Il Partito Comunista 433

In this historical phase—eighty years after the immense tragedy of the Second Imperialist War—the specter of an international conflict once again looms on the horizon. For us Marxists, it marks the inevitable culmination of capitalism’s general crisis: a necessary convulsion to resolve its contradictions, wipe out debts and credits accumulated through the profit cycle, and destroy the surplus of commodities that can no longer be absorbed—including the surplus of human labour-power. This is all done in order for the cycle to restart once more the infernal loop of accumulation, driven by production.

For proof, we need only look to history. There has been no economic expansion since the Industrial Revolution that rivals the one unleashed after 1945.

Communists do not oppose war out of pacifistic moralism. They understand that inter-imperialist conflicts are a catastrophe for the global proletariat—unless it is broken at the onset.

Such a conflict will bring untold devastation, amplified by the destructive capabilities of our time. If humanity could endure this great tribulation, the resurgence of a powerful revolutionary class movement will be more difficult than ever. Harder still, the creation of a movement capable of dismantling the profit system and the entire machinery that sustains it—chief among them, the State itself.

Our doctrine exposes the root contradictions of capitalism. We have no room for petty-bourgeois pacifism. Instead, we call to turn imperialist war into class war.

Without this, peace remains an impossibility. Naturally, this is a projection—no one has a crystal ball to foresee the exact moment.

It doesn’t matter that the populations in the imperialist centers are far from a “war sentiment.” It doesn’t matter that aspirations for peace currently prevails among the majority of society.

Once the financial and economic crisis drags both the proletariat and the middle class (who have hitherto thrived in the shade of capitalism) into misery, it’ll be easy to find “enemies” to direct the armies against. Schools, media outlets, and so on will fervently compete with each other to incite defense of sacred borders. They will smear any who seek to overthrow the national order, who violate the freedom and independence of the European homelands.

We’re already getting a taste of this in our daily lives. War hysteria is obsessively pushed, and “enemies” already named. They are those who supposedly threaten “our way of life, “our” customs, and “our” civilisation.

Even now, with that horizon barely in view, the hounds are already loose against the usual suspects—the enemies of the beloved democratic façade.

This is a fact. Yet it does not, and must not, disturb our revolutionary work.

The drumbeats of jingoism have already taken hold of the media. Any who try to push back do so from within the bounds of impotent petty-bourgeois pacifism.

Derelict Europe, a hollow construct born of feeble national bourgeoisies, has already lined up against the so-called enemy in the East. They dream up tales of a supranational “European” army to repel an attack that is no more than a phantom. All the while, the postwar US led military alliance begins to fray, as American forces pivot toward the Pacific to confront the rising Asian giant—dominant in both production and exports.

Evidently, even Europe’s bureaucrats can sense where the next fronts will be and are now scrambling to make sure they’re ready.

While the United States gears its war effort toward the Pacific, the burden of containing Eastern Europe is shifted onto the shoulders of the European powers.

Of course, without real backing from the US, the task is impossible. Any talk of handling it independently, as dreamed up by the French and British governments, is pure delusion.

A separate matter altogether is the rearmament of Germany. This is the real game-changing development that upends the entire European balance between the US, Europe, and Russia.

It’s common knowledge that the bourgeois need to “defend” the borders in the East has unleashed a warmongering frenzy in the European states.

Thus, the unmistakable signs of the coming imperialist slaughter are already present in today’s situation:

the financial crisis, the crisis of production (more and more shoddily poorly disguised by accounting tricks used to inflate GDP figures), and the trade war—which historically tends to precede military conflict.

We have seen this unfold in recent days.

All it took was for a raving fanatic—the leader of a declining but still dominant global power—to formally announce plans to pull back funding from Europe, while once again brandishing the threat of tariffs to curb imports undermining the country’s economy. In response, the EU descended into panic, rushing to present its own program to defend domestic production, albeit with uncertain prospects.

Oddly enough, the devastating loss of cheap Russian energy was met not with protest, but with near-celebration and then promptly swept under the rug.

The United States threatened a full-blown trade war by announcing aggressive tariffs against both allies and foes. Although most were ultimately scaled back to a more measured 10% and selectively applied—except in the case of China. China is the US’s true commercial, political, and military adversary and tariffs reached as high as 140% on a wide range of products.

At the heart of it all lies the imperative to contain the imperialist giant that now poses an objective threat to the waning supremacy of the US.

Politically or militarily, it makes little difference  that the measures have been paused for “everyone else” for 90 days. What comes after remains entirely unclear, even to the President himself.

But this is insignificant to us.

What truly matters is that the international trade agreements, once treated as eternal commandments of capitalist order, have been unceremoniously torn up. Meanwhile, we see a world increasingly destabilised by ongoing wars, mounting threats, and tensions ready to erupt, disrupting the global balance after eighty years of relative peace among the imperialist powers.

As for all the other states, their fate will be determined by the shifting tactical circumstances and needs of American capitalism.

Following the 2008 subprimes crisis—the worst financial crisis since the Second World War—capitalism has lurched between recoveries and fresh crises, each arriving more quickly than the last. Yet all of this has occurred within a framework of relative military stability, where even the many bloody wars never truly threatened the overall structure established after the world war.

Even the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is often seen as the closest the world came to nuclear war, did not pose a genuine risk of a new global conflict—though at the time it felt, to many, as if war were just a step away.

But above all, the decades that followed marked a period of relative peace within the social sphere of the capitalist metropolises.

Wars would of course break out, but only in the periphery. They weren’t less destructive or devastating, but they were kept at a distance, contained so as not to disrupt the imperialist core.

International treaties, the legal fictions of a so-called supranational order upheld by impotent institutions, placed an illusory “legal” seal on an already fragile military peace.

Likewise, in the metropolises of Capital, the working class and the other subordinate strata of the social body have placed themselves the complete subordination of the national States. The flare-ups of social insurrection that characterized the post-war period, up until the storming of heaven by the October Revolution, no longer appear on the historical scene.

After the Second World War, as the global situation gradually stabilised and spheres of influence became firmly established, social struggle grew steadily weaker and more infantile. This first occurred under the weight of Stalinism, and then through political and trade union opportunism. Exceptional moments did break through—such as the uprisings of 1968 or the Polish shipyard strikes—briefly reminded the bourgeoisie where the real threat to their dominance lies.

The lesson the bourgeoisie learned was not in vain.

The capitalist state has always managed to defuse and eventually silence every attempt at revolt from the working class. Even those that violently erupted in the peripheries were grinded down into pulp.

The war in Southeast Asia and the continuous clashes in the Middle East and Africa denote the shifting fractures and realignments at the edges of imperial influence. Even Europe’s own conflict which resulted in Yugoslavia’s fragmentation took place against a backdrop of financial instability. Yet none of these crises, despite their severity, were decisive enough to trigger the collapse of the capitalist system.

That is why, until now, the idea of a generalized war among the imperialist powers never appeared as a truly imminent event. In this phase, however, it feels closer than ever.

The fate of the capitalist process appears sealed.

War fronts are multiplying: from the invasion of Ukraine, to the Middle East, where the genocide in Palestine gives way to rising tensions with a nuclear-aspiring Iran, and to a Syria dismembered and under foreign occupation. In the Pacific, the question of Taiwan stands at the heart of an impending confrontation between China and the United States.

It is only the international proletariat, stateless and without borders, that can and must halt the madness of capitalism’s drive to war.

Ceasefire Negotiations and the Prospects of Fake Bourgeois Peace

Shortly after his election as president of the United States, the Republican candidate appears to have overturned the entire architecture of foreign and domestic policy pursued by his Democratic predecessors.

The apparatus and institutions of the postwar period, created to ensure free trade and monetary stability, have been challenged and openly denounced.

In particular, “free trade,” a veritable trade dogma for the states of the democratic West, has been denounced by the new administration. This has been done with the risk of aggravating the economic crisis gripping the economies of the various European states.

Thrown (yes, thrown) into panic, the European states see this measure as a dramatic deterioration of their economies, which is precisely based on the export guaranteed by free international trade.

The rules and agreements established in the postwar GATT made the Trente Glorieuses, the famous “thirty glorious years,” possible. But now, they have been shattered by the global crisis of capitalism and the profound change in the balance of power among states.

Likewise, increased financial imbalance has been politically accompanied by the emergence of new vigorous and belligerent regional players: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazi, India, and especially the emergence of a new superpower, China. Meanwhile, the old imperialist states are declining.

As far as Europe is concerned, the military alliance system that ensured imperialist peace for all the decades after World War II has simultaneously broken down.

Until yesterday, European states were forced under the protective NATO umbrella. NATO is itself an expression of the powerful US imperialism, and any “defense” from any external aggressor (!) was entrusted to it. Now, the European states are groping for an alternative that can overcome the limitations of their national armies. The certainty that most of the costs of maintaining this huge supranational apparatus will have to fall on their own economies poses a very difficult problem for the band of dreary and incompetent officials governing the so-called United Europe.

These profligate figures seek miraculous recipes for finding financial resources all strictly based on increasing state debt. This is ironic given that strict debt control was an indispensable principle of the financial practices of the EU. Sometimes, this debt control meant social slaughter, which was passed off as a miracle cure for the national economies of Southern Europe.

Likewise, the European States are assiduous about setting up an infamous nuclear deterrent, which was guaranteed ad abundantiam by the US. The only European states that possess nuclear devices are France and the UK. They will never ever share their arsenals with the other states in this new “coalition of the willing,” which the shaky upcoming alliance has been called in the EU, with unintentional humor.

There will be another imperialist war as it is the only way that the US can eliminate its stratospheric debt to the rest of the world. In this impending conflict, there will be fronts on which states will have to take sides. It is on the Western Front that the derelict EU will have to align with, for better or worse.

US imperialism accounted for 40% of the world’s industrial output in 1956. Today, it has seen its relative weight on a global scale steadily decline to just 16.7% in 2018. This percentage continues to decline.

We see the same trend in Russia. Russia,  as a part of the USSR, was worth almost 13% in 1960, yet in 2018 was worth only 4%. This is the same weight as Japan, but Russia today is far behind Japan, Germany, and France in terms of technology.

All the great European powers of yesterday are now mid-sized powers and, like the United States and Russia, are on the road to decline.

In addition, the United States has also been facing major imbalances for several years, not to say decades. One such imbalance is the large budget deficit that by 2024 had exceeded $1.8 trillion, which is enough to make the European states’ $900 billion trade balance deficit look trivial.

To get an idea of the size of the trade deficit, consider that this figure exceeds all Japanese exports ($718 billion in 2023), despite Japan being the world’s fourth largest exporter.

This trade deficit is compounded by a balance of payments deficit. Hence, there arises the need to cut spending and impose customs duties on imports.

The problem is that the trade deficit is a structural fact, and that it causes the offshoring which has allowed American companies to increase their profit rate.

The current US administration is trying to bring this trade deficit under control with both threatened tariffs and incredible tax advantages for companies that set up their production in the territory of the States.

This measure, which abolishes the dogma of the free market and competition—a fiction of financial imperialism—has no chance of reversing the productive decline of the USA in the current stage of the capitalist crisis. This is also because the imposition of 25% tariffs on Mexican products or on processing companies will further destabilize American firms that relocated to low-cost countries to boost their profit rates, which are now drastically collapsing.

It is a fact that in the past twenty-five years, the economic center of gravity has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

This is where the main economic development for capital has taken place over the past 30 years.

It is the prodigious accumulation of capital in China and Southeast Asia during this period that has allowed global capitalism to survive to the present day and enabled the United States, Japan, and Germany to reap huge excess profits and escape the collapse of the profit rate for a time.

But in this final stage of capitalism, Chinese imperialism is itself affected by the crisis of overproduction.

The result, of course, is the emergence of a fierce competitor and a new global imperialism that challenges American leadership.

And this is the new big problem facing US imperialism.

In short, the US superpower is in decline and its leadership is being challenged by China, the second superpower that will soon surpass the US.

Europe is composed of medium-sized powers that are also in relative decline.

As we have said, the geopolitical center of gravity is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the United States intends to loosen—but never abandon—its presence in Europe.

Some data on the subject:

in the late 1980s, US forces in Europe numbered 315,000, but after the collapse of the USSR and the disarmament of Europe, the Americans drastically reduced their military presence to the point that in 2019 the US armed forces numbered just 65,000 soldiers.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they rose to 100,000 men.

This is 35,000 military personnel who have been added on a rotational basis.

To reinforce the notion of the need for European defense against alleged Russian expansionism, at a NATO meeting in Warsaw last February, the US Secretary of Defense stated that Europe cannot assume that the presence of American troops on the continent “will last forever.”

This and other claims were reported and exaggerated by the European press. For the sake of its vested interests, the European press must hammer on the need for an appropriation of 800 billion—of course all “in debt”—to be found by sacrificing all social spending.

At this historical stage, it seems clear that for the United States, the goal is to drastically reduce its presence from a theater of operations that has become secondary in order to strengthen its presence in Asia.

American imperialism obviously cannot reduce its military presence in the China Sea, or even afford not to actively support Taiwan, which occupies a strategic position.

If the United States abandoned Taiwan, it would lose all credibility with South Korea and Japan, and with all Asian states in general.

Worse, they would leave the field militarily, politically, and economically open to China, which, today, is America’s main adversary.  Thus, abandoning Taiwan or reducing presence in the China Sea are manifestly impossible events.

That being said, to say that Europe, with all the NATO bases scattered throughout the states and extra-territorial US bases, may be abandoned by the United States, is a stretch.

Previous Democratic administrations have worked vigorously to increase military pressure on Russia. For its part, Russia, after the collapse that culminated in the Yeltsin era, is a “lower-ranking” imperialist power—though one equipped with a formidable nuclear and missile arsenal. However, given the current economic, financial, and productive conditions, the current US administration needs to reestablish relations with Russia both to resolve the conflict in Ukraine—which has been dragging on for three years and has no reasonable way out—and to address other global crises, primarily in the Middle East.

Also, as already mentioned, to stem Chinese expansionism. The crises are multiplying and deepening.

