Because capitalism is founded on unplanned competitive production for profit between capitalists, the incessant chase for profits leads to overproduction and financial shocks, causing bankruptcy, mass unemployment and the possible dislocation of whole economies and even the world system.

As Paul D'Amato pointed out in his book The Meaning of Marxism:

Economic crises underline the fact that in our society, production is not for human need, but for profit. Crises happen because capitalists can't sell their goods profitably, not because there aren't millions who use the "overproduced" goods...Millions can be homeless, yet there can be talk of a "real-estate glut."

The fact that capitalism is prone to crisis is another reason why revolution is necessary. Under capitalism, reforms--whether economic or political--won through struggle are never permanent. Capitalism in crisis will always attempt to save itself by making workers pay the price for its anarchy.

The world economy has for a long time been ripe for socialist planning. Indeed, this is the only way society can move beyond the anarchy and destruction--and here, we should include imperialist war--of the system.

As Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

In our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Marx and Engels were identifying the great inescapable fault line of capitalist society--class and class struggle.

Capitalism gave birth to the proletariat, what we now term the working class. The immense profits of capitalism, apparently "created" in the free market, are actually the difference between what workers get paid and the value of the labor they perform in producing products and services. Marx's labor theory of value explains how this "exploitation" is fundamental to capitalism.

With class division and exploitation, class struggle is also inevitable. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

[W]ith the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels its strength more...Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots....

This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with each other. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle.'

Since Marx's day more than a century ago, the potential power of the working class described in this passage has grown enormously. Capitalism has created a global economic system, and with it, a global working class.

The great power of the working class derives from its strategic position in the process of production. Workers can paralyze a factory, an industry and even a whole economy by going on strike. Technological advances mean some groups of workers, even if smaller in number, hold even more strategic power today.

Yet the road to workers' power and socialism is not straightforward. Marx argued that the working class could be the gravedigger of capitalism and the founder of a new society based on equality and democracy, but he also outlined the obstacles to this project.

In particular, he identified how capitalism fosters and depends on divisions within the working class. Taking the example of the working class in England, he wrote:

In all the big industrial centers in England, there is a profound antagonism between the Irish proletarian and the English proletarian. The average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him.

He regards him somewhat like the poor whites in the southern states of North America regarded Black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this scission is the true secret of maintaining its power.

As Paul D'Amato points out:

The same logic is at work under capitalism today. One has only to think of the deliberate racism fostered against Mexican immigrants. If native-born workers can be made to believe that immigrant workers threaten their jobs; if white workers can be made to hate or resent Blacks; or if Americans can be made to think that Arabs and Muslims are the enemy, it makes it more difficult for workers to unite against their common enemy.

Racist and xenophobic ideas do not benefit workers and the poor, whatever their race, sex, or ethnicity. But they do benefit the exploiters.

Because workers share material interests, these divisions can be overcome through common struggle. But this is far from an automatic process. Reactionary ideas, such as racism, sexism and homophobia, inside the working class have to be consciously opposed and challenged in advance of, and in preparation for, struggle.

Struggle is the key to challenging reactionary ideas and forging a working class that is united and capable of founding a new society that discriminates against no worker. As Marx wrote:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old crap and become fitted to found society anew.

IN THE Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels addressed the question of how socialists should organize:

In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions and the ultimate general results of the proletarian struggle.

Thus, revolutionaries need to participate in and lead working-class struggles--and at the same time win others to the need for a socialist alternative. Future Marxists developed the question of socialist organization further, but their starting point remained Marx and Engels' general guideline: the construction of an independent working-class revolutionary socialist party.

The ruling class is centralized and organized through the state, so the working class must be as well. For workers as a class to gain political power and overturn the capitalist state machinery, the working-class movement must develop its own political leadership forged around this goal.

At the heart of Marxism is the idea that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself."

This is the project that Marx dedicated his life to. As his lifelong friend Engels summarized his contribution:

Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society...and to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was first to make conscious of its own position and needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation.

The revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx have never been so relevant. We have a world to win.

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