The Mathematics of Dead Ends

A master’s degree at a top-tier university. Competition of 65 people for one intern position, a year and a half of internships for the right to be called a junior. Twenty years of a mortgage for a shoebox apartment. This is not a prospect – it is a sentence.

This article is about those who do not expect a pardon. About the young proletariat, which was the first to feel that the system no longer works. About those who understood: they will not have capital – capital has already appropriated their future.

A Crisis of Legitimacy

The younger generation is not lazy – it is rational. If "the game is not worth the candle," then working hard is pointless; the gap is insurmountable. The decision does not depend on age, gender, or continent – the NEET phenomenon is universal.

In Europe, the US, and Australia, the refusal of overtime has taken the form of quiet quitting. In Asia it is more radical: Chinese “lying flat,” Korean N-refusals (from dating and marriage to work and life itself). Capitalism takes away the future piece by piece; youth refuse item by item.

The refusal is global. Out of 128 countries, only 21% of workers are “engaged,” 62% are in a state of quiet quitting, and 17% are openly hostile. In developed countries the picture is the worst: Switzerland – 84% disengaged, Germany – 72%, the US – 51% plus 17% actively disengaged.^{1 2}

Four out of five workers in the world have either rejected voluntary exploitation or are hostile to capital. This is not a crisis of HR strategies, but a crisis of the legitimacy of the wage-labor system.

Gallup interprets this as a "management problem." Those who voluntarily surrender surplus labor are called "engaged." Refusal of overtime is declared a defect, although it is the norm: the worker sells labor power strictly according to contract. The actively disengaged are accused of "undermining colleagues' work."

Capital’s reaction is predictable. Youth are lazy, unmotivated, “snowflakes” incapable of work and discipline.

However, the data expose this myth. Youth (<35) are engaged at 22%, the older generation at 21%.³ A difference of one percentage point. This is not a “snowflake generation” – it is the entire proletariat.

Capital's overseers (management) are engaged at 27%, rank-and-file workers at 18%. The closer to direct exploitation, the fewer illusions. In reality, the rejection of careerism and self-exploitation is a sober assessment: labor is not valued, does not lead to prosperity, and only reproduces exploitation.

A spontaneous, mass refusal of the rules of the game strikes directly at the legitimacy of the system. If a worker sees that labor does not pay off, and that the issue is not personal effort, the legends of “deserved authority” and a “just order” begin to collapse.

Capital can survive a crisis of profits, but not a crisis of legitimacy. When two out of three workers are openly hostile or passively resisting, the ideology of the “free market” becomes an empty sound. For the first time in history, youth are massively refusing to believe in the system before being integrated into it. This is the end of illusions and the beginning of capital’s fear.

“Life chances,” “social mobility,” “investment in human capital” – all of this is empty promises for those who have already seen how the system works. Young workers stopped playing not because they do not understand the rules, but because they understand them too well.

Bourgeois sociology will say you cannot buy housing because you have “low positive privilege in the economic sphere.” Marxism explains it more simply: you work for two – one capitalist steals your labor at work, the other through rent.

The same person? Even worse – they are friends.

The Mathematics of Dead Ends

§1. The Ratio of Labor and Life

Ratio of housing prices to average income (how many years of wages are needed to buy an apartment):

The rise in housing prices is not an accident, but a law of capitalism that has turned the need for a roof over one’s head into a financial noose. The rate of profit falls, small capital flees into real estate. Housing becomes a speculative asset. Save up, buy, rent out. The worker receives rent bills.

The growth of the organic composition of capital (automation, robots) means you produce three times more than a boomer in the 1990s, but wages grow more slowly than prices. The share of living labor shrinks, the rate of exploitation rises, more unpaid labor is squeezed out of each hour.

Financialization turns housing into a derivative, and you into a bond. A 30-year mortgage at 7% makes you a source of guaranteed income for the bank for decades. You buy an apartment, you sell your future.

The reserve army of labor (millions of migrants, students, unemployed) presses down wages. Capital does not merely compress income – it grinds you into the pavement with competition. Capital does not merely use migrants; it creates hostility between you. But you both sell the same labor power to the same owners of the means of production. Their power lies in your disunity.

The concentration of jobs in megacities means capital waits for you where demand for housing is artificially maintained. You cannot move to the provinces – there is no work there. You are forced to pay monopolists for the right to work.

