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Here Marx's philosophy is dissected from the angle of bourgeois capitalism which he, Marx, sought to overcome. His social, political and economic ideas are criticised. Although it is noted that Marx wanted to ameliorate human suffering, the result turned out to be Utopian, contrary to his own intentions. Contrary to Marx, it is individualism that makes the best sense and capitalism that holds out the best hope for coping with most of the problems he sought to solve. Marx's philosophy is alluring but flawed at a very basic level, namely, where it denies the individuality of each person and treats humanity as “an organic body”. Capitalism, while by no means out to guarantee a perfect society, is the best setting for the realisation of the diverse but often equally noble human goals of its membership.

This chapter examines the labor-empowerment potential of emerging taxi driver cooperative-union partnerships. Cooperative-union partnerships can adopt differing stances toward the virtue of waging broad-based, class-conscious conflict against economic elites to win economic change, as opposed to the virtue of small-scale and practical steps to improve the immediate conditions of individual “job-conscious” workers. This case study utilizes a “class consciousness” versus “job consciousness” framework to examine a recent immigrant taxi driver union-cooperative partnership.

Case study of taxi driver organizing in Denver (CO), utilizing narrative inquiry, and survey and interviews with 69 drivers.

The US tradition of accommodational job consciousness continues to influence union and cooperative leaders. Among Denver’s taxi cooperatives, an emphasis on accommodational job consciousness, bereft of class perspectives, has undermined a narrative promoting worker solidarity or encouraging workers to engage in social justice campaigns for immigrant workers. The consequence has been to weaken the transformational potential of taxi driver activism.

Findings based on a single case study need to be confirmed through additional research.

Cooperative-union partnerships that adopt a class-conscious political approach, including leadership development opportunities, a “labor empowerment curriculum, and partnerships with broader social movements, are a promising alternative to narrowly tailored “job conscious” organizing strategies.

Immigrants are increasingly forming worker cooperatives, and the recent Denver taxi driver union-cooperative is one of the largest taxi cooperatives in the country. Current research on the labor empowerment consequences of these emerging immigrant cooperatives is sparse.

The term reformism has been in frequent use by leftist critics who have seen reform as the biggest enemy of the revolution. If the capitalist system were proved to be in danger of collapsing under its own weight, then intervention by the “bourgeois” state to reform the system and to make concessions to, say, labour, then the system would continue essentially unchanged. Examples of reformism are, therefore, free elementary and secondary education for all, the welfare state generally, trade union legislation permitting collective bargaining and so on. The main philosophical ideologist of such reformist strategy was originally John Stuart Mill, simultaneously a classical economist and utilitarian and proponent of reformist tendencies and government intervention. The term reformism is also applied to the political process whereby socialism might be implemented through parliamentary means. The working-class interest could be introduced into a parliamentary system via the electoral process and lead to reform progressively that would result in steps or increments to a socialist society. This was very much the view of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their Fabian followers in the Britain. One of the main opponents of reform or social reform, as she put it, was Rosa Luxemburg who saw such a process as leading to the death knell of the German socialism and, by extension, of socialism everywhere (Howard, 1971, p. 52).

Mainstream sociology tends to consider mental processes and their underlying structures, including the perception of society, mainly to be a result of socialization, which is generally conceptualized in terms of the more or less intentional, interpersonal transmission of cultural elements. In contrast and rightly so, marxist theory has always insisted on praxis as an essential feature of consciousness formation. The concept of alienation, when it is not entirely subjectivized (as it is in the Seeman tradition), is usually derived directly from basic structural conditions of capitalism, especially from the coerced division of labor (Wallimann 1981). Conceived to be a constant of the entire system, it is of little use to explain within‐system variations of current images of society and of one's place within it.

This chapter is a Marxist Critical Realist inspired discussion of my interest in, and experiences of, being a working-class academic from Indian/African heritage. I begin my autoethnography by problematising the limits of defining social class from a gradational approach, which is the most common way to make sense of social class in academia and beyond. I argue that neoliberal capitalism organises people into workers and owners of production and without this acknowledgement, discussion of social class in the gradational approach is limited. I then go on to critique the de-centering of social class, for which I used Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a case study. My intention is to promote the explanatory power of approaching social class as as an organisational relationship, which assimilates racism, in the service of capitalism. Throughout the chapter, I provide examples of the way that I navigate this intellectual standpoint in the classroom, specifically through utilising the concepts of mystification and feasibility that I developed through my PhD that focussed on social class in Sweden. Without dismissing the value of the gradational approach of understanding social class in toto, and also the importance of personal identities (indeed I have focussed on my ethno-racial identity), my basic argument is that without the centralisation of social class, and crucially its articulation with neoliberal capitalism, social class becomes a descriptive category rather than explanatory, rendering the possibility of radical social change as severely diminished.

Henryk Grossman was the first person to systematically explore Marx’s explanation of capitalist crises in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to place it in the context of the distinction between use and exchange value. His “The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System” remains an important reference point in the Marxist literature on economic crises. That literature has been plagued by distortions of Grossman’s position which derive from early hostile reviews of his book. These accused Grossman of a mechanical approach to the end of capitalism and of neglecting factors which boost profit rates. Grossman, in fact, contributed a complementary economic element to the recovery of Marxism undertaken by Lenin (particularly in the area of Marxist politics) and Lukács (in philosophy). In both published and unpublished work, Grossman also dealt with and even anticipated criticisms of his methodology and treatment of countertendencies to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Far from being mechanical, his economic analysis can still assist the struggle for working class self-emancipation.