The end of capitalism is not utopian – it is capitalist ideals that constrain our horizons for revolution in order to keep the system alive. The force necessary for a working class exist, all we need is the push – which is the alt.

The productive forces necessary for socialism exist in the US and throughout the global north. The conditions to eradicate poverty, homelessness, create non- ablest spaces, and so on exist. It just takes the political will to make this material reality free from its capitalist confines. For working- class activists living in the global north, this needs to be emphasized ad nauseum. As Marx says, the bourgeoisie create their own “gravediggers”: “the advance of industry … replaces the isolation of the workers…with their revolutionary combination, due to association (Marx, 1970: 930 FN). However, and most unfortunately, the simple centralization of workers in one place (like a city or a factory) does not automatically produce revolutionary consciousness amongst the workers themselves. Capitalism and all of its vulgarities still persist; something is blocking the transition. Many point to things such as ideology, bourgeois cultural hegemony, “false consciousness,” “desire,” and “mystification” as reasons for the nonexistence of a working- class revolution in the US. The argument goes: the reason feudalism could be transcended was because in feudalism the division between the time when serfs/peasants were working for their own subsistence and directly for the lords was clear as noonday. Feudal exploitation was achieved through “extra- economic” means as Wood (2017) says. In capitalism, “surplus labour and necessary labour are mingled together” (Marx, 1970: 346). “Mystification” is built into the wage- relation itself (see Burawoy, 2012). There is some deal of truth that workers in capitalism can fall for imperialist- capitalist ideology, but I argue that there are actual real material and structural reasons for the nonexistence of working- class revolutions in the US and global north more broadly. If one actually talks to working people, a lot of them know that things in their world are messed up and don’t necessarily buy into capitalist ideology. Though many do not have revolutionary consciousness yet, they are not simply tricked by imperialist- capitalist ideology. “The everyday” for US workers is in the workplace. Many work multiple jobs just to scrape by. Working people just want to come home from work and enjoy the little free time they have, or they are simply working so much that it is almost impossible to have revolutionary consciousness, or if they do they cannot act upon it because they are just trying to survive, and thus doubt better days are ahead. But, these conditions can be overcome. Truly revolutionary working- class ideas do not arise spontaneously within the working class itself. Marxism has to be learned by the working masses, and it is indeed a science that working and oppressed people can learn; it just has to be introduced. It must be introduced by a revolutionary vanguard party composed of the most advanced and class conscious working people. Vanguard parties provide the material and infrastructural foundation for working- class people to join the ranks of the revolutionaries (see Dean, 2016). Workers must be able to understand and explain the class character of all political phenomenon—Marxism provides this. In “What Is to Be Done?” Lenin says that a class conscious worker cannot be left to work 11 hours a day in a factory if we want the worker to develop clear revolutionary class consciousness. Thus, as he says, the party must make the arrangements necessary to ensure that the worker can have more free time for organizing and developing revolutionary class consciousness. The vanguard party form makes joining the revolution truly accessible to the vast masses of people. To paraphrase Lenin (1987 [1929]), the working class left to organize themselves will fall into trade unionism, which is ingrained in bourgeois ideology and thus cannot transcend the capitalist mode of production. A Marxist (i.e. historical materialist) understanding of society can indeed be understood by the masses of people, which will in turn unleash the power of class consciousness itself as a real material power. The way Marx explains how the capitalist mode of production develops through time empowers workers and provides revolutionary optimism/hope. As the productive forces develop, more and more proletarians are produced and less and less capitalists exist (due to competition and monopolization, etc.). Out of market competition, “[o]ne capitalist always strikes down many others” (Marx, 1970: 929). The means of labor are transformed into forms “that can only be used in common.” Thus, as the capitalist mode of production develops, The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production … The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (Marx, 1970: 929) The “immanent laws of capitalist production” itself leads to not only class struggle but also to communist revolution. The laws of competition within the capitalist mode of production have the tendency to constantly revolutionize/ develop the productive forces even in the era of monopoly capitalism. The developed productive forces that are created in capitalism create the foundations from which socialist society can arise (see Phillips and Rozworski, 2019). In Capital, Marx says it will be easier to move beyond capitalism than it was to move beyond feudalism, for the simple fact that during the transition from feudalism to capitalism “it was a matter of the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers.” But in the case of transitioning out of capitalism, “we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people[!]” (Marx, 1970: 929–930). Thus, to end capitalist private ownership of the means of production, we only have to usurp a handful of capitalists, which numerically speaking should be easier to do than usurping millions of people as what occurred within the process of primitive accumulation that created the social conditions necessary for the capitalist mode of production. The inert power working people have exists at all times (even in eras of global working- class defeat and retreat); workers can simply shut production by striking, occupying the workplace, and so on (see Allen and Mitchell, 2003; Glassman, 2003). A nice made- up scenario I like to give students is that no one would really notice if all the bosses/ CEOs did not show up to work for one day, but if all workers did not show up for one day, all of society would simply shut down and reach a standstill. Additionally, and most importantly, the proletariat can use its class power to overthrow and transcend the bourgeois order by seizing political power—that is, the state—and radically transform it to serve the class interests of the working class. This cannot be dismissed as utopian. It has been done in history and it will occur again. This revolutionary takeover allows for the working class to make “despotic inroads on the rights of [bourgeois] property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production” (Marx and Engels, 1978: 490; see also Lenin, 1987 [1932]: 336).