Marx explained the catch, simply. If you begin with your labor, you earn the going rate, which (hopefully) allows you to buy your means for survival. But if you start with cash you can shop for labor at a rate that will increase your rate of return. [1] Save a few over-circulated rags-to-riches stories, it's nearly impossible for workers to reverse the equation.
Think. Workers loan themselves to capitalists, doing work first, then getting paid in cash, later. Capitalists take that loan, then later give their workers cash to buy, ultimately from them, goods for their survival. Put another way, the capitalists get to use their work for free up until the point it becomes valuable through production; value the law says belongs to the capitalists.
It doesn't matter, even if you're starving, that your labor is your own. You have to loan it to your boss, first. Then wait a week or two for him to pay you before you can use it to buy food.
-Even if you're starving. You can't buy food unless you loan yourself to the capitalist first. And yet whether you loan to him at all is the capitalist's choice. You can in no way demand he employs you. And this fact is assured by the other group of poor.
We may sometimes bargain for higher wages but only once having bargained for lower ones in order to qualify for work and to compete in the workforce. Your hard work frees capital. Wages are still factored, not by your added value, but the downward pull of the unemployed.
It's myth then, that well-seated workers, sometimes called the 'middle-class', are able to demand remittances schools, welfares, insurance, etc.- that also help the poor. Particularly, since these are most-often either state policies and/or tied to employment, they are exclusive, not inclusive. Moreover, it's necessary for capitalists to NOT lift the poor, as their poverty is needed to hold-down wages. And since there's no median between fairness and security in a competitive system, it's in workers' immediate (though not broader) self-interest to defer 'peace-keeping' to the 'authorities', however gory and one-sided that gets.
And if life is, for a time, better as a relatively rich subject than an abject poor one, it still requires we make ourselves -not free at all- but more and more useful to capitalists. Higher education and self-pitches are the bright side. The rest includes -if not loving, accepting- worse and worse conditions on the other side of the wall.
So, we needn't descend into Fascism. Everything we need to make border-walls, mass-shooters, or police that see the public as war-enemies is endemic to Liberal society. All it takes is (misplaced belief in) hard work.
The problem is complex, but not obscure. (When even states have no choice but compete, ecocide is built in.) Our day to day survival is engineered to run counter to our long term. I hear often, the reflexive" 'but a cooperative world is impossible'. Yet we live in an impossible world already, under capitalism. And now with Trump at the helm we're mostly careful not to rattle its walls, thinking -wrongly- they stand between us and Fascism.
Fascism won't be the cause if they fall. With its promise of cooperative living, at least for its in-group, it might be the result.
[1] Money-commodity-money vs. commodity-money-commodity, Kapital, p.165
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