Contents
- Theoretical Foundation: Variable Capital and the War of All Against All
- Anatomy of Structural Shifts: From the Myth of “De-industrialization” to Tertiarization
- The Illusion of Wealth and the Falling Share of Labour
Contemporary global capitalism hasn’t overcome the contradictions that characterised its earlier stages of development. As we argued in the inaugural issue of this journal in the article “From Engels’ Manchester to the Global Manchester”, capital hasn’t changed its predatory nature; it has merely extended the infernal conditions of nineteenth-century industrial Manchester to the entire globe. Confronted with the inexorable operation of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the system has carried out a tectonic spatial reconfiguration. A substantial share of material production has been relocated to regions offering cheap labour, while the system has subordinated the proletariat of the old imperialist metropolises to digital Taylorism, contemporary forms of piece-rate labour embodied in the so-called gig economy, and the exhausting culture of hyper-exploitation exemplified by the “996” work regime. Bourgeois statistics and reformist institutions seek to conceal this global sweatshop behind the myths of the “post-industrial society” and the “knowledge economy”, employing sterile terminology to obscure the reality of both the absolute and relative immiseration of the masses.
Today, however, capitalist expansion generates not only physiological exhaustion but also what Friedrich Engels famously termed “social murder”1, perpetrated against the working class itself, whose demographic resources are literally consumed in the furnaces of platform surveillance and imperialist wars. The enforced atomization of workers, together with the false consciousness sustained by the illusions of financial fetishism, namely the fictitious participation in capital through share ownership, and by the ideological dead end of capitalist realism, the hegemonic bourgeois conviction that capitalism admits no alternative, has produced an unprecedented level of competition within the proletariat itself, thereby paralysing its capacity for collective resistance. Stripping away the ideological facade of bourgeois apologetics and exposing the underlying structure of the class-in-itself points toward the only viable direction of its historical development. This trajectory requires transforming internal competition into proletarian solidarity, breaking decisively with class-collaborationist trade-union reformism, and forging an independent communist vanguard as a necessary condition for the future world communist revolution.
The construction of a world communist party, proclaimed in our Manifesto as the outcome of the real revolutionary movement, requires a clear understanding of the present condition of the working class. The immediate task is therefore to undertake an objective investigation of its underlying structure, its demographic limits of reproduction and survival, and its actual level of class consciousness.
Theoretical Foundation: Variable Capital and the War of All Against All
Why has global capitalism, riven by profound internal contradictions, managed to survive successive crises and construct the contemporary planetary architecture of domination? The answer lies not in the system’s alleged stability but in the cold logic of political economy. Capital discovered a historical escape route that enabled it to postpone the operation of the inexorable law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The precise mathematical and structural mechanism underlying this reprieve is revealed through an analysis of the classical “counteracting influences” discussed by Karl Marx in Volume III of “Capital”. Foreign trade and the export of capital constitute the most powerful checks upon the fall in the rate of profit. If the rate of profit is expressed by the formula
,
then this spatial reorganization enables capital to act simultaneously upon all of its variables: radically reducing the value of variable capital, that is, labour-power (v); lowering the cost of the elements of constant capital (c) through the appropriation of cheap resources; and maximizing surplus value (s) through the absolute extension of the working day.
«Since foreign trade partly cheapens the elements of constant capital, and partly the necessities of life for which the variable capital is exchanged, it tends to raise the rate of profit by increasing the rate of surplus-value and lowering the value of constant capital. It generally acts in this direction by permitting an expansion of the scale of production. It thereby hastens the process of accumulation, on the one hand, but causes the variable capital to shrink in relation to the constant capital, on the other, and thus hastens a fall in the rate of profit. In the same way, the expansion of foreign trade, although the basis of the capitalist mode of production in its infancy, has become its own product, however, with the further progress of the capitalist mode of production, through the innate necessity of this mode of production, its need for an ever-expanding market».2
At the same time, however, the general law of capitalist accumulation operates with equal inexorability. In the pursuit of profit, the capitalist introduces new technologies, thereby increasing the organic composition of capital (c/v). As the variable component of capital inevitably declines in relative terms, the following principle comes into effect:
«Once given the general basis of the capitalistic system, then, in the course of accumulation, a point is reached at which the development of the productivity of social labour becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation».3
Here lies the fundamental contradiction of the system. By replacing living labour, the sole source of surplus value, with machinery, capital undermines the very basis of its own profitability. It is precisely for this reason that the bourgeoisie is compelled, with relentless ferocity, to offset the falling rate of profit through the absolute and relative extension of the working day, extracting the maximum possible amount of absolute surplus value from the workers who remain employed.
