This essay continues Dmitry Petrov’s series “Working-Class Politics.” Following “The Worker and War” and “The Worker and Power”, we examine the relationship between the Worker and the Worker’s opposite: the profiteer.

Resolve Without Submission

On August 17, 2026, I watched a harrowing video. It showed no charred bodies, mutilated wounded people or maimed children. There were no narcissistic politicians or billionaires, no maniacs or fanatics praising leaders and prophets.

Instead, there was a line of decent-looking people boarding a police van at the orders of uniformed bullies. This was how Yabloko activists’ attempt to support their party ended as it was being pushed out of the elections. Was this passive resistance in the tradition of Gandhi? In appearance, yes. In substance, no.

The leaders of nonviolent resistance called on people to “fill the prisons,” entered them first and led vast crowds after them, until there was no room left. That was a struggle. Here, by contrast, simply being detained was presented as a “bold challenge to the system.” The system recognizes only strength. What it was offered was meekness.

What else can we expect from people who want change but are unwilling to fight for it? From people who submit to those who control the streets, minds, businesses and the country: the profiteer and the official? Can they be considered part of the great collective organism we have called the Worker?

Perhaps they are wage earners and are exploited. But they are far removed from the Worker as an actor in the struggle for rights, freedom and justice. The Worker’s path is one of resolve, not submission.

The Battle of Homestead

The Battle of Homestead offers a vivid example of the Worker’s refusal to submit to the profiteer. At the steelworks, metalworkers fought back against Carnegie Steel’s armed mercenaries. Sent on the orders of millionaire Andrew Carnegie to disperse the workers, the mercenaries were defeated.

Carnegie is an innovator. He builds a fast, cheap, large-scale steelmaking operation. The business grows and generates extraordinary profits. The workers are satisfied with their pay. Carnegie is regarded as a progressive. He says that no factory is worth a single drop of blood.

But the market stabilizes and wages are cut. Members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and the Knights of Labor are outraged. In response, manager Henry Clay Frick decides to dismiss them and recruit poor, non-union workers. Carnegie agrees. For the profiteer, profit comes first. Frick obstructs the signing of a new collective agreement, while the steelworkers form a strike committee and declare that “the rights and interests of the workforce cannot be altered without due legal process; workers have the right to steady employment and to resist a company that disregards the interests and views of the community.” A strike begins.

Frick hires 300 armed thugs from the Pinkerton agency to occupy the steelworks. They approach the plant on barges, and a gun battle breaks out. Both sides suffer casualties. Three hundred workers return fire. Women shout, “Death to the Pinkertons!” Armed workers from neighboring factories send a raft loaded with burning planks down the river, and a cart carrying burning oil toward the barges overland. The agents surrender and leave, unarmed, as people spit at them. Their barges burn. The workers win.

The Homestead strike stands out from earlier struggles for its courage and discipline. It unites the steelworks and neighboring factories into a single Worker, ready to confront the profiteer and the profiteer’s mercenaries. The Worker will also learn to fight strikebreakers: enemies of a different kind.

Scabs

The profiteer is protected by the police, the army, hired thugs and mercenaries willing to work for a pittance. These are scabs—the word also means the crust that forms over a wound—or strikebreakers. They replace the strikers, who fight them.

“Having created the snake, the toad and the vampire, the Lord thought there was little left to make for the world. Then, in a filthy puddle, he saw a scrap of devilish nastiness. Sparing no effort, he fashioned a strikebreaker from it. The most disgusting creature: an imbecile, a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain and a backbone made of shit and glue. Where others have a heart, the scab has a gonorrhea of rotten principles, a tumor and pus.

“When he trudges home from the factory, men turn away. Even the angels weep over this vile flesh. The devil himself locks the gates of hell to keep his own offspring out. No one should become a scab while, beneath the beautiful blue sky, there is still a pool deep enough to drown him. A strikebreaker has no right to live. […]

“He sells himself and his brothers—a Judas. The boss and the devil, the profiteer and evil itself, pay him. But the filthy money will turn to poison.”

That is how Jack London mocked the scab in his scathing “Ode.” A scab is a servant hired to intimidate the Worker. In fighting the scab, the Worker confronts the profiteer.

