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Last Tuesday, Charlotte’s local elections were held, with Democrats nearly sweeping the city council elections and incumbent Mayor Vi Lyles winning a fourth term as the Mayor of Charlotte. However, for workers, the results were decided long before a single ballot was even cast; they had already lost.

Over the past fifteen years, the city of Charlotte has seen nearly every type of politician, from the rare Republican Mayor of a Major City in Pat McCrory, “grassroots progressives” such as Braxton Winston, along with Obama-Biden endorsed Democrats like Anthony Foxx, and the current Mayor, Vi Lyles. The one constant amongst all this has been that the city’s politicians don’t serve the working class, which keeps the city afloat, but the ruling class, which keeps their pockets full. Taking one look at who funds Charlotte’s government shows this. Mayor Vi Lyles’s top donor is the CEO of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of the Carolinas, Frank Harrison. Some of Lyles’s other top donors include Bank of America and Lynn Good, CEO of Duke Energy, the company that left tens of thousands of Charlotteans without electricity in the middle of winter last year. Serving the interests of large corporations and banks is a bipartisan issue. Elected City Councilors Tariq Scott Bokhari, a Republican, and Dimple Ajmera, a Democrat, both received money from Peter A Pappas, CEO of Pappas Properties, a multimillion-dollar real estate company. Vi Lyles’s top donor, Frank Harrison, donated thousands of dollars to her campaign, but also to that of openly queerphobic Republican Mark Robinson.

The evidence for Charlotte’s government not serving the working class goes beyond donor lists, but it lies in the fact that Charlotte has some of the worst working conditions of any major American city. A 2015 study showed that Charlotte workers work the third highest number of hours per week of any major American city. While this year the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Charlotte workers make 4 dollars less per hour than the national average. This means that in Charlotte, workers work longer hours and are paid less than nearly anywhere else in America.

Is this because Charlotte’s politicians and CEOs are exceptionally corrupt? No, it is the system at hand that is the root of all of this: capitalism. Across the country, no matter how “progressive” or “worker-friendly” the elected government is, workers continue to not see the full value they create as it is taken by their employers. That is because it is systematic; capitalism can only survive if exploitation exists. There is no way to alter capitalism to change this and create a capitalism without exploitation. Even when “progressives” or “leftists” such as Braxton Winston locally or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nationally are elected, they are forced into upholding the system at hand due to the nature of capitalism.

There is no path to liberation for workers in working within the system. This year, Charlotte city workers pleaded for better wages to the Mayor and City Council, but when it came time to vote on a budget, their wages still lagged behind the national average. Workers are correct in wanting change, but reforms are unreliable and can easily be reversed due to the nature of capitalism. Corporations, with their vast amounts of wealth accumulated off the backs of workers, are able to buy off politicians and lobby for laws that favor their interests, entrenching their power and giving them the ability to undermine reforms at a later date. When they do come, reforms are used as a last-ditch effort to placate the anger of the masses before it turns into a full-blown rebellion. The only answer for the working class to build power, end their exploitation, and build a system that works for them is through revolution. To do that, it will require workers to reject the system at hand opting instead to build Independent Revolutionary organizations and unions that work to build towards the goal of seizing power.