The choice made by a section of the American bourgeoisie, which has prevailed at this moment, was to therefore change its perspective of its massive presence in Europe.

The prospect that America intends to “wrest” Russia from China’s costly embrace, put forward by certain sections of the press, is even more remote and unlikely. China, meanwhile, has made no secret of its desire for Siberia’s riches.

At present, China and Russia’s fates appear to be inextricably linked, although it is not immediately clear how this current “partnership” will evolve into an alliance in the future.

But the “historical vector” that indicates the direction of the two imperialisms, one in decline and one on the rise, would seem to be indisputable.

Our materialist doctrine indicates that the present historical phase is developing in the direction of a general crisis of the capitalist mode of production.

This is a general observation, but in the Russian Federation, this trend, albeit limited in scope, is reinforced by a three-year war.

Catastrophic reports have been circulating for some time about its economy, its finances, and its productive potential.

It is not certain how much of this is the result of Western propaganda predicting Russia’s imminent collapse.

However, public data show a state of general difficulty and a very difficult financial situation.

The rising inflation rate and low interest rates to finance the war effort, alongside the depreciation of the ruble against other currencies—such as the dollar and the Chinese yuan, which currently belongs to one of Russia’s essential partners—are undeniable facts.

Even on a strictly military level, the recent successful counter offensives are losing momentum.

The losses are significant and have forced much more limited advances.

At this stage of the war, the main effort has been focused on the very small area of the Kursk Oblast that was previously invaded. Kursk has today been reduced to a minimal front after the Russian military strategy decided to liquidate it, thereby easing pressure on other areas considered critical. To name just one, operations in the highly critical area of Pokrovsk—a true strategic hub for holding an extensive section of the front line by the exhausted Ukrainian army and a heavily fortified bastion—are almost suspended.

Yet the collapse of that stronghold would truly undermine the entire defensive apparatus of the Donetsk Oblast, and would be an almost fatal blow to Ukraine.

How long Russia’s efforts to maintain the war could last is unknown, even if the current American president has boasted about a “secret report” from the CIA that sets the limit at 2026.

But here we are in the realm of the most vulgar propaganda.

However, the need to put a stop to this is clear, and the extremely difficult talks for a ceasefire are continuing, though with difficulty.

When and how they will end is another question.

The unfortunate Ukrainian state, squeezed between many neighboring wolves ready to take advantage of its dismemberment, seems to have a fate that is already sealed.

The powerless EU, a political and military dwarf, is pushing for rearmament—its not-so-hidden goal being to revive its depleted productive capacity, naturally financed entirely through debt. This follows the blueprint of the United States in the period immediately preceding World War II, which allowed them to unleash their immense power.

But today’s weak and divided Europe is not the powerful America of that time, which was emerging from the general capitalist crisis.

The UK and other European countries have imagined a “coalition of the willing,” which Canada and Turkey could also join. But this fanciful alliance will never achieve military unity, as that presupposes a unified state.

The fantasized “United States of Europe” is a dream—or a nightmare, depending on your point of view—that is totally unachievable, outside of history, impossible to realize by bourgeoisies that have completely exhausted their progressive cycle for centuries and are incapable of going beyond convenient military or economic alliances.

Each is ready to denounce these alliances if better opportunities arise, each is reluctant to submit to anyone but a powerful master who has the strength to keep them in line.

Let’s set aside the hysteria of the Baltic states, three nobodies the confused and wavering situation of the EU has brought to ridiculous visibility. Germany, the UK, and France are heading down the path of rearmament in disarray, without even a shred of a common policy beyond the endlessly reheated line: “we must help Ukraine resist the invader.”

This is very little for those who delude themselves into thinking they represent an alternative to US imperialism, against the Russian Federation and China.

While the bourgeois states prepare for a future of further wars and mourning, the proletarians of Russia and Ukraine are slaughtering each other in a bloody war that is supposedly in the name of the “fatherland.” In reality it is only for the interests of the national bourgeoisie.

The proletarians of Europe are equally oppressed by their bourgeoisies, and will be even more so until the eve of war.

The task of communists is as clear and unambiguous as it was on the eve of 1918: “to transform the war between states into a war between classes.”

The Party does not express any particular inclination towards any of the warring sides, but brands them all as products of the capitalist world, which pits class brothers against each other, brothers beyond national divisions and “homelands.”

That is why we hate with the same hatred all states that fight the “holy war” without distinction. The flag of the communists is not that of any state, but that of proletarian internationalism.

The Decree on Security we have already written about in No. 430 of our newspaper has become operational.

In particular, “road blocking ” in the case of an unauthorized demonstration is now a crime.

Thus, participants in an unauthorized demonstration will be criminally prosecuted when the procession encroaches on the roadway and creates traffic impairment.

It has also greenlit body-cameras on police officers’ uniforms in order to record those who resist and resist charges. Yet, police officers are still granted legal protection when proven to be abusive.

It also serves to identify and card those who express dissent or distribute unwelcome material.

This activity has always existed, but it has now been made far easier and will be much more widespread.

Soon we will see the outlawing of organizations that do not fit within the framework of the regime’s institutions.

We wrote four months ago:

“This is how the State and the bosses forge the legal framework: they seek to obstruct and suppress any working-class action that falls outside the control of the ‘official’ unions. It’s no surprise that it’s the right-wing government who is tasked with carrying out this ‘liberticidal’ work. Left-wing governments will later benefit from this when they are called upon to do their part. It’s also unsurprising that Italy’s ‘official’ union confederations have responded weakly, without any significant mobilization. This has effectively signaled a tacit acceptance of these measures.”

However, the aim is to ensure their presence and retention among workers.

On October 1st, 2024, 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at 36 ports across the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast went on strike after negotiations between the union and the US Maritime Alliance (USMX), the industry association composed of shipping lines, port operators, and other employers in the longshore industry, broke down. This marked the first time since 1977 that the ILA has struck. The ILA demanded substantial increases in compensation, and has consistently opposed automation at the ports where its members work. Contract negotiations were supposed to begin in June. However, the ILA claimed that it had discovered that APM Terminals, and its parent company Maersk, had implemented an automated gate system. This allowed trucks to move containers in and out of the port without ILA clerks or checkers, canceling negotiations. The bourgeois press was keenly interested in this event for a short time, though they quickly lost interest when negotiations resumed following the ILA’s top leadership ending the strike after only three days, quickly settling on monetary demands.

The international proletariat cannot afford to let this event be sent down a memory-hole. The ILA’s members occupy a significant position in the capitalist production process, for reasons that should be clear—its size and geography, that is, the significance of the US to the global economy, the extent of its jurisdiction, and the significance of the ports in question to the United States economy. Its activities must be watched with keen interest in order to assess the state of the class struggle. We must therefore clarify what is at issue, and what is at stake.

Capitalist production exists in a complex web of global commerce; commodities move into and out of the United States at various stages of the production process, much of it moves on ships. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 22 of the 25 top ports by dry bulk tonnage and 21 of the top 25 container ports by twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) fall within the jurisdiction of the ILA. The members of the ILA therefore occupy a critical position in the production process, and for that reason, they wield significant power.

The ILA maintains that it is opposed to automation, which it ostensibly fears will put its members out of work. This is not an unfounded fear; after all, the introduction of ever-greater levels of automation displaces ever-greater numbers of workers. The bourgeoisie are in control of production, giving them the power to determine what technology gets introduced. Moreover, the bourgeoisie are in general compelled by the laws of capitalist production to increase the degree to which machinery is substituted for human labor in the production of commodities. All of this renders union resistance to the introduction of new technology a fool’s errand, if it is not aimed at a proportional and general reduction of labor time while maintaining wage levels.

In June of 2024, the ILA’s officialdom canceled the negotiations scheduled to begin that month with USMX. This was due to the alleged discovery that automation had been introduced in several ports. The ILA maintains that this technology threatens to displace its members and render them unemployed and/or impoverished. The union ultimately struck on October 1^st, but called it off after three days, as we have said, and resumed negotiations. This was in part because it did not have a strike fund! Moreover, the ILA also maintains that it is not opposed to modernization. Yet what is modernization if not the increasing substitution of human labor with machinery, i.e., automation?

The last round of negotiations between the ILA and USMX was in 2018, when they signed a six-year contract extension. The ILA’s officialdom knew that this contract had a definite lifespan. Furthermore, at the time that it was negotiating this contract, technology like what the ILA alleges Maersk—through its port-operator subsidiary APM Terminals—introduced in violation of its contract had already been introduced in many ports around the world. This included the US ports where the ILA had jurisdiction!

In our leaflet The Need for an International Organisation of Port Workers (The Communist Party No. 6, June 2017), we highlighted struggles by the ILA against automation. Are we to believe that Harold Daggett, then and now the International President of the ILA, so quickly forgot about this issue, only to remember it six years later? No, this clearly points to a more serious problem with the ILA, with the AFL–CIO, and with unions across the globe. These organs of proletarian struggle have been perverted. They were formed to defend the immediate economic interests of the class against the intensification of capitalist exploitation, to ensure that the proletariat has the means not only to survive, but to fulfill its revolutionary destiny. Now, they stymie that struggle.

Apart from wages, which by all reports has been settled, what is ostensibly at issue in the conflict between the ILA and USMX is the introduction of automated gates at several ports subject to the ILA’s contract with USMX. There are a number of actions that must be performed in order for cargo to move through a port. When a truck arrives at the port, it must pass through the terminal gate before it can unload its cargo. In order to be admitted into the terminal, the identity of the driver and the firm employing them must be verified, as must the identity of the cargo that truck is delivering to or receiving from the port. In addition, if the truck is carrying cargo to be shipped, the owner of the cargo must have a valid contract with a shipper to accept the goods and place them on a ship. The compliance of the container and its cargo with relevant laws, as well as the completion of any relevant financial transactions, must also be verified. If the truck is departing the terminal with foreign cargo, that cargo must have cleared customs. This process is currently done by human clerks, who are ILA members, and the introduction of automation technology threatens their jobs.

Shipping is a business. The container shipping lines do not move containers out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather in order to make a profit. Thus, before they will accept a load of cargo, they must be sure that the load has a place to go and know when it needs to be there and that the intended recipient is willing and able to receive the cargo when it gets there. A container ship makes money by selling space on its deck, and cargo that isn’t going anywhere or can’t be unloaded reduces the space it has available to sell. The terminal operators are also in the business of making money. Therefore, they will not allow a load whose departure is not assured to enter.

Is the ship delayed? Is it due for departure before the cargo can be processed and loaded?  While there are warehouses at the ports, they have a finite amount of space and are often already full. Thus, there is also the question of whether there’s room for the container. If the cargo can’t be accepted for any reason, it will have to be taken to an inland warehouse. As the cargo has already been sold to a customer, who is expecting delivery by a date and time certain (as modern, just-in-time production methods make scheduling cargo shipments extremely inflexible) the cargo’s owner is now losing money. The owner must now pay twice for the cargo to be delivered, and their contract with their customer will contain penalties for late delivery.

The cargo owner must now negotiate for another truck to get it and bring it to the port, which may take days or weeks, and for another shipping contract to get it loaded onto another ship. As the availability of truck and ship must coincide, the fact that that the law limits the total number of hours a driver is permitted to be on the road in a given time period, as well as the number of consecutive hours they is permitted to drive before being required to stop and rest, becomes a significant complicating factor. This law is increasingly enforced by means of computerized logging devices, which increases the likelihood that a driver who violates the law will be caught and fined. It also increases the chance that the driver’s employer will be fined. Even when the driver is nominally freelance, the capitalists that require the truck driver’s services are unlikely to contract with him directly. Instead, they prefer to deal with other capitalists who provide them with the services of such “independent” “owner-operators”. The driver is therefore strongly disincentivized to exceed these limits, as they will not only be punished by the state, but their employer will also punish him. Of course, they will also be punished if they fail to violate this law at their employer’s insistence, which creates a perverse incentive.

In the case of unloading a ship, the truck enters the port empty, but the driver must still know what he’s expected to pick up, and similar challenges arise. Is the ship in port? Is the cargo unloaded? If not, how long will it take before it is? Where is the driver taking it? How long have they been on the road? When moving cargo, you are, in effect, solving a large series of equations, these questions are the variables in those questions, and it is precisely in solving these equations that the art of logistics consists.

The electronic computer is, if nothing else, a magnificent calculating machine, capable of processing large amounts of data quickly. It was invented precisely to solve such complicated problems, and the algorithms employed by the programs that it runs have undergone many decades of testing and refinement. In order to ensure that the programs are able to fulfill their purpose, the users must be able to rely upon the accuracy and timeliness of the data they need. 

Where it’s feasible to introduce such a system, its introduction is guaranteed. As Marx explained “[f]ree competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.” This is why we have seen the introduction of these technologies elsewhere, such as the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of New York. 

It strains credulity to claim that Daggett and the rest of the ILA’s international executive are unaware of this. The obvious conclusion is that the whole thing is a charade. They cannot permit the ILA rank-and-file to wield a real weapon—indefinite strikes terrorizing the profit-hungry capitalists that run the port—with which to defend themselves. 

But even if one can fool some people all the time, and all the people some of the time, one cannot fool all the people all the time. There must be many within the ILA who see through the charade and recognize the true game: the ILA’s international executive conceives of itself as being at the head of a power bloc within bourgeois society, and is playing the game of bourgeois politics. Instead, the view must turn 180 degrees, to that of united, non-compromising class struggle. With the leadership of its class political party, armed with its scientific program of communist revolution, the proletariat can re-conquer the trade union movement and revitalize its organs of economic struggle. Under the banner of a united class union front, with the International Communist Party at its head, the miserable conditions of modern life can and will be abolished!

Following the complete Italian reproduction of our fundamental text The Party Facing the Unions in the Age of Imperialism, published in issue No. 10 of 1982 of our magazine Comunismo. We will now outline the parts of it that describe the history of the Party’s labor union activity starting from the period immediately after WW2.