The Profiteer

This figure has already appeared in the series. Why invent a definition? The profiteer has been portrayed in scholarly, journalistic and literary texts, in painting, in theater and in cinema.

The profiteer lives off others. For “property and capital produce nothing unless they are fertilized by labor.” The profiteer appropriates the fruits of the labor of those deprived of property and capital, who are “forced to sell their labor to the owners of wealth and the means of production.” So writes Bakunin.

The profiteer is a “person with money.” At the same time, the profiteer is “capital endowed with will and consciousness.” This is also a pole at which wealth accumulates, condemning the “class that produces its own product as capital” to poverty, the torment of labor, ignorance and degradation. So writes Marx.

“Profiteers and careerists,” writes Kropotkin, create governments to carve up public wealth—what we would now call siphoning off the budget. A dictator consolidates the power of the military, police, intelligence services, the newly rich and their servants: officials.

But while Kropotkin is writing “Words of a Rebel,” Yakov Mayakin, a character in a novel by Gorky, cries: “The trader, the merchant, the man of business! We carry the country on our shoulders… Yet they keep us penned in and give us no room to act!”

Rebellious thinkers see the bureaucrat and the law serving the profiteer. Yet the profiteer feels “penned in,” unable to make money without restraint. That is what business is for. And what is the money for? To make still more money. Science, education and art become sources of fresh profit. “Ethics, aesthetics and other nonsense,” as Mayakovsky writes, are the profiteer’s “maidservants.” They, too, can be sold. The profiteer wants every restraint torn down.

But even in Mayakovsky’s dream—socialism, in the form familiar to us—the profiteer does not disappear. An official takes the profiteer’s place as exploiter and oppressor. It was against this figure that Kronstadt rose in 1921, Hungary in 1956, Poland in 1980, and Kuzbass and Vorkuta in 1989.

The Challenge of a New Wave

The world is entering a new wave of development. Such transitions always produce crises, partly because technologies and social roles change.

According to a simplified Marxist account, in the nineteenth century the revolutionary bourgeois gives way to the proletarian as the vanguard of development. But the proletariat changes along with the division of labor. In the twentieth century, some left-wing thinkers—Garaudy, Marcuse, Habermas and others—concluded that it had lost its revolutionary potential in developed countries. Žižek writes that there is no longer a unified proletariat: the division of labor splits it into groups.

One such group consists of workers in IT, intellectual work and the creative professions. They are exploited, even if they do not look like the weavers of Bangladesh, where, as in other countries of the Global South, the profiteer relocates production and creates a proletariat. This sharpens and broadens the struggle.

Through the media and other means, the Worker’s enemies pit these groups against one another. Refugees are presented to workers as competitors in the labor market; refugees are frightened with warnings about local chauvinism. How will a cheesemaker in France, an IT worker in India, a construction worker in the United States, a weaver in Turkmenistan, a miner in Chile and a driver in Egypt respond? They, too, form the Worker. Their common enemy is the profiteer.

In periods of relative stability, the Worker and the profiteer reach something resembling a truce. As a new wave of development begins, their conflict intensifies. Scholars offer different accounts of this relationship.

Three Accounts

I. The market account. This rejects the concepts of exploitation and the Worker’s rights. Its essence is an individual contract: relations between the profiteer and the worker are a matter of private agreement. The former may dismiss the latter at will; the latter may leave. That is the full extent of their rights.

II. The radical account. This characterizes organizations, societies and regimes that call themselves “Marxist-Leninist” or “communist.” Its main features are:

  • Class struggle. The Worker fights oppression and exploitation.
  • Revolution. The Worker dismantles hostile state and economic power.
  • Abolition of private property. The Worker deprives the profiteer of the means of production, turning them into “the property of society”—in theory. In practice, they become state property.
  • Dictatorship of the proletariat. The Worker creates a state of its own to fight its enemies.

