When Marx famously declared that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it, he was asserting that it was not enough to dream of another world nor to understand the dynamics of the present. It was critical above all to address the question of agency in carrying out transformative change. For Marx, that agent was the working class. The gap between workers’ needs and their actual lives — between desire and reality — gave workers an interest in radical change, while their place in production gave them the leverage to act.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, Marx and Engels argued, was that as capitalists brought workers together to increase profits they opened the door to workers discovering their own potential. Capitalism created its own gravediggers.

What was much too insufficiently emphasized, however, was that there were also contradictions within the working class. These countered the revolutionary potentials of the class and even came to undermine workers’ defensive capacities. Whatever unity workers had within a particular workplace, they were fragmented across workplaces and, as a class, were stratified by income. Moreover, their daily experiences ably taught them how dependent they were on capital. Employers organized their separate labor power, embodied science in their control over technology, and had all the essential links to finance, suppliers, and markets. And the very conditions of workers, their low wages and uncertain jobs, pressured them to think in terms of immediate improvements, not longer-term change.