Workers of the world, unite!
FOR THE RESUMPTION OF CLASS STRUGGLE TOWARDS THE ANTI-CAPITALIST SOCIAL REVOLUTION!
The basis of the society in which we live is wage labor. The only source of profit is the exploitation of this wage labor, the labor of the working class. The profit comes out of the fact that, although we are paid a wage, in reality, we produce more value than we are paid (or, what is the same, we are not paid a part of the work we do). This happens even when we are paid what the agreement or the contract says because, otherwise, there would be no profit since nothing comes out of nothing. We cannot free ourselves from this exploitation because we can stop working for an employer, but we cannot free ourselves from the class of employers as a whole. If we do not agree to be exploited, we have nothing to buy food, pay for housing and clothing. This happens because the class of wage laborers do not have the means of production while the employers are the class of the owners of these means of production. Thus, wage labor is a form of exploitation and modern slavery. Whoever conceals this scientific fact or defends its permanence is a traitor to the working class and a lackey of the Capitalists.
This profit based on the exploitation of the working class is what they then cheat each other out of, share out underhandedly, etc. With the hype they give to "corruption" they conceal the fact that, even if there were no corruption, we would still be living in a system of exploitation and slavery.
We have seen many times the police and even the army intervene when the working class has raised struggles and strikes that have put the Capitalists in trouble. We also see continuously how the Courts or the Labor Inspection are a mockery for the workers. The parliament systematically passes laws that are nothing more than the will of the dominant class disguised as general interest. All this means that the parliamentary state is a weapon in the hands of the capitalists to guarantee exploitation: it is "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848).
Some currents propose that we make cooperatives or become autonomous. What is the crude reality behind this proposal? As long as the mercantile-capitalist system is maintained, we produce for a market that cannot be controlled and therefore anarchy of production and crises of relative overproduction of capital are produced. The consequence is bankruptcy due to competition or submission to the conditions of the bank for obtaining credit, as well as the self-imposition of marathon working hours and insane rhythms of work. In short, we would become our own exploiters in order to pay the credit to the bank. For this reason, the currents that propose self-management and similar only propose self-exploitation and are accomplices and perpetuators of the capitalist system.
Others say that everything would be solved by nationalizing the big enterprises or certain sectors. But the parliamentary State is the instrument of the employers' class (and it cannot be anything else) and the only thing that nationalization does is to substitute a private boss for the boss State. Nationalizations are always in exchange for a rescue or indemnity so that capital remains intact to continue exploiting the working class. Moreover, normally it is nationalized paying much more than it is worth and when the cycle alternates, what had been nationalized is privatized again, but for much less than it is worth.
But someone will exclaim: we must claim for the "public sector", health, education, etc. Is it not true that in public health care doctors are paid bonuses for giving less sick leaves and using less equipment? Is it not true that we are sent to work sick by the public medical courts? Is it not equally true that in schools it is taught that property is sacred, that the natural order of things is that there are employers and employees, that children are educated to meet schedules and accept discipline at work? Then, it is clear that the working class is interested in being given free access to the best medical methods and treatments, in not being forced to work sick, in not educating our children to be good slaves and exploited tomorrow. Our question is: what does this have to do with whether the service is public or private? Absolutely nothing. It is perfect for the bourgeoisie that certain services are provided by the State in order to reduce costs and thus be able to pay less salary to each individual bourgeois. That's all there is to it. For this reason, when they want to reduce the costs of wages, they cut back on health and education. Thus, those who call for nationalization and defense of the public sector are only sweetening the class content of the bourgeois state and calling, consciously or unconsciously, to defend the enemy's weapon.
The interest of the bourgeoisie is that we should not be aware of the situation of exploitation and for this reason it tries to prevent us from using the exact terms: working class, proletariat, wageworkers. This is why they speak of the "middle classes" and the "people". But words have a meaning. What is the "people"? The "people" are the set of classes that were not part of the aristocracy or the church. This therefore includes the landowners, the bourgeoisie. Perhaps we are told that large companies and banks are excluded. But 80% of the enterprises have less than 10 workers. In these small enterprises is where the most direct, brutal, and stark exploitation takes place, where wages are the lowest and where not even contracts are made, nor are contributions paid, nor can they take sick leave. To speak of "people" is to encourage and embellish the crudest exploitation of the working class, it means convincing the workers to help their own exploiters, it means betraying and abandoning a great mass of wage workers. Exactly the same applies to the "middle classes" which are either small owners or are privileged sectors of the working class trying to defend their status quo. Both of them, today, defend their present situation of privilege and call on the proletariat to defend them with misleading concepts instead of attacking the foundations of exploitation, they are thus conservatives and reactionaries.