This means that society’s demand for living labour declines in relative terms. With each successive generation of capitalist development, the same volume of output requires fewer workers per unit of capital. It is precisely in this relative reduction of the labouring population required for production that «the specifically historical and distinctive character of the mode of production based on capital manifests itself directly».4
The displacement of living labour by machinery isn’t a secondary consequence of capitalism but one of its essential characteristics. It is the reality captured in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times: the mechanical consumption of human labour, in which the worker is reduced to a mere cog in the ceaseless motion of the assembly line.
In this respect, the recurring Future of Jobs Report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF), together with studies produced by the consulting giant McKinsey, is highly revealing. Apologists for capital predict that artificial intelligence and automation will eliminate as many as 85 million jobs in the coming years while allegedly creating 97 million “innovative” new positions, requiring from the proletariat nothing more than perpetual reskilling and upskilling. Behind this bourgeois euphemism lies the formation of a reserve army of labour on an unprecedented scale. The “new jobs” so enthusiastically celebrated by the WEF consist, in large measure, not of highly paid engineering positions but of low-paid data labelers in the countries of the so-called Global South and workers employed in algorithmically managed warehouses. Capital simply employs technological innovation as another means of de-skilling labour and driving down the value of labour-power to the greatest possible extent.
Algorithmic management and robotization have brought about an extraordinary degree of labour standardization. Capitalism has now approached a situation in which “every worker can produce virtually anything”, and therefore “everyone can take the place of everyone else”. Marx had already identified this tendency in the mid-nineteenth century:
«The growth of productive capital also means the accumulation and concentration of capital. The consequence of the centralisation of capital is a greater division of labour and a wider application of machinery. A more developed division of labour destroys the worker’s specialised skill, replacing this skill with work that anyone can perform, and thereby increasing competition among the workers.
This competition becomes all the fiercer because the division of labour enables a single worker to do the work of three. Machinery produces the same result, and on a much larger scale».5
This interchangeability gives rise to an extraordinary degree of competition. As early as 1844, Marx identified an inexorable tendency: the division of labour reduces the worker’s specialised skill to a monotonous operation that anyone can perform, with the inevitable consequence that competition among the workers increases.6 Friedrich Engels expressed the same idea in 1845 in “The Condition of the Working Class in England”:
«Competition is the fullest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place.
The workers are in constant competition among themselves as are the members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other. But this competition of the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state of things in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie».7
In the twenty-first century, this war has assumed a global scale, intensified by structural shifts and the physiological exhaustion of the class.
Anatomy of Structural Shifts: From the Myth of “De-industrialization” to Tertiarization
To conceal the contradictions of the system, bourgeois statistics offer us a three-sector model of the economy: agriculture, industry, and services. Relying on UNIDO reports (Structural Change in the World Economy) and ILO reports (Global Shifts in the Employment Structure), economists serving the interests of capital proclaim the advent of a classless “post-industrial era.”
Indeed, the figures show tectonic shifts:
- from 1970 to 2005, in global value added, the share of the services sector increased from 52% to 68%;
- de-agrarianization in the zones of old capitalism is virtually complete, with the share of agricultural employment falling to 1-3%, while in countries such as China and India tens of millions of peasants are moving into the cities;
- Asia’s share of global industrial value added has soared, while Europe and North America are experiencing what is called “de-industrialization.”
