“Marx’s Inferno” by William Clare Roberts

The fight against overwork, and for higher wages, was, he argued, the basic spur that drove capitalists to introduce new production technologies. Industrialization and mechanization, in turn, provoke the agglomeration of capitalist producers, increasing both the mass of workers and the concentration of capital. These fights also bring workers together, and give them political experience. All of this, Marx argued, prepared workers to win the battle someday, and to replace capitalist production entirely. This understanding of the links between exploitation, class struggle, capitalist development and revolutionary politics has largely fallen out of favor among radicals.

only those dependent upon wages for life — a class that far exceeds industrial workers — have an interest in universal emancipation. Anyone who is dominated or oppressed has an interest in the emancipation of their own group. But Marx thought that wages made people interdependent on one another and dependent upon technologically advanced production to such an extent that wage workers could only liberate themselves — even at a national level — by liberating everyone, everywhere.

Marx's "vision of communism" is notoriously indefinite. I argue that there are good reasons for this…He was convinced that, if the workers knew how their unfreedom was sustained and reproduced, they would be able to figure out how to organize themselves to abolish it…Revolutionary situations — like that of Paris in 1871 — saw the common people organizing themselves into networks of communal self-government. Marx took this as confirmation of his faith in the workers' ability to emancipate themselves and create a global framework of interdependent "social republics."