Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know about the Affordability Crisis

But as Grand Theft Capital demonstrates, workers’ current conditions are the result of a deliberate, long-term effort by the corporate rich to increase their own wealth largely by extracting it from workers’ pockets. The evidence shows that workers’ wages have not kept pace with rising costs and that they’re feeling unhappy and stressed on the job. This partly reflects the weakening of worker power as union membership has declined over the past sixty years—reaching levels last seen before the major unionization wave of the 1930s. Regardless of what mainstream economists and the Consumer Price Index suggest, successive generations of young workers have been confronting difficult and precarious employment conditions. On top of it all, workers of all generations are alarmed at the possibility of job obsolescence given the looming threat of AI and automation.

In the face of this evidence, Grand Theft Capital offers a clear answer to the source of the problem and charts a clear way forward. What workers are facing is nothing less than a class war waged from above; the only solution is an equally determined class war from below.