Here we must make a fundamental digression and expose the anti-scientific character of the very term “de-industrialization”. Historically, the term has been used in different contexts. In particular, in the Morgenthau Plan (1944), it referred to the deliberate dismantling of German industry as an instrument of post-war suppression of a competitor. In the 1970s and 1980s, confronted with a profound structural downturn, bourgeois economists appropriated the term and reinterpreted it as an allegedly natural and painless transition of the West to a “knowledge economy”, which is an ideological mystification concealing the real substance of the process.
From a Marxist standpoint, the euphemism “de-industrialization” conceals a process of large-scale devaluation and destruction of capital, namely of gigantic masses of “dead labour” in the form of constant capital. As Karl Marx demonstrated in Volume III of Capital, such destruction takes place under conditions of a structural crisis of over-accumulation: when the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall paralyses capitalist production, the system restores profitability only by barbaric means, physically destroying or radically devaluing previously accumulated productive forces. Factories are closed down and left to rust not because they can no longer produce things useful to society, but because the dead labour objectified in them can no longer function as capital, that is, can no longer extract sufficient surplus value from living labour. “De-industrialization” is not a step toward a bright post-industrial future, but a logical phase in the brutal destruction of excess capital.
But if the old industrial core of the imperialist metropolises is partly consumed in the fires of crisis and partly relocated to regions of “new” capitalism, what exactly is the enormous and bloated “services sector” that, according to the bourgeoisie, has replaced the factories? To answer this question, Marxist analysis must expose the falsity of the very methodological foundation of bourgeois statistics. The founders of the three-sector model, A. Fisher and C. Clark, relied on Adam Smith’s erroneous assumption that only labour embodied in a material, durable object is productive. Marx leaves no stone unturned in demolishing this illusion:
«Productive labour is here defined from the standpoint of capitalist production, and Adam Smith here got to the very heart of the matter, hit the nail on the head. This is one of his greatest scientific merits (as Malthus rightly observed, this critical differentiation between productive and unproductive labour remains the basis of all bourgeois political economy) that he defines productive labour as labour which is directly exchanged with capital; that is, he defines it by the exchange through which the conditions of production of labour, and value in general, whether money or commodity, are first transformed into capital (and labour into wage-labour in its scientific meaning).
This also establishes absolutely what unproductive labour is. It is labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profit (including of course the various categories of those who share as co-partners in the capitalist’s profit, such as interest and rent). Where all labour in part still pays itself (like for example the agricultural labour of the serfs) and in part is directly exchanged for revenue (like the manufacturing labour in the cities of Asia), no capital and no wage-labour exists in the sense of bourgeois political economy. These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised. An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages; while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer. The former’s labour is exchanged with capital, the latter’s with revenue. The former’s labour produces a surplus-value; in the latter’s, revenue is consumed».8
To put an end once and for all to the arguments of the advocates of the “knowledge economy”, we must recall Marx’s key methodological criterion:
«Productive labour’ is such a characteristic of labour which has absolutely nothing to do with the particular content of the labour, with its specific utility or with the specific use-value in which it is expressed».9
Marx explains this with a concrete example:
«A writer is a productive labourer not in so far as he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher who publishes his works, or if he is a wage-labourer for a capitalist».10 For Marx, the criterion of productive labour is not the material nature of its product, but the social relation of production: productive is the labour that is exchanged for capital and creates surplus value. A Glovo courier, call-centre operator, or Uber driver is just as much a productive proletarian as a weaver or a miner. Bourgeois statistics continue to preserve an unscientific division between sectors that is chronological rather than logical. In our time, the primary (agricultural) and tertiary (services) sectors have become fully capitalist and have shifted toward the type of mass production characteristic of the secondary (industrial) sector, adopting its methods: standardization, mechanization, and automation.
We categorically reject attempts by sociologists to exclude the so-called “precariat” from the ranks of the working class. At the same time, we do not forget that the sociological myth of the “precariat” conceals the fact that unstable, insecure employment, as the natural condition of relative overpopulation, has always been the historical norm for the proletariat. The period of the so-called welfare state after the Second World War was merely a temporary anomaly, a product of the post-war economic boom. As the rate of profit declines, capital returns our class to its natural condition of total insecurity.
