodic incompatibility of the M-C-M’ (money->commodity-> more money) valorization process and reproduction of total capital with the process of the expanded material reproduction of society.
In my own writings I describe this incompatibility as the creation of more claims on value than the system is able to produce. 3
Historically this incompatibility has been temporarily averted by the credit system—the circulation of fictitious values. But eventually there are more claims on value than what the system is able to produce. At this point various ways are found to temporarily put the system in balance again. One is simply the destruction of claims on value—both economic destruction (inflation, unemployment, bankruptcy and deflation) or extermination of a growing number of surplus workers through the use of prisons and war. Once claims are eliminated the system has reorganized itself, reset and started the process all over again.
Loren argued, however, that despite these measures the underlying crisis is ongoing and reappears from time to time. But the temporary fix means that some members of the working class find that they are unable to purchase their housing, food, clothing, education and healthcare. Nor can they pay increasing taxes. The concept of devalorization is critical to understanding this.
As an example of devalorization as a system-wide response to crisis, Loren points to the destruction of manufacturing jobs in industrial countries that began in the 1970s and greatly accelerated in the 1980s during which workers supported Reagan for President. Looking at this process today, you can see exactly what Loren was driving at.
By now the extent of deindustrialization and its destructive wake are clearly visible throughout all of the industrialized nations and in what are now termed “battleground states” where Trump has now won the Presidency in the United States twice. The Southeast side of Chicago and Northwest Indiana included one of the largest concentrations of heavy industry in the world. The region was anchored by ten steel mills, which at their peak, employed two hundred thousand workers, half in Chicago. It has been estimated that for every steel job in the region there were seven other manufacturing workers bringing the total employment to over one and a half million workers. The presence of Lake Michigan ports, rivers that served industry, railroad spurs, highways and the mills themselves attracted firms that manufactured steel products like automobiles, railroad cars and steel structures. It also attracted industries that supplied products to the mills and to other factory workers—chemicals, processed foods, tools, work boots, welding equipment. Today, nearly all of this is gone. All of the Chicago steel mills are closed and demolished along with most of the factories whose location was determined by the mills. What was left behind is toxic waste and crushing poverty.
The work in the mills and the associated factories was hard, dirty, and dangerous. Noel Ignatiev’s book Acceptable Men describes in detail his working conditions at US Steel in Gary, Indiana. 4 And I document my work in seven smaller factories in the area in, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor.5 Also the mills and factories polluted the air when they were up and running full blast and when they closed, the land on which they once sat was polluted with toxic waste requiring extensive clean up if they were ever to be developed again. Yet the historical struggles of the people who held these jobs yielded living wages that were eliminated once the mills and factories were closed.
The Southeast Chicago Northwest Indiana area jobs that were lost were replaced largely by service industry jobs. Workers often have to work two or three such jobs to maintain a standard of living that the old manufacturing jobs once supplied. And these jobs fail to contribute to expanded reproduction of capital and are considered “unproductive.” Many workers left the area and migrated to other states in a futile search for living wage jobs.
The collapse of manufacturing jobs in this region and throughout the industrialized world was part of a strategy on the part of the capitalist class to deal with crisis and associated worker militancy that had begun in the 1960s as documented in Loren’s Remaking of the American Working Class. Manufacturing jobs and the capital behind them were moved in order to lower the costs of production, essentially lowering the global social wage. It was a form of devalorization as a way to reset the system to enable the valorization process (moneycommodity productionmore money) to continue.
The process involved more than simply moving production to low wage/lower environmental and safety regulation parts of the world. As Loren demonstrates in Remaking…, capitalist crisis is not centered in production at all. Crisis was not the result of over production or under consumption. Rather, crisis is situated in the global valorization process that results in a situation where claims on value are greater than the system can produce. That meant that the temporary fix had to be a global devalorization that took the form it did in Southeast Chicago/Northwest Indiana and other industrialized areas of the world.
What happened between the mid 1960s and into the 1990s was a radical transformation of the global capitalist system. New technologies were developed that required less living labor, a form of devalorization itself. But equally important was the development of process technologies that made it feasible to decentralize the production of specific products. Parts of automobiles or computers and most other commodities could economically be produced in different locations around the world and assembled somewhere else entirely. New transportation technologies and computer based inventory control made it possible to construct complex global production chains. New institutions like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were introduced and old ones like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were repurposed to enable unfettered movement of capital around the world. As a result, the capitalist class itself became predominantly trans-national which hollowed out the capitalist state in individual nations.
