This discussion is a clarification on the relationship between private property and personal property in the future communist society.
We will address the question using our method: dialectical materialism. To begin with, we must give a more detailed explanation of the phylogenesis of property within human society. Such a development is inseparable from the development of the productive forces, the relations of production, and certain environmental factors. That is, we will always discuss property in relation to a given mode of production. To do otherwise, to address the question of private property in isolation, would be metaphysics.
Some petty-bourgeois intellectuals, valiant “popularizers” of Marxism, together with certain theorists of workerism, revolutionary syndicalism, and council communism (of which the Gramscian ordinovisti, past and present, are a distinctly Italian example), have believed—and still believe—that taking the means of production away from the bourgeois class takes precedence over the political struggle. Thus, they relegate the transformation of society as a whole to a secondary matter, sometimes viewing it as superfluous. We will show that not only all of this is wrong, but that it is also counterrevolutionary. We will begin with a quotation from Marx. Note that, for us, what was written by our “fathers” is not only descriptive but also prescriptive. This is not because it is the brilliant idea of this or that individual—whom we regard as merely a historical actor—but because it is the result of the method used to study reality. Thus, we said in Origin and Function of the Party Form, commenting on the Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Hegel:
‘“The proletariat does not found its action in history on the ownership of a certain means of production and so on the partial liberation of man, but on the non-possession of human nature which it wishes to appropriate and thus emancipate man ‘which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’”
Thus, the communist doctrine is not simply a list of “detailed theses” (on tactics, trade unions, organization, etc) separated from one another or mechanically added together. Even worse would be to make one more prominent than the others. Rather, the communist doctrine is a new conception of the world and of its understanding. How did this awareness develop in Marx and Engels? A very clear explanation is provided in the party text Origin and Function of the Party Form (Il Programa Comunista #13 of 1961):
“It was from Marx’s and Engels’s observations of the struggle of the proletariat that they gave birth to the idea that the enlightening solution was not the real, the true one, and they also saw that this solution was to be found in the proletariat’s struggle. They understood that the question could not be resolved theoretically because the question, the emancipation of humanity, had not been posed practically since the bourgeoisie thought in terms of an abstract man in a category excluding the proletariat. The liberation of man had to be seen in the area of practice and one had to consider real men, i.e. the human species. (Theses on Feuerbach 8 and 10)”
Marxism is not only the theory of the proletarian class, but of the entire human species. Since the bourgeoisie treats man as an abstract entity, it does not and will never be able to formulate a theory that conceives of humanity in movement, in its transformation in time and space, and in its relation to the material factors that determine its existence. Though Enlightenment thinkers claimed to elevate Reason to the only intelligible principle useful in understanding the world, they did not realize that their reason was nothing more than the result of the productive forces developed by the bourgeoisie. Though this is progressive compared to feudalism, it is incapable of placing Man in his rightful place within History and the Universe, which are correctly understood as a totality. Bitter theoretical battles have been fought both within and outside the proletarian movement. These were necessary both to sculpt our doctrinal corpus, which is understood as a monolith, and to demonstrate its superiority over bourgeois and petty bourgeois theories. Still, our “reason” should not be asserted on school desks, in state or private universities, nor in circles big and small, but with actual force. Let’s embrace Gracchus Babeuf’s saying, “He who has force is right.” We don’t mean this as the doctrine of the thug, but to best explain how futile chatter—which is today more than ever spread and amplified through those democratic sewers called social networks—in the face of the necessary and indispensable violent seizure of political power. Such a seizure will not only revolutionize the economy, but all knowledge.
Thus, Marxism is not simply a political theory. While this is not a secondary aspect in any sense, this is only a partial aspect of the Marxist doctrine. Rather, Marxism places theory in its proper dimension: as the phenomenological form of the clash between two antithetical modes of production (capitalism and socialism), which shall unfold their effects on the battlefield.
Returning to the topic of this presentation, the abolition of private property is not a “nice idea” or “invention” of Marx and Engels, but is the culmination of a historical process that started from specific material premises. This knowledge is achieved through a method that studies the movement of matter and (in this case) the succession of the modes of production, during which private property itself is transformed. By “movement” we do not mean the motion of particles, a form of motion, but the dynamic transformation of matter itself in spacetime, from which it is inseparable.
For obvious reasons, we shall begin by starting from the primary form of production. We will summarize part of the Party work entitled The Succession of Modes of Production in Marxist Theory, which was published starting in Communismo #79.
Primitive Communism
The first forms of social organization were characterized by collective property and communal life. In the absence of private property, social classes, and the state, the reproduction of the species and family ties were based on natural relationships, with descent following the maternal line. Initially, the development of productive forces was slow, and the division of labor was based on sex and age.
Family as a Collective Production Group
In these primitive societies, the family was not a mere group of relatives but a work group, where all members worked together to manage natural resources. A correct definition of the family in materialist terms is one that frames it as a production relationship. This is not to be confused with the “romantic” representation of the bourgeois family which is, in fact, an ideology aimed at maintaining this production relations unchanged.
Returning to primitive society, we will underline how the division of property did not yet exist and how the family had a collective relationship with the environment.
Evolution of Family Ties and Family Splitting
As productive forces increased, family ties based on consanguinity (particularly the female line) weakened. In order to avoid incest, the family split and evolved into more complex forms. One such form was the “punalua,” where more structured relationships developed between the different generations. Over time, the primitive family was transformed. It moved from group marriage to couple marriage. This was then consolidated into a family structure that initially maintained collective ties, but gradually saw the emergence of private property.
At first, this happened for strictly genetic reasons. In the short run for a large group, promiscuous mating actually results in gene frequencies remaining stable over time and tends to favor great genetic diversity. However, in the long run, inbreeding creates the risk of genetic diseases, which results in the need to transition to a subsequent family form: the “punalua.” The evolution from consanguineous family to this family form can therefore be interpreted as a natural selection that minimizes the negative effects of inbreeding.
Such a path follows an adaptive principle in that societies that reduce inbreeding improve the health of their offspring and have an evolutionary advantage. This leads to the progressive regulation of marriage.
The development of productive forces and the division of labor will determine subsequent family forms. With the introduction of animal husbandry, a new form of wealth developed. Originally, this belonged to the gens, but it began to pass into the hands of the heads of families. This marked the beginning of private property and assets, in the form of livestock and slaves. The development of agriculture and sedentary lifestyle also eventually led to an increase in both population and available resources. Such marks the transition from primitive communist society to a society in which private property (especially land and resources) became crucial for social and economic control.
We must now specify how the division of territories within a gens arose from the need to improve the productive organization. This followed a growing specialization and division of labor which favored an increase in the general productivity of society. Thus, this should not be understood as a total break with collective property. Since we often lack the terms to describe and understand the dynamics of classless societies, we are forced to use the improper terminology of bourgeois law, that is, the land was “entrusted” to the various gentes.
The Transition from Matriarchy to Patriarchy
When private property (and therefore the accumulation of wealth) fell into the hands of the heads of families, lineage was no longer determined by the female line but the male. This gave rise to patriarchy. The woman previously had a central role as guardian of the gens, but became subordinate. Her main function was reduced to procreation.
The patriarchal family was consolidated as a social structure, and the head of the household held property and authority. At this stage, the family was not a simple work group, but became the nucleus of social and economic organization. The estate was passed down primarily to male children.
Through patriarchy and private property, the family became synonymous with property. The family did not simply include material goods, but also slaves, who were considered part of the familial property. “Family” takes its name from famulus, the domestic slave, and this is no coincidence. The term itself indicates the dominion of the head of the family, who owned not only the land and livestock, but also the people. This marked the height of the concentration of the property in the hands of a few.
Schematization
The factors that led to the disintegration of primitive communism are to be sought in what has been written before, summarizing this while adding new details.
The division of labor and the resulting increase of surplus within a gens and the greater productivity of one land compared to another entails greater control of resources. This led to the greater importance of the gens, and then the single family, within a society.
Trade grew from the surplus product (in relation to the collective needs of a tribal society), which in turn grew from the greater productivity of labor. Such growth favored exchange between different communities, which allowed the acquisition of goods that would otherwise be unavailable. Specialization in trade developed and money was gradually introduced as a general equivalent of exchange.
Introduction of slaves in a society that does not produce excessive surplus, there is no need to introduce slaves into the production process. In certain contexts, prisoners of war formed the forcibly subordinated workforce. But at first, such prisoners were either exterminated or used to strengthen the “gene pool” of the community.
Class Divided Societies
In relation to a succession of modes of production, class societies may be divided into
A type with three variants
The “asiatic” variant
The “antique-classical” variant
The “germanic” variant
Feudalism
Capitalism
Without dwelling on the analysis of each of these modes of production, we will focus on some of their invariant traits (the state, social classes, and private property) that are useful to this exposition and transversal to every class-divided society.
According to Lenin in State and Revolution, the state is defined as “an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.” That is, the state is the organization of violence intended to repress a certain class. It is also specified in Class, Bureaucracy, and State in Marxist Theory that the State is “a form of property that corresponds to given economic relations, which appeared with them. The state tends to conserve them and defends them by force even when they have become ‘chains on new productive forces’ capable of advancing general well being.” The State therefore fulfills a dual function: The state moderates class conflict by “abolish[ing], in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state.” (Marx, On the Jewish Question)
It does so by using its ideological, legal, and institutional strength.