These quotations highlight the continuity of the Party’s union activity, which persisted in spite of the different circumstances it was developed in. Over time, these circumstances produced tactical formulations. These were both long-term and immediate indications addressed to the class which our militants engaged in labor union activity translated into action.

This study will concentrate on the Party’s intervention in labor union issues in Italy. It is in Italy that it became possible for the party to develop such tactics. While this occurs in an extremely reduced form, it is nevertheless an activity that gives great lessons and is rich in significance.

The effect of the negative events that followed the defeat of the powerful proletarian movement of the first post-war period allowed “the worldwide transition from the class unions of the first post-war period to the “tricolor” (nationalistic, patriotic) unions of the second post-war period and of today.”

“[…] The precise trajectory of this involution should be studied with reference to each capitalistically advanced country. This is how the trade union question should be addressed in general: at a world scale, by analyzing the characteristics of the current trade unions in each country. Or, at the very least, in each geopolitical area the planet can be divided into. This is to arrive at a tactical solution that cannot but be diversified according to the particular situations of the various countries.

Such an analysis, however, is impossible today given our limited forces. This is because we cannot simply rely only on existing written materials, as well as the fact that we lack the direct presence of the Party in various countries.

In fact, tactics are also the result of the direct experience that emerges from practical work. This, or at least the possibility of this, allows one to perceive the situation’s fundamental features. Besides the nature and specific characteristics of the trade union organizations with which one must work, most important are the proletariat’s attitude toward the unions and in general its attitude and predisposition to struggle. This can only be correctly grasped by the physical presence of militants.

This does not exclude that it is possible to outline general tendencies valid for the whole of the capitalistically developed countries which—even if they do not delineate a specific tactic that is valid everywhere—allow us to emphasize the classical perspective lines of revolutionary Marxism. Such an outline also allows us to exclude that the dynamics of the future fire of the worldwide working class might follow unknown and original paths; paths that would modify the general practice of class conflict as Marxism describes it.

It is not by chance that our classic text Revolutionary Party and Economic Action (1951) very clearly states:

‘Apart from the contingent question of whether or not in such and such a country the revolutionary communist party should participate in the work of given types of union—or keep out of it—the elements of the question recapitulated so far lead to the conclusion that any prospect of a general revolutionary movement will depend on the presence of the following essential factors:

1) a large, numerous proletariat of pure wage-earners, 2) a sizeable movement of associations with an economic content comprising a large part of the proletariat, 3) a strong revolutionary class party, which, composed of a militant minority of workers, must have been enabled, in the course of the struggle to oppose, broadly and effectively, its own influence within the union movement to that of the bourgeois class and bourgeois power.’”

Since the time of the First International, the Party has recognized that “[…] communists must enter the unions to transform them into conscious instruments of struggle for the fall of capitalism.

[…] Communists must form everywhere, in the unions and factory councils, communist fractions. With the help of these fractions, they will take over the union movement and lead it.”

The Communist Party, with Marx and Lenin, in the Second and Third International, has always considered intervention in proletarian economic organizations to be central.

The Italian Communist Left and the Communist Party of Italy it led also acted in this way. Within the ranks of the CGL after World War I, the militant communist workers were organized in a fraction of the union, in the struggle against the reformist leaders. These were the same leaders who later became accomplices of fascism for the defeat of the proletarian movement and the sinking of its organizations.

Balance sheet of the Communist Left in the Union Field at the Beginning of the Second Post-war Period, on the Red Thread of Revolutionary Marxism

“[…] the Left places the unionism born from the resistance and democratic anti-fascism in an antithetical position to the first post-war period.

[…] “Tricolor” unionism was the worthy heir of fascist national-syndicalism, just as democracy, re-established by the bombers and cannons of the Allies, could only have been the continuation of fascist totalitarian reformism.”

The Party defined these post-war unions, as “organizations tailored on the Mussolini model.” We went on to quote a previous text that said

“[…] The salvation of the working class, its new historic rise after tremendous struggles and hardships […]does not lie with any of these bodies.”

We then commented:

“Implicit in this statement is the assertion that no matter how one would approach the CGIL from the tactical view (whether to work inside or outside), the attitude could not be similar to that of the communists towards the red unions after World War I.”

What exactly is the great and substantial difference between the red unions of the first period of imperialism and of the first post-war period, and the current ones?

though directed by reformist opportunism, the former were unions forged in the process of the progressive organization of the proletariat as a class fighting against capitalism. This was done in an attempt to overcome the divisions of factory, territory, and category.

They arose in the beginning of the century from the impulse of powerful class movements. They contained various political components—all conflicting with each other and allowed to act autonomously—that were calling out to the proletariat and had solid roots in it.

Certainly, the reformist and counter-revolutionary fraction had held the reins until then.

“The ‘unitary CGIL,’ born in ’45, has nothing in common with these features, besides the organizational form.

Instead of being a class organization controlled by opportunism, it is a union set up by a bloc of political forces united in national unity. Openly bourgeois and self-styled workers’ parties belong to it, all under the aegis of American imperialism and the blessing of the Church….”

In spite of all this, the Party did not deny then the need for communists to work within the post-war unions, in particular the need to work within the CGIL.

“Therefore, in order to decide whether or not to work in a trade union, it’s not enough to identify the historical tendencies of the trade union form and verify which are attributable to the organization in question.

That is, it is not enough to deduce the tactics from the political nature of this body. Above all else, it is necessary to see the attitude of the workers towards it.

As materialists, we do not attribute to the workers enrolled in a union the consciousness of what that union historically represents to Marxist analysis.

If the workers, or the majority of them (especially the most combative workers), see themselves represented in a given union, if they see a particular union as the instrument of their defense, and if they fight for it and with it, then our battle station has to be in that union.

This was precisely the inclination of the most combative working masses in Italy in the post-war years. Thus, the Party decided to work within the CGIL as an organized fraction.”

In 1951 we wrote:

“The union situation today differs from that of 1921 not only because of the lack of a strong Communist Party, but also because of the progressive elimination of the content of union action. Basic activity has been substituted for bureaucratic functions:

assemblies, elections, party fractions in unions and so on, from professional officials to elected leaders, etc.

Defended by the capitalist class so as to defend its interests, this elimination results—on the same historical line—in the following factors:

CLN-type corporatism, Di Vittorio or Pastore-type unionism.

This process cannot be declared as irreversible.

If the capitalists’ offensive is faced by a strong Communist Party, if the proletariat is torn away from the (syndicalist) CLN tactics, if it is torn away from the influence of current Russian politics, at time X or in country Y, classist unions can be reborn either ex novo or from the (perhaps violent) conquest of the current ones.

This cannot be historically ruled out.

Certainly those unions would be formed in a situation of advance, or of conquest of power” (Letter from 01/05/1951).

By classist unions we do not mean an economic organization necessarily controlled by the Party, but an organism in which there is the possibility of activity and movement for a fraction organized within it.

Putting the alternative in these terms, the Party could certainly not assume a cautious attitude. We will not wait for the knot to unravel throughout the course of events. Instead, where its very weak worker base allowed it, the Party gave the natural and obvious disposition to organize into a fraction within the CGIL.

“[T]he union cannot remain indifferent to the party which never gives up willingly to work there, which distinguishes it clearly from all other political groups who claim to be of the ‘opposition.’

The Party acknowledges that today, its work in the unions can be done but sporadically; it does not renounce however to enter into the economic organisations, and even to gain leadership as soon as the numerical relationship between its members and sympathisers on the one hand, the union members or a given branch on the other is suitable, so long as the union in question does not exclude all possibility of autonomous class action.”

(Characteristic Theses of the Party, 1951)

Why the CGIL and not the other “tricolor” or corporatist unions?

“[Because] the CGIL gathered the most combative part of the Italian proletariat, which saw it as a ‘red’ union, an acronym, the symbol of a tradition not yet extinguished.

[…] It was this state of mind of the Italian proletariat—and nothing else—that led us to consider the possibility of a violent reconquest of the CGIL with class leadership.

This reconquest could not be gradual, but would only be possible when a powerful proletarian movement took place, which would sweep away the opportunist leaders and break the structure they had set up.”

The Party referred to the tradition of the red CGL, which opportunists could not openly disavow at that time:

“In order to control and organize Italian workers, the opportunists had in fact been forced to refer to the words of the glorious traditions of past proletarian struggles, to wave the red flag every now and then.

We saw a positive element in this.

In order to fool the Italian workers it was necessary to wave the red flag. That is, the Italian workers were still moved by their flag.

For a large part of the Italian proletariat, the CGIL represented that symbol.

“Under that flag the workers unleashed strong strikes, sometimes going beyond the directives given by the opportunist leaders. With formidable courage, they clashed with the police who often proved unable to contain their fury. They faced dismissals, beatings, jail, and left hundreds of dead on the streets and public squares.”

However, in the advanced phase of imperialism, the conquest of that organization could only be understood as the destruction of the entire organizational framework of a union which is now tied by a thousand threads to the institutions of the class enemy. This destruction would have to come under the pressure  of the activity of a class resurrected for true anti-capitalist and anti-opportunist social struggle.

The eventual future ‘red’ CGIL could only have risen from the ruins of the one that the communists were facing.

[…] Our action was constantly based on a tactic linked to the general principles of the Party. Each time, we applied it to individual situations.

No action of sabotage or boycott of the union struggles and strikes organized and controlled by the unions. Participation in the unions while constantly denouncing the anti-worker policy of the union centers. Indicating to the proletariat the general class objectives on which to fight in order to unify all workers across all categories. Indication of the class methods of struggle, first and foremost the general strike without time limits and without notice. Constant connection of these immediate indications of objectives and struggle with the ultimate political aim of Party action.”

The Most Significant Struggles of the Party

“Our incessant work of denouncing union opportunism was always accompanied by constant participation in the workers’ struggles. Whenever the slightest opportunity arose, we attempted to organize workers’ forces on a class level in open opposition to the central unions.”

In the early ‘60s, the Party created the first specific organs for orienting its union activity.

“In November 1961, Tranviere Rosso was released. This was a bulletin of the ICP tram drivers within CGIL. The first issue said:

‘We international communists continue the glorious party of Livorno, the militant traditions of the union, and the proletarian organizations throughout the class. We have not ceased for a moment to challenge the current union leaders who come from opportunist parties, nor their ruinous work that destroys the class union.’

The Tramviere Rosso was the instrument of agitation and propaganda for our very small group of tram workers. It reported correspondence on specific problems of the trade,  as well as reports of meetings and strikes. It always exalted the combativeness of the workers and highlighted the betrayals of the piecards. It also contained general articles on all issues of interest to the workers.

Its publication lasted until 1963.

As the party’s trade union activity expanded in conjunction with large workers’ strikes, in May 1962 we began publishing Spartaco: Central Bulletin of Programmatic and Struggle Organ of the International Communists within the CGIL.

‘[…] If, therefore, today, we seek to extend and better coordinate this work, it is not because a particular “new and original idea” has crossed anyone’s mind. Rather, it is because the general situation and development—even if disorganized, of class struggles—and the process of consolidation of the party network have forced us to translate into action, one as continuous and systematic as possible, a permanent task of ours. This is the case even when events—not the will or decision of men—limited it (as they still partly limit it) “to a small corner of the overall activity.”

“This was the necessary response to questions that arose, both on the periphery and at the center of the party, from ongoing agitations. We can now give this response on a larger scale than in the past, precisely because, during the long and not yet completed phase of the ‘re-establishment of the theory of Marxist communism’ that occupied the last decade of our organizational life, the relationship between our ideologically strengthened network and the (still slender) strata of proletarians has been expanding and strengthening. This is not a ‘turning point’ but a continuation of work that never ceased, even when external circumstances—beyond the will or desires of even the most combative and enthusiastic militant—limited its scope.”

(Firm Points of Trade Union Action, Il Programma Comunista #19/1962)

This is how Spartaco introduced itself:

“We are fighting so that the traditional workers’ union, the CGIL, may be reborn as a class union. To become a union that exclusively affirms and defends—with no quarter—the life and interests of the proletariat. To become a union that never accepts subordination to the so-called higher needs of the company, the national economy, the fatherland, and much less to the defense of bourgeois institutions.”

(Spartaco #1/1962)

“In July 1968 we began printing Il Sindacato Rosso, the monthly organ of the Central Union Office of the International Communist Party.

It used the same masthead as the party’s labor union organ in 1921.

Created to coordinate and direct the Party’s union activity, it bore the following banner:

“For the class union!

“For proletarian unity against corporatist unification with CISL and UIL! 

“For the unification and generalization of workers’ demands and struggles, against reformism and splitting up the struggle!

“For the emancipation of the workers from capitalism!

“Let the organs of the party, the factory and union communist groups arise, for the revolutionary leadership of the working masses.”

“The Sindacato Rosso was the organ of agitation and propaganda of our workers’ groups. Both inside and outside the union, it was the only voice that stood against the betrayal of workers’ interests.

“In 1969, the piecards brought the dues checkoff—the mechanism by which the employer deducts all union dues from each worker’s pay-check and then sends the funds directly to the union—campaign to a conclusion by having a clause inserted into the contracts. This clause placed company management in charge of the collection of union dues.

“This act, which was of course presented as a victory, definitively sanctioned dues checkoffs as the only form of union membership.

“At that time, in all the workplaces we were present, we organized an energetic campaign that demanded the return to direct registration through the ‘collectors.’ We called on the workers to refuse the checkoffs, as we did ourselves.

[…] it was a very serious step towards the integration of the union structure into the state and employers’ machinery.

That is, it was a political act in the direction of fascist unionism.

Checkoffs also served to expel the most conscious revolutionaries and workers from the CGIL. This is because the piecards oftentimes refused to renew the membership of those who did not agree to sign the checkoffs agreement […]”

(The Party in the Face of the Unions…)

Refusing checkoffs does not mean leaving the union.

On the contrary, it means opposing the definitive degeneration of the CGIL….

No to dues checkoffs, yes to the class union!”

(Sindacato Rosso, #18, 1969).

“At the same time, this was  the period of the long contract struggles that marked the peak of the Italian union movement after World War II.