The reprieve this offered to the ongoing crisis was of short duration. What was left was toxic waste and a working class in the industrialized nations that was angry and afraid. Establishment Republicans and Democrats had facilitated the closing of factories and the establishment of the institutions that made the radical systemic changes possible. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both contributed to the establishment of an unprecedented globalization and devalorization on the backs of the working classes in industrialized nations. Both political parties continued to advocate a continuation of what had come to be called “neo-liberalism.” The recent elections that brought back President Trump and rejected establishment Republicans and Democrats suggest that the working class in the United States has had enough. But there were no options offered by liberals or leftists.
Looking at this incredible exercise in devalorization and reorganization through the lens of Southeast Chicago/Northwest Indiana, the devastation to the working class is highly visible. For example, one of the largest steel mills in South Chicago was US Steel South Works. Constructed in the late 19th Century, the mill, which occupied 600 acres of land along the shores of Lake Michigan, once employed up to 20,000 workers. Beginning in the 1970s the total number of workers began to decline. By the end of the decade employment had declined to 10,000. The mill was shut down in 1992. Its employment was down to 700 before it closed. All of the buildings were torn down. Part of the site became a public park. Several development projects including a “new town in town” were proposed but never materialized. For one thing the ground was highly polluted and would have to be restored. Meanwhile the neighborhood around the mill has deteriorated beyond recognition. The sons, daughters and grandchildren of the former South Works employees have all suffered.
The latest effort to develop the South Works site is a proposal called Quantum and Microelectronics Park anchored by a quantum computing facility owned by PsiQuantum. They intend to occupy 300,000 square feet of land (about seven acres) and employ up to 150 people within five years. The Democratic Party leaders, Illinois Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, are fully behind the project. The State of Illinois is offering PsiQuantum $200 million in incentives and the Mayor of Chicago has expressed his desire to offer an undisclosed amount of tax incentives even as his city council turned down his bid to raise property taxes. If going from 20,000 jobs to 150 isn’t bad enough, most of the new jobs will go to highly trained and educated workers rather than the working class residents of the Southeast Side. Here is devalorization at work. The fact that establishment Democratic Party political leaders support the entire process, caused Loren to label such leaders as “the left wing of devalorization.”
Fictitious Capital
The whole shift in the nature of the global capitalist system described above was made possible by finance capital. In Remaking… Loren, drawing largely on Volume 3 of Marx’s Capital, stresses how the system of international loans and credit are extensively used to keep the system going. But any capital that does not enhance the valorization process is fictitious because it is not backed by actual value, which can only be produced by living labor. In fact, loans and subsequent debts constitute a claim on value not yet produced. Investment in technology that enables production without human, living labor cheapens labor globally. This is a form of devalorization and it is not sustainable. As loans and debt pile up faster than global productive output, the system breaks down and it is unable to produce more value than the claims on it and we are in crisis.
The capitalist system’s use of fictitious value has gone way beyond what Loren could see in 1980. He used the framework of his 1980 book to look at the further development of the global system of credit and debt. In 1999, Loren wrote a new introduction to Remaking stating his intention to write a revision even though he thought 80 percent of it needed no revision. The last time I saw Loren in Brooklyn in 2019 we discussed the incredible development in the global system of credit and debt. And we discussed the possibility of including these developments in a new edition of Remaking. He had written about some of the developments in the expansion of fictitious capital in a number of subsequent interviews and essays. For example, in 2012 he wrote “Fictitious Capital and Contracted Social Reproduction Today,” which can be seen on his website. 6 Unfortunately he never did a full rewrite of “Remaking…” as his health deteriorated and he died before he was able to do it. Reading his 1980 essay today, however, offers the reader the basic theoretical formulations that can inform today’s ongoing crisis, a crisis that is at the heart of the MAGA movement that just propelled Donald Trump to a second term as President of the United States.
Fictitious Capital continues to evolve in response to crisis and is at the heart of global capitalism today. Credit is now being used to buy debt. And debt is being bought and sold in speculative derivative markets. Giant “asset managers” like Vanguard and State Street are now playing a growing role in the circulation of fictitious capital globally. Asset managers are major stock holders of the largest industrial corporations in the real economy and are on the board of many of them. But the assets they hold constitute a claim on wealth yet to be produced. And these claims add up to more than the system can produce. The global system as a whole is unable to feed, clothe, house, educate and care for the workers of the world while a handful of people get wealthy on returns on fictitious capital.