Once again we are convinced of the strict invariance of Marxist doctrine: the so-called “innovative” platforms of the gig economy have not created a new political-economic reality. They have merely brought to technological perfection the most archaic and barbaric form of remuneration, piece-wage, which, as Marx noted, is the form most suited to the capitalist method of extracting sweat and an ideal instrument for dividing workers against one another.
In any case, a superficial view often classifies couriers or taxi drivers who own their own cars as “typical petty bourgeoisie”, erroneously equating them, for example, with the peasants of Tsarist Russia merely because they formally own a means of production, their own automobile. Moreover, it is necessary to understand that in the figure of the “digital” taxi driver we encounter a widespread phenomenon under capitalism: the mixed social figure. Most often, in the evening or during weekends, this person is a taxi driver, while during the day they are a classical wage-worker on a construction site or in a factory; very rarely are they occupied exclusively with driving for Bolt or Uber.
In analysing such mixed, transitional figures, Karl Marx examined in detail the position of independent artisans and peasants in capitalist society. He pointed out that under the domination of capital such a semi-independent worker economically “splits into two”.11 The classical petty producer appeared on the market as the seller of a commodity, rather than of his labour-power. Possessing his own means of production, he was, in relation to himself, both a capitalist and a wage-worker:
«He thus, as a capitalist, pays himself wages, and draws profit from his capital, i.e. he exploits himself as a wage-labourer and, in the form of surplus-value, pays himself the tribute which labour owes to capital».12
It was precisely because they actually owned land or tools that peasants and artisans had the possibility of appropriating their own surplus labour (the surplus value they had created).
However, the attempt by bourgeois sociology to impose this model upon the contemporary platform taxi driver or IT specialist is an ideological fraud. Whereas the peasant of the past was split into capitalist and worker in order to retain the surplus value for themself, the contemporary gig worker is split only within the forms of their exploitation by someone else’s capital. During the day they are directly exploited by industrial capital, at a factory or construction site; in the evening they get into their own car in order to be subjected to hidden, algorithmic exploitation by the owners of a digital platform.
Unlike the peasant, who was an independent commodity producer controlling the entire cycle of their economic activity and their access to the market, the contemporary platform worker does not sell an independent commodity on a free market. They control neither pricing, nor the customer base, nor the labour process itself: all of these are monopolized by the corporation. They perform productive labour, that is, they contribute to the expansion of capital, creating enormous surplus value, but this value, unlike the product of the artisan, is appropriated by a third party, the owners of the platform.
As Marx perceptively observed, the capitalist system likes to impose its own appearance and terminology upon relations whose substance is different, producing fictions, such as the purely nominal ownership by a peasant of mortgaged land. The legal status of a taxi driver’s “independent contractor-partner” is precisely such a capitalist fiction. This myth is actively cultivated not only in logistics but also in high-tech sectors. For example, the co-founder of the AI startup Browser-Use cynically compares the work of his programmers, who work 70 hours a week, with that of German farmers who “get up at five in the morning and work without days off”. But just as the taxi driver does not control the aggregator, the salaried IT developer does not possess the rights to the neural network he creates; his surplus labour serves only to enable the venture capitalist to monetize the product faster than his competitors.
The true means of production, functioning here as capital and dictating the conditions for the creation of surplus value, is the corporation’s digital algorithm and aggregated databases. According to Marx, “the means of production become capital only in so far as they, being separated, confront labour as an independent force”.13 In relation to monopoly capital, the taxi driver’s car or the programmer’s personal computer function merely as instruments of labour. The platform completely subordinates this labour to itself, turning formal ownership of these means of production, the automobile, into a convenient pretext for shifting the costs of depreciation, insurance, and fuel onto the shoulders of the proletarian himself.
Such is the «tendency of development in the social formation in which the capitalist mode of production predominates»14: capital inevitably deprives the worker of real independence, erasing every form of autonomy and transforming the nominal owner of the means of production into an absolutely dependent, exhausted wage-slave of the digital conveyor belt.