In this period, in several large factories, at Pirelli, FIAT, etc., the first Unitary Rank and File Committees were created. These were spontaneous workers’ organizations that attempted to bypass unions and, on some occasions, sought to replace them.

In the years immediately following the struggles of ’68-69, a process of  rapprochement between the unions and state institutions slowly emerged.

“This accelerating stroke did not happen by chance, but coincided with the beginning of the cycle of international crisis of capitalism […].”

(The Party in the Face of the Unions…)“The union is on its way to becoming a highly bureaucratized apparatus, removing any classist residue.

That little bit of union life, of the direct relationship between officials and members that still existed, and which had allowed or could have allowed a certain amount of internal work by communist militants, was definitively over.

The CGIL, as had already been the case with the CISL and the UIL, progressively became an organization resistant to any class stimulus. More often than not, the CGIL simply nipped class struggle in the bud. More and more apparent over the years, a slow but inexorable separation began between the union’s territorial structure and its members, who in previous years had generally followed the union’s directives with a certain conviction.”

(continued from the previous issue)

From “Il Partito Comunista” n. 77/1981

Economic struggle is an objective fact that arises from the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. No reforms, concessions, special laws, or police operations can eliminate it as long as private ownership of the means of production and wage labor remain.

After an initial phase where the bourgeoisie absolutely denied workers’ struggle and organization, it was forced to tolerate it. Then under fascism, the bourgeoisie attempted to give it a framework in its own legal system by creating labor organizations under direct state control.

At the time of the First International, the proletariat was still a tiny minority of the population.

The nascent proletarian movement developed in a direct and open clash with bourgeois legality, as strikes and street demonstrations were prohibited.

Worker and peasant demonstrations almost always took on the appearance of riots; looting, clashes with police and army, mass arrests, shootings, deaths, injuries.

Even for the most limited demands, workers always faced the state in its true essence as a repressive apparatus. The state’s militias and courts were fully deployed in defense of property.

As the state always gave a police response, any movement for demands led to a clash with the state that left no room other than mass action.

Both striking and participation in a demonstration meant risking either your life or years in jail.

Thus, economic struggles immediately became political because they presupposed an awareness that capitalists and landowners could not be hit without clashing with the apparatus set up to defend their privileges: the State.

The distinction between economic struggle and revolutionary political struggle was not clear-cut. They coincided because the economic struggle could only be conducted by revolutionary methods.

At this time in Italy the leaders of the first major workers’ agitations—such as the construction workers in 1888—were the anarcho-syndicalists.

In the second phase, which saw the development of the great socialist parties of the Second International, the bourgeoisie could no longer use pure police methods to contain the movements of a proletariat which grew enormously in terms of numbers. Simultaneously, the bourgeoisie had greatly increased its profits and could make concessions by bribing certain strata of the workers.

Thus arose the objective basis of the development of reformism and trade-unionism, both of which resulted in the Second International’s degeneration and transition into the bourgeois camp.

Police methods alone would have brought an even more numerous and concentrated proletariat into the terrain of open confrontation. This is why the more shrewd bourgeoisie combined repression with the haranguing of social-democratic leaders; leaders who channeled workers’ struggles toward partial gains within the framework of bourgeois social order.

Because of the changed economic and political situation, workers’ struggles resulted in demands for reforms, wage improvements, and alleviation of working conditions. These were no longer seen as steps toward the assault on bourgeois power and the complete destruction of all forms of private property and exploitation. They were now ends in themselves, perfectly compatible with a booming capitalist economy.

The economic movement of the masses compactly proceeded in this direction, all under the leadership of the reformist leaders of the big social democracies and the big class unions.

This is not to say that street riots, shootings, and arrests cease! Of course they continued, but there was a noticeable improvement in proletarian living conditions, which is fertile ground for democratic, pacifist, and legalitarian canvassing.

Revolutionary political organization no longer coincided with workers’ associations, and were progressively isolated and reduced to small groups and factions within the parties of the Second International.

The movement of the masses was then taken to the terrain of reformism and class collaboration. This went so far as to even support their respective bourgeoisies in the imperialist war.

Being communist revolutionaries then meant not following the masses on this ground, but sharply standing out in order to safeguard the prospect of revolution.

This was done by Lenin, the Italian Communist Left, and a few others who declared war on war while the proletarian masses were being led to slaughter under their respective national flags.

With the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the welding between the revolutionary program and the spontaneous motion of the masses was realized. This was not because one fit in with the masses, but because the goals the masses were moving towards—in that brief historical glimpse—could only be pursued with the realization of the revolutionary program.

The example of Russia is crystal clear.

The exploited masses wanted an end to the war and the lands of the big owners.

However, neither peace nor land could be achieved without an insurrection set out to overthrow the bourgeois state and form a workers’ and peasants’ militia.

The Bolsheviks did not improvise, but prepared with iron discipline over the course of decades of hard trials.

They prepared for revolution on the theoretical, programmatic, tactical, organizational, and military levels.

The masses were with them at one of those very rare moments when action and consciousness, spontaneous movement and revolutionary organization become one and the same, merge and form a formidable wedge that routs opposing defenses.

Fascism—an expression of the modern capitalism of banks and monopolies—brought together the two methods of reform and that of open police repression. Fascism realized the old reformist dream of legally framing labor struggles and labor organizations in bourgeois legislation.

The novelty it introduced was precisely the creation of state unions with compulsory membership by workers.

These unions defended workers economically—even going so far as to call strikes—but they did so on the condition that the economic struggle never affected the national interest.

Although formally free membership and not legally subservient to the state, the trade unions that arose after World War II, the current confederations trace the fascist policy.

They display open and avowed submission to the state, economic struggle yes but only to the extent that this is compatible with the performance of the capitalist economy.

They struggle for wage and regulatory improvements when the economy is expanding, they control the working class in order to push through layoffs and increased exploitation while the economy is in crisis, and they cooperate with the state in patriotic mobilizations in the case of war.

Due to the economic crisis, we are in one of those periods when workers’ demands become incompatible with regime stability.

Yesterday it was a purely economic claim to demand wage increases or reduced working hours.

Today, simply fighting to prevent work aggravations, to abolish overtime, to prevent layoffs, to reduce working hours, etc, acquires an increasingly subversive flavor because these demands—compatible yesterday—clash against the bourgeois plan to dump the crisis on the shoulders of the proletariat.

That is why we see the state, all parties, all unions, all institutions, etc, arrayed in defense of the national economy and against proletarian needs.

Thus, today, the economic struggle tends to become political because proletarians who want to move in defense of their needs are forced to take note that

1) the official trade unions are siding with the bosses and the state; 2) in order to struggle, it is necessary for workers to form their own organizations independent of the state, parties, and the regime’s unions.

The issue then becomes exquisitely political not only because class claims would endanger the social order, but also because it is clear that the state defends its unions in every way. This is primarily done by granting them the right to exclusively represent labor.

This means that the workers’ organizations that spontaneously arise (and will arise) are in fact illegal. This is unless they submit to the state—as Solidarity has done. This also means that it is forbidden for all individual bosses and all private or public business administrations to enter into agreements of any kind with those spontaneous workers’ associations that act outside the control of official trade unions.

This means that it is not enough to today tell the workers that one must fight against the bosses. One must also say that in order to fight against the bosses, one must free oneself from the police control of the regime unions and revive real class organizations.

But even this is not enough. It must also be said that the resurgence of class organizations can never take place “freely,” but only in fierce struggle against the state, all parties, and all unions that support it.

In this sense, therefore, the claims that yesterday fitted perfectly into a trade unionist policy, take on a political character. This is not because of any inherent characteristics, but because the changing situation means that the margins of maneuver of the bourgeoisie have shrunk. They are unable to make concessions anymore, and they will soon have to openly resort to force by denouncing all those who struggle for housing or jobs as subversive and anti-social elements.

But even if economic struggles take on a distinctly political character, this does not mean that the nature of class-based economic organizations changes.

Even in moments of the most acute revolutionary struggle, the objective determinations that impel the proletariat to struggle and organize are always the same. They are material in character, not ideal.

Therefore, even in the rare moments when it is guided by genuinely classist politics, economic organizations always retain their objective limitations that make them a suitable organ not of attack but defense.

Class unions alone can excellently defend working-class living conditions against exploitation, but they cannot by themselves constitute a suitable organization for the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie.

A revolution is not the “beau geste” of a handful of desperate people, nor is it the uprising of crowds on a “big day.”

It was precisely in Italy that all the experiments were performed,

from the ridiculous Mazzinian attempts, to individual terrorism (which then reached the flattering result of killing King Umberto I), from the action of bands of anarchists (who in the Matese mountains declared the monarchy deposed and private property abolished), to the peasant uprisings to the Palermo uprising of 1866 and the great proletarian uprisings of 1893 and 1898 that simultaneously affected a large part of the national territory, from the agitations against the Libyan War and the Red Week in 1914, to the armed occupation of factories in 1920, from the strikes of ’43 to the half-insurrection at the assassination attempt on Togliatti in ’48.

A party already existed in Italy that identified itself with workers’ associations and which only proletarians could join:

the Italian Workers’ Party.

It was a strong party, with 30,000 adherents with a wide influence on the proletariat in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria. It was the first autonomous organization of the Italian proletariat that finally separated itself from the bourgeois left and the radical petty bourgeoisie.

This party was basically nothing more than an association of leagues and claimed disinterest in general politics and to be concerned only with proletarian struggles.

In 1886, it was outlawed on charges of preparing insurrection. The organization was virtually destroyed in a major police raid, and the remnants later flowed into the future Socialist Party.

The same fate befell the organization of anarchists—numerous and scattered throughout Italy—after 1888.

The history of these attempts is well preserved in the police archives, which seamlessly go from the Bourbons to the Savoy, through Fascism and to the Democratic Republic.

Governments, parties, and institutions pass away, but the essence of the state, the “old fox questor” who knows everything about everyone, who has learned their lessons and knows when to cane and when to dress as a lamb, remains. No change of government or uprising has caused it to leave its post.

The poor fools of today, who know nothing about anything and claim with their baleful improvisations to “attack the state,” should reflect that one by one all their attempts and all their ways have been tried by far more determined, far more numerous, and far fiercer men and exasperated masses and have failed anyway.

History has shown that to bring down the capitalist regime and to lead workers’ struggles in this direction requires a special organization specially created and prepared for this purpose. This organization is called the Communist Party, an organization that treasures past experience so as not to repeat old mistakes, which knows how to foresee situations and does not allow itself to be surprised, which is able to resist repression because it does not feel that it has “spaces to defend” in this society, which has a precise and proven plan in which the daily proletarian struggles, the assault on bourgeois power and the political and economic measures to be taken after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie are framed.

A Party that knows how to lead proletarian organizations not on the terrain of ephemeral partial achievements, but toward the ultimate abolition of the exploitation of wage labor.

A party such the Bolshevik Party, the Third International, the Communist Party of Italy of 1921, all tended to be. We can proudly say that the Communist Party of Italy was not defeated by the fascist repressions to which it resisted and responded, but by the betrayal of the socialists first and the Stalinists later.

This is what the proletariat lacks today. Without this, all the strikes, agitations, and riots in this world may come, but the power of the bourgeoisie will not be affected in the slightest.

Those who say they want to bring down this infamous regime must therefore be consequential and accept the necessary tools for this purpose.

We resume this study on Sudan, the first part was published in The International Communist #3, which covered the history of the country from the Ottoman invasions to independence

Sudan was Born Weak

Even before the general imperialist war broke out again in 1939, the financial executors of the Sudan Political Service (SPS)—the administrative body of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium—distinguished themselves by their servile obedience to the dogmas of liberalism.

In their narrow-minded view, the state should not go beyond its role as guardian of private property and arbiter of trade, shunning the heresy of direct intervention in the economy.

Their greatest fear—completely unfounded—was that they would go down in history as the promoters of a non-existent “socialist experiment” in Sudan.

Nothing could be more grotesque:

State control of the capitalist economy is not, and can never be, socialism.

But beyond this misunderstanding, the reality was that in their zeal to preserve the colonial economic order, they even discouraged industrial development, both by local and foreign capital.

The only exception was

the cotton industry, which had already begun in the 1920s. This industry was structured according to sharecropping arrangements and confined to the cultivation of raw materials for export.

Here, the dilemma of imperialism is clearly evident.

On the one hand, capitalism demands productive expansion; on the other, colonial logic imposes the maintenance of a subordinate and backward economy.

Moreso than phobias about socialist “statism,” the colonial administration’s real concern was that industrial takeoff would strengthen the Sudanese proletariat to the point of enabling it to subvert the existing social order.

During the war, there were fears of a wave of inflation, fueled both by the increase in the money supply—which rose from £1.75 million in 1939 to £4.25 million in 1943—and by difficulties in importing consumer goods.

This scenario could have prompted urban proletarians and farm laborers to demand substantial wage increases.

To avert this danger, price stabilization measures were adopted, including trade agreements with the United Kingdom, which in return obtained cotton on favorable terms.

Even the sharecroppers accepted compromises.

Foregoing profits from the price increase, cotton producers saw their surpluses set aside in a special insurance fund, which was intended to compensate them during periods of decline.

During the war and immediately afterwards, cotton production grew significantly, especially in Gezira, with repercussions on Khartoum and Port Sudan, a key logistics hub.

Production of lower quality cotton also began in Kordofan, near the Nuba Mountains.

In addition, water collection works were completed shortly before the conflict, in Gash, in the province of Kassala.

In the province of Equatoria, the Zande Scheme was launched, with the cultivation of cereals, legumes, coffee, and tea, generating relative economic development in the southernmost region.

However, transportation and communication difficulties prevented Equatoria from establishing solid economic ties with the rest of the country. Instead, it was anchored to the economic sphere of the Colony of Kenya.

At the same time, outlying regions, particularly Darfur, were sinking into famine and misery.

The war and the post-war period only widened the gap between the central areas and the suburbs.

