….Michael Yates’s
Can the Working Class Change the World? uses Marx to describe capitalism’s historically unique emphasis on the unending accumulation of capital and its resulting human and environmental catastrophes. In
Capital, Marx famously erected a hypothetical, ideally functioning capitalism freed from real world imperfections. By doing so, he demonstrated that, even in the best of circumstances, capitalism must always be exploitative and destructive since the foundation of capitalist growth is a social relationship in which capitalists take more from wage workers than they give back, thereby increasing wealth and power through an endless accumulation predicated on the immiseration of the working class….We will not save ourselves from Dracula by fining him for his excesses but by driving a stake through his heart.