Each of these points is not a separate cause. They are five fingers with which capital strangles the young worker. The system is not broken – it works exactly as it should. Its task is to turn a basic need into a source of passive income for those with capital, and into bondage for those who sell their capacity to work.

Credit chains you to a place, deprives you of the ability to strike, quit, resist. Rent preserves mobility; every month of rent is a month of freedom from bank slavery. Capital wants to bind you so that you cannot say “no.” Do not allow it.

§2. A Career Elevator to the Grave

The career elevator is not jammed – it does not exist. Grades are handed out like confetti: promoted to middle, salary +10%, rent up 30%. The math is broken. Earlier, ten years from junior to senior meant a three-to-fivefold salary increase and the ability to buy a house. Today you rise in grade, but prices rise faster.

Career positions are occupied by the 35–50 generation, clinging to them desperately because of loans, children in universities, and status. Young people are offered to “intern” for years, receiving experience instead of wages. The average CEO is 56. He clings to the position with his teeth, because he knows: to fire him means to become you. And for you – to become nobody.

Job-hopping is not a strategy but the panic of a drowning man. You jump from ship to ship, and they are all sinking. The more often you change jobs, the less loyalty you have, the easier it is to throw you out.

The career dead end has engulfed not only offices. In manufacturing, it takes twenty years to go from worker to foreman, with a symbolic pay raise and evening side jobs. The prospect is physical exhaustion by fifty and dismissal at the next crisis. In IT, high wages today are replaced by mass layoffs tomorrow. The ceiling is senior; beyond that only a few pass. Ageism is harsh – at 35–40 you are “too old.” In services there is no growth at all – waiter today, waiter in ten years.

Internships are legalized expropriation. An intern produces full value (otherwise they would not be hired), but receives wages below the cost of reproducing labor power. The difference is covered by parents, loans, or poverty. Experience does not convert into income; this is the direct theft of life time.

The exhaustion of the social elevator is not a cultural problem and not the result of “generational laziness.” It is the inevitable evolution of capitalism due to the global fall in the rate of profit. The growth of the organic composition of capital leads to the reduction of managerial, clerical, and worker positions. Financialization separates income from productive labor. The reserve army of labor pushes wages downward.

§3. A Diploma Instead of a Future

Higher education guarantees nothing. It is not a pass into a non-existent “middle class,” but a mortgage pact with capital.

A top-tier diploma. Six years of study plus tutors. The amount spent could have been a down payment for housing. The diploma granted the right to compete among 65 people for an intern position.

Education Lending

Student debt in the US amounts to $1.8 trillion, more than Spain’s GDP. Twenty years ago, education was almost free.

The US model is now exported worldwide. Education turns into a commodity with declining quality; the student becomes a debtor before the start of working life. This is not an “investment in human capital,” but serf dependence.

You are obliged to work because you owe the bank. You cannot refuse exploitation and can hardly choose conditions. This is an anchor that deprives you of options.

Restructuring of Education

When the metropolis does not need specialists, it dismantles universities. States around the world are pushing youth out of higher education into vocational training. Germany, France, Russia are massively cutting state-funded university places while expanding vocational programs.

This replenishes exploited sectors and is an attempt to resolve the crisis of deindustrialization. Vocational education trains workers for services, logistics, low-complexity production – with high turnover, low wages, and no growth.

Capital export moved production to countries with cheap labor. Developed economies do not need millions of engineers; production moved to China, India, Vietnam. Higher education in the metropolises is now excessive.

Devaluation of the Diploma

The massification of higher education first turned the diploma into a norm, then into a minimum requirement. In the 2000s a diploma gave an advantage. In 2025 its absence is an automatic rejection, while its presence guarantees nothing.

Capital shifted the costs of reproducing skilled labor power onto the workers themselves. Earlier, enterprises trained workers; now the worker arrives with a diploma paid for out of their own pocket.

Education does not convert into stable employment; 50–60% of youth work on temporary contracts without social guarantees. The diploma grants the right to participate in day labor, but not to escape it.

The Academic Proletariat

A postgraduate student lives in bondage, paying for the opportunity to work. They produce scientific output that brings the university grants, publications, and reputation. Their labor is monetized by the supervisor and the dean’s office.

A PhD becomes a lab assistant on a miserable wage with random side gigs. Defending a dissertation allows one to move from one form of bondage to another. Years of labor in exchange for vague promises of an “academic career.” The university bears no obligations.