This disparity was also reflected in institutions, where positions of greater responsibility were reserved for native Arabic speakers. This was to the detriment of the southern populations, who were excluded from even the possibility of social advancement and lacked their own bourgeoisie or technical class.

Thus, while Sudan contributed to the British war economy, its own development remained stalled.

The empire’s post-war appropriations—a paltry two million pounds—could only clash with the dilemma of every colonial economy.

Modernization meant unleashing unmanageable social contradictions, while inertia condemned the country to stagnation.

Moreover, colonial officials and the Sudanese elite had already had occasion to deal with the first manifestations of proletarian struggle.

The Sudanese Workers’ Federation of Trade Unions (SWFT) was founded in March 1949, a year of major strikes, especially by railway workers.

Since its foundation, the union has represented the majority of the country’s wage earners.

In 1950, the SWFT tested its strength by calling a general strike, which was then called off by union leaders.

Threatening to unleash class warfare was enough to obtain a new labor law that recognized the right of Sudanese proletarians to strike and associate.

But rights alone do not feed the proletariat.

In 1952, there was a large wave of strikes, culminating in three consecutive days of general strikes.

Sudanese railway workers drove this struggle, and they demanded large wage increases.

Subsequently, the president and secretary of the SWFT were arrested. This triggered a second wave of political strikes in May, with further arrests and serious acts of class violence.

Frightened by the modernity of class struggle, in 1954, local planners decided to perpetuate this vicious cycle.

They focused once again on expanding cotton production. Sharecrop contracts were expanded and the water infrastructure in Gezira was strengthened, while the rest of the country was deliberately ignored—especially the southern provinces, which were condemned to chronic poverty.

Inevitably, independence in 1956 found Sudan economically powerless and politically fragile.

The exclusive reliance on cotton proved to be a double-edged sword.

The collapse of world prices between 1954 and 1958 shattered all budget forecasts. This made it impossible to finance infrastructure projects for marginalized provinces, which lacked even the most basic services.

This led to a mutiny by the army and police in Equatoria as early as 1955, which soon degenerated into a full-scale war against the central government.

The revolt, as will be seen below, was the beginning of the first Anyanya War, a terrible conflict that lasted 17 years, marking serious unresolved contradictions in the country.

During this period of instability, a real tug-of-war took shape between the state and the trade unions, which were strongly influenced by the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP).

The cotton crisis also gave the SCP an opportunity to rally sharecroppers behind the demand to cancel the contracts binding cotton producers to creditors and the agencies that manage the Gezira water infrastructure.

However, it did so using populist tactics very similar to those we have already widely denounced in Italy, when the Italian Communist Party was building the backbone of its organization with sharecroppers from Tuscany and Emilia. In effect, the Italian Communist Party replaced the fascist party, which used sharecroppers as a rear guard for conservatism.

Sharecroppers and smallholders are facing an increasingly rapid and widespread process of agricultural industrialization. However, they cannot access this due to the fragmented nature of their farms, which are limited to the narrow confines of the farmstead.

It follows that their “struggle” stems from the aspiration to individually own the means of production which, by their very nature and function, require associated labor.

In the Sudanese case, for example, associated work was conditioned by the complex water management system of the Gezira, which necessarily extends beyond the limits of small plots and individual farming.

It is on this antagonistic basis that, with the increasing penetration of machinery into agriculture and the structural necessity of centralized water management, both sharecropping and small peasant farming have become historically inadequate.

Furthermore, cotton production itself is subject to market dynamics that are beyond the control of small producers and even the Sudanese government.

The sharecroppers see their crisis worsening, driven to agitation by pressure from landowners, creditors, the body that manages the water infrastructure, and the global cotton market.

However, they react by calling for a return to a utopian economy for family businesses or, at most, with modest use of associated labor, never with a view to the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism.

Their political position and their struggle arise from the psychology of the “poor relative” who wants to get rich, or at least not become proletarianized, not from that of the proletarian who has no use for private property and can only expect liberation from a system of social production and distribution.

Thus, the anti-Marxist SCP, which has adopted the democratic and populist program of the sharecroppers, the petty bourgeoisie, and professional associations, renounces the proletarian and revolutionary perspective in this textbook example of opportunism.

Nevertheless, the considerable strength of the Sudanese proletariat, when it led a powerful general strike in October 1958, seriously undermined the government’s hold on power.

Thus, by completely failing in its economic policy, the Sudanese central government exposed itself to irreconcilable contradictions.

The Anglo-Egyptian rivalry, intertwined with the dynamics of the Cold War, did the rest.

In November 1958, the political crisis ended with the fall of the democratic system and the establishment of Abboud’s military dictatorship.

The Abboud Regime

As the direct expression of the state—itself nothing but the committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie—the military identified political legitimacy with economic growth, replacing suffrage with the measurement of per capita income.

From this perspective, capitalist development in the most advanced regions is nothing more than yet another expedient to perpetuate class domination and guarantee the stability of the bourgeois order.

Thus, with their rise to power, nothing changed in the substance of economic and social relations.

The dictatorship of the ruling class remains intact, while the misery of the proletariat persists and deepens.

The coup d’état is nothing more than the synthesis of the balance between the factions of the national bourgeoisie, sanctioned by the tacit consent of the two main parties:

the Umma, voice of the cotton-owning class, and the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), instrument of the military bourgeoisie.

The economic crisis, caused by the fall in cotton prices, exacerbated the living conditions of the urban poor, farm laborers, and rural masses, pushing them to revolt.

The weak Sudanese bourgeoisie, in its perpetual fear of proletarian revolution, sees as a threat not only the federalist movements of the rejected provinces, but also professional associations, trade unions, and the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) itself. By the way, far from being a revolutionary vanguard, the SCP remained trapped in reformist mediation, rooting itself in universities, professional associations, the middle classes, and the sharecroppers of the Gezira, without ever escaping the yoke of capital.

For the Umma and the PDP, military rule is a necessary interlude to bring the economic process back within the bounds of bourgeois stability, waiting for cotton prices to stabilize and the farce of democratic elections to be restored.

The imperialist structure of international capital manifests itself in the influx of loans from the centers of Western power—the United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany—and the International Monetary Fund.

The flow of capital has no flags.

Even Nasser’s Egypt, in its nationalist mystification, bowed to the logic of exploitation, granting the use of the waters of the Nile with additional dams to feed the agricultural income of the “Arab” bourgeoisie.

Furthermore, during this period, Sudan also attracted the attention of Arab monarchies for the first time, as Kuwait granted a significant loan to expand the African country’s railway infrastructure.

Like every bourgeois government, Abboud’s regime succumbed to the superstition of “economic balance,” basing its entire strategy on cotton monoculture.

This was the fetish commodity, the beating heart of agricultural rent and imperialist domination in Sudan.

The bourgeois economic illusion was based on calculations made by state accountants.

It was estimated that even an 80% drop in the price of cotton would keep production profitable.

But this “miracle” was nothing more than the product of the brutal mechanism of exploitation, in which the only variable that could be compressed was, as always, the flesh and blood of the Sudanese proletariat and sharecroppers.

It was not enough that cotton was sold at a good price on international markets.

Capital, by its very nature, demanded tribute paid to the usurers of global finance.

The Sudanese bourgeoisie, in its servile subordination, lulled itself into the illusion that its “friends” in the Western bloc would show clemency.

A benevolent suspension of payments was expected when, in 1962, a disastrous harvest threatened profits.

It hoped for some leniency in 1964, when, strangled by deficit, it was forced to beg for new loans to carry on with its illusory “development plan.”

But capital knows no friends.

The credit crunch is not a political choice, but rather an iron law of economic domination.

Interest rates are not concessions that can always be renegotiated, but rather the tribute that every subordinate national bourgeoisie must pay to its imperialist masters.

Meanwhile, in the southern provinces, the war for autonomy erupted as a manifestation of the irrepressible contradictions of central rule.

The rebellion against the central power in Khartoum was supported by neighboring countries:

Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya.

The rebellion spread geographically, also involving the provinces of Bahr al Ghazal and Upper Nile, although internal conflicts between Nilotic and Equatorial groups ultimately weakened the rebel forces despite the geographical extent of the war.

The war was a serious problem, especially for the image of Aboud’s regime, which repressed the separatist guerrillas through widespread use of terror, committing indiscriminate reprisals against the civilian population and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.

When a conference entitled “The Problem of South Sudan” was organized at the University of Khartoum in October 1964, Abboud’s military forces stormed the venue. This triggered a wave of civil protests and a massive general strike.

Since the strike did not subside despite dozens of proletarians being killed in various pockets of unrest across the country, Abboud himself dissolved the government and the supreme council of the armed forces to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.

Abboud’s regime crumbled under the weight of its own lies.

Per capita income did not grow, “stability” was not achieved, and consensus was not bought.

It was not the shortcomings of an incompetent government, nor the absence of a more prudent economic policy, but rather the very logic of capital that sealed its fate.

(continued from no. 432)

The Organs of the Formal Party

The report entitled “The Organs of the Formal Party” was a series of short comments, following a series of quotes presented at the last general meeting.

The purpose of the exposition was to remind us that organic centralism does not provide any theoretical “recipe,” but rather indicates a way of working in and relating to the party.

It requires the party to behave in a unitary and international rather than federalist sense.

The party organs are constituted exclusively according to the current needs of the party.

There is no a priori form of the party that is always better suited to preserving doctrine than another. However, the organs must perform their function by taking into account only the tasks of the party. These, in turn, are determined by doctrine.  

The party will have moments in its life when it will have to have even secret activities, and implement military-type discipline.

This presupposes organic, even absolute and military discipline, but imposing military discipline when the conditions are not there is the path that opportunism in the party has always used to assert itself and its anti-party views.

It was also stated that the party does not need “great men” or leaders.

We do not simply mean the rejection of the idea that there are great men capable of advancing history by their force of will, which of course we already rejected with Marx.

Rather, we refer to those historical figures who have served as guiding lights for the proletariat and its vanguard, whose contributions have been great, but whose names are often abused.

This cult of personality has been a weakness of the socialist movement and has always manifested itself at times when the party was composed of heterodox currents and groups, with the admission of internal democracy.

Voting and leader arbitration were both used to resolve irreconcilable disputes.

These disputes were irresolvable because they stemmed from theories and objectives that were not our own.

This cannot be in our party today.

All “misunderstandings” or seemingly divergent opinions are easily resolved by the continuous study of our tradition, in which all the answers are to be found.

Although the comrades at the center obviously have the task of centralizing communication and linking the different parts of the organization, they do not have the right to make decisions about doctrine at will.

The party is guided by its continuous work of sculpting the theory of revolution and makes decisions organically. It  does not regard the center as a special source of will or knowledge.

The Military Question: Moscow Directive—First Phase, July-September 1919

After the decisive last victories over the four Red armies, Denikin assessed the conditions for the final attack on Moscow.

The “Directive No. 08878,” or “March on Moscow,” was an elaborate and complex maneuver basically divided into two phases.

The former phase established a fan-shaped advance of its armies to consolidate the flanks of the entire front and then converge the counter-revolutionary forces on Moscow through the vast area between the Don and Dnieper rivers.

A map was displayed to illustrate the theater of operations with the new arrangement of the White Army and their objectives.

Its commanders expressed strong doubts, mainly due to the reduced forces at their disposal and the need for control in controlled areas and the danger of riots, which could be dealt with an adequate mobile cavalry force.

Through general mobilization, Denikin’s forces grew from 64,000 to 160,000, hastily trained.

The Red Army had 116,000 inexperienced and inadequate cavalry units on the southern front.

It was necessary for the Red Army to put forward a suitable strategy, which emerged after a strong disagreement within its leadership.

After a change at the top of the sector command, it was finally decided to launch a counter-offensive along the Volga to recapture Tsaritsyn by moving reinforcements from the east.

The White Army needed about two months to consolidate the flanks of the front, after which their attack was successful and moreover accompanied by the breakthrough of the Cossack cavalry deep into the Red rear, resulting in the devastation of warehouses and stores.

The Red counter-offensive along the Volga halted the White advance, forcing it to retreat.

A Cossack revolt broke out in the Red rear, which was soon resolved. However, it blocked their maneuvers to conquer Tsaritsyn, which resulted in unsuccessful and heavy losses.

Another objective of the Red Army was the capture of Kharkov in the central part of the front through a pincer manoeuvre, which was disrupted at the outset by a rapid and effective white counter-move that drove the entire Red sector back.

The Red strategy on the Volga had, at the time, resulted in a partial failure. The White Army ended up controlling the fertile grain-producing regions and enjoying more credit and international support for the fight they were waging against the Bolshevik revolution.

CONCLUSIONS ON THE MILITARY QUESTION IN GERMANY 1918-23

In the final months of 1918, all the objective criteria for revolution were met. Yet, what was clearly lacking was an agent of “subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to […] break (or dislocate) the old government.” (Lenin, the Collapse of the Second International.) In the absence of a communist leadership, the insurgent sailors were soon defeated.

In the Munich uprising of 1919, the Red Guards could not break out of the immediate environs of Munich, which was never more than a revolutionary island in a sea of Bavarian reaction; meanwhile the Communist Party had already suffered terrible defeats at the hands of Noske’s Freikorps, notably in Berlin.

During the Kapp putsch of March 1920, the social democrats were in the ascendant. The great mass of the working class wanted to prevent a return to militarist reaction of the old imperial regime. Once that threat was averted, the Communists were crushed in a White Terror.

In the March Action of 1921, the militant workers of the mining regions of Central Germany were soon isolated. A general strike broke out, and in certain regions this escalated into an armed insurrection. But it was only a matter of time before the Reichswehr and police defeated the uprising at huge cost to the miners and the Communist Party.

In the so-called “German October” of 1923, the situation was ripe with opportunities for a successful seizure of power, with Germany in a deep economic crisis and the German bourgeoisie powerless in the face of the French occupation. A series of strikes and the formation of Proletarian Hundreds in many parts of the country demonstrated that the masses were being “drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves into independent historical action”. (Lenin)

Yet it was only in the second half of the year that the KPD oriented itself towards insurrection, after the August strike wave, which brought down the Cuno government. Instead, the Party’s focus had been on opportunist tactics, notably the formation of so-called “Workers’ Governments” in the states of Saxony and Thuringia.

