The workers’ movement can and must confront the power of capital in every aspect of social life, organizing resistance on the terrains of the economic, the political, the urban, the social-reproductive, and the associational. It is the fusion or synthesis of these struggles, rather than their simple addition, which invests the proletariat with hegemonic consciousness.

Marx and Engels, for example, clearly believed that mass socialist consciousness would be a dialectical alloy of the economic and the political; of epic battles over rights as well as over wages and working hours; of bitter local fights and great international causes. Since the formation of the Communist League in 1847, they had argued that wage-labor constituted the only serious social force able to represent and enact a consistently democratic program of suffrage and rights, and thus provide the hegemonic glue to bind together a broad coalition of workers, poor peasants, national minorities, and radicalized strata of the middle class. While the mind of the liberal petty bourgeoisie easily amputated political rights from economic grievances, workers’ lives refuted any categorical distinction between oppression and exploitation. The “growing over” of political into economic democracy, and of economic class struggle into the question of state power—the process that Marx characterized as “permanent revolution” in the contexts of 1848 and Chartism—was a recurrent motif in all the great European social crises from 1848 to 1948.