The Lie of Payback

Bourgeois economics claims that a diploma pays off in 10–20 years, with a lifetime income premium of $1–3 million. Pure statistical manipulation that hides reality.

Payback is calculated only for those who survived in the labor market; youth on temporary contracts are excluded. Ten to twenty years of payback is half of working life spent servicing debt, and real cost includes not only tuition but interest, lost income, and campus expenses.

Positive ROI has narrowed to STEM, engineering, and programming. For humanities and education it is close to zero or negative. Millions pay for education that will not pay off, because capital has already decided that it does not need your education. It needs labor.

§4. What Labor Is Under Capitalism

Labor has turned you into an appendage to a phone. You have no product, no process, no self. There is only an account in capital’s system.

The worker is alienated from the product of labor. The programmer writes code that becomes the company’s property. The courier delivers goods; the money goes to the platform. The teacher teaches; their labor is appropriated by the university. The product becomes alien and hostile.

Man is alienated from the labor process. The worker does not decide how, when, or why to work. This is determined by the capitalist or their manager. KPIs, deadlines, efficiency metrics turn you into an appendage of an algorithm.

Modern exploitation is total. Capital demands not only physical labor, but emotional, intellectual, psychological labor. “Smile at the customer,” even if they are rude. “Be engaged,” “be creative.”

The result is burnout, depression, addictions. Capital does not care about mental health; it exploits it to total exhaustion. Youth see colleagues on antidepressants, managers with hysterics, “successful” careerists in endless therapy and refuse to pay such a price.

Capital Steals Time for Development

Capital consumes labor power as a commodity – and this is life time. Eight hours at work, two hours commuting, one hour preparation. Eleven hours belong to capital. Out of sixteen waking hours, five remain for sleep, food, household tasks. Two-thirds of life simply do not exist. They belong to the capitalist.

There is no time to read, study, do what interests us, build relationships, raise children. Everything is postponed until “later,” which never comes. Life is spent producing profit.

Capital steals not just working hours, but the possibility of development. Marx showed that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. But under capitalism it is the opposite: your unfreedom is the condition of another’s freedom.⁴

Youth feel this and resist. In essence, refusal of overtime is the defense of time, a refusal to give more than is paid. Attempts to escape into freelancing are an illusory hope to control one’s time, often leading to harsher self-exploitation without guarantees. This is a struggle for life.

The Sale of Labor Power

Apologists of the system insist that labor is self-realization, a path to success, a career. A lie. Labor under capitalism is the sale of labor power. The worker sells time, energy, knowledge and receives not the value of the product, but the cost of reproducing themselves as labor power – just enough to return to work tomorrow.

Labor power is a commodity of a special kind. Its use-value for capital lies in its ability to create surplus value. Capital pays for food, housing, clothing, minimal reproduction, but takes the entire product. The difference between produced and paid is surplus value – the source of capitalist profit – our unpaid labor.

The worker produces value throughout the working day but is paid only for part of the time. The rest turns into profit. An intern works full time, creates a product that brings income, but receives a symbolic wage “for experience.”

Unfreedom of Labor

According to official ideology, you are free. You can choose a job, quit, change professions. A lie. You are forced to sell labor power in order not to starve. To submit to a capitalist in order not to end up on the street. To work on others' terms because there is no alternative. This is compulsion by hunger, not freedom.

Marx defined the position of the wage worker as follows: they are free in two senses. Free from the means of production – owning nothing that would allow them to work for themselves. And free to sell their labor power – otherwise they will die. This is the freedom of a slave to choose a master. You can change companies, but you cannot refuse wage labor as such.

The liberation of labor is possible only through the abolition of wage slavery, through the transfer of the means of production into the hands of those who work. Labor not for capitalist profit, but for the development of society and the worker. As long as the means of production are privately owned, labor remains forced, alienated, and unfree.

The Spontaneous “Union” of Individuals

Capital destroyed unions to atomize workers. Quiet quitting is the case where the atomized accidentally agreed. Imagine what will happen when they agree consciously. This is what capital fears most – the end of its legitimacy.

Not Generations, but Classes

Bourgeois sociology loves to talk about “generations,” as if millennials, zoomers, and alpha are different subspecies with different values and brains. This camouflage is needed to avoid speaking about the main thing – class slavery.