“One does not play with insurrection,” wrote Marx, but this is precisely what the KPD leadership did in 1923, which is not to decry the bravery of the Hamburg insurgents themselves.
Failure to subvert the armed forces and the police was a key factor in the collapse of the armed struggles. The bourgeoisie could always count on loyal troops to quell the uprisings in Berlin, Munich, the Ruhr, Central Germany, Hamburg and elsewhere. As Lenin wrote in Lessons of the Moscow Uprising (1906) “Of course, unless the revolution assumes a mass character and affects the troops, there can be no question of serious struggle.”

A brief history of the Ottoman Empire

The party has begun to analyze the historical and social development of the Ottoman Empire. We aim to elaborate upon the specific characteristics of the early period of the capitalist mode of production and, consequently, the historical peculiarities that determine the clash between social classes. Of course, the historical outcome of this clash can only be the universal class war that sees the International Communist Party at war with all other parties.

The Ottoman Empire was founded in the 14th century as a small Turkish principality in Asia Minor, between the declining Byzantine Empire and the Seljuk Sultanate.    

Thanks to its strategic position and skillful military and diplomatic policy, it rapidly expanded.

In 1352, it crossed the Dardanelles and settled in Gallipoli.

Under Murad I (1362-1389), Adrianople became the new capital.

Despite their defeat against Timur in 1402, the Ottomans enjoyed a new period of splendor under Mehmet I and Murad II, consolidating their control over the Balkans.

In 1453, Mehmet II conquered Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul, transforming it into the heart of the Empire.

In the following decades, Serbia, Bosnia, Crimea and other regions were conquered.

Ottoman success was based on a centralized state system that abolished feudalism and replaced it with an efficient administration.

The land was expropriated and managed by the State (miri), while the peasants paid lower taxes than under the previous Byzantine Empire.

Recruited from young Christian converts, the Janissaries ensured military stability.

The Ottomans presented themselves as protectors of the lower classes, integrating local elites as vassals (timar) and granting religious autonomy to Orthodox Christian. Thus, they gained their support against powers such as Venice and Hungary.

In the 16th century, under Selim I (the first Caliph) and Suleiman the Magnificent, the empire reached its peak.

The Ottomans exploited divisions between European powers, allying themselves with France and England and attacking the Habsburgs, conquering Hungary (1526) and besieging Vienna (1529).

However, structural problems began to emerge in the late sixteenth century:

1) Currency devaluation and increased military spending; 2) Impoverished peasants joined armed gangs (celali), destabilizing Anatolia; 3) Land passed into private hands (mulk) or to religious institutions (vakf), reducing central control; 4) Social mobility came to a standstill, with abuses by the askeri (military and religious elite).

Nomads (Turkmens, Kurds, Bedouins) were crucial to the economy, managing pastures, transport, and carpet production.

It was precisely because of their great economic efficiency that the Ottoman Empire was slow to develop a road network.

Furthermore, agricultural expansion reduced their territories, leading to conflicts with farmers and migrations towards Persia.    

The nomads, marginalized, often became rebels or mercenaries, undermining imperial stability.

The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in the 16th century thanks to a centralized system, skilled diplomacy, and pragmatic integration of ethnic and religious diversity.

However, from the 17th century onwards, economic crises, rebellions, and decentralization led to its decline, paving the way for subsequent defeats and reforms.

Leaflet distributed by our comrades on the occasion of a school workers’ struggle in Croatia.

Workers can only expect an improvement in their material conditions from the Croatian state if they exert strong pressure on it.

This is clear to anyone who has had the opportunity to work in the public sector, and it should also be clear to workers in the private sector. After all, a boss is a boss, whether it’s an individual, a corporation, or the state itself.

In recent months, we have once again witnessed the Croatian state’s hostile attitude toward education workers.

From kindergartens to universities, the demands of education workers can only be seen as excessive by the most arrogant representatives of capital and the ruling class. From Minister Fuchs to Prime Minister Plenković, we can immediately count the entire leadership of the Republic of Croatia among them.

What are the education workers demanding?

In schools and secondary institutions, they demand an increase in base salary and salary coefficients, as well as the rejection of “on-the-job evaluations,” which would certainly be used as a form of pressure on workers.

In the preschool system, the demands are even less ambitious.

They simply want the enforcement of existing laws and pedagogical standards, and the equalization of kindergarten wages with those in primary schools.

Unions tend to frame the issue of coefficients in moral terms.

They compare them to other jobs in the public and state sectors, highlighting the key role education plays in shaping and training the younger generations.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenković responded by saying he saw through the unions’ lies and that in the end “it’s all about material things, about money.”

We should clearly respond to Plenković:

so what?

Of course it’s about material things: you can’t live off air and good vibes!

Let him try it himself if material things don’t matter to him.

The attitude toward kindergarten workers is even more hypocritical.

After various associations and unions organized a protest, the Ministry decided to support the protesters!

Of course, only in words!

Fuchs and his gang “warned” the kindergarten administrators (i.e., the local authorities) that they are still obligated to follow the provisions on equal pay in preschool and school education.

Has the Croatian government decided to do anything concrete?

Perhaps they’ve provided funding for wage parity and new hires?

Of course not! Nor should we expect them to without strong and ongoing pressure from below.

This pressure must not be based on moralistic arguments about education jobs, as the unions are known to do, but on a clear and united struggle for the material rights of the category.

The struggle must not rely on the support of a vague “public opinion,” which may seem particularly tempting in the weeks before the local elections [scheduled for May 2025].

“Public opinion” is delivered by the media into the hands of capital and its political representatives.

It will certainly not be on our side, nor should we count on it.

We can only laugh at every article about “public sector parasites” and remind ourselves who lives by their labor, and who lives off our exploitation.

We must instead organize on a class basis.

All public and private sector workers ultimately share the same material interests, no matter what Index, Jutarnji, or social media propaganda tell us.

But we must start from reality,

from the unity of educators at all levels of the education system and in all workplaces, from teachers to janitors.

We must undertake a joint struggle and strike, and then work to unite into a single fighting union—sectoral and, ultimately, class-based—for all workers.

We must not rely on NGOs or believe the lies of politicians.

Our only strength is solidarity.

On February 28, 2023, near the capital Athens, a terrible train accident occurred in Greece.

In the accident, 57 people lost their lives when a train was diverted onto the same track as another train.

Most of the victims were students.

After investigations, it was discovered that the accident was caused by a combination of human errors, inadequate infrastructure, and a lack of safety measures.

These were measures that had been eliminated to save costs.

Accidents like this have happened and will continue to happen as long as capitalism exists in our lives. Capital does not see human suffering; it sees only profit.

The Tempi train accident has not been forgotten by the Greek working class, which, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the accident, organized to protest against the government through demonstrations, rallies, and a general strike.

Public transport, factories, construction sites, shops, schools, universities, mines, theaters, ports, banks, and much more were shut down across Greece.

Protests were organized in more than 250 cities, with around 1.5 million demonstrators nationwide.

These strikes and protests were organized under the slogan of ΠΑΜΕ (The All-Workers Militant Front):

“Their profits or our lives.”

Workers all over the world must understand that what is happening now in Greece, and around the world, is not an occasional malfunction of the system. It is the system working perfectly, exactly as it is meant to, because the goal of the capitalist system is not—and has never been—to make the worker’s life better or safer. Rather, it is to exploit them ever more, with the least possible investment in them and their safety.

The goal of capital is to make profits at all costs.

Moreover, one of the most important lessons to learn from both the Paris Commune and revolutionary Russia is that whenever the proletariat rises up in a given country, the working classes of other countries must support them. Otherwise they will be crushed. However, such support can only happen if they are organized internationally.

We pay tribute to our comrades in Greece for their efforts in fighting the Greek government, but it is our duty as a communist party to emphasize the necessity for local, even national, struggles of the proletariat to be united, coordinated, and centralized in the international class war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for communism. This can only be achieved through an international program, and on an international scale.

Thus, against the international unity of capitalist forces, the proletarians must succeed in opposing their own organizational and political unity, guided by the only International Communist Party.

This is the only way to prioritize our lives over their profits.

Bourgeois elections remain futile spectacles perpetuating class oppression. Politicians posture over contrived “issues,” yet the ills innate to capitalism persist irrespective of who waves its banner. Social and economic woes are not contingent upon electoral outcomes: they are the inevitable products of bourgeois order and this mode of production.

As with every bourgeois election, the spectacle distracts from the reality of the worsening conditions of the proletariat. 

Since the pandemic, a global trend has emerged: an unrelenting rise in the cost of survival. In Australia, this is the central issue, and over half of voters identify it as their primary concern. 

Internationally, costs for basic necessities have soared tremendously. Since COVID-19 and the 2019–20 recession, consumer prices have surged cumulatively in most of the imperialist powers: roughly 22% in the US, 24% in the UK, 23% in Germany, 20% in Italy, and 19% in Australia. This is not a mere passing discomfort, it is the daily confrontation of economic suffocation and the inescapable weight of a system that feeds off inflation while wages deteriorate. Here, survival itself has become a ballot issue.

Even as a majority of working-class Australians are forced to abandon basic comforts for mere survival, Albanese’s Labor Government continues to boast about its achievements. In a recent press conference, Albanese claimed that “the families of middle Australia are the biggest beneficiaries of cost-of-living help.” Yet, it is precisely under the Labor Party that the Australian “middle class” and proletariat have faced the consequences of economic austerity. The Labor Party, just like the Liberal Party, has never attempted to champion the interests of the working-class, and it would be erroneous to imagine a future otherwise.  

Under Albo’s mentorship, Q4 of 2024 sees the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) announce the official end of Australia’s four year recession. The economy has finally broken the seven consecutive quarter streak of real per-capita GDP declines with a 0.1% quarterly expansion!

“Hurrah!” cried the regime media. Yet this supposed recovery means nothing to the proletariat as household consumption continues to recede for eight consecutive quarters (real per capita household consumption).  Nearly 60% of income is spent on essential needs—utilities, groceries, et cetera—leaving the majority of Australians near their breaking point. By December 2022, inflation surged to 7.8% before tapering off to 2.4% by the close of 2024. Trump’s return to the global stage promises more tariffs that could exacerbate international recession and escalate the trade war intensifying inflationary pressures. It is the proletariat who will ultimately bear the consequences.

Tariffs or otherwise, the economic situation in a number of industries was already far from flattering. 92% of construction businesses are overdue on payments. The hospitality sector has hit a record 9.3% closure rate over the 12 months ending in February 2025. Nationally, approximately 13,500 businesses in 2024 alone closed.

The impending collapse of countless companies will soon batter the Big Four (ANZ Bank, Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Westpac). Already, there has been a 47% surge in invoice defaults in the past year. Of course, the bourgeois government will have to intervene to defend, at any cost, the interests of these fundamental banking institutions. Previously in 2008–09, Australia’s largest banks solidified their domination by absorbing smaller institutions, aided by the Rudd Labor Government’s AUD203 billion deposit guarantees. Recently, the Reserve Bank funnelled around $188 billion into these same behemoths, cementing their grip on more than 75% of total banking assets nationwide. 

The banking tactics used in Australia are not unique. Internationally, the same pattern has emerged. 

“The initial response of the central banks to the 2019-2020 recession was to flood the banks with liquidity in order to enable them to support businesses and avoid a general collapse. Then, with the return of inflation, they discontinued their policy of quantitative easing and gradually increased interest rates to make money expensive and put pressure on demand to reduce inflation. This led to a real decline in inflation towards the 2% target.” (The Course of Global Capitalism, The International Communist 4).

Yet it is precisely the architects of finance capital who devise their own “solutions” to the crisis they themselves fuel. They elevate mortgage interest rates under the pretext of “risk management.” Simultaneously, they widen access to predatory credit lines, ensuring the working class remains tethered indefinitely to debt. In 2024, the volume of mortgage loan commitments surged by 12% nationally. This is the aggressive intensification of usury. 

Since the onset of the pandemic, rents have soared 36% nationally. In 2024 alone, Melbourne city witnessed rents jump by 8%, outpacing the decade’s average increase of 4.7%. Sydney endured a 6.5% climb, while Brisbane by 9%. Therefore, housing costs account for a large portion of the income of low-wage workers, to the detriment of other necessary items. Thus, the way for the perpetual rent of landlords has been created. Landlords indirectly participate in the extortion of surplus value, and thus form a parasitic caste supported by a significant portion of workers’ wages.

Concurrently, homelessness has increased, with ten thousand additional Australians onto the streets monthly—a 22% increase over just three years.

Even among employed workers, those whose survival relies upon public aid has grown from 10.9% in 2018 to 15.3% by 2023. Simultaneously, social housing has dwindled from over 4% of total dwellings in 2006 to 2.7% in 2023 (a 33% decrease). The crisis gripping Australian households now extends into food insecurity, affecting 3.4 million households (approximately 8% of the population) in 2024 alone. These hardships have been exacerbated by the price gouging of Australia’s supermarket duopoly, Woolworths and Coles 

To cope with rising living costs, workers are more and more compelled to take on additional employment. The proportion of Australians working multiple jobs has risen by ~26%, increasing from 5.3% in 2012 to 6.7% in 2024.

In the current year, the economic recession that hit Australia has nominally come to an end, to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. However, its effects on Australian proletarian families are certainly not over and are still felt within them.

Real per-capita household disposable income has faced unprecedented erosion, declining by 11% since late 2021. The media’s pandering in the face of the latest economic data serves only to mask the worsening exploitation of proletarians. 

This sustained collapse of working class living conditions surpasses Australia’s severe downturns of 1982–83 and 1990–91. It’s a symptom of capital’s necessary intensification of the exploitation of labor-power. 

