ABSTRACT
This article follows on from a piece by the present author that attempted to explain why Marx thought that proletarians have a tendency towards socialist preference formation. My first intention here is to establish that the historical evidence of Marx's time and since lends weight to Marx's hypothesis that workers, due to their reliance upon labour-power as the form of subsistent property peculiar to their class, incline towards support for socialisation of their mode of subsistence. My second intention is to sketch the interaction over time of labour-power as a property-form and the imperatives of capital. Finally, I seek to understand capitalist crises in this context. The title borrows from Flora Tristan's Union ouvrière.