The state perpetuates the domination of one class by another. It does this through its repressive bureaucratic apparatus of judges and cops. “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.” (The Communist Manifesto)
The state represents nothing other than “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In a purely bourgeois sense, the state presents itself from the very beginning as a true capitalist, the driving force of capitalist economy (the Communes and Maritime Republics which arose in the Middle Ages are a clear example of this), only to reaffirm this role during the full development of the capitalist mode of production. To quote Engels, at this stage the state presents itself as “the ideal collective capitalist,” the centralizer of productive forces and capital.
Statistically speaking, social classes can be defined on the basis of the relationship that specific social groups have with production relations that that class tends to reproduce itself. However, this definition proves insufficient to frame classes in their evolutionary dynamics within the different modes of production. Two social classes dialectically oppose each other, determining a leap forward towards the next mode of production. Social classes are not mere “estate registers” presented in a Linnaean manner. Rather, they are defined both in relation to production relations and on the basis of their historical evolution. Class divided societies present the pecularity of the extraction of the surplus product of one class by another—such as the surplus value of the slave, the surplus product of the peasant, and finally, the surplus value produced by the worker.
Dealing specifically with the role of the proletariat in the capitalist mode of production, we can note that its action is divided into two phases. First, the proletariat presents itself as a class “in itself,” when it is simply a group of individuals who share the same position in the relations of production and limit themselves to struggles and demands that improve their working condition. Then, the proletariat comes a class “for itself” when it achieves political consciousness through the Party, which is a jealous guardian of its doctrine, true class consciousness. The working class “for itself” understands the need for the revolutionary transition to communism or faces the extinction of the human species itself.
Private property, the history of which is what we are precisely writing about, and which consolidates in class society.
Israel’s attack on Syrian military power centers in Damascus is nothing more than a new move to divide regional power in the complex Middle Eastern chessboard. Israel struck several buildings near the Ministry of Defense and other strategic targets, formally justifying this action with the need to defend the Druze community. Yet this masks much broader strategic interests, tied to territorial control and the emerging political order in Syria after the fall of the Assad dynasty. The attack on Damascus is one of the pieces in a broader strategy aimed at consolidating Israel’s control over a strategically crucial strip of Syrian territory.
Israel’s goal is to maintain control over the entire southwestern part of Syria. This region borders southern Lebanon and northern Israel. The control over it is part of a broader plan to secure Israel’s northern and northeastern borders through a series of buffer zones, or outright territorial acquisition. The occupation of Syrian territory is part of an even broader strategy, namely maintaining explicit control over Syrian airspace and territory, extending as far as Iran.
Bashar al-Assad’s power finally collapsed on December 8th, 2024, marking the end of the Baathist regime after half a century of unchallenged rule. Since that very day, Israel has conducted hundreds of raids that destroyed all of the Syrian army’s Soviet-era air defenses. This prepared a land and air corridor that was later used to bomb Iran, without having to cross other airspaces.
New agreements to partition Syria among various regional and global actors are emerging on the horizon. Israel controls southwestern Syria, Turkey has influence over northwestern, central, and part of southern Syria. Turkey maintains a rhetoric of hostility toward Israel, but shares with it and the United States a substantial division of influence in Syria. Meanwhile, the United States maintains a presence in the northeast in the Kurdish areas. Northeastern Syria is rich in resources like water, oil, gas, and phosphates, and has a strategic position on the border with Iraq and Turkey.
Syria’s new central power, made up of conservative Islamists, is trying to juggle things. It’s attempting to maintain its balance like a tightrope walker, but at the same time seek to equip itself with an effective safety net in case it falls.
Ahmad Shara, the self-proclaimed Syrian president, has changed sides several times in his now countless attempts to climb the ladder of power. As a good representative of the bourgeoisie, he has stripped himself of his previous ideology each time. From a young jihadist fighting against the United States and Britain in Iraq, he underwent various transformations. He was a founding member of the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda, then formally broke away from this organization to create a new coalition, and finally came to power in Idlib with Turkish support. The new regime is now attempting to extend and strengthen its control over territories that were never completely under Damascus’s control during the long civil war that began between 2011 and 2012. In addition to the Suwayda region, unresolved issues remain in the Alawite-majority coastal area and in areas controlled by Kurdish-Syrian forces in the northeast of the country.
From February to the present, there have been bloody clashes and massacres by government and pro-government forces. The coastal area saw the killing of around 1,500 civilians, including women and children. The Alawites are identified with the previous regime and suffered particularly atrocious and systematic violence. While still significant, violence against the Druze was relatively less widespread and severe.
To date, the new power in Syria has been dealing with the Druze in accordance with historical Syrian tradition. It uses force to push them to give up part of their autonomy, simultaneously, it tries to negotiate so as to maintain effective control of the territory.
The Druze mostly populate the Suwayda region in southwestern Syria. Essentially, they aim to maintain a form of quasi-federal autonomy. advancing their right to a monopoly on the management of resources and services in a territory they consider their own. It is obvious that managing services and resources is a fundamental aspect of maintaining political control.
Meanwhile, the new regime in Damascus seeks to consolidate control over all the lucrative aspects of state management. Therefore, Druze autonomy is nothing more than an obstacle. The regime also wants to impose its control through new financial companies for the distribution of services such as electricity, water, and banking. Israel could not have found a better excuse to continue its expansion project—now indispensable to a capitalism that is no longer young and needs war and destruction to regenerate itself. Reconstruction and a new cycle of accumulation will follow, prolonging capitalism’s agonizing existence.
However, it is only the working class that pays for this agony, and it is therefore up to them to rise up first and foremost against their own bourgeoisie and its state. The proletariat, led by the International Communist Party, the only real instrument of class struggle, must rise above national flags and fight for its liberation from the rotten capitalist system and its ephemeral reforms. It must look towards the realization of the only type of society in which man can fulfill himself as a truly free being. It is communism, the dream and need of the human race. Communist man will enjoy the rebirth of nature. The development of science and technology will be regained for the happiness of mankind and not for the needs of the individual of bourgeois memory.
The recent escalation of tensions between Iran and Israel represents yet another manifestation of the bourgeoisie’s inherently bellicose nature. While bourgeois propaganda frames this confrontation as a matter of “national security” or “resistance,” reality reveals an imperialist war rooted in the enduring contradictions of capitalist production.
Behind nationalist and religious rhetoric lie concrete interests: the struggle for control over energy resources and commercial trade routes.
The shallow and contemptible rhetoric of the bourgeoisie reappears today, as always, in its worn repertoire. The search for the “guilty” and the “innocent,” the “aggressor’ and the ‘victim,’ is nothing but a recycling of Capital’s permanent lie—used to mask the true nature of conflicts between states. Nothing new under the sun. As we already exposed with the clarity of revolutionary Marxism in our June 1967 text — Out with the obscene hypocrisy of bourgeois propaganda of war and peace! (Il Programma Comunista, No. 12/1967)
“Argument No. 1: there is war because there has been a sinister ‘aggressor” and a meek “victim”; let us rush to defend the latter, condemn the former, and there will be peace. We replied then and we reply today that, even if it were possible to establish who fired the first shot (and it will never be possible), the rifle shot does not fall from the sky: it is the epilogue, not the origin, of a war — political, commercial, diplomatic — that is perpetually waged in the depth of commodity society and money, of wages and profit, the capitalist society; a war that will continue to rage after the alleged aggressor has been removed by the alleged victims. We said it, and this way it was.”
The main facts of the current conflict
In recent months, armed confrontation between the Israeli military apparatus and that of the Islamic Republic has escalated to unprecedented levels. Direct clashes have multiplied, drawing allies into the war’s vortex either directly or indirectly.
The State of Israel, the long arm of Atlantic imperialism in the Middle East, has launched a vast military offensive against Iran. The campaign targets scientific and industrial installations, leaders linked to the nuclear programme, senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and infrastructure strategic to Tehran’s power projection. As expected, this operation is cloaked in the usual “preventive justification”—an alleged security necessity that masks the true imperialist character behind hypocritical defensive language. The real goal: prevent a regional competitor from developing autonomous offensive capabilities, thereby escaping the military monopoly of currently dominant powers.
While sections of bourgeois intelligence continue questioning Iran’s actual capacity to produce nuclear weapons in the short term—citing low uranium enrichment levels and the absence of plutonium production facilities—the possibility cannot be excluded that the Islamic regime might opt for more primitive, heavier, and less sophisticated weapons that nonetheless serve intimidation purposes. On 19 June, the operational deployment of Sejjil missiles revealed the maturity of Iran’s missile program, which has now reached efficiency levels higher than predicted by competing imperialist strategic centers. These missiles can carry heavy warheads, demonstrating that the nuclear option, even in its crudest form, is no longer mere hypothesis.
The Iranian bourgeoisie responded to the Israeli offensive with a series of missile launches, alternating the cadence and type of missiles with the declared aim of saturating the Zionist air defences, quickly wearing down their reserves of interceptors and striking targets considered crucial to the enemy’s economic and military apparatus. These include the financial district of the economic capital, the Haifa refinery — a key hub of the national energy network — strategic port and airport infrastructure, telecommunications centres and intelligence apparatus.