There are no “generations.” There are only those who sell labor power and those who buy it. Proletariat and capitalists. Exploiters and exploited. Everything else is marketing fog to make you look for causes in yourself.

§1. Phases of the Crisis

The difference is not in minds, but in material conditions. Millennials entered the market in the 2000–2010s, when capitalism still threw out crumbs. Housing cost four salaries, permanent contracts were normal, a career was not a myth. Simply landing in a window that capital opened for a second after the 2008 crisis – and immediately slammed shut.

There were no real prospects in that window either. The “middle class” millennials are the same proletarians, just ones who managed to take a mortgage before opportunities disappeared.

Zoomers entered the market after 2015, when the window was already bricked up. Housing doubled in price, permanent labor became a luxury, wages stagnated. You are not a “loser,” but a victim of a new phase of accumulation.

Capitalism develops through crises, through restructuring toward harsher exploitation.

• 1991. Collapse of the USSR, the “end of history.” Capital stopped fearing alternatives; neoliberalism conquered Scandinavia.
• 2000. Dot-com bubble; the programmer was turned from engineer into day laborer.
• 2008. Financial crash. Crisis of overproduction shifted to the periphery; housing prices soared; temporary contracts became the norm.
• 2014–2015. Oil price collapse, crisis of peripheral economies. Devaluations, wage cuts, rising unemployment in developing countries. Capital shifted the costs onto the weakest.
• 2020. COVID; “remote work” became a 24/7 prison; the new norm of “always online.”
• 2023–2025. General collapse. Mass layoffs, the AI cudgel, the reserve army grew to millions.

The intervals are shortening. Capital is reconfiguring itself faster, compressing the time between blows.

The bourgeoisie calls this “overheating of the economy.” A deception. This is a crisis of overproduction. Capital produces more commodities than it can sell because it has impoverished its own buyers – us.

Each crisis is a new turn of imperialism. Capital dumps problems on everyone – youth, pensioners, the proletariat. You are not a zoomer with “issues,” but a proletarian of the era of imperialist decline.

§2. Day Labor of the 21st Century

Permanent crises in the absence of a socialist alternative have returned capital to 19th-century methods. Temporary contracts, internships, freelancing are not “precarious employment,” but day labor and piecework. The proletariat has been returned to an old form of exploitation: a three-month contract, a project, a task.

You become an instrument that capital uses as needed. It fires without compensation, does not pay sick leave or social contributions, does not renew contracts.

Capital fragments the class. In a factory you know your shop-floor neighbor; you rebel together. Now you are alone. Courier, programmer, copywriter – work in isolation, no collective forms, no solidarity. Everyone for themselves, and all for no one.

Communism welcomes the struggle for improved working conditions. But if social democrats drag the movement into “fair elections” and economism, without a revolutionary party, without theory, without the goal of overthrowing capitalism – it is running in place.

A day laborer’s union is illusory. Tomorrow a new intern will arrive, and the struggle will begin anew. The only way out is organized political struggle for power.

But capital would not be capital if it did not drive a wedge inside the class. While some balance on the brink of survival, others receive handouts and guard the system from within.

§3. Managers

Within the proletariat there is a layer feeding on your labor. Lenin called them the labor aristocracy. Today these are millennial managers who occupy supervisory positions and exploit youth as cheap labor implementing their ideas. Their interest is preserving the status quo.

The millennial manager creates departments to justify their salary. They do not teach, but control; they sell their usefulness at a higher price instead of transferring knowledge. Not smarter – just arrived earlier. More cynical, more experienced in playing by capital’s rules. Refusing to submit to their “authority” is not rudeness, but class instinct.

The labor aristocracy serves as a buffer. Their salaries are paid by us – interns, staff, outsourced pieceworkers. They suppress discontent, implement “corporate culture,” and discipline.

Lenin wrote that monopoly superprofits allow capital to bribe “labor leaders and the upper stratum of the labor aristocracy,” in “thousands of ways, direct and indirect, open and concealed.” This layer of “bourgeoisified workers,” “quite petty-bourgeois in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings, in their entire outlook,” is the main social support of the bourgeoisie.⁵

Today they call themselves the “middle class.” They earn more because your wages are lower. A boss is not an “experienced colleague,” but an agent of capital interested in keeping you a cheap executor as long as possible to justify their usefulness. An enemy, even if personally pleasant.

Class struggle occurs not only between workers and capitalists, but also within the class itself. The enemy is not the “boomer,” but the capitalist and their managers. The ally is the one who sells labor power alongside you.

