Thank you for this excellent introduction.

I believe that Marx had an unnecessarily binary view of economic relations. Where he saw a struggle between classes that one or the other must win, I see a negotiation between partners.

To be sure, when Marx was writing, the capital partner had way more bargaining power than the labor partner, which explains why labor got so little of the revenue arising from its efforts. But Marx seems to have missed the import of the Reform Act of 1832 in England. Suffrage was expanding, and with it, the power of the masses to affect industrial policy. Things were still awful for workers, but Marx should have recognized that electoral politics, and collective bargaining supported thereby, were all the "revolution" workers would need to get a bigger share of the economic pie. The workers did not need to own the means of production to obtain the fruits thereof through collective action at the job and in the legislature.

Collective action by those not in power was an as yet uninvented "technology." As you point out, capital resisted unionization, but in the end, universal suffrage secured it. Marx erred in not seeing the possibility and working for it.