What might appear “counterintuitive” to the naive eyes of petty-bourgeois pacifism proves perfectly consistent with Capital’s political economy. Since the current war cycle began—inaugurated by the armed action of October 7, 2023—Israeli financial markets have suffered no systemic contraction. Instead, they have recorded steady gains. This only confirms, once again, the parasitic and superstructural character of financial capital, which sees not horror in war, but opportunity. For capital, material destruction represents no loss—it announces new destruction, new production, new circulation, new accumulation.
The Iranian attack of June 19 against Tel Aviv’s financial district exemplifies this logic. Missiles striking the Israeli Stock Exchange building caused brief trading suspension but barely scratched the profit machine. When trading resumed, the TA-35 index rose 2.3%, driven by defense stocks. Capital’s indifference to the physical collapse of its most iconic structures confirms it has no roots, no national identity. Capital has no homeland, no religion, no ethics. Where death and ruin strike millions of proletarians, it already envisions returns, interest, and dividends.
In this context, “post-war reconstruction” — a slogan already being bandied about by Western imperialist centres — is nothing more than the other side of planned destruction. Concrete on corpses, steel on rubble, billion-dollar contracts on the blood of Iranian, Arab and Israeli proletarians: this is the true face of capitalism at war. The ridiculous caricature generated by artificial intelligence — with US President Trump triumphantly strolling through a Gaza “rebuilt” in his own image — is not a grotesque deviation, but a lucid and cynical anticipation of the real programme of the Western bourgeoisie. And it was Trump himself who spread this representation, as if to sanction the definitive fusion between financial capital, spectacular technology and war of annihilation.
A total victory for the Israeli state — however unlikely — would open up a “golden age” for the Atlantic bourgeoisie: the normalisation of relations with the oil monarchies that signed the Abraham Accords, the elimination of the Palestinian question as a hindrance, and the hoped-for geopolitical downsizing of Iran. From this perspective, genocide and regime change are considered mere entry costs for accessing a pacified and subjugated market. The new Pax imperialis, if it succeeds, will be nothing more than the silence of the grave under the sovereignty of capital.
Already today, the military-industrial complex, energy companies and construction companies are posting record profits.
The Economic Roots of the Conflict and the Illusion of a Diplomatic “Solution”
Faced with the escalation of war, the chorus of bourgeois pacifists ritualistically calls for a “return to dialogue” and new “peace agreements” – illusions that betray a radical misunderstanding of the nature of imperialist conflict. These champions of democratic peace forget that international treaties are not instruments of justice, but instruments of rule of capitalist domination: they crystallise existing power relations and legitimise the conquests of temporary winners.
The history of the Middle East is littered with ‘peace agreements’ that have turned out to be mere armistices preparing the ground for new carnage: Oslo, Camp David, the Roadmap have all failed systematically because they merely treat the political symptoms without touching the economic roots of the conflict. A genuine peace agreement would require the elimination of the capitalist system itself – precisely what imperialist diplomacy cannot conceive without denying itself.
The evolution of the conflict will depend on the balance of power between the imperialist blocs. Washington, committed to containing China, may prefer an indirect approach, while Beijing—which absorbs over 90% of Iran’s hydrocarbon exports—has already deployed electronic warfare vessels in the Persian Gulf. The Israeli offensive, while decimating the Iranian leadership and exploiting the collapse of Syria to isolate Tehran, cannot sustain itself without the American strategic umbrella. The central question remains: are the United States willing to engage in a direct confrontation with China for hegemony in the Middle East? The answer will determine whether the regional conflict will become the spark of a new global imperialist slaughter.
The Mirror Totalitarianism of Iran and Israel
A Marxist analysis of the current situation in the Middle East shows that Iran and Israel, far from representing antagonistic poles in a supposed clash of civilisations, are in fact twin expressions of bourgeois class oppression. Beyond ideological mystifications, both states demonstrate identical mastery in the art of social control and systematic repression of dissent. Their supposed rivalry is nothing more than a mask behind which hides the class solidarity between national bourgeoisies engaged in the common task of exploiting their respective working masses.
Both regimes have perfected the same instruments of domination: pervasive censorship of information, the use of war propaganda to stifle internal protests, and the complete militarisation of civil society, which has been transformed into a huge barracks at the service of national capital.
In the case of Iran, the censorship apparatus of the theocratic bourgeoisie methodically cracks down on traditional media, the internet and social media. Any voice that dares to raise criticism against the war adventure is “educatively” silenced, while those who have the temerity to question the regime’s warmongering policy are destined to attend accelerated political re-education courses in the country’s prisons. The state propaganda apparatus systematically presents the imperialist conflict as a holy war against Zionism, cynically exploiting religion, the rhetoric of martyrdom and the “red flag of vengeance” to silence dissidents – a perfect dialectical synthesis of religious mysticism and police terrorism.
In the Israeli case, the substance does not change, only the ideological orchestration. The Zionist state’s military censorship democratically “protects” strategic information about the conflict, while the press “enjoys” the democratic freedom of being subject to severe restrictions on its reporting. Anyone who dares to criticise the war policy is immediately accused of treason – a practice that is one of the most established traditions of liberal democracies. The propaganda apparatus instrumentally wields the memory of the Holocaust to pre-emptively bless any massacre, thus transforming the historical memory of Jewish persecution into a carte blanche to legitimise future atrocities against oppressed peoples.
Israeli social media are systematically flooded with advertising material extolling the alleged charitable deeds of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, taking scrupulous care never to mention the tanks of democratic peace that daily machine-gun Palestinian proletarians as they queue for bread to survive. At the same time, cameras broadcast live images of clear skies over Tel Aviv, sunshine and swallows. There is total censorship of any self-produced video showing the horrors of this war. The democratic fiction proceeds smoothly: nothing must disturb the bourgeois peace, Israel proclaims itself invincible and its defences are presented as inviolable.
This substantial identity between the two bourgeois regimes reveals the inconsistency of all those currents that claim to side now with one imperialist camp and now with the other. The international proletariat has nothing in common with either the Iranian theocracy or Zionist democracy: both represent different forms of the same capitalist oppression that must be swept away by the world communist revolution.
Trade Union Piecards Confirm Themselves
The union piecards of the Histadrut have disciplinedly fulfilled their historical function as collaborators of the state apparatus and watchdogs of the bourgeois order. Facing no organised resistance within the Israeli proletariat — which is fragmented, disoriented and devoid of any independent class consciousness — the union leadership, headed by Arnon Bar-David, was able to immediately declare its full support for the war of aggression waged by the Netanyahu government, confirming itself as one of the central cogs in the national war machine.
The Histadrut responded to the 12% wage increase in the civilian sectors, due solely to the temporary shortage of labour, with yet another patriotic statement: ‘The duty of the union is to support the homeland in danger’. Since the beginning of the military operation in Gaza, no demands have been made on behalf of the working class: only a sterile and bureaucratic statement calling for the wages of workers unable to reach their workplaces to be paid. Not a word, however, for the 45,000 Palestinian proletarians thrown into starvation by the forced suspension of work permits. No denunciation of the huge cuts in social spending, destined to directly finance the war effort.
Not content with this, the trade union centre promoted among its members — and indirectly among the entire Israeli proletariat — a campaign to subscribe to so-called ‘patriotic loans’, collecting 280 million shekels from workers’ pockets to support the war economy.
Not even a whisper of dissent was expressed by the Histadrut against the Israeli military operation against Iran. As in the case of Gaza, the union reconfirmed its role as a social buffer for bourgeois war, setting up an assistance fund — reserved exclusively for its members — for those affected by the bombings, with the sole aim of pre-emptively stifling any form of discontent that might emerge from the home front.
The conduct of the official Iranian trade unions, embodied by the so-called Islamic Labour Councils — corporate bodies established by the post-“revolutionary” regime of 1979 to discipline the proletariat within the legal-religious framework of the Islamic Republic — is specular. Throughout the conflict, these bodies did not perform any autonomous protest function, limiting themselves to carrying out the orders of the state apparatus, mobilising workers in welfare activities in favour of the displaced and appealing for national unity in the name of “resistance against the Zionist entity”. In reality, their real function — yesterday as today — is to prevent the formation of independent proletarian organisations, stifling any impulse towards class struggle under the veil of religious ideology and national subordination.
The False Alternative of Regime Change
One of the most insidious narratives accompanying the current cycle of war is that of so-called ‘regime change’ in Iran. Both Western imperialist propaganda and that of the Israeli state converge on one point: presenting the fall of the Ayatollah regime as a panacea for the ills of the region, as if the replacement of the political form could abolish the material contradictions that generate the conflict. Bourgeois impudence even goes so far as to make explicit statements: the German chancellor, no longer even bothering with the veil of diplomatic hypocrisy, has stated that Israel “is doing the dirty work for all of us”. European capital applauds, even if it remains behind the scenes for now.
From the point of view of revolutionary Marxism, this narrative is false at its root. As our party has always affirmed, the enemy is not the regime as such, but the economic-social form that it represents and defends with its repressive apparatus. It is not the form of the state that determines its nature, but the content of the relations of production that underpin it.