All the above speeches are usually accompanied by a request to vote for this or that parliamentary party or old or newly created electoral platform. In our epoch - in the epoch of imperialism in which the domination of finance capital is overwhelming - parliamentarism is only the play with which the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy are deluded, and they try to corrupt the working class. Parliamentarism is also a big business for those who occupy seats and manage municipal, regional, or central budgets. That is why they all lie more than they talk to get there, and they are all willing to do the opposite of what they promised.
A truly transforming and revolutionary movement can only be born out of this environment of parliamentary cretinism.
All exploiters are super patriots because they need to narcotize us so that we produce their profits, profits that they then evade and reinvest around the world. Thus our patriots exploit the working class of their own state and the rest of the world. One does not and cannot fight the exploiters with a supposed "true" patriotism because, as the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) says: "The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got". The working class is an international class and needs internationalism as the only oxygen to fight for its emancipation. Wage workers in other countries are our class brothers, our equals. Nationalism and patriotism are poison that divides the working class and calls us to the union with our exploiters: with the small, medium, and big bourgeoisie.
But should not something be done here and now? This is the usual question of the reformists to convince the proletarians to stop with the social revolutions. Certainly, something must be done here and now. But wanting to reform or preserve this society means maintaining the exploitation and slavery of the wage system, it means maintaining massive and growing unemployment, it means maintaining the wars that capitalism needs to overcome the crises of overproduction to which it is driven. No matter how many proletarian lives it costs!
The working class will not be able to undertake the radical and revolutionary transformation of the foundations of society if we are not capable first of fighting against the daily outrages to which we are subjected in the workplaces and if we are not capable of separating our immediate demands from the marsh of the small bourgeoisie. For this reason, what we have to do "here and now" is to defend ourselves from the outrages we experience in the workplaces, extending the struggle and with it the organization. The subsidized "unions" are union service companies, apparatuses at the service of the Employers. To oppose the abuses of the Capitalists the working class needs the Class Union: organization of immediate struggle not subsidized by the Employer nor by the State, without members released from work or professionals, in which nationalism and parliamentarism are excluded, promoting direct action and the extension of indefinite strikes and without minimum services.
We will be told that drastically reducing working hours, raising wages with strong linear increases, eliminating subcontracting, lowering the retirement age, etc. is too much. We respond that whoever reasons like that is a defender of slavery and that if capitalism survives by exploiting the working class... let capitalism explode!
And if capitalism collapses, what is the alternative? The alternative to capitalism is a society without classes, without money, without private property and without mercantile exchange: Communism. But hasn't communism already failed? We have always been told that in Russia and satellites, in China, Vietnam, Cuba or Venezuela there was socialism or communism. This is a huge lie because "there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848) and in all these places there has always been wage labor and commodities. This lie was denounced by the Communist Left since 1926 against the false theory of "socialism in one country". However, the October revolution of 1917 was indeed a politically proletarian revolution which overthrew the bourgeois provisional government, the tsarist restoration, established the dictatorship of the working class over the propertied classes, put an end to World War I and founded the Communist International. This great proletarian revolution could not develop economically without a revolution in Europe and it was retracted until it was buried by "Stalinism" which assassinated the old Bolshevik guard, dissolved the corpse of the Communist International in 1943, made a pact first with the National Socialist German Workers' Party (better known as the "Nazi" party) for the division of Eastern Europe (1939-1941) and then with the USA, England and France for the division of half of Europe and the world (1945), rehabilitated the Orthodox Church in Russia, entered the UN (the "thieves' kitchen", according to Lenin), etc.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Russian bloc is not the failure of communism or socialism: it is the failure of Russian capitalism dressed up as socialism, the failure of a great historical lie.
At present, we live in 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 destroying 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") 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.
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, 2023
www.pcielcomunista.org – twitter.com/pcielcomunista