Relevance of Loren’s 1980 Analysis to Today
The connection of Loren’s 1980 work to today is revealed by the fact that much of the United States working class including black people, Latinos and even women have helped bring Donald Trump back into the White House. Not only that, but Trump now also has control of the entire Federal Government and many State and local governments as well. Furthermore, far right wing politics like Trump’s MAGA movement are replicated throughout the world as the entire global capitalist system finds itself in deep crisis. “The system” can only be understood today in terms of the operation of total capital that is accumulating and expanding through the use of primitive accumulation that pushes the global peasantry into wage labor. And the system depends on massive devalorization through the circulation of fictitious capital. The ruling class is decisively transnational and dominated by finance and technology, which only deepens the crisis. In 1980 Loren worked out Marx’s critique of the political economy in part to gain insight into why the working class brought Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to power. Today those same insights can be helpful to our understanding of the global right wing insurgence. Back in 1980 Loren also tried to correct the explanation offered by what he called “official Marxism.” Much of the left then and now saw capitalist crisis being generated within the process of production. “Official Marxism” claimed that huge firms with monopoly power to set prices were over producing and consumers were under consuming. Specific corporations were associated with nation states that represented their interests. These huge firms were identified with powerful nations that enabled them to export capital to a “periphery” of less developed nations which was termed imperialism. Loren countered that the root of crisis was not in production at all but could only be understood in terms of “the process of capitalist production as a whole” or total capital. I believe Loren’s understanding of capitalism revealed in Remaking can help us think through what is happening today and offers a guide to action.
Activism today offers revolutionaries the opportunity to project what their activism is for to those with whom we interact. The broad context of all activism today is ongoing capitalist crisis. The problems our activism seeks to address are generated by that crisis. So while the problems we address such as mass deportations, climate change, police and prisons, speculative excesses of the financial institutions, militarism and war, can be ameliorated, they ultimately can’t be solved without ending capitalism itself and replacing what Loren termed “the system.” Below are a few examples of what I mean.
Immigration Rights
As I write this, activists in the United States are gearing up to resist Trump-promised mass deportations. Within the United States there is considerable public support for the deportation of undocumented workers. The immediate need for the activism on immigrant rights is to protect the people being targeted by the Trump administration for deportation while countering propaganda that accounts for public support.
Borders around the world have been historically established to facilitate the rule of capitalism. Ongoing global capitalist crisis has undermined nation-based capitalism and given rise to a transnational capitalist class. This in turn challenges the relevancy of borders drawn in an earlier era. This is an opportunity for revolutionaries to place immigrant rights work in a broader anti capitalist context. How might a world without national borders facilitate meeting the needs of people in a new type of society? Questions such as this can be raised as supporters of immigrant rights work together to resist the immediate threat of mass deportations. A recent demonstration at the airport in Gary, Indiana where deportations are being implements had a banner and a chant: “No Borders/No Nations/Stop Deportations.” This seems to me to be a good starting point for a discussion among demonstrators and onlookers of what an immigrant rights struggle is for.
It is important to understand and project the immigrant question from the perspective of total capital. Peoples throughout the world are leaving their nations looking to survive in a world racked by war but also a world in which capitalists are throwing millions of workers out of the labor market altogether. Most of the migrants who try to cross the United States border with Mexico are doing so not solely because of actions by their own governments and the United States government in their countries. Rather, from the perspective of total capital, the system is unable to employ the working class, which creates an enormous pool of surplus labor. These surplus workers then leave their homelands frantically looking for a way to find living wage jobs.
War and also the growth of criminal gangs and cartels are also due to the crisis of the capitalist system. This is another cause of migration world-wide.
Anti War Movements
There are growing anti war movements around the world that revolutionaries should be a part of. Most recently we have witnessed or participated in efforts to stop Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon through demonstrations and waves of occupations and encampments on college campuses.
Wars around the world are also a product of the crisis of total capital. And our anti war work needs to project that as we work to stop the wars and try to undercut militarism and also to abolish the police and prisons locally. As discussed earlier, war is an extreme form of devalorization as it exterminates workers who have a legitimate claim on value in order to meet basic needs. War as devalorization also destroys capital. While war can and should be opposed on humanitarian and moral grounds, its relationship to the need of total capital to grow and expand should not be left out of the discussion.