A regime change that leaves the rule of capital intact is nothing more than political window dressing: a metamorphosis of form, not a break with substance. The Iranian regime, founded on bourgeois theocracy, and the Israeli regime, based on a bourgeois democracy under alleged siege, are two different—but not contradictory—expressions of the same class rule.
Both subject the proletariat to national discipline, both use war as a tool of internal stabilisation, both serve national and transnational capital. Their ideological or geopolitical differences do not cancel out their common social function: to perpetuate the exploitation of wage labour, to guarantee the order of capitalist production, to annihilate any embryo of autonomous struggle by the proletariat.
A possible “regime change” in Iran — if not accompanied by a social revolution that abolishes the capitalist mode of production — would only replace one mask with another. A liberal, secular or pro-Western government would not transform the condition of the Iranian proletariat at all: it would continue to exploit it, repress it, harness it to the national state machine and the mechanisms of profit.
The history of the Middle East is overflowing with such changes of facade: monarchies overthrown by republics, republics sold off to technocracies, military replaced by civilians — but everywhere class rule has remained intact. The bourgeoisie willingly changes its political representatives, as long as its economic privileges remain intact.
Regime change is often just a way of giving new legitimacy to a system of exploitation that has lost credibility among the masses. The political form may change — from monarchy to republic, from theocracy to parliamentary democracy — but the economic substance remains unchanged: the private appropriation of the surplus value extracted from wage labour.
The modern history of Iran provides a crystal-clear example of this continuity in form and essence. The Iranian nuclear programme is not a creation of the Islamic Republic: it was launched in 1957, under the pro-Western regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi, as part of the American imperialist project “Atoms for Peace”. It was US imperialism that installed the first reactor in Tehran, and in 1974 the monarchist government signed billion-dollar contracts with Western companies for the construction of nuclear power plants: a bourgeois programme, serving national capitalist development, already disguised at the time as technological modernisation.
The Shah’s regime, beloved by Western imperialism, was no less bloody than the current one. Founded on the ferocity of the SAVAK — a secret police apparatus trained by the CIA — monarchical Iran specialised in the industrial export of torture. Its instruments of repression, the fruit of national technological “excellence”, were sold to democratic and dictatorial regimes alike, transforming suffering into a commodity and pain into business. Red-hot chairs, acid nasal sprays, and the “Apollo” electric chair — with a metal mask to amplify the screams of the tortured — were the cream of the crop of repressive engineering made in Iran: a veritable niche product in the global free market.
The Islamic revolution of 1979 did nothing but replace one form of bourgeois rule with another. Where there was once a militarist monarchy, there is now a militarist theocracy. The nuclear programme has continued, and workers continue to be exploited. The rhetoric has changed, but not the substance: Iranian capital continues to accumulate, now under the banner of Islam instead of the monarchy.
The Iranian proletariat must beware of the deceptive siren songs of all those self-styled “workers” parties’ which, in the hour of crisis for the theocratic regime, are rushing to pick up the legacy of bourgeois power: the Mojahedin of the national-democrats of Kalak, the Kurdish nationalist factions waving the flag of petty-bourgeois self-determination, the Pahlavian neo-fascists nostalgically invoking the return of the imperialist monarchy, and the whole plethora of liberal-social democratic formations swarming in the university student movement.
But the Iranian proletariat must neither fall into the error of identifying itself with Hekmatism, which, while retaining the merit of denouncing the imperialist character of the present war and exposing the betrayal of these bourgeois opposition movements that pander to the workers, nevertheless remains imprisoned in democratic and gradualist rhetoric, incapable of proposing a genuine revolutionary alternative to the proletariat. This current, while proclaiming itself authentically Marxist, cannot free itself from the shackles of gradualism, culturalism, councilism and therefore democratic illusions.
The position of revolutionary communists cannot be reduced to sterile humanitarian propaganda to defend the proletariat from the effects of war – a task that belongs to the welfare organisations of the bourgeoisie. Communists cannot compete with the Islamic Labour Councils by remaining on their same level! The historical duty of the communist vanguard is instead to organize the Iranian proletarian movement in the perspective of transforming the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war between the classes. Only in this way can the proletariat escape the blackmail of national unity and definitively break the chains that bind it to its exploiters, whether they are dressed with Nehru jackets or collars.
The Proletariat, the Perspective, and the Party
What position should the international proletariat take in this imperialist slaughterhouse? The answer is unequivocal: the workers have no homeland to defend, they have no interest in shedding their blood for one of the bourgeois factions in struggle.
The Iranian regime and the Zionist state are equally enemies of the working class: both ruthlessly exploit their proletarians, both use war to stifle internal contradictions, both annihilate any attempt at autonomous workers’ organisation. The Persian workers sacrificed for the ‘glory of the Islamic revolution’ and the Jewish workers sacrificed for ‘national security’ are victims of the same capitalist logic.
The proletariat has no homeland: its homeland is the whole world, its enemy is world capital. When the bourgeois slaughter each other, the proletariat must turn its weapons against the bourgeoisie.
This position, far from being utopian, is the only realistic one: every time the working class has allowed itself to be dragged into imperialist carnage, it has emerged decimated and subjugated. Imperialist war dialectically contains the seeds of its own negation: social destruction, the sharpening of contradictions and growing militarisation create the conditions for revolutionary crisis.
It will be decisive for the proletariat to rediscover its class autonomy, its courage and independent spirit, in order to transform the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war.
The most emblematic example of capitalist logic: while missiles rained down on the Tel Aviv stock exchange, the stock market rose vertiginously. Military stocks, security companies and construction companies posted record profits. Capital had already monetised the present destruction, transforming it into future investment. Against this logic of death, pacifist moralising or reforms of international law are useless: what is needed is proletarian revolution, the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production. The revolutionary party must prepare for this final showdown, leading the working class to the historic crossroads: socialism or barbarism.
The International Communist Party rejects petty-bourgeois hysteria and pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric saturated with pacifist or humanitarian moralism. It does not offer false “concrete solutions” when these do not exist. Small and weak, it nevertheless remains invincible as long as it keeps its strategic compass steady, immune to opportunistic compromises, democratic whining and nationalist exaltation. Revolution matures in the times of history, not in subjective impatience.
In recent months, the newly installed Trump administration has decided to eliminate the so-called DEI programs (workplace programs and policies that focus on the vague concepts of “Diversity,” “Equity,” and “Inclusion”) at the federal level. This has caused quite the stir on both sides of the Atlantic.
Simply put, we’re talking about those directives aimed at promoting “pink,” “black,” and “rainbow” quotas in companies and institutions of various kinds, as well as professional training courses to raise workforce awareness on certain “sensitive” issues, etc. This is all in the name of diversity and inclusion in matters of gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on. According to years of petty rhetoric, the goal was to ensure fair and equitable treatment for various “groups” historically discriminated against or underrepresented in certain sectors of the American workforce.
These programs can be traced back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished (very timidly, even in its words) any type of discrimination based on race, religion, sexual orientation, etc, in the workplace. Yet, Trump’s new directives have resulted in dozens and dozens of companies (Google, Amazon, Meta, Disney, GE, Intel, PayPal, Morgan Stanley, to name a few) changing and backtracking on programs they had been committed to for years. Others, like Apple, Microsoft, and Costco, appear intent on continuing them. Needless to say, Trump’s (perhaps) sudden initiative has sparked strong opposition in the parlors of the Democrats and their ilk. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the new administration’s approach “upends longstanding, bipartisan federal policy meant to open doors that had been unfairly closed.”
Of course, while there is a fuss about this issue from both sides of the bourgeois camp, they are definitely not referring to the diversity, equitability, and inclusivity of the American countryside. Here, the vast majority of the workforce is represented solely by enormous hordes of super-exploited Mexican laborers.
It is true that the anti-DEI shift suggests some companies are temporarily challenging personnel policies deemed not in their best interest and exacerbating competition within the company to increase labor exploitation, as well as to present investors with a corporate image consistent with government guidelines. Overall, however, the situation of most workplaces is not going to be significantly altered by the DEI U-turn, especially in the lowest paid sectors.The objective nature of capitalist oppression has been, is, and always will be, the oppression of one class over another. This is not a question of DEI or similar slogans.
Rather, it is worth pausing to remark upon the festering pit that constitutes the realm of bourgeois rhetoric. This poison of the proletariat has been increasingly strewn with identity-based references of all kinds. The factions that participate in these macabre debates accuse each other of racism, misogyny, or homophobia, or, on the other hand, reverse racism, misandry, etc. Behind all of this is the game of charades, the ancient mantra of divide and conquer. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the capitalist mode of production and the preservation of the class domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. The ultimate task of opportunism is to subject the proletariat to the interests of the national economy (and therefore to the bourgeoisie) while maintaining social peace. The ruling class knows that it must use the possibility of “granting” democratic and civil “freedoms”—which can always be questioned at a later point in time—and apply policies aimed at “integrating” the workforce.