In 2008 Australia suffered less severe consequences from the great recession, relative to other imperialist powers. Bourgeois commentators usually credit this to the Labor government’s economic policies. However, these accolades conveniently ignore the severe consequences born by the working class. Between 2008 and 2010, underemployment surged to nearly 8%, affecting around 900,000 workers. Furthermore, wages stagnated significantly during this period, allowing inflation to outpace income growth. Labor’s policy response transferred the crisis’s burden onto workers, consolidating wealth and protecting—thereby sustaining—bourgeois order. Statistically, household disposable incomes exceeded OECD averages by roughly 15% in 2008. This lead would be systematically undermined post-2011. Labor’s Fair Work Act (2009) led to synchronised expirations of numerous industrial agreements around 2011, forcing renegotiations under significantly worse conditions. The Act imposed severe constraints on wage negotiations and drastically curtailed industrial actions, effectively criminalising most strike strategies and amplifying employers’ advantages. And with the Liberal Party’s inauguration, a near decade of austerity-driven economic policies further constrained workers, eroding wages and intensifying pressures.

However, the worsening of the Australian proletariat’s living standards is not the result of poor handling of a few, nor is it a governmental failure. Instead, it is the byproduct of the absolutely inevitable contradictions within the capitalist system in which the bourgeois order directly opposes the immediate and historical goals of the proletariat. 

Manufacturing once dominated the national economy, peaking at 25% of GDP during the 1960s. Today, however, the Australian economy, a world leader in lithium and uranium extraction, is ever more so dependent on profits generated by the mining industry. The latter represents around 15% of the country’s GDP, an ever growing number. The Q2 ABS report for 2024 showed that 268,000 jobs were created in government-funded roles in 2023-24, whereas only 33,000 new jobs were created in the market sector. This is an annual growth of 7.6% for the non-market sector and just 0.1% for the market sector. In a similar vein, total public sector wages surged by around 5% in Q2; but non-farm private sector wages rose by just under 1%. The economy is now increasingly becoming solely reliant on the public sector: 27% of GDP is now public demand and growing. While public investment has surged since pre-covid’s by around 23%, government recurrent spending is also rising much faster than nominal GDP growth.

Initiatives such as high-speed rail projects, NDIS, and Dutton’s speculative nuclear-energy schemes—framed as remedies for mounting energy deficits—cannot but increase public debt. Simultaneously, they push the economy into further dependence on state-driven investments. At the start of 2007, the Australian Government gross debt was under $52 billion. The debt for 2022-3 is now $783 billion. A 1400% increase! This, however, must be seen internationally. After the 2008 crisis, virtually all countries have become heavily indebted, and continue to do so.

It is precisely through 1) intensifying the exploitation of labor 2) the growing participation of the state into the economy (by also onboarding private debt) that the ruling-class tries to contain the decline in the rate of profit, which is an intrinsic and fatal law of the capitalist mode of production. These “maneuvers” have thus enabled the Australian (and global) bourgeoisie to partially mitigate the effects of the crisis and maintain a dominant position. 

However, Australia, alongside other old imperialist nations, finds itself mired in an irreversible decline. Historically, the capitalist mode of production is destined to successive crises of ever greater magnitude. This continues until all produced surplus is eventually destroyed, in order for capital to start its cycle of accumulation anew. Such is our revolutionary analysis. Increasingly frequent crises necessarily lead the proletariat onto the ground of economic struggle, and towards social revolution, if the Party is able to take the proletarian movement’s lead. Once again, the proletariat, with nothing to lose and a world to conquer, will “storm the heavens” against the bourgeoisie and for communism.

Preface

The pamphlet reproduced here was disseminated by the Party in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, during the industrial action undertaken by junior doctors from April 8th to 10th, 2025. The strike, declared illegal by the Fair Work Commission (FWC), was the first of its kind in NSW in 25 years. 

The doctors demand a 30% wage increase from the current $38/hr to bring their pay in line with their comrades in other states: $42 in Victoria and $45 in Queensland.

Predictably, the Labor Government, as they did recently with the nurses, denounced the doctor’s as ‘selfish’, accusing them of endangering patients. The FWC, in their role, declared the strike illegal, threatening punitive measures unless the action was abandoned, and negotiations were returned to. 

Junior doctors in Australia, however, regularly work outside of their contracted hours, with 10-12-14 hour days commonplace without compensation. This pedagogical practice was once rationalised as a rite of passage with the promise of future professional autonomy, social prestige, and economic prosperity. Yet these promises are increasingly elusive. 

Austerity measures and intensified workloads have eroded these privileges, reducing junior doctors to conditions like their fellow proletariat: they are no longer a special caste. The material reality has eroded the very distinctions that once justified their exploitation. As in any factory driven by the dictates of surplus value extraction, the pace of work has become more intense. In private facilities, the resulting accumulation of wealth is evident, yet the state, as the main employer of doctors, seems less involved. But, according to the old mole method, we see that there are no real differences.

Hence, hospitals are no different from the factories in their usage of increasingly unpaid surplus-labour for the creation of capital. 

The Australian worker still has, on average, little class consciousness, and none more so than the young doctors on strike, who fell straight into a carefully orchestrated manoeuvre by the newly elected union leadership. The strike was inevitable, but whether it would be rank-and-file  or organised was left to the officials, who chose between chaos or a controlled explosion.

Declared ‘illegal’ by the state, the action was nevertheless  sanctioned after 18 months of fruitless negotiations and one of the most expensive elections in the union’s history. The change in leadership allowed the strike to proceed—less as a show of militancy but as a desperate attempt to stem growing distrust from below. In this we see their opportunism: the strike was not meant to win, but to pacify; not to confront, but to contain. With inflation biting deep, failure to act would have meant mass defections—perhaps even toward a union of a different kind, one forged closer to the rank and file, on the road to the red union.

Nevertheless, the striking tactics utilised see it doubtful that their immediate demands will be achieved.

The recent nurses’ struggle is a clear example. Their initial demand, a one-off 15% pay rise, was quickly watered down under the leadership of the NSW Nurses’ Union (NSWNMA), which insisted on maintaining ‘good faith’ with the state. In the end, they organised only three legal strikes, tightly controlled, scheduled a month in advance and lasting only one day each over the course of the year.

Predictably, this was not enough.

On the floor, the mood is bitter; their demand reduced to scraps. The energy has bled out. At best, they may walk away with a deal that barely keeps pace with inflation.

And yet, of the two, it is the nurses who may emerge better positioned. The doctors, having had their demand for a strike nominally ‘met,’ now renew their trust in the leadership—trust that will take years to undo. The nurses, by contrast, have begun to grasp, if only subconsciously, that their union no longer represents them. 

The union action showed a lack of organisation, and the tactics employed were characterised by confusion and a lack of direction. Without the intervention of the Party, workers were left free to adopt tactics aimed not at confronting capital, but at arousing sympathy. The strikers marched through the streets, seeking public approval, rather than denying entry and thus the use of labour in the hospital. The legal status of these actions, as always, was defined by the ruling class itself, whose aim is not to arbitrate fairly, but to suppress any movement that threatens its control.

In any case, it will be up to the current and future generations of workers and comrades to relearn this lost knowledge; to once again understand the operatives they have as the working class. The regional nature of this text mustn’t lose its understanding in the spirit of international solidarity.

* * *

Solidarity with the Junior Doctors!

From April 8th to April 10th, junior doctors in NSW will engage in a three-day strike demanding a necessary and justified 30% pay increase. This is the first strike by NSW junior doctors in 25 years, and notably, it sees senior and junior doctors uniting on the picket line. The Fair Work Commission has already declared this strike illegal, threatening punitive measures unless the workers abandon their industrial action and return to negotiations. The Minns Labor government cynically denounces the striking doctors as ‘selfish’, accusing them of endangering patients.

We respond unequivocally: Full support to the striking doctors! Reject the threats of the Commission and the hypocritical denunciations by the Labor government! 

Under the austerity measures dictated by successive governments—most recently accelerated by the Labor administration—workers have borne the full brunt of capitalist crises. Despite Labor’s empty promises to ease the soaring cost of living, austerity has been selectively imposed only upon the working class. Doctors, once somewhat insulated by their professional status, now suffer declining wages, gruelling workdays of up to 14 hours, and relentless institutional pressures designed solely to ensure profitability and efficiency.

The deterioration of conditions within healthcare is not accidental; it is the deliberate consequence of capitalism, which treats health as merely another sector for profit extraction. Doctors, nurses, wardies—all hospital workers—face increasing exploitation and alienation, forced into ever-lower wages and longer hours.

Yet, wage increases alone, though necessary, are insufficient. They represent only temporary solace. To truly address the exploitation at hand, workers must expand the struggle beyond immediate economic demands for a single category of workers and confront capitalism directly as a class. Historically, sector-specific strikes—such as those by wharfies or the tradies—have yielded only limited gains precisely because they remained isolated within their industries. Without extending these struggles across sectors, breaking the artificial divisions imposed by employers, the workers are defeated.

Labor governments, far from protecting workers’ interests, consistently expose their true role as defenders of capitalist exploitation. Prepared by decades of Coalition policies and entrenched by the 2009 Fair Work Act, Labor actively intensifies exploitation under the guise of moderation. The Minns government’s recent dismissive response to nurses’ wage demands exemplifies this pattern, deliberately offering piss-poor drafts, prolonging the negotiations, thereby losing traction among the workers for a settlement significantly less than initially demanded. The union leadership, in their role, maintains this very system and corals the workers into this prefigured equation.

To achieve meaningful and lasting victories, junior doctors and all healthcare workers must therefore demand:

• A substantial, universal pay increase for all healthcare workers.
• Full compensation for all overtime hours worked.
• The immediate abolition of unpaid internships and exploitative training practices.
• A significant reduction in working hours with no loss of pay.
• Significant new employment for every healthcare section to ensure the demands are maintained.

These demands, essential to workers’ wellbeing, cannot be met by isolated or short-term strikes. They require a general and indefinite mobilisation, transcending occupational and sectoral boundaries imposed by capitalism. Recent industrial actions—such as those by NSW nurses and Sydney transport workers—reflect broader, shared grievances within the proletariat. The capitalist class fears precisely, though not yet here, the united and generalised resistance.

The ruling class responds with legal threats, media vilification, and intimidation precisely because it recognises the revolutionary potential inherent in the working-class united front. The right to strike is never freely granted by capitalist institutions; it is a weapon workers must seize to combat capitalist oppression. And the limitations imposed by the Fair Work Commission are designed explicitly to contain and neutralise workers’ resistance, with the recent CFMEU debacle exemplary. 

Strikers! It is in your interest and precise duty for the working class to keep on your demands and expand the strike!

The bourgeoisie fears nothing more than a unified proletariat with its vanguard. The State, the Labor Party, the Fair Work Commission, and opportunist (thereby bourgeois) union leaders tremble before the possibility of genuine solidarity and organised resistance. As economic pressures inevitably intensify, pushing workers deeper into precarity, these bourgeois shills’ charades only conceal and perpetuates capitalism’s fundamental contradictions.

Only through a decisive and united class struggle, led independently by class-based unions against the capitalist institutions and opportunist union leaders, can workers achieve genuine victories. The junior doctors’ strike, therefore, represents not merely an isolated demand for better pay but a critical step toward confronting capitalism itself. Immediate economic demands, crucial as they are, must ultimately advance towards dismantling capitalist exploitation and realising revolutionary abolition of capitalism towards the end of the society divided into classes. 

SOLIDARITY WITH THE JUNIOR DOCTORS’ STRIKE!

GENERALISE THE STRUGGLE NATIONALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY!

TOWARD CLASS UNIONS, CLASS UNITY, AND REVOLUTIONARY ACTION LED BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY!

In China’s Xinjiang region, the Uyghur question has arisen. Here we find at least three ideologies that see it fit to divide the region’s proletariat to the whims of differing bourgeois interests

The first enemy is nationalism. It expresses itself through a Uyghur independence movement, which seeks to establish an “East Turkestan,” independent from the PRC.

This perspective must be rejected. The capitalist world revolution is complete and any new nationalist struggle will only give rise to new national bourgeoisies. Our communist and revolutionary tactics therefore no longer support nationalist movements that fight for the creation of independent states. Instead, we recognise only a single revolutionary struggle: that of the international proletariat against the bourgeois world order.

The other enemy is democracy. It deploys humanist rhetoric in order to co-opt the Uyghur question for the imperialist aims of Western democracies, whose bourgeois press has long shone a spotlight on China’s alleged genocide of the Xinjiang Uyghurs.

The rotten capitalist order routinely invokes “the defense of peoples” to excuse its ignominious wars. In Ukraine, Moscow defends its imperialist venture as defending Russian-speakers from the “Nazis” in Kyiv.

This is, of course, the imperialist appetite grooming its working-class with humanitarian violations so as to prepare them for war propaganda.

Our third enemy is China’s counterfeit socialism. Beijing pedals the Uyghur question with tales of seamless harmony between the Han majority and Muslim minorities, claiming its economic model has hauled Xinjiang out of “backwardness” and poverty.

In reality, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” offers the proletariat nothing but obedience to capital. Sweating for the national economy today, and bleeding for the defense of the motherland tomorrow.

These are the three insidious enemies the Xinjiang proletariat must confront if it is to reclaim its class autonomy.

The Xinjiang Populace

Chinese historiography portrays Xinjiang as an inseparable limb of the motherland, citing supposedly ancient bonds. In reality, the millennial Chinese empire held sway over the region only intermittently—and often only over portions of it—when its frontiers pushed into Central Asia.

Only in 1758 did the Qing dynasty secure Xinjiang’s formal annexation.

Even then, imperial authority was never fully controlled and uprisings against Qing rule amassed as early as the nineteenth century.

During Qing rule, Xinjiang drew almost no immigration from China and remained on the fringes of the empire.

Even after the Xinhai revolution, Xinjiang maintained a measure of autonomy from the central government.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the earliest Uyghur nationalism manifested through Pan-Turanian ideas that circulated mainly among the more affluent Uyghurs.

