Will workers be the revolutionary class?
The emancipation of the workers is the act of the working class itself, not of a benevolent superior; and workers’ emancipation means also “freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggle”. In some ways, that argument, from Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, requires less imagination today than it did back then. Then, the working class was a minority in almost all countries; the industrial working class in mass production and in big cities, on which Marx focused, a smaller minority. In Capital volume 1, 19 years after the Communist Manifesto, he found that even...