From schools to stadiums, the ruling class has promoted moral initiatives in favor of integration and inclusiveness, aping the most shallow anti-racist demagogy. In the context of a mature capitalism where the network of interests has taken on an extremely global character, that very ruling class claims to celebrate a thousand “foreign” customs and traditions while expanding its business and lifestyles: after all, skin color and passports ultimately have little impact on the unfolding of the processes at the base of capitalist production and the accumulation of capital.
The aspirations of reformism cannot help but stop at mere cultural intermediation, which remains an impossibility for bourgeois society. Still, bourgeois society necessarily needs to be able to make use of fratricidal warfare between the exploited, and knows how to exacerbate it in order to hinder the maturation of the class front. Ultimately, they want to lower wages for all proletarians. In any case, the bourgeois class produces and reproduces the internal dividing lines within the proletariat (which every bourgeois camp recognizes): white and black, native and immigrants, men and women, heterosexual and homosexuals, etc. It doesn’t matter if these divisions have emerged from within capitalist societies or are the inheritance of now backwards historical forms that the once revolutionary bourgeoisie promised to relegate to the dustbins of history. That same bourgeois class can—in accordance with the requirements dictated by historical continuity—tip the scales towards “progressive” inclusiveness or towards “nationalist populism.”
Because of the inexorable maturation of social contradictions and the advance of the capitalist crisis, today more than ever every faction of the bourgeois front has moved to instill identity politics in the proletariat. Every front is committed to pigeonholing workers into various interclass blocs and movements based on race, gender, or sexual orientation.
According to the major news outlets in the United States, the statistics show that the number of articles and news items dedicated to or in any way referring to issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc, has seen a tremendous—in many cases exponential—rise since the beginning of the last decade. This has produced a monstrous profit model—by now as pervasive as it is irreversible—built on selling ads to traffic driven by clickbait headlines and irrational outbursts. But don’t be surprised. Due to factors such as 1) the vaunted “change” and strengthening of the welfare state promised by Obama’s first term losing the momentum it had gained among the proletarians, 2) the preparations and strategies for his following presidential campaign and above all 3) the shockwaves caused by the significant 2008 crisis, the American bourgeoisie and its lackeys were forced to ever more frequently plunder from the miserable arsenal of “identity” in order to dull the workers and nip the resurgence of more intense class struggle in the bud. In 2020, following the widespread protests following the disgraceful murder of George Floyd, many of the companies now withdrawing their DEI programs made a big deal about them, and others promised to introduce them. The African-American bourgeoisie immediately seized the opportunity, steering street protests towards the preparation for the electoral “confrontation.”
The African-American bourgeoisie has for decades been working to mobilize the black proletariat. Whether it makes use of the illusion of racial unity, reverse racism, or “identity politics,” its goal is to increase its influence within the Democratic Party. Today, the Trump administration leverages entrenched racial and sexist prejudices, as well as the desperate mantra of “every man for himself,” and seeks to delude the white worker by telling him the fairy tale that he will return to being as “great” as America was when other white workers like him still enjoyed significantly higher wages, services, and benefits than their class brothers and sisters of other colors.
But communists are neither horrified nor surprised by the lies of capital’s puppets. They are aware that “the true struggle of the working class coincides with the defense of its weakest section” and that only in this way “can the relatively least exploited workers protect themselves first and foremost from the downward competition of their more blackmailable class brothers.” We communists are organized in the International Party of the Proletariat, which knows no division within its ranks. The Party’s militants are communists and nothing else, the party places no distinction based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Above all, we communists are aware that only through unification for the united class front, beyond any barriers and “identitarian,” nationalist, or warmongering rhetoric, can the working class return to the path of revolutionary struggle. Thus, the proletariat will finally fulfill its historical task: communist society. Communism will be “the overcoming and synthesis of the ancient historical cultures of man in a superior form that will deny them all.”
The general strike of July 9th, 2025, was originally scheduled for May 20th. Though it was delayed, the strike still involved hundreds of millions of workers across India. The Joint Platform of Central Trade Unions and Federations (JPCTUF) decided to postpone the strike following “Operation Sindoor” on May 7th. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s military provocation against Pakistan brought the two rival nuclear powers in South Asia to the brink of all-out war
The Federation’s capitulation to anti-Pakistani nationalist fervor strengthened the Modi government’s grip. This furthered its agenda, both domestic and foreign, in pursuit of predatory objectives against the workers.
The Stalinists’ Organizational Structure
The JPCTUF comprises 10 trade union bodies and several sectoral federations. Among the largest and most politically influential are the two main federations led by Stalinists: the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), aligned with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), affiliated with the Communist Party of India.
The strike on July 9th was a direct response to the Modi government’s intensified assault on the working class. Workers protested against longer working hours, precarious employment, privatization, the dismantling of public services, and legislation that would introduce new obstacles to trade union organization, which would make most strikes illegal.
The Stalinists placed all the emphasis on privatization. They aimed at portraying the recent history of the Indian trade union movement since the Rao government’s 1991 “liberalization” as a struggle simply against market reforms. Rather than struggling against the lengthening of the working day that affects all Indian proletariat, these ultra-opportunists exclusively mobilized the public sector employees, the base of their clientelist political power.
Yet, the private sector workers who went on strike were motivated by the fight against the extension of their working day from 8 to 12 hours!
This is particularly significant when we consider that it directly attacks the historic eight-hour day; an achievement won by the international working class through decades of bloody struggle.
The other demand that could have unified the entire Indian proletariat is the struggle for substantial wage increases. After all, the central concern for the strikers is inflation and the deterioration of the purchasing power of their wages.
Strike Chronicles
According to the strike organizers, 250 million workers took part, the same as in 2020. The strike involved large sections of the working class, distinct from the religious and caste divisions incessantly promoted by the ruling class and its political representatives. Some interesting sectors involved: civil servants, employees of India’s still-extensive public-sector enterprises, workers in the globally integrated manufacturing industries such as automotive, and, to a lesser extent, the informal sector.
Industries such as coal mining, steel production, banking, postal services, and public transport were severely disrupted. Some car manufacturing plants, including an Ashok Leyland plant in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, had to be partially shut down. Others, Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai, reported high levels of “absenteeism,” slowing down production lines.
In Kerala, where the state government is run by the CPI, daily life was paralysed. Though Kerala State Road Transport Corporation promised buses would operate normally, they too were disrupted.
In West Bengal, where the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government promised to break the strike, several districts broke into violent clashes between strike supporters and the police and TMC thugs. According to news reports, more than a thousand strike supporters were arrested. A TMC spokesperson defended the state crackdown, calling the strike “hooliganism disguised as protest.”
In Gurgaon, thousands of workers from the automotive, construction, banking, healthcare, and childcare sectors marched from Kamla Nehru Park to the post office and held a rally.
In Assam, tea plantation workers went on strike en masse and organised demonstrations across the state.
In Tamil Nadu, public transport and auto-rickshaw services were suspended. In Chennai, the capital and largest city, the manufacturing centers of Coimbatore and Tiruchirappalli were stopped. Numerous bank and insurance branches closed and car production halted.
In Jharkhand, the strike paralysed all operations of Central Coalfields Ltd. and Eastern Coalfields Ltd.
The main office, as well as all 450 branches and regional offices of the Jharkhand and State Gramin Bank were closed. Neighbouring Bihar also shut.
In Maharashtra, workers walked off. This caused the automotive, pharmaceutical, and engineering companies to report reduced production, disruptions to just-in-time production, and blackouts. In the western part of the state, a strike by workers at the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company disrupted power supply to the industrial regions.
Banking and insurance services across Uttar Pradesh ground to a halt. Some 270,000 electrical workers walked off the job in protest of the planned privatisation of the state-owned distributors PVVNL and DVVNL.
Only in West Bengal, Odisha, and Bihar were rail services occupied by protesters. Railways were largely unaffected by the strike otherwise. This distribution of impact reveals the limitations of Indian trade unionism, which is still concentrated in the state and partially stated owned sectors.
Support for the strike varied sharply by region, secondary to union density and regional class composition. Districts with large public-sector workforces turned out strongly, while areas of large privatized industries saw weaker participation.
Nationalism Remains Strong
The contemporary Indian trade union movement shows a detrimental contradiction in the current phase of the subcontinent’s class struggle: the capacity to mobilize hundreds of millions of workers paired with absence of the revolutionary political leadership. This is no accident, but the result of trade union leadership that is structurally reformist. Such leadership is embedded within the capitalist system rather than committed to its revolutionary overthrow.
There is nothing new about the labor movement bowing to bourgeois nationalism during military crises. In 1999, during the Kargil War, union federations shelved scheduled mobilisations to align with the Vajpayee government’s rhetoric. After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the JPCTUF similarly pushed back the December general strike, citing the “need for national unity.”
More recently, during the Pulwama-Balakot crisis in February 2019, the trade union federations systematically avoided any criticism of the Modi government’s military policies, focusing their opposition exclusively on economic issues. The statement issued by the AITUC on February 28th, 2019, is emblematic. While denouncing “anti-worker policies” in detail, it completely omitted any reference to military escalation and its costs for the working class.
The strike on November 26th, 2020, which according to official estimates involved over 250 million workers, was the largest trade union mobilization in world history. However, the demands remained limited to immediate economic issues, systematically avoiding any criticism of imperialist and militarist policies.