However, Marxist dialectics requires us to see here not only absolute subordination but also the material preparation for the collapse of the system itself. By creating global platforms for coordination and logistics, capital drives the socialization of labour to unprecedented scales. The algorithms of Amazon or Uber are a distorted, alienated form of planned economy. They concentrate within themselves socialized knowledge and the coordination of labour on a scale inconceivable for an individual enterprise. In this sense, they embody what Marx called general social knowledge: the transformation of social knowledge into an immediate productive force. Yet the objective function of these systems is fundamentally different from that of a planned economy: they optimize not the satisfaction of social needs but the extraction of profit. This is not a planned economy but its alienated double: the socialization of the process while private appropriation of the result is maintained.
«The development of fixed capital indicates the degree to which general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it; to what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process».15
This colossal productive force is already entering into an irresolvable contradiction with the narrow private-property shell of venture capital. The task of the proletariat is not to destroy these digital chains, but to expropriate them after the communist revolution and reconfigure them to satisfy social needs rather than maximize profit. The extremely high degree of “self-exploitation” experienced by these workers is conditioned not by the “freedom of the independent entrepreneur” but by the most brutal form of piece-wage labour.
The clearest example of the masking of this sweatshop extraction of surplus value is the expansion of the “996” culture, working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, from Asian IT corporations into Western start-ups in Silicon Valley and New York. The bourgeois press has noted with astonishment how venture capital openly demands 70- to 80-hour working weeks from salaried programmers and AI developers. This corporate coercion originated in Asia, where capitalists such as Alibaba founder Jack Ma called the “996” schedule “a huge blessing”, while JD.com chairman Richard Liu openly branded workers who refused overtime “lazy”. The excessively long working day in Western startups, however, also has a history of its own that cannot be reduced to the importation of Asian practices: Silicon Valley venture capital developed its own ideology of hyper-intensive labour. Concealing themselves behind free gym memberships and ideological slogans about “cu_s_tomer obsession” and the search for workers with the character of “Olympic athletes”, corporations resort to the most primitive method of the initial accumulation of capital: maximizing absolute surplus value through the barbaric extension of the working day. This total colonization of life by capital goes so far that IT workers are housed in so-called “hacker houses”, erasing the last boundaries between the workplace and the sphere of physiological reproduction. As the adherents of this culture themselves admit, their excessive labour becomes “an addiction similar to video games”. This is the ideal form of alienation: the proletarian, whose exploitation has reached the stage of gamification, voluntarily works himself to exhaustion, perceiving the extraction of surplus value from himself as an engaging process.
Moreover, as the British philosopher Mark Fisher demonstrated in Capitalist Realism, in the era of so-called “post-Fordism,” beginning in the late 1970s, capital’s abandonment of the old disciplinary factory schedules and pyramidal hierarchies did not lead to freedom but to a total intensification of control over workers, that is, to the real subsumption of labour under capital. The proclaimed “flexibility” of working hours in practice turned into an obligation to work constant overtime, with employees required not merely to work their hours but to “realize themselves”, demonstrating perpetual enthusiasm. Fisher calls this phenomenon “market Stalinism”, a system combining ruthless market imperatives with monstrous bureaucratic reporting, in which symbols of achievement, such as filling out a pile of performance metrics, become more important than the work itself.16 This is confirmed by capitalists themselves: as partners at investment funds such as Menlo Ventures openly acknowledge, coercion into a “996” schedule inevitably leads to “simulating intense activity”. This system conceals total alienation. A worker confined to an office for twelve hours is physically incapable of being productive for all of that time, yet the system forces him to simulate productivity in order to meet algorithmic performance indicators.
Thus, this is neither the petty bourgeoisie nor a privileged caste of creative workers, but a proletariat drawn into relations of wage labour disguised as “partnership”.
The “deindustrialization” of the West, exaggerated and deployed by the bourgeoisie for ideological purposes, is not the “death of industry” but its spatial and functional fragmentation.
