Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.16
Workers of the world, unite!
CAPITALISM IS CHAOS, WASTE AND DESTRUCTION
"CAPITAL eschews no PROFIT, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent, and there is not a CRIME at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a PROFIT, it will freely encourage both." (Capital, Volume I, Chapter XXXI).
“Natural" disasters or a product of greed?
When there is a FIRE or a FLOOD, it is quickly qualified as a “natural” disaster. But how can it be considered “natural” that houses are knowingly built on flood lands, that these houses have real mousetraps in which part of the working class is condemned to live and die, that forests are left uncleared because it is not profitable, or that they are deliberately set on fire to collect subsidies, or that bridges that are known to be in a precarious condition are left unfixed until they collapse?
Fire, water and gravity are natural forces, but the reasons and consequences of these natural forces throwing thousands of people to their deaths are social reasons and consequences. It is the EAGER OF PROFIT imposed by the process of ACCUMULATION of Capital (impersonal force that feeds on the exploitation of the working class) that produces the circumstances in which these natural forces cause ravages dragging thousands of people to premature death:“(…) when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man
sees the murderer, (…). But murder it remains.” (Condition of the Working Class in England, F. Engels).
Labor murders: squandering of workers' lives
And these circumstances do not only occur in the housing sector, but also in the workplaces. According to the ILO report, more than 2.9 million workers worldwide die every year as a result of so-called “accidents” at work or work-related illnesses.
This is consubstantial to CAPITALISM, its very nature leads to this result: “The capitalist mode of production proceeds to count the prodigious dissipation of the labourer's life and health (…) Since the labourer passes the greater portion of his life in the process of production, the conditions of the production process are largely the conditions of his active living process, or his living conditions (…) overwork, the transformation of the labourer into a work horse, is a means of increasing capital, or speeding up the production of surplus-value. (…) The capitalist mode of production is generally, despite all its niggardliness, altogether too prodigal with its human material.” (Capital, Volume III, Chapter V).
To cover up this mass murder, the labor origin of all the illnesses suffered by the working class because of the conditions and rhythms of work is denied and covered up by the mercenary doctors paid by Capital and the State whose bonuses and good life depend on making us go to work sick. The integrated and subsidized trade unionism on its side signs in the collective agreements “absenteeism bonuses” to criminalize the sick fellow workers and to pressure everyone not to take sick leave, with the same objective of forcing us to work sick.
For the abolition of wage labor
The way in which Capital appropriates surplus value (unpaid labor of the working class) is through wage labor. Under capitalism, labor force is just another commodity and, as long as we do not eliminate the commodity character of our labor force, we will inevitably suffer the situations described above: “[The working class] ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!”.” (Value, Price and Profit, K. Marx).
However, while we cannot yet achieve this revolutionary aim: “(…) the working-class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. (…) By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.” (Value, Price and Profit, K. Marx).
Precisely to liquidate or corset any impulse of struggle even on the immediate level, the bourgeoisie finances and subsidizes integrated unionism, authentic life insurance for capital. And for this reason communists must support and encourage the development of a network of union struggle outside and against integrated unionism: the class union.
Capitalism means waste and squandering
The internal laws of CAPITALISM determine the inevitable overproduction of what is not needed while not enough is produced to satisfy other pressing needs, leads to the same processes being carried out in duplicate and kept under commercial secrecy, leads to a multitude of unproductive jobs from a social point of view, to a multitude of other antisocial jobs (think of the bureaucratic apparatus at the service of the domination of the bourgeoisie), to the production of commodities destined to spoil in order to be sold again (programmed obsolescence), and, finally, to the periodic destruction of the productive forces already created through crises and wars.
Therefore, only with the communist revolution and the abolition of the anarchy of commodity production will we be able to eliminate all this redundancy and waste of effort, eliminate all useless and antisocial work, incorporate the entire population into production, thus reducing the obligatory working time to a minimum fraction of the day, through the combination of the obligation to work with the distribution of this work among the entire population, at different durations and intensities according to age and other personal circumstances.