Those who try to climb into the aristocracy face self-destruction. Young specialists in consulting, law firms, banks work 80–100 hours a week. Their goal is junior partnership in 10–15 years, status, money.

In this hamster wheel, five may become partners, maybe ten; the other 90% will be discarded. Burnout, heart attacks at 35–40, depression, addictions. The few who succeed pay with health, psyche, and a life without family. Antidepressants, therapy, and flight from oneself.

The bourgeoisie presents them as an example: “Look, he made it! That means you can too!” This is not a path to freedom, but a lottery at the edge of moral survival.

How to Force You to Work

§1. Capital’s Problem

Youth work strictly according to contract. Refusal of overtime, rejection of “startup culture,” high turnover. Capital is losing control over the main thing – voluntary self-exploitation of the proletariat.

Earlier, promises of career, status, and wages were enough, and the worker would drive themselves. Today four out of five workers have either rejected voluntary exploitation or are hostile to capital. This is a crisis of the legitimacy of the wage-labor system. Ideology has exhausted itself; only material methods of coercion remain.

§2. The Reserve Army of Labor

If youth do not want to work hard, they must be made dependent or replaced. The reserve army of labor includes not only the unemployed, but all those through whom capital creates pressure, constantly threatening replacement.

The reserve army includes you on an internship, a woman on part-time, an unemployed person after automation, a migrant without rights, a newcomer from a poor region. Capital sets us against each other. The more people ready to work for less, the less everyone is paid.

The reserve army presses down wages, destroys solidarity, turns the proletariat into a competing mass. You cannot demand a raise when ten people stand behind the door ready to take your place; you can only beg.

Capital divides workers by nationality and gender, preventing class solidarity. But we are all victims of exploitation; our enemy is the bourgeoisie that divides and rules. While you fight an Indian coder for a contract, capital appropriates the surplus value created by both of you. The enemy is not the one who sells labor power next to you. The enemy is the one who buys it from both of you.

§3. Automation

The growth of the organic composition of capital means replacing living labor with machines, algorithms, robots. For productivity this is progress. In the hands of capital it becomes a means to reduce dependence on labor power and strengthen control over workers.

Automation not only replaces jobs, but serves as a tool of blackmail. “Work worse – we’ll replace you with an algorithm.” “Waiting for a promotion? Let’s see how the neural network does.”

The fall in the share of living labor in the value of the product means you produce three times more than a worker thirty years ago, but wages grow more slowly than prices. Why? Because value is created by living labor, and capital minimizes its share while appropriating an ever larger part of what the remaining living labor produces.

An accountant is replaced by a Python script; a designer’s work is done by Midjourney in seconds. A driver expected to work until retirement; in five years a self-driving vehicle will take their place. Investing in skills is pointless if your profession disappears in ten years.

Capital concentration intensifies. Small enterprises go bankrupt, unable to compete with giants that have implemented automation. Jobs shrink; remaining workers are exploited more harshly.

§4. What Does the State Do?

Bourgeois ideologues present the state as an arbiter between labor and capital. Another lie. The essence of the state is that it is a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeois class. Its function is to maintain conditions for exploitation and suppress resistance.

The state legalizes exploitation through bourgeois law. Temporary contracts, internships, zero-hour contracts are inhuman and “legal” at the same time. Workers are deprived of social guarantees, sick leave, protection from dismissal. Retirement ages are raised; anti-union laws and strike restrictions are introduced. The state protects the right of capital to exploit and crushes the right of workers to resist.

To strengthen dependence, the state dismantles social guarantees. The commercialization of education and healthcare is not accidental. Treatment costs a yearly wage; quitting means losing insurance. The threat of losing housing binds you firmly.

Police and courts are needed by capital not so much for “order,” but for dispersing protests, arresting union leaders, and persecuting communists. When workers strike for wages, it is disorder. When a capitalist steals their labor, it is “legal” profit. The repressive apparatus protects capital from those it exploits.

Education prepares cheap labor, not critically thinking people. School teaches obedience; university teaches competition; media shift the blame for systemic exploitation onto the exploited. The state propagates “national interests” instead of class interests, as if you have more in common with a local capitalist than with a foreign worker. Nationalism, racism, xenophobia are known tools for dividing the proletariat.