Moreover, the structure of manufacturing itself, as the data of UNIDO demonstrate, has undergone enormous internal differentiation. Traditional industries, such as textiles and metalworking, are giving way to high-tech sectors, such as IT, chemicals, and precision instrumentation. This process is highly uneven across the world: while the United States has radically shifted toward IT and chemicals at the expense of traditional sectors, China has leapt from heavy industry to the production of electronics and transport equipment. Italy represents a notable anomaly among developed countries, where, paradoxically, a high share of traditional industries, such as textiles and footwear, persists. India is modernizing slowly, remaining concentrated in basic metals and chemicals, while Russia has become frozen in structural stagnation, relying almost exclusively on resource extraction and metallurgy. This international disproportionality of production chains only intensifies the fragmentation of the global proletariat.
Bourgeois economists, such as Richard Baldwin or World Bank theorists, would attempt to object by invoking the theory of “Global Value Chains” and the so-called “smile curve”. They argue that the relocation of production to Asia represents natural progress, whereby the West reasonably retains the most profitable and “intellectual” stages, such as research, design, and marketing, while physical assembly allegedly generates minimal value. Consequently, they argue, the so-called “de-industrialization” of the West represents a positive transition toward a “knowledge economy”.
However, drawing upon Marx’s economic legacy and Lenin’s theory of imperialism, we can readily expose this apologetics. Bourgeois theorists of “global value chains” deliberately overlook the law governing the modification of value on the world market. As Marx pointed out:
«In every country there is a certain average intensity of labour below which the labour for the production of a commodity requires more than the socially necessary time, and therefore does not reckon as labour of normal quality. Only a degree of intensity above the national average affects, in a given country, the measure of value by the mere duration of the working-time. This is not the case on the universal market, whose integral parts are the individual countries. The average intensity of labour changes from country to country; here it is greater, there less. These national averages form a scale, whose unit of measure is the average unit of universal labour. The more intense national labour, therefore, as compared with the less intense, produces in the same time more value, which expresses itself in more money.
But the law of value in its international application is yet more modified by the fact that on the world-market the more productive national labour reckons also as the more intense, so long as the more productive nation is not compelled by competition to lower the selling price of its commodities to the level of their value.
In proportion as capitalist production is developed in a country, in the same proportion do the national intensity and productivity of labour there rise above the international level. [2] The different quantities of commodities of the same kind, produced in different countries in the same working-time, have, therefore, unequal international values, which are expressed in different prices, i.e., in sums of money varying according to international values. The relative value of money will, therefore, be less in the nation with more developed capitalist mode of production than in the nation with less developed. It follows, then, that the nominal wages, the equivalent of labour-power expressed in money, will also be higher in the first nation than in the second; which does not at all prove that this holds also for the real wages, i.e., for the means of subsistence placed at the disposal of the labourer».17
Even under formally “free” trade, one hour of an engineer’s labour in the old imperialist metropolises is exchanged for dozens of hours of exhausting labour performed by a worker in Bangladesh. Western capital appropriates this difference not merely as monopoly rent, but as the result of objective unequal exchange: the poorer nation systematically gives up a greater mass of materialized living labour in exchange for a smaller one.
As Marx demonstrated in Volume III of Capital in his analysis of the transformation of surplus value into profit, value is created exclusively by living productive labour in the process of production, not in the offices of marketing departments. What bourgeois analysts call the “high value added” of Western brands and IT monopolies is, in reality, a gigantic imperialist rent. In Lenin’s terms, modern imperialism is not merely an unfair exchange of commodities; it is the total dictatorship of finance capital and the fusion of banking monopolies with the state apparatus. The export of capital, rather than merely the export of commodities, serves as the principal instrument for slowing the crisis in the major imperialist centres. Through unequal exchange, financial diktat, and intellectual-property patents, the transnational monopolies of the imperialist metropolises simply siphon off, and appropriate, the surplus value created by the hyper-exploited industrial proletariat of the “Global South”. Western capital has not begun to produce more “intellectual wealth”; it has simply become more efficient at exploiting the global working class.