The public sector recorded participation rates of over 70%, with particular intensity in banking, postal, and railway services. The Reserve Bank of India estimated economic losses of over €3.5 billion, mainly concentrated in the state and public-company sectors. The participation of agricultural workers, organized through rural associations affiliated with trade union federations, was significant. Over 200 million agricultural workers took part in the demonstrations, which blocked the main rural transport routes.
In the private sector, union membership stayed below 30%. Simply, the unions have little influence in the most dynamic areas of capitalist accumulation. This sectoral distribution is not accidental but reflects the parasitic nature of Indian trade unionism, concentrated in the state sectors and unable to penetrate the strategic areas of the modern capitalist economy.
Break off from Trade Union Opportunism or Remain Paralyzed
It is not a lack of strength that paralyzed the Indian proletariat, but its leadership. Faced with enormous capacity for mobilisation, the trade unions chose the path of conciliation. July 9th showed the working-class army was ready to fight but lacked leadership. The trade union bosses’ avoidance of confrontation during the military crisis confirms their integration into the bourgeois state apparatus.
The systematic separation between “economic issues” and “political issues” is the very structure of opportunistic trade unionism. The complicit silence in the face of war and nationalism shepherds the proletariat into bourgeois legality and constitutional patriotism.
Within this strategy, rhetoric against privatization plays a central role in preserving the capitalist order. Trade union leaders and reformist left-wing parties denounce the selling off of the public sector and call for a return to state management of services, presented as “fairer” or “pro-worker”. But this opposition is deceptive.
The state, whether it manages or privatizes, remains the bourgeoisie’s state. Defending public enterprise means defending another form of the same exploitation, under the direct control of the state. Public ownership of the means of production, without the overthrow of bourgeois power, is not emancipation: it is state capitalism.
There is no such thing as “bad” capitalism in private hands and “good” capitalism in state hands. Incidentally, it’s the “good” hands that keeps wages low and extends the working day to 12 hours! The state is never neutral: it represses, exploits, militarizes, and arms itself. Instead of denouncing this basic truth, trade unions act as guarantors of social peace, calling for better administration of capital. In doing so, they bind the working class to the fate of the national economy and to the reformist illusion that the system can be corrected.
The working class does not defend the state, its assets, or its economy. It defends only itself, its autonomy, and its revolutionary organisation. Every economic struggle, including the struggle against privatisation, is futile if it isn’t subordinated to the destruction of the bourgeois state and the capitalist mode of production.
Either a Break with the Piecards or Class Sterilization
It must be clearly stated that the Indian working class will not be able to advance as long as it remains tied to the existing trade union federations and their opportunistic leaders. No democratic illusions or economic rhetoric can mask this reality. The official trade unions have become instruments of containment of the proletariat, not of its emancipation.
We must break away. Break away from compromised trade union structures, break away from opportunistic leaderships, break away from the bigwigs who speak in the name of workers but act as guardians of the bourgeois order. Only this way will it be possible to rebuild, on internationalist and communist foundations, a political leadership worthy of the strength shown on July 9th.
In the current phase of the general crisis of capitalism, Japan exemplifies the growing contradictions of imperialism. For decades, the Japanese bourgeoisie was bound to the military protection of North American firepower. Now, it finds itself crushed in the grip of competition between imperialist powers, where there are no “historic” alliances but only changing and brutal power relations.
The introduction of 24% customs duties on Japanese imports by the US administration (April 2, 2025) marks a significant shift in the escalation of the trade war between imperialist blocs. The target is clear. The Japanese automotive sector, which alone accounts for 28.3% of exports to the United States, is subject to tariffs of 25%, with an estimated impact of a 4.3% contraction. This measure is consistent with the laws of capitalism. In order to survive the crisis of overproduction, every power is forced to expand at the expense of others.
The Japanese bourgeoisie had exchanged its strategic subordination for commercial advantages. But imperialism knows neither gratitude nor historical memory. It only the continuous change in relations between capitals in permanent war. Financial capital immediately recognized the severity of the attack. The 3% loss on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on the day of the announcement is nothing more than a reflection of the blind and impersonal intelligence of capital.
The Japanese leadership, caught off guard by the change in American attitude, proved to be lacking in vision. The failed merger between US Steel and Japan Steel—blocked by a bipartisan front in the US Congress—should have made it clear that the “friendly” cycle in relations between the two powers had come to an end.
The new Ishiba government, a weak echo of previous cabinets, is reduced to postponing meetings and passively enduring the country’s growing isolation within the imperialist bloc. The major maneuvers of the Kishida period—the “Japan+” project, integration with QUAD, NATO’s expansion into the Indo-Pacific, the AUKUS illusion—have dissolved in the realization of Japan’s marginality in the new world order. The inability to transfer troops to Guam and the paralysis in revising the Security Treaty are just visible signs of the geopolitical decline of Japanese capital.
Behind its technological facade, the Japanese economy is undermined by irreversible imbalances. The slow erosion of the productive base, the forced transition to a service economy, and the growing dependence on tourism—an unproductive and volatile activity—reveal the impossibility for Japanese capital to reestablish a stable cycle of accumulation.
Inflation—at 4.0% in January, 3.7% in February, and 3.6% in March – is beyond the control of the Bank of Japan, which has been unable to cope with currency devaluation for three years. The “core” and “core-core” versions consistently exceed target levels. On this fragile basis, the US customs offensive exacerbates the crisis, making the systemic weakness of Japanese capitalism even more evident.
The rice crisis—a product symbolic of Japanese food sovereignty—clearly shows the anarchy of the bourgeois regime. The 70.9% increase in prices in a single month is the result of the convergence of factors typical of senescent capitalism: environmental destruction, speculation, collapse of logistics networks. The bourgeois state has totally demonstrated its ineptitude. Of the 210,000 tons declared in reserve, only 4 tons were actually released when needed. The myth of food self-sufficiency is dissolving in the need to import rice—even from South Korea, in quantities not seen since 1990—marking the definitive failure of the protected and autarkic agricultural model.
The resumption of contacts between Japan, South Korea, and China does not represent any opening for peace or cooperation between peoples. On the contrary, it is a necessary move by three national bourgeoisies forced to defend their interests against the growing aggression of US imperialism.
The trilateral meeting on March 30 in Seoul and the attempt to relaunch the RCEP agreement—the Asian alternative to the American trade sphere—are expressions of this defensive need. Cooperation in strategic sectors (semiconductors, artificial intelligence, submarine cables, digital surveillance, etc) is anything but peaceful. These are preparations for future wars, in which each bourgeoisie arms itself to defend its profits against its competitors.
The GCAP program—developed jointly with Italy and Great Britain—sought to project Japanese capital into the global arms market. But the Indo-Pakistani conflict and the effectiveness demonstrated by Chinese technologies shattered those illusions. India, increasingly attracted by American weapons, is gradually abandoning Japanese suppliers, who are left with unused production capacity and a failed strategic investment.
Japan thus discovers the impotence of its military industry. On the one hand, it is unable to establish itself as an independent power, and on the other, it is exposed to fierce competition from Western and Asian giants.
The Ishiba cabinet has no line. It lies between conciliatory gestures and empty threats, between openness to American agricultural products and appeals to international law, it expresses nothing but the confusion of a bourgeoisie that has lost its horizon. Concessions to the US—import relief, lowering of quality standards, transfer of market share—only serve to exacerbate economic dependence.
Not even the most hawkish wing of the establishment—the Bank of Japan, with its threats of legal action at the WTO—can propose a way out of the crisis which only continues to crescendo The state apparatus appears divided, powerless, unable to resist the offensive of dominant capital.
The use of the rhetoric of “technological sovereignty” does not mask the real meaning of current policy. This is nothing more than the strengthening of the military-state apparatus as a response to the economic crisis. Cooperation with the European Union in sensitive areas—from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence—has a single purpose. This purpose is the control of the proletariat and the preparation of future inter-imperialist wars. Militarization is not a sign of strength, but of weakness. Capital is in difficulty and seeks what it can no longer obtain in the free market through armed threats.
In this situation, the Japanese working class is exposed to a new intensification of exploitation. Inflation affects real wages, recession eliminates jobs, and the bourgeois state prepares for patriotic mobilization in anticipation of conflict. Every attempt by the bourgeoisie to resolve the crisis—through reforms, alliances, compromises—is doomed to failure. Japanese capital, like any other national capital, is trapped in the crisis of the mode of production itself.
The solution does not lie in defending “sovereignty” or in new imperialist balances. The only way forward is through organized class struggle, under the leadership of the revolutionary party, to transform the commercial and military war between capitalists into a revolutionary civil war against capitalism.
Let us resume the narrative of events in Croatia, following the publication of the last article, published in The International Communist #5. In general, the situation remained stable. There is a low level of proletarian activity and an increasingly aggressive nationalist movement in the dominant political current.
The Education Workers’ Movement
First, we must discuss the progress and conclusion of the education workers’ movement, which began in the fall of 2024. This movement involved workers from elementary schools, high schools, and public universities in Croatia and initially issued five demands:
A 10% increase in the base salary of all education workers.
Increase in salary coefficients for education workers. That is, bringing them into line with those of other similar positions in the public sector. (Salaries are calculated as base salary x coefficient + bonus determined by length of service).