Climate Change
As wildfires rage, massive hurricanes and tornadoes reek havoc, death and destruction, some regions in the world suffer droughts and others floods: some of the representatives of the capitalist state dither over regulations to combat climate change and the now the President of the United States declares his intention to “drill, baby, drill” (for more fossil fuels).
Since the 1960s a small number of environmentalists began giving us warnings that releasing carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels would result in a warming planet and we would experience monster storms, droughts, floods, forest fires, melting of polar ice caps and a rise in sea levels that would wipe out many cities around the globe. What seemed fantastic to many at the time is no longer fantastic at all. Beginning in 1969 the United Nations began issuing proclamations and holding conferences to try to slow down or stop the degradation of the environment. Increasingly the emphasis was on the burning of fossil fuels. By 1975 a number of scientists began to publish articles in scientific journals sounding the alarm. In the United States, much of this was largely ignored until 2019 when liberal Democrats—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States House of Representatives and Bernie Sanders in the Senate—introduced resolutions calling for a “Green New Deal.” President Joe Biden during his term in office signed legislation that would promote the use of “sustainable energy.” His successor declares that he will reverse Biden’s initiatives and return to large scale use of coal and oil and pull the United States out of even the weak international efforts to stop climate change fueled by global warming.
In 2020 I wrote an essay offering a critique of the Green New Deal.7 Briefly, I argued that the limits of any Green New Deal were to be found in the capitalist system. Going back to Loren’s argument that the system as a whole must “valorize value,” I argued that the relentless need for growth and consumption will always over run any of the measures included in the “green new deal.”
Environmental activists of all political stripes should unite to stop the use of fossil fuels for energy. But while uniting in this effort, it is important for revolutionaries to take this occasion to put capitalism’s role in the destruction of the planet into the discussion.
Fictitious Capital
The global flow of financial assets is what keeps the system in crisis afloat. As I stated above, “any capital that does not enhance the valorization process is fictitious because it is not backed by actual value, which can only be produced by living labor.” In fact, stocks, bonds and other loans and subsequent debts constitute a claim on value not yet produced.
In the past, the circulation of fictitious capital was generated by banks that were regulated by their respective governments. Today fictitious capital is being used to control capitalist development including global corporations, domestic companies, farmland, hospitals, senior assisted living facilities, residential and commercial real estate, railroads, highways, oil pipelines, ports, water supply systems, electricity transmission grids. Massive amounts of assets from pension funds, insurance companies as well as banks are used to purchase stocks, bonds and all sorts of funds are used to control corporations and to purchase small businesses, infrastructure, land and housing. 8 Asset management companies that operate world wide hold assets consisting of fictitious capital (claims on value not yet produced by human labor) that enables the capitalist system to function. Asset management firms like Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street, Blackstone and Carlyle own or control much of global capitalism. It is a house of cards.
There are many struggles going on at workplaces to gain living wages and safe working conditions. These struggles offer participants an opportunity to expose how the company relies on and is partially controlled by asset management companies who are also major players in the circulation of fictitious capital worldwide. For example, the top stockholders of Amazon are: Jeff Bezos (10 percent ); Vanguard (6.4 percent ); BlackRock (5.6 percent ); and State Street (3.2 percent ). Public employees can see who manages their pension funds and the role their funds play in keeping the system afloat. Also the owners who profit from municipal infrastructure are visible. A consortium of asset managers own the City of Chicago parking meters: Morgan Stanley, Allianz Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Activists can turn a struggle over pay, working conditions or the policies of a piece of municipal infrastructure into an opportunity to explain how these conditions contribute to the functioning of global capitalism.
Immigration rights, anti-war, climate change action, and work place struggles that expose the generation and use of fictitious capital are all examples of how Loren’s insights into the workings of global capitalism can be useful to turn various activist struggles into an anti capitalist direction.
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https://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/the-remaking-of-the-american-working-class-the-restructuring-of-global-capital-and-the-recomposition-of-class-terrain/.↩︎
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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 28 “Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58,” (International Publishers, 1986) p. 411.↩︎
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See, for example, https://www.david-ranney.com/books/new-world-disorder-the-decline-of-us-power.↩︎
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Noel Ignatiev, Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World, (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2021).↩︎
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David Ranney, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out. (PM Press, 2019).↩︎
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https://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/fictitious-capital-and-contracted-social-reproduction-today-china-and-permanent-revolution/.↩︎
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https://www.david-ranney.com/essays-videos/eco-socialism-or-annihilation-toward-a-green-new-deal.↩︎
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Brett Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, Verso Press, 2023.↩︎