To finally dispel the bourgeois myth of the disappearance of industrial labour, it is sufficient to turn to the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) aggregated ILOSTAT databases. The statistics are unequivocal: not only has the industrial proletariat not physically disappeared; it has reached an absolute historical maximum. On a global scale, between 750 and 800 million workers are currently employed in the industrial sector, including manufacturing, mining, and construction. What has changed fundamentally is only their geographical concentration: more than 60 percent of this colossal labour force is now concentrated in the countries of the “Global South,” predominantly in Asia, including China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Capital has carried out a massive spatial shift, relocating the physical production once carried out in the factories of Detroit and Sheffield to the industrial zones of Guangzhou and Dhaka. And if, in the nineteenth century, the power of European industry was captured on Adolph von Menzel’s monumental canvas “The Iron Rolling Mill” (1875), celebrating the exhausting labour of German workers, today this industrial hell is concealed from the eyes of the Western philistine behind the high walls of Asian mega-factories.
The Illusion of Wealth and the Falling Share of Labour
To keep the working class in submission, capital employs a powerful ideological weapon: the statistical illusion of rising incomes. Reports from inequality research centres, such as the LIS Data Center, deconstruct the “myth of the impoverishment of the middle class”, showing that over the past 40 years real household labour incomes in Western countries have risen in absolute terms, by an average of 33 percent over 30 years.
Moreover, the World Bank regularly reports the historic successes of capitalism in eradicating poverty, emphasizing that hundreds of millions of people have risen above the absolute poverty line, artificially established by bourgeois institutions themselves at two dollars a day.
Marxism makes a strict distinction between absolute and relative impoverishment. The economic “pie”, thanks to technological development, is growing at an enormous pace. Yet fundamental macroeconomic research, such as _The Declining Labor Share of Incom_e, demonstrates incontrovertibly that since the 1980s the share of national income going to labour compensation has been steadily declining across the world. This alone makes the claim of “rising incomes” subject to an important methodological qualification: the data of the LIS Data Center and the World Bank record an expansion of consumption possibilities, but do not take into account the rising cost of the basic conditions required for the reproduction of labour-power. It is precisely this gap between the growth of consumer incomes and the growth in the cost of reproducing labour-power that is crucial for understanding relative impoverishment in the Marxist sense.
Data from the World Inequality Lab and consolidated Oxfam reports document a persistent tendency toward the concentration of capital, confirming the continued relevance of Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation under contemporary conditions: the increase in the consumer possibilities of the proletarian masses proclaimed by the bourgeoisie, such as the ability to purchase inexpensive smartphones or clothing, is completely offset by their total class dispossession of the means of production and the unprecedented rise in the cost of the basic conditions of survival, above all housing and healthcare. Here the absolute, general law of capitalist accumulation formulated by Marx reveals itself in its full force:
«The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. […] The accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital».18
The principal drivers of this process are automation and the cheapening of constant capital. Capital deliberately replaces living labour with machinery. The paradox of the present is that a worker today consumes more commodities in absolute terms than his grandfather did in 1980, while the degree of his exploitation has increased many times over. The entire superprofit generated by the IT revolution has been expropriated by corporations, while the small absolute addition of crumbs from the bourgeoisie’s table provides the material basis for the political opportunism of the labour aristocracy of the old imperialist metropolises.
Defenders of capitalism from the IMF and the WEF like to counter this with the absurd bourgeois theory of “human capital”19 and the concept of “creative destruction”. Their argument boils down to the claim that technological unemployment is temporary: allegedly, automation inevitably creates demand for new, more creative professions, and the proletariat need only “upgrade its skills” (upskilling).
This liberal illusion is shattered by the general law of capitalist accumulation. Contrary to the fairy tales of the neoclassical school, Marx demonstrated incontrovertibly that under capitalism the introduction of machinery serves not to make labour easier, but to cheapen it to the greatest possible extent and break the workers class resistance.
At the very beginning of the chapter “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”, Marx writes:
«John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of Political Economy: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being”.
But this is by no means the aim of the machinery employed by capitalism.
