On November 28th, 2025, workers across more than 30 countries walked out of Amazon warehouses on Black Friday, demanding dignity. At the same time, Jeff Bezos’s personal fortune was estimated between $234 and $254 billion dollars. Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk-three tech oligarchs-hold more personal wealth than the entire bottom 50% of the American population.

Same company. Same day. Two completely different realities. One for those who own, another for those who work.

This divide isn’t new. It’s as old as civilization itself. The master became the lord, and the lord became the employer. The plantation became the manor became the warehouse. But the fundamental relationship never changed: one group owns, one group works, and only one group decides where the wealth goes.

What are we looking at when we see Jeff Bezos’s $234 billion next to workers across 30 countries struggling to put food on their tables? This is class struggle in its most visible form-not the Hollywood version with pitchforks, riots, and revolution, but the everyday economic reality that shapes the lives of billions of people.

Class struggle, at its core, is the conflict between those who own the means of production (e.g., equipment, tools, factories, warehouses, technology needed to make things) and those who must work for the owners of those means to survive. The owners are one class. The workers are another class. The struggle happens because the two groups have fundamentally opposing interests. Economist Dr. Richard D. Wolff describes the interest of owners this way:

Said another way, the owners interest is to extract as much value as possible from the worker’s labor while paying as little as possible. The worker, in contrast, wants fair compensation for the value they create and some control over their time and labor.

Here’s a crucial point: this isn’t about greedy bosses or bad individuals. When political conservatives and capitalism’s defenders see inequality or exploitation, they’re quick to blame it on a few bad apples. But inequality and exploitation aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features. When a small group controls the means of production and the majority must access those resources to earn a living, the natural outcome is an imbalance of power. The owner class holds all the leverage. They decide what gets produced, how it gets produced, who works and doesn’t, and most importantly, what happens to the profits.

Lets revisit the Amazon workers who walked out on Black Friday. They’re the ones packing boxes, printing shipping labels, loading trucks, managing inventories, doing the actual work that generates billions in revenue. But they have no say in how that revenue gets used. They don’t decide their wages, working conditions, or whether the company should invest in automation that eliminates their jobs. Instead, its Jeff Bezos and the shareholders who make those decisions. Again, same labor creates the same value, but entirely different dynamics to power and wealth.

This brings us to the fundamental question that reveals class struggle across every economic system in history:

The answer to that question determines who prospers, who struggles, who lives in security, and who lives paycheck to paycheck. Here’s what’s crazy, for thousands of years, across wildly different economic systems, the answer has remained essentially the same. A small ownership class controls production and decides distribution, while the working majority produces the goods but has little to no say in either.

The story of class struggle is one of evolution of exploitation. To understand this story, let’s examine the three major economic systems of human society: slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. What we’ll see is exploitation didn’t disappear as societies ‘progressed,’ it just evolved better disguises.

During slavery, there was no pretense of freedom or choice. Masters owned both the means of production (land, tools, equipment), the producers (enslaved people), and everything that was produced. An unspoken reality around America’s fast economic growth as a young country was the slave system. Through slavery, masters earned one hundred percent of the profits, only needing to pay for the upkeep of equipment and the bare minimum to keep slaves alive and working.

Here’s how the exploitation worked: A slave’s necessary labor is the portion of their work that produces value equivalent to their own subsistence, the food, shelter, and basics needed to survive and keep working. Everything beyond that is surplus labor, creating surplus value that fully belongs to the master. A slave might work twelve hours, with maybe three hours of labor covering their own survival and nine hours of pure profit for the master. Because slaves received no wages, it appeared as though masters were generously “providing” for them, when slaves were actually producing everything.

When slavery’s brutality became economically unsustainable and morally indefensible, the system evolved into feudalism. Feudalism promised a more humane arrangement but continued to deliver the same exploitation with a legal makeover. Lords didn’t own the serf’s bodies, but they owned something just as essential: the land. Serfs could live on the lord’s land, farm it, and keep a portion of what they grew for their own subsistence, so long as they agreed to hand over all the surplus labor to the lord. Some serfs owed their lord a specific number of days of labor each week, working the lord’s fields before they could work their own. Others paid in crops or goods.

The division was visible in a way slavery wasn’t: three days for the lord then three days for yourself. This visibility was the disguise, it made the arrangement look like a fair exchange of protection and land access in return for labor. In reality, nothing fundamental had changed. The lord owned the means of production (the land), decided what happened to the surplus, and justified it all through claims of divine right. The serf had no choice but to accept the lord’s terms or starve. Different contract, same power dynamic. The ownership class still extracted maximum value from the worker class.

After the American and French Revolutions came capitalism, promising to finally break the pattern of exploitation. Capitalism appeared on the scene with the most compelling pitch yet: freedom. No more masters owning your body. No more lords owning your land. You could sell your labor to anyone, negotiate your wages, move freely, and switch from job to job. The chains were gone. The manor was gone. People were finally, truly free.

Except the answer to the fundamental question remained the same. Who owns what gets produced, and who decides what happens to it? Workers don’t own the factories, the equipment, the technology, the means of production. Capitalists do. And capitalists still decide what happens to the surplus value created by workers. An Amazon warehouse worker might generate $100 of value per hour through their labor, but they’re paid $18. Where does the other $82 go? Into profits for shareholders, executive compensation, expansion, decisions the worker had no part in making. The relationship is fundamentally identical to slavery and feudalism: those who do the work don’t control what they produce or where the wealth goes. The only difference is now we call it a ‘voluntary contract’ instead of ownership.

I can already hear defenders of capitalism pointing out the obvious: we’re not slaves or serfs. We have labor laws, the freedom to quit. Those improvements matter. They were won through centuries of workers organizing and fighting. But the fundamental power dynamics remain the same. A small ownership class still controls the means of production while the worker class creates wealth with no say how it’s distributed.

Each system claimed to be better than the one before. Feudal lords argued, “at least we don’t own people!” Capitalists say, “you’re free to choose your employer!” But that freedom is only the freedom to choose which capitalist exploits your labor, not freedom from exploitation itself. You’re free to quit, to find another job where you still don’t own what you produce, still don’t participate in deciding what happens to profits, and still have no power beyond renting your labor or starving.

This is why people feel trapped even in good jobs. Your boss buys a vacation home or upgrades their existing home while you struggle to come up with next months rent. The company boasts record profits while your 2–5% raise doesn’t cover inflation. The system is designed so the math never adds up in your favor. Those who own extract maximum value from those who work. That’s not a bug, it’s the same feature that’s existed within every economic system.

The truth is this pattern isn’t inevitable. Slavery seemed to be the only economic system until it wasn’t. Feudalism seemed like the divine right of the few until it collapsed. Capitalism insists it’s the “end of history,” but it’s not the best humanity can do, it’s just the latest iteration of the same ancient theft. Breaking this pattern means those who do the work control what they produce. The Mondragon Corporation in Spain, a federation of worker cooperatives employing over 80,000 people, proves what’s possible. The ration between highest and lowerst paid workers is capped at 6:1, compared to 670:1 within typical U.S. corporations. Worker cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid networks already exist, succeeding despite capitalism, proving a better way is possible.

The master became the lord became the capitalist. The plantation became the manor became the warehouse. But the fundamental relationship never changed. It won’t change until we change it. Understanding this pattern is the first step. Building the alternative is the next.

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