The bourgeois state cannot help workers; its institutions were not created for that. Reforms, “social partnership,” “dialogue with power” work only as long as they do not threaten profits. As soon as workers demand more, the state uses violence.

The only way to liberate oneself is to destroy the bourgeois state and build the dictatorship of the proletariat, which defends labor, not capital.

Political Consequences

§1. Depoliticization and Atomization

Youth retreat into individual survival strategies. Attempts at integration, freelancing, multiple side jobs, relocation to regions with lower living costs, rejection of family and children as economically irrational decisions. There is no collective struggle.

This is not accidental; capital actively implants the ideology of individualism and the “value” of participation in bourgeois elections.

There is no party that shows that collective struggle wins. There are only bourgeois branches offering anything except class struggle.

§2. The Rightward Turn

Reformist parties have become too obvious a surrogate for a workers’ party. Capital redirects discontent toward false enemies, internal and external.

The internal enemy is seen in migrants, whom capital itself imports to pressure wages. “They take jobs, receive benefits, destroy culture.” The right proposes deportations and closed borders, persecuting those who expose this falsity. The question – who hires migrants? Who lowers wages? – is not asked.

The external enemy is presented as a faceless “they.” “The enemy is at the gates, unite around the nation.” Nationalism, chauvinism, militarism are old methods that force workers to defend the interests of their own exploiters. Without class consciousness, youth follow easy slogans – liberal, far-right, populist.

Lenin wrote: “People have always been and always will be foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics until they learn to look for the interests of certain classes behind all moral, religious, political, and social phrases, declarations, and promises.”⁶

The problem is not in “enemies,” but in capital. And it has learned well how to hide behind others’ backs.

§3. The Prospect of Class Struggle

Can youth become a revolutionary force?

On the one hand, under capitalism there are no prospects, nothing to lose. No property, no stability. A sharp sense of injustice, the embryo of class consciousness. On the other hand, the labor movement is atomized, depoliticized, lacks experience of collective struggle, lacks mass workers’ organizations.

The problem is systemic and international. Not local, not cultural, not generational.

Who Is Already Striking Capital

• United Auto Workers (2023). Six weeks of strikes, 46,000 workers against the “Big Three” of Detroit. Victory. Wages rose by 30%, inflation indexing was restored, the two-tier pay system was eliminated, and the right to strike against plant closures was secured.

• Amazon Labor Union (2022). Eight months of struggle, the first union at Bezos’s warehouses. Victory in the vote. Amazon has refused to recognize the union for three and a half years, dragging it through courts. No contract yet, but the struggle continues.

• French youth (2023). Millions took to the streets against Macron’s pension reform. Ten waves of protests, strikes, blockades. The reform was pushed through parliament without a vote. A defeat, but the scale of resistance was enormous.

The spontaneous sabotage of individuals must grow into organized strikes. When individuals become a union, capital will crumble to dust.

Communist parties that have remained orthodox Marxist-Leninist also continue the struggle. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) organizes mass demonstrations; the PAME union openly confronts the bourgeois state.

Organized struggle is possible and exists.

Conclusion

Youth refusal to "work hard" is not laziness or degradation, but a rational reaction to a system without prospects and the first embryo of class consciousness – a step toward understanding that the problem is not you, but capital.

Capital can no longer force work as before. Four out of five workers have either rejected voluntary exploitation or are hostile to the system. This is its crisis, not ours. The legitimacy of wage labor is collapsing; only material methods of coercion remain – the reserve army, debt, repression.

But coercion generates resistance. The spontaneous refusal of individuals must become mass organized struggle, beginning with demands that capital cannot fulfill without ceasing to be capital: a 30-hour workweek without pay cuts; housing as a right, not a speculative commodity; cancellation of debts – life should not be debt bondage.

But this is the minimum, not the goal. The goal is the liberation of labor and the abolition of wage slavery. Marx wrote: “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.”⁷ We are not fighting for a better cage, but for an exit from it.

The liberation of labor is possible only through the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Class consciousness does not arise spontaneously; it is introduced through agitation, education, organization – through a mass party as an organ of class struggle, not parliamentary decoration.

“The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.” No one will liberate us except ourselves.⁸

Our task is to stop being refusers and become rebels. Not quiet quitting, but a strike committee. Not individual survival strategies, but collective struggle for power. Slogans are not given – they are wrested. And only the proletariat organized into a party can wrest them.

Dec. 2025

Notes