Trade war leads to military war
As long as capitalist mercantile production and anarchy of production continue to exist, supply will precede demand and more than can be sold will be produced. The development of this process leads at the same time to the RELATIVE OVERPRODUCTION OF CAPITALS and to the TENDENCY OF THE RATE OF PROFIT TO FALL.
The ANARCHY OF COMMODITY PRODUCTION produces at the same time OVERCROWDING and SHORTAGE. If a lot of energy is produced and the price drops, then all the unprofitable generators are taken out of production and the result of the initial abundance is a sudden shortage, capable of generating a BLACKOUT because the infrastructure is both insufficient and excessive for both situations. If too many commodities are produced then the price drops so low that the capitalist powers have to impose the stoppage of production and circulation with HOUSE ARRESTS and LOCKDOWNS. But when circulation is resumed, where there were too many goods, there are now too few goods ready and too few means of transport. Then there is over-ordering, prices soar and circulation is saturated. Until it has accumulated so much at the destination that there is again overproduction and inventories are so full that it is necessary to sell at a discount. And when this EPILEPTIC ATTACK has passed, world capitalism returns to the same situation of overproduction, waiting for new SPASMS that have the momentary effect of stopping the fall in prices. Nothing new: “And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced DESTRUCTION of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the CONQUEST of new markets, and by the more thorough EXPLOITATION of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848).
The pressure exerted by overproduction drives the rush of goods to other markets. England played this role until it was displaced by the USA, which has now been displaced by the capitalist China. The center of gravity of world capitalism has shifted to Asia. For this reason, the former exporting powers that conquered the world with their commodities are now trying to build tariff walls.
This displacement was accompanied by rupture of the division of the world after World War II and the retreat of the USA, forced by material circumstances. But a new distribution of the world cannot be made without recourse to the use of force and all this has its culminating point in the MILITARY WAR, the capitalist solution to the crisis. The capitalist world is already on this path.
Facing the growing MILITARIZATION of capitalist society, and the bourgeoisie's use of any circumstance to inculcate and introduce in the population the normality of war, the militant communist position is that of REVOLUTIONARY DEFEATISM, the transformation of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war: “The proletariat must not only oppose all such wars, but must also wish for the defeat of its 'own' government in such wars and utilize its defeat for revolutionary insurrection, if an insurrection to prevent the war proves unsuccessful.“ (The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution, Lenin, 1916).
For social revolution, for communism
At present, we live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, no matter how much embellishment they put on it. It is a truth that we feel at every moment in the strikes, in the courts, etc. For this reason, we will not succeed in breaking or modifying the system of capitalist relations of production, from which exploitation derives, without overthrowing the bourgeois State. The working class will have to equip itself in turn with its own instrument to prevent the restoration of slavery and exploitation: the dictatorship of the proletariat, history does not allow a middle term. However, this revolutionary State is only necessary in a transitory period and will die out and will be gradually replaced by the collective organization of the associated free producers.
To be able to carry out this task, the working class needs a Party with a scientific understanding of history and a program that is not one of reform or conservation of the present society: this party is the International Communist Party that must gather the most advanced and determined part of the proletariat, unifying the efforts of the proletarian masses by leading them from the struggle for contingent interests and results to the general struggle for the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat.
It is essential to understand that "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" (Lenin) and to study the scientific foundations of Marxism ("Wage Labor and Capital", "Manifesto of the Communist Party", "Anti-Dühring", "Capital", “Critique of the Gotha Programme”) together with the lessons drawn by the Communist Left from the tactical-programmatic-organizational degeneration of the Communist International (degeneration of which "Trotskyism" was a co-participant), which ended up abandoning the world communist revolution in 1926 with the Stalinist counterrevolution whose effects have weighed like a slab on the possibility of the resumption of the class struggle.
This bourgeois world is sinking and threatens to drag us down with it, we have no patches or mends to apply it but a new society to fight and live for. And not a caricature of it with changed names but a truly communist society: without wage labor, without market, without anarchy of production, without private property, without State, without crisis or war... in which "the free development of each will be the premise of the free development of all" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848).
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST PARTY– “THE INTERNATIONALIST PROLETARIAN” – May 1st 2025 – www.pcielcomunista.org – x.com/pcielcomunista