III. The reformist account. This seeks to change the relationship between the profiteer and the Worker in the Worker’s favor without violence. Its main features are:

  • Law. The Worker pressures the state to tax the wealthy and the profiteer to shorten the working day, improve working conditions and introduce a minimum wage.
  • Politics. The Worker forms parties, participates in elections and uses clear procedures to change laws and rules in its favor.
  • Trade unions. Mass organizations defend the Worker.
  • Disobedience. The Worker refuses to work for the profiteer.
  • Pressure. Through petitions, lobbying, the media and art, the Worker pushes the profiteer to recognize the injustice of the system the profiteer has created and to change it.

These are three familiar accounts. Our task here is to present a fourth, rather than critique them.

A Fourth Account

Libertarian / collectivist. The Worker takes control of the means of production and transfers them to the collectives of enterprises and industries. These establish relationships of self-organization and self-government with one another and with neighboring communities. The main features are:

  • Direct action as a method. The path to change is the strike, the boycott and the uprising.
  • Removing the profiteer. The profiteer’s private property, land and natural resources are converted into collective ownership, which must not be confused with “public ownership.”
  • Abolition of the state as a hierarchical system, replacing it with horizontal self-government and self-regulation.
  • Solidarity among workers of every profession and industry and with neighboring communities.
  • High levels of skill among members of workplace collectives, from fitters to professors.
  • Collective decision-making without discrimination or coercion.

These principles of a just, participatory economy have been widely described and put into practice many times. But the profiteer and the bureaucrat, whose existence they threatened, were stronger: they held more power than the Worker, as we discussed in the previous essay.

Today, the experience of earlier attempts, successes and defeats requires the Worker to gain more power than the profiteer and the bureaucrat have appropriated.

The Bee Metaphor

What might represent the Worker in the natural world? I am drawn to the bee, and I am not the first.

  • The bee represents wage earners of every gender, profession and region.
  • The honeycomb represents the different parts of society. Their development depends on how well the bees pollinate the surrounding plants: how, by exchanging ideas and experience, workers connect society and form collectives, unions and other organizations.

The Worker’s role, then, is less about producing honey as a commodity than about successful pollination. The more successful that pollination, the richer the harvest—the activity of social life—and the greater the biodiversity, or wealth of ideas. The whole ecosystem—society—develops more successfully.

The stronger, more committed and more courageous the Worker becomes, the freer it is from the drones: consumers who create nothing, organized around power and money. Their interests drive them to hold back development and attack it with every force available, from North Korean troops to the thugs of ISIS.

But workers, like worker bees, gather into swarms—self-governing structures—bringing more and more members into them and creating a Worker capable of fighting back.

From Defense to Offense

The profiteer breaks whatever gets in the way. What should the Worker do? Certainly not follow that example: their aims are different. The Worker’s strength lies in collective action where each person alone is weak.

For a long time, the Worker and its unions have concentrated on defending gains already won: pay, working hours, safety, benefits and the right to organize. This remains important. But defense is not enough. Its rules are often set by someone else, and the Worker cannot accept playing by rules imposed by others.

The next step is therefore to move from defense and resistance to establishing rules of its own. To demand not only a share of the wealth produced, but also the right to decide what, where, how and for whom to produce. To defend not only a job, but the right to determine how work and society are organized.

The division of labor has long crossed national borders. Production chains, labor migration, markets, knowledge and information are all transnational. The profiteer exploits this. The Worker must learn to operate across borders and turn those connections into a source of strength.

A cheesemaker in France, a programmer in India, a construction worker in the United States, a weaver in Turkmenistan, a miner in Chile and a driver in Egypt may never meet. But what they produce is connected through the global system of labor. The task of organizing is to turn this objective connection into conscious solidarity.

Homestead showed both the Worker’s strength and the limits of courage alone. Workers can force armed mercenaries to retreat yet still lose to those who possess power, capital and the ability to replace strikers. What matters most, then, is the ability of collectives to resist being turned against one another, rather than a hero’s willingness to sacrifice.

The Worker becomes a force not through suffering, or even through protest, but through self-organization.

Here lies the boundary between submission and resolve. The Worker’s resolve takes the form of organization; its language is solidarity. Its aim is people’s control over their own lives and work.

P.S. Let us not be embarrassed by lofty words or afraid of difficult deeds. Their time is returning.