Introduction of a bonus for the education sector until the issue of coefficients is resolved.
Exemption from workplace assessment for teaching staff.
One-year moratorium on the implementation of the proposed reform of vocational school curricula.
Requests 1-3 were economic in nature and were the main motivation for joining the movement. Croatia is has one of the highest inflation rates in the Eurozone, with an average increase in food prices of 45% compared to 2021 and a 47% increase in housing prices since 2022. Rental prices have followed the same trend. It was understandable to demand wage increases in such circumstances, but, as expected, the government and capitalists are not interested in alleviating the increasingly dire economic situation of workers.
The two final requests were not of an economic nature. The government has promoted workplace assessment as a way to encourage excellence among teaching staff, while also penalizing those who don’t meet the required standards. Of course, any kind of assessment conducted by the school administration or inspectors appointed by the ministry would inevitably be used against “troublemakers,” agitators in the workplace, etc. Education workers’ unions have thus decided to fight against the implementation of workplace assessment.
Another project favored by the government is the reform of vocational school curricula. Welcomed by the Croatian Employers’ Association (HUP) as a positive step towards a more market-oriented education system, the reform aims to limit the study of “general culture” subjects (such as history, biology, geography, etc) in vocational schools, instead focusing students’ efforts on “practical” subjects, i.e. those that better prepare them for a life of wage slavery. The implementation of this reform would above all lead to increased job insecurity for a considerable number of teachers.
Discussions about possible union action began during the 2023-24 academic year, and by September 2024, it became clear that a strike was looming. The entire education workers’ movement was mainly organized by three unions: the Independent Trade Union of Secondary School Employees (NSZSŠH), the Preporod trade union, and the Independent Trade Union of Research and Higher Education Employees (NSZVO). Two of the aforementioned unions are strictly sector-specific. The NSZSŠH brings together high school workers, while the NSZVO organizes workers at Croatian universities and research institutes. The Preporod union, on the other hand, includes members from both elementary and high schools.
However, the break in the struggle by the Croatian Teachers’ Union (SHU), which is the dominant union among elementary school employees, dealt a severe blow to the movement, as it meant that collective action in elementary schools was undertaken only by a limited number of workers, mostly members and supporters of the Preporod union. On the other hand, it has long been known that the SHU is nothing more than a collaborationist union, always ready to compromise with the government. It is no coincidence that the Ministry of Education recently transferred some valuable properties to SHU.
After months of fruitless negotiations with the government, the three unions involved have decided to call a “warning strike” for March 19, 2025. Classes were not held in most high schools and many elementary schools throughout Croatia. Although participation may appear excellent, the statistics may have concealed the real situation on the ground. Preporod announced that the strike had been declared in 512 of the 545 schools where the union was active, plus another 117 schools and other educational institutions. It should be noted that “declaring a strike” does not necessarily mean that all—or even most—of the workers at a given school will participate. In fact, in many cases only a minority of workers—usually those most active in the union—take part. In some cases, the strike was “declared” by a single person, while all of their colleagues continued to work. Furthermore, many elementary schools only have SHU union sections, which means that hundreds of schools did not join the strike at all.
Nevertheless, the “warning strike” on March 19 showed that there was a significant number of workers willing to continue the struggle. After fruitless and exhausting negotiations with the government, the three unions decided to call a “regional circular strike.” Croatia has been divided into five geographical regions, and schools in each region have called a one-day strike on a date between April 1 and April 11. Schools in Dalmatia were the first to strike, on April 1, while those in central Croatia were the last, on April 11. The number of schools that declared a strike during this period was roughly the same as during the “warning strike” on March 19, but the number of participants decreased considerably. For example, auxiliary staff (cleaners, janitors, secretaries, etc) mostly remained at work.
It seems that the main reason for this lack of participation was that, given their low pay (often less than €1,000 per month), it was difficult for auxiliary staff to give up a day’s salary. However, this is a very weak argument and says a lot about class consciousness. Workers do not take up the fight when they are sufficiently well off, but when economic difficulties force them to do so.
After the “circular strike,” Preporod, NSZSŠH, and NSZVO announced a protest demonstration for April 25. The demonstration was supposed to take place in Zagreb’s main square, and the unions intended to mobilize their members from all over Croatia. Since April 25 was a Friday, union members should have been entitled to a day off work guaranteed by law for “union activities.” However, the government ordered school principals to not grant such requests, demonstrating once again how much the rights guaranteed by bourgeois law are worth.
In any case, the protest on April 25 was ultimately postponed—as ridiculous as it may seem—due to the death of Pope Francis on April 21. The unions have decided to postpone the protest “in memory of the late pope.” This is yet another example of the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church in Croatian society. The postponement of the protest contributed further to the demoralization of the workers.
The long-awaited event finally took place on May 9th in Zagreb. Turnout was lower than expected, as many workers were prevented from exercising their right to take a day off for union activities. Turnout outside Zagreb was particularly low, and only small groups of activists arrived from the rest of the country. The protest itself featured a mix of speeches ranging from openly anti-capitalist statements to moments of pathetic nationalism. Union leaders promised the crowd that the fight would continue and announced the possibility of a general strike by education workers, similar to the massive (and somewhat successful) strike of 2019.
As the end of the school year approached, however, it became clear that the momentum had been lost. The Preporod union organized a referendum on May 27th and 28th, asking its members if they were willing to strike during the last weeks of elementary school classes and during high school final exams. The results were rather disappointing. Only 34% of elementary school employees said they were willing to strike. The vote in favor of the strike was successful in high schools, but only by a narrow margin.
Following these results, the unions decided to announce another strike in mid-June, this time only in high schools. In the end, however, even this minor action wasn’t implemented. The education workers’ movement of 2024-25 thus completely dissolved without achieving any concrete results. Salaries remained unchanged and the curriculum reform—which the government had practically promised to suspend at the end of 2024—was implemented. The only partial success has been a moratorium on workplace assessments, but it is impossible to say how long this will last for.
There are several reasons for the failure of the education workers’ movement. Firstly, the fact that the largest union in the education sector, the SHU, decided to break ranks with the union and side with the government. Although many SHU members left the union following this apparent betrayal (and many joined the more militant Preporod instead), it remained the largest and most influential union in many elementary schools, especially outside of large urban centers.
Another important cause of the failure was the difficult to understand delaying tactic adopted by the three unions. It took several months to organize a “warning strike,” even though it was clear from the outset that the government would not voluntarily accept any of the main demands (this, of course, came as no shock to Marxists!). After the success of the “warning strike” in March, the unions decided not to go “all in,” but instead to proceed with a “rolling strike” in April. Instead of paralyzing the entire education system, this strike did not affect the Ministry of Education’s plans for the 2024-25 academic year in the slightest. Although time was running out—it makes no sense to organize a strike during the summer holidays, after all—the three unions did not call a general strike, but organized a protest, which they themselves ruined by postponing it due to reactionary Catholic influences. In the end, the momentum for resistance had been exhausted, and the government felt free to declare victory. However, even lost battles can serve as lessons for the future!
Additional Activities among Preschool Educators
It wasn’t just schools and universities that saw organized union actions in the first half of 2025. Even the nursery school workers have joined, forming their own movement. This still seems to be alive. After a series of strikes in nurseries during the summer of 2024 (which we have already written about), nursery school workers have decided to go on the offensive. On April 12th, a protest organized by the professional association of kindergarten educators SIDRO and the Croatian Union of Education, Media, and Culture (SOMK) was held in Zagreb. Several hundred nursery school workers from various parts of the country took part in the protest, which was intended to serve as a springboard for further action. The initiative of the nursery school teachers led to another protest on May 15, with a one-hour strike in nurseries across Croatia.
The fact that the main organizer of the protest was apparently a professional association (similar to an NGO) and not a trade union could prove problematic in the long run, and the Party has already commented on the issue in a leaflet distributed during the protest (already published in the party press).
The main problems facing Croatian nursery school operators today are low wages, overcrowded nurseries, and poor teaching equipment. While school staff receive their salaries from the Ministry of Education directly, employees of public kindergartens in Croatia receive their salaries from local authorities. This has led to huge wage disparities between the richest and poorest municipalities in the country. The government recently attempted to alleviate this problem by formally equalizing the salaries of preschool educators with those of elementary school teachers, which meant that local authorities would have to grant pay rises when necessary. Of course, this has often remained a dead letter, and many preschool educators continue to be underpaid.
The initiative by pre-school teachers (led by SIDRO and SOMK) calls for the Ministry of Education to pay employees’ salaries, as this is the only way to obtain the long-awaited pay rises. Additional state funding for nurseries was also requested in order to reduce overcrowding.
Unlike other workers in Croatian schools, pre-school teachers seem to be continuing their activities without interruption. The SOMK has announced the possibility of a strike in kindergartens in the town of Đurđevac, near the Hungarian border. We wish the workers good luck and hope to see more direct action of this kind throughout Croatia.
Unfortunately, the movement of preschool educators has remained separate from the movement of school workers, even though both essentially belong to the same sector, not to mention the same class. This type of sub-sectoral fragmentation of the trade union movement in Croatia is a disease that dates back to the late 1980s and the destruction of the old industry unions. The unification of all workers in the education sector seems a necessary step towards the creation of a class-based union, and this goal will certainly be supported by Party members employed in the education system.