From the 1920s onward, the echo of the International Revolution was heard in this remote area. An embryonic Uyghur national movement emerged, sympathetic to Bolshevik policies on oppressed nationalities. Keen to blunt Pan-Turkic currents, the Bolsheviks attempted to morph Xinjiang’s Turkic-Muslim struggle in explicitly revolutionary terms.

The subsequent separatist currents established into short-lived independent states two separate times: first, the East Turkestan Republic of 1933-34, and a decade later with the Second East Turkestan Republic in 1944.

The latter was sovereign until 1949 when it was incorporated into the young People’s Republic of China.

There were two major reasons for Xinjiang’s annexation. First, to cement control from the newborn People’s Republic. Secondly, to unlock fresh sources for accumulation. By crushing Uyghur nationalism, Beijing cut off any foreign power that might have rallied the region’s Muslim minorities to extend the civil war against Mao’s “communists.” Once pacified, the province’s coveted oilfields—and its vast cotton acreage—could at last be exploited, resources the fledgling state badly needed.

In order to achieve these goals, an increase in the Han population of the region was planned from the outset.

Beijing soon moved to dilute Uyghur dominance by sponsoring migration of Han settlers into Xinjiang.

Beginning in 1954, Beijing created semi-military production corps, composed of demobilised soldiers. Tasked with both farming and policing, these units became a linchpin of central control over the region.

As a result, the Han population grew from 300,000 in 1953 to over 5 million in 30 years.

Their share of Xinjiang’s population grew from about 8% in 1949 to nearly 40% by 1978, a ratio that has held steady ever since.

Xinjiang’s current demographics were collected in a 2020 census.

Xinjiang spans roughly one-sixth of China’s landmass, yet it is among the country’s most sparsely populated provinces, with barely 12 inhabitants per square kilometre. Despite being destitute, it is quite diverse. There are at least thirteen ethnic groups, although the Uyghurs and Han Chinese dominate the demographic balance.

According to China’s census, Xinjiang has 25.9 million inhabitants. Of these, 11.6 million (~45%) are Uyghurs, while 10.9 million (~42%) are Han.

Since 2010, when the population of Xinjiang was 45.84% Uyghur and 40.48% Han, the Han population has grown more than the Uyghur population, with the Han increasing by 25% and the Uyghurs by 16%.

The data has been read differently.

Beijing’s critics say they confirm a deliberate drive to shrink the region’s Muslim minorities. Beijing, for its part, brandishes them as proof that Western claims of a Uyghur “genocide” are unfounded. They argue that the rise in Han numbers reflects internal migration from other provinces, while the slower growth among Uyghurs and other minorities stems from economic development that encourages later marriages and smaller families.

In opposition, the United States and its Western allies centers their propaganda on accusations of a genocide, as wel as supposed concentration camps and forced-labor schemes.

They allege that China runs concentration-style “re-education” camps holding over a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz who are conscripted into forced labor. Beijing, in turn, insists these facilities are merely “education and vocational-training centres” essential to its counter-terrorism campaign.

In any case, the presence of these concentration camps in Xinjiang would represent nothing new under the regime of capital. It has already concentrated and forced masses of humanity to work, exploiting them to death, for the production of surplus value.

This mass-incarceration apparatus functions as a mechanism of primitive accumulation. By supplying factories with cheap labor, it drags Uyghurs who formerly engaged as pre-capitalist small producers, artisans, and peasants, into the ranks of the wage-earning proletariat.

The lure of cheap, incarcerated labor acts as a magnet for capital, driving new investment and coaxing factories to relocate into the region.

The textile and garment industries have particularly benefited, and exploit Xinjiang as the main source of Chinese cotton.

Independence and Repression

Current Uyghur nationalism originated in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Soviet War in Afghanistan first destabilised regional order. Later, the collapse of the USSR placed newly independent Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan on Xinjiang’s doorstep. These two events revived long-dormant separatist sentiments, now intertwined with a renewed Islamic religious fervor.

The resurgence of separatist demands is thanks to widespread economic discontent among the Uyghurs.

The economic development in the 1950s only deepened Xinjiang’s internal divide. An industrialised North drew migrant Han labor, while the South—where most Uyghurs lived—remained tethered to archaic farming and herding.

With the 1980’s push for market liberalization, Beijing redoubled its push to “develop” Xinjiang. Yet this agenda only deepened economic stratification between the Han migrants who reaped the benefits and the Uyghurs who were shunted into the region’s lowest-paid, least-skilled jobs. Their quality of life fell far below the  Han Chinese.

Economic discontent soon stoked political unrest. By the late 1980s, Turkic-speaking Muslim communities had been driven into open struggle against the Chinese government that combined the call for a “holy war” and Xinjian’s independence (East Turkestan in the separatists’ view). The result was a slew of attacks throughout the 1990s.

For this reason, the US’s War on Terror also involved Uyghur organisations.

Under the same pretext, China went on to repress any manifestation of aspirations for independence. The government lobbied to have the East Turkestan Islamic Movement  (today the Turkestan Islamic Party) designated a terrorist organisation, portraying it as a front for Islamist extremism.

The Movement, initially irrelevant, ended up increasing its influence in reaction to Beijing’s repression. It became one of the largest organisations of Uyghur extremism, aiming for separation from China as an independent state. In the process, it also acquired battlefield experience by fighting in Syria alongside the anti-Assad front.

The repercussions of 2008’s economic crisis—hitting hardest in Xinjiang’s oil sector, the region’s economic backbone—sharpened Uyghur anger over their deteriorating economic conditions. One must include Beijing’s iron-fisted rule and the numerous economic projects which bulldozed through vast infrastructure and urban projects, as well as forcibly displacing thousands of Uyghurs.

In 2009, the growing regional tension in the capital, Ürümqi, exploded into clashes between Han and Uyghurs resulting in dozens of deaths.

As a result, Beijing intensified its repression in Ürümqi as the Uyghur minority were considered to be the source of instability. Rather than restoring order, Uyghur resistance grew into terrorism. Among them the 2014 attacks on the Kunming and Ürümqi railway stations are attributed to Uyghur terrorist organisations.

Since the latter half of the 2010s onward, the government has continued to escalate its crackdown on the Uyghur population, leaning ever more heavily on its burgeoning network of internment camps.

Anti-historical Uyghur Nationalism

From a revolutionary communist standpoint, the Uyghur question demands that we first analyze the roles played by the various  classes. Equally, we must clarify the objectives pursued by the movement unfolding in that specific geo-historical context.

To this end, the Uyghur question must begin with a firm reaffirmation of our doctrine on the liberation struggles of oppressed nationalities. We must then restate the unshakable principles at the heart of our approach to the national question.

Opportunism shows two faces on the national question.

First, it simply denies that the nation-state was a decisive weapon in the bourgeois assault on feudalism. Second, conceding that the nation-state was once a necessary bridge out of pre-capitalist society, it keeps invoking that logic even in regions where anti-feudal and anti-colonial struggles have already produced fully bourgeois states—thereby seeding the working class with the toxin of nationalism and patriotism.

Against the first form of opportunism on the national question, the Marxist doctrine and the method of economic determinism gave an explanation of national struggles, establishing the struggle for the independence of an oppressed nation and its political unification into a nation-state.

This would have created the conditions for the transformation of the old economic-social structures in a bourgeois sense, allowing for the rapid development of capitalism and consequently the development of the full opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, thus maturing the conditions for the proletarian revolution.

But at the same time, Marxism established limits in both time and space for support of national liberation struggles.

In the context of an anti-feudal or anti-colonial revolution, the proletariat supports the struggle for national liberation because it creates the best conditions for the implantation of the capitalist mode of production. However, once we come to a mature capitalism where the bourgeoisie having seized state power and the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has unfolded, the proletariat must reject any call for national unity and solidarity. Instead, the proletariat must claim its dictatorship as the only perspective.

In this way, Marxism had established that with 1871 and the bloody defeat of the Paris Commune, the cycle of national liberation struggles came to an end for Western Europe. This was because, in this geo-historical area, all the European bourgeoisies were united to crush the proletariat. From then on the only struggle was that for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Revolutionary national movements did, however, occur in Eastern Europe and throughout the Afro-Asian area.

For several decades now, these national revolutions have led to the establishment of bourgeois states everywhere. The capitalist mode of production now prevails throughout the world, and even in Africa and Asia the cycle of national revolutions is well and truly over.

Nowhere in the world is there a process of national independence to be completed. On the contrary, everywhere we find the conditions for the proletariat to fight its own bourgeoisie and overthrow the regime of capital.

Statistics compiled by the Chinese authorities provide a general picture of the economic and social structure of Xinjiang.

Data referring to 2020 show that 14.61 million people live in urban areas, 56.53%, and 11.24 million in rural areas, 43.47%.

Compared to 2010 (thus over the ten-year period 2010-2020), the urban population increased by 5.28 million and the rural population decreased by 1.24 million.

Taking into account the employment figures of the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors, we have that in 1955, 86.9% were employed in the primary sector, and this had reduced to 45.4% in 2014.

The contribution of the primary sector to GDP was 54.4% in 1955 and 16.6% in 2014.

In 2019, the share of workers employed in the primary sector decreased further to 36.4%.

From this meager data provided by bourgeois statisticians, we derive the process of transition from a backward, pre-capitalist economy, based on traditionally conducted agriculture and animal husbandry, to a modern, capitalist society, with the development of a local industrial structure and related activities.

The current trend is therefore the liberation of surplus rural labor that is increasingly moving to cities, leading to the transformation of peasants and farmers into proletarians.

As according to revolutionary Marxism, the cycle of national liberation struggles has been completed, Uyghur nationalism and the demand to establish an independent nation-state is anti-historical and reactionary. This divides the proletarians of Xinjiang on the basis of their nationality, setting them against each other, and thus ensures the perpetuation of capitalist exploitation.

Proletarians have no homeland, including the Uyghur one.

The Importance of Xinjiang

Today, the Uyghur question is used in the clash between rival imperialisms, whose opposing propaganda masks the considerable importance of Xinjiang in imperialist contention.

Xinjiang’s importance is first and foremost due to the wealth of energy resources in its subsoil, especially oil and gas, but also to its strategic economic, commercial and political position.

Xinjiang is the westernmost region of the People’s Republic of China.

Its geographical location allows Xinjiang to be well connected with the rest of the world.

It borders Mongolia to the northeast, Russia to the north, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to the northwest and India, Pakistan and Tajikistan to the southwest.

If in the past the region had remained on the fringes of the Chinese empire and then of the People’s Republic, the impetuous development of Chinese capitalism has reached that decidedly inhospitable territory and from there it is transiting to reach markets in the West.

The need for the export of goods and capital, and the import of raw materials for the country’s industries, is expressed in the project that Beijing has called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the New Silk Road.

In the development of the BRI, which envisions the construction of imposing infrastructures, the Xinjiang region is of enormous importance since no less than three economic corridors cross its territory.

These are the New Eurasian Land Bridge (NELBEC), which runs from the coastal regions of eastern China to the markets of northern Europe; the China-Central Asia-West Asia (CCAWAEC), which runs from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, through the Middle East to the port of Piraeus in Greece; and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which runs from the city of Kashgar in southern Xinjiang, through Pakistan, and reaches the waters of the Arabian Sea.

The development of the New Silk Road thus requires a stable and secure Xinjiang, which Beijing tries to guarantee by all means, but the contradictions that run through Xinjiang become weapons used by rival bourgeoisies in their clash with Chinese imperialism.

Among these is precisely the ethnic division of the region, which US imperialism uses to create an internal front against Beijing.

It is the escalation of the clash between the imperialist powers that leads to the involvement in the dispute of certain internal Chinese areas that have long been hostile to the central power.

The very issue of Taiwan, witch is the point of maximum friction between American and Chinese imperialism, is considered by the latter as an internal affair.

Then there was Hong Kong, where the widespread hostility towards the Beijing government is currently at a standstill but could flare up again as it did in the summer of 2020. There is also the People’s Republic’s other vast peripheral province, Tibet, which, like Xinjiang, is riddled with long-standing tensions that make it unstable.

The interest of the Western capitalist powers in the plight of the Uyghur population represents an attempt to foment division and adversity towards Beijing, which has the primary need to quell any threat at home in order to aspire to a new world partition.

Given the situation in Xinjiang, in order not to spill their blood in the service of opposing bourgeois interests, the proletariat in the region must first of all unite over ethnic divisions. They must set up their own organisations of struggle that will unite proletarians regardless of ethnicity. Together with the entire proletariat of the vast China, they must reject nationalist and democratic appeals, fight against the monstrous Chinese bourgeois state, which is deceptively painted red, until the conquest of the true dictatorship of the proletariat.

Across the European side of the Mediterranean, just a few thousand kilometers away from the so-called “civilized” world which watches indifferently, there is massacre. The massacre of Palestinians trapped in the city of Gaza, which has been reduced to nothing but rubble.

In a mere 48 hours, another 700 victims and 1000 wounded have been added to the tens of thousands already killed by the bombings and incursions of the Israeli army. Most of the victims have been women and children, and with health facilities collapsing and hospitals destroyed, with food supplies interrupted continuously, their rescue and treatment is enormously difficult.

Recently the Israeli army has entered the Strip again. The army has taken possession of the city of Rafah, whose inhabitants have been forced to flee.

New massacres and new deportations have transformed Palestine into a true extermination camp.

It is a holocaust which is analogous to that suffered by the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany. The difference is that today it is carried out by the democratic State of Israel, which intends to eliminate the Palestinian presence in the territories it plans on taking into its hands.

This happens with the blessing of the world’s largest democracy, the United States of America, and the acquiescence of other imperial powers. The so-called “friendly” Arab states, who are also responsible for the brutal repression of Palestinian proletarians, carry the blame as well.

It is up to the proletariat of the entire world—today asleep in the metropoles of Capital—to avenge the genocide of its brothers, the Palestinian proletarians, through international revolution. The genocide unfolding today foreshadows the massacre that awaits the global working class: the massacre born of ever-expanding imperialist conflict. If the proletariat fails to counter this war between States with a united front of class war, it condemns itself to that same fate.