Like every other increase in the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and to shorten that portion of the working day in which the worker works for himself, in order to lengthen that other portion of the day, in which he works gratis for the capitalist. Machinery is a means for producing surplus-value».20
In the section of the same chapter, which is entitled “The Struggle between the Worker and the Machine”, Marx writes explicitly that capital consciously finances the invention of new machines in order to replace striking skilled workers with compliant mechanisms:
«But machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the worker superfluous. It is a power inimical to the worker, and capital proclaims it as such and uses it as such. It becomes the most powerful weapon for repressing the periodic revolts of the working class, strikes, etc., against the autocracy of capital. According to Gaskell, the steam-engine was from the first an antagonist of ‘human power,’ an antagonist that enabled the capitalists to crush the growing demands of the workers, which threatened to bring the newly developing factory system to a crisis. One could write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class».21
In the same section, Marx quotes the Scottish engineer and inventor James Nasmyth, who invented a new steam hammer precisely in response to strikes by blacksmiths. Before a trade-union commission, Nasmyth testified:
«One great feature of our modern mechanical improvements is the introduction of automatic machinery. What the machine worker has now to do is not to work himself but to superintend the beautiful working of the machine, which any young boy can do. The whole class of workmen that depended exclusively upon their skill has now been done away with. I formerly employed four boys to one mechanic. By these new mechanical improvements I have reduced the number of grown men from 1,500 to 750. The result was a considerable increase in my profits».22
Mechanization generates relative overpopulation, that is, the industrial reserve army. Today’s “new jobs” for the proletarian masses displaced from the industrial core are not jobs in engineering, but low-paid employment in the service sector and logistics. Capital deliberately deskills labour, a process constituting the real subsumption of labour under capital, transforming the vaunted “human capital” into an easily replaceable cog in the platform economy, stripped of any bargaining power.
Thus, objective structural analysis demonstrates that the large-scale introduction of technology and the global relocation of production have not abolished the fundamental contradiction between labour and capital, but have merely given it a contemporary form and hypertrophied it. Capitalism has successfully employed digital algorithms to devalue labour-power, maximize absolute surplus value, and subject labour to total domination, while concealing this process behind the illusion of growing consumer wealth. Yet this historical postponement comes at the price of creating an unprecedented global reserve army of labour and an extreme intensification of exploitation. This political-economic dead end of the capitalist system leads inexorably to the next stage of our analysis: the physical and mental limits of the proletariat itself, which will be the subject of the next part of our study.
May 2026
Footnotes
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- F. Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch04.htm ↩
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- K. Marx. Capital, Vol. III Part III: Chapter 25 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch14.htm ↩
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- K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 25 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm ↩
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- K. Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Chapter 15 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic ↩
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- K. Marx. Works of Karl Marx 1848. On the Question of Free Trade // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htm ↩
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- K. Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Wages of Labour // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/wages.htm ↩
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- F. Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England, Chapter 5 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch05.htm ↩
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- K. Marx. Theories of Surplus-Value, Chapter IV, “Theories of Productive and Unproductive Labour” // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm ↩
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- Ibid. ↩
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- Ibid. ↩
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- Ibid. ↩
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- Ibid. ↩
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- Ibid. ↩
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- Ibid. ↩
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- K. Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Chapter 14 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm ↩
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- In the strict categories of Marxist political economy, this phenomenon represents the apotheosis of the real subsumption of labour under capital and the dictatorship of abstract labour over concrete labour. Capital is indifferent to use-value and to actual utility, that is, to concrete labour. Its sole concern is the generation of quantitative metrics through which the valorisation of value can be recorded. By forcing the proletarian to fill out endless performance metrics (KPIs), the system shifts the unproductive costs of supervision onto the worker himself, compelling him to expend his labour-power on the bureaucratic administration of his own exploitation. ↩
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- K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 22 //Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch22.html ↩
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- K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 25 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm ↩
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- The bourgeois concept of “human capital” is an ideological falsehood concealing the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of labour-power as a commodity that the wage-worker is compelled to sell on a daily basis. ↩
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- K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 15 // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm ↩
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- Ibid. ↩
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- Ibid. ↩