The Food and Beverage Industry
The food and beverage industry is the most important sector in Croatia today, which is now largely deindustrialized. It currently accounts for 18% of manufacturing GDP and 3.3% of total employment. It also accounts for 13.4% of manufacturing exports. In recent years, it has seen growth in production and employment, while other sectors have stagnated.
Since 2015, wages in the food industry have been consistently 2% lower than the national average, and despite increased labor productivity, there has been no corresponding growth in wages. Meanwhile, average wages in the beverage industry are 2% higher than the national average wage (but this is a much smaller sector than the food industry). Despite the sector’s considerable growth, wages have remained stagnant and have been severely affected by the inflation that has affected European economies in recent years.
The Fortanova Group was founded in 2019 after the collapse of the former mega-corporation Agrokor, which was then rescued by the Croatian state due to its strategic value. This value is represented by €5 billion in turnover and approximately 50,000 employees in Croatia. Fortanova holds key positions in small retail trade, agriculture, and food production in the states of the former Yugoslavia and Hungary. Owned by a consortium of European and Russian capital, the Russian part was subject to sanctions after the war in Ukraine, and in 2024 was completely removed from ownership. Currently, the majority owner of the company is Open Pass, owned by Croatian arch-capitalist Pavle Vujnovac, who also owns PPD, which trades in Russian gas, and the retail company Pevex. Vujnovac was also one of the main financiers of the far-right Croatian party Patriotic Movement (Domovinski pokret), which entered government after the last elections with the right-wing HDZ party. This party promotes anti-worker, austerity, and anti-immigration policies.
The Strikes
In May, there were strikes at three different companies: the meat producer PIK Vrbovac, the beverage producer Jamnica, and Zvijezda, best known for its mayonnaise. The strikes were led by the PPDIV, a union representing workers in agriculture, the food industry, tobacco, and water supply. It currently organizes around 20,000 workers. It is an important union affiliated with the main trade union center, the SSSH. The union has often shown pro-government tendencies, particularly in 2016, when it did not support a wildcat strike at the Koka poultry plant in Varaždin. It subsequently initiated legal proceedings against a worker who had published a critical text on the matter and against the website that had published it.
After collective bargaining negotiations failed, a strike was called, with over 80% of union members from the three companies participating, who voted in favor of striking to obtain the collective agreement. After the strike was announced, Fortenova Group CEO Fabris Peruško attempted to attend the workers’ meeting to try to calm tensions, but to no avail. The strike began on May 27. At the same time, the union reported further pressure from management on the most active union members and attempts by the company to persuade workers to sign individual agreements and break the struggle.
PIK Vrbovac has 920 members and Zvijezda has 138. Of these, approximately 570 participated in the strike. In the early days there were even more, including foreign workers, but they were scared off by the managers. Before the strike, PIK produced around 80 tons of meat, but during the strike only 10.
On June 23, the strikes at PIK and Zvijezda officially ended with the signing of the new collective agreement. This is the longest struggle in the food sector since the wars of the 1990s.
In Jamnica, things turned out differently. On the day the strike was supposed to begin, the strike committee members decided to call it off, despite the fact that it had been voted for by over 80% of unionized workers. That illegitimate strike committee decided that labor relations would be governed by the Pravilnik o radu, a separate regulatory body. After being rightly expelled from the union, the aforementioned members proceeded to form their own union. At present, it is unclear what will happen with the strike or how many members have left the original union.
Preparations for War: Nationalist Parades and Compulsory Military Service
In line with the global trend toward rearmament and militarization, the Croatian government has decided to reintroduce compulsory military service, which was abolished in 2008. At the beginning of June, far-right Defense Minister Ivan Anušić presented the new law on military service, with the first compulsory enlistments expected to begin in 2026.
Since the Croatian state does not currently have the resources necessary to enlist entire male cohorts (women are still exempt from military service), military service will initially be limited to approximately 4,000 recruits per year. However, all males between the ages of 18 and 30 will be subject to compulsory military service. Although conscripts will be given the opportunity to serve in a non-military role, full military service is promoted with the promise of subsequent preferential employment in the public sector. This is a prospect welcomed by many, especially in economically disadvantaged areas of Croatia.
At the same time, Croatia is leading the arms race in the Western Balkans region. Following the purchase of 12 French Rafale fighter jets for nearly €1 billion in 2021, the Ministry of Defense has already ordered 50 German Leopard tanks, which are expected to arrive by the end of 2026. Significant investments in combat drones have also been announced, with the possibility of local production, research, and development, much to the enthusiasm of the Croatian bourgeoisie.
In 2025, Croatia finally achieved NATO’s target of allocating 2% of GDP to defense, and the conservative-nationalist Croatian government immediately welcomed the US proposal to increase this percentage to 5%. Croatian Social Democratic President Zoran Milanović expressed moderate criticism of the increase in military spending, but declared his support for compulsory military service, in line with his new “sovereignist” rhetoric.
The ideological apparatus of the bourgeois state has also worked tirelessly to promote militarization. On August 5, Croatia’s “Victory Day,” a large military parade celebrated the 30th anniversary of “Operation Storm.” This was the decisive military operation of the Croatian War of Independence, followed by the mass expulsion of 150,000 members of the Serbian ethnic minority.
Finally, nearly 500,000 people attended the concert of neo-fascist singer Marko Perković Thompson in Zagreb on June 5, 2025. The concert was, in essence, a political rally organized by the clerical-nationalist wing of the Croatian bourgeoisie. Perković has publicly called on Europe to “return to its Christian roots so that it can regain its strength.” Add to this the militaristic and nationalistic themes of his songs and his clear support for the right-wing political and clerical establishment, and it became clear that Perković will have an important role to play in the future initiatives of the Croatian bourgeoisie.
Forests are burning, glaciers and permafrost are melting, people are fainting and dying on the streets and at work under the scorching sun. Tropical cyclones are expected in the Mediterranean, and millions of the working class around the world could be forced to migrate due to extreme weather conditions.
The climate issue is becoming more and more urgent every day, but, as with any social issue, there are no “universal” truths, only class truths. The bourgeoisie is in no hurry. It has all the means to protect itself from at least the less catastrophic conditions. Such means do not simply safeguard their capital, but they actually increase it by taking advantage of disasters. This is nothing new, they take advantage of every crisis, whether economic, military, or environmental.
Some petty bourgeois movements seem to be shocked by the horrors created by capitalism. These are reactionaries who simply dream of a “different” form of capitalism, but one that remains capitalism nonetheless.
And no less reactionary are those movements—also intrinsically petty bourgeois—that dream of returning to a supposedly idyllic past. This would be in a world based on small-scale agriculture, small towns, and small shops, without the ugliness of capitalist industrialization, where there would be no pollution or exploitation. On the other hand, the proletarian truth is that the first requirement for tackling the climate crisis is the destruction of class society. Then, the collective management of the planet’s resources can take place in the most appropriate way to guarantee a full life for all humanity, without the gradual (and not so gradual) destruction of the planet itself.
Those who feel the need to add prefixes to communism—talking about “eco-Marxism” or “eco-socialism”— are nothing more than the usual vulgarizers and revisionists with whom we are all too familiar. Marxist doctrine does not need to be “updated,” and it is only under communism that crises, including the climate crisis, can be resolved Those who speak of “eco-socialism” always end up comparing it to the false socialisms of the last century. Besides, these capitalist states act like all others and are not any more “respectful of the environment.” This is because they are driven by the economic laws of capitalism, which turns every good into a commodity, and makes the goal of every production process “the greatest possible self-valorization of capital, that is, the greatest possible production of surplus value.” The development of capitalism is by its very nature as anarchic as it is impetuous. It has led to a serious deterioration in environmental conditions since its inception, and the working class has always been the one to suffer the worst consequences. Marx’s Capital is full of stories of workers living in misery created by their bosses. Workers had been condemned to unhealthy living conditions, they had become immiserated both materially and morally. Workers often died at a young age. When they were alive, they lived and worked in spaces where there was little breathable air and many toxic chemicals.
Even today, billions of workers live in the same conditions. Workers who live in slightly better conditions owe this mainly to the achievements made in the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. Achievements that the bourgeoisie always call into question, by the way. In any case, even in the “richest” Western societies there are large pockets of widespread poverty that this mode of production necessarily entails and creates.
Among all the predictions regarding the increase in average temperature and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent decades, the most pessimistic predictions have proven to be the most accurate. In the meantime, summits and conferences are held regularly to discuss real (or imagined) concerns about this issue and possible solutions. These conferences are attended by representatives of states, so-called “civil society,” and the business world. We hear the usual rhetoric that characterizes bourgeois formulations and the climate agreements that some countries will nevertheless commit to supporting—at least on paper. But the underlying implication is that capital must be given time (and state support) to adapt and “clean up,” to transform industrial plants and energy sources
As time passes, it seems that public debate has increasingly shifted from attempts to reverse the “climate disaster” to the search for “mitigation measures” to deal with climatic conditions that are already well beyond the point of no return. And there are numerous cases in which the objectives under discussion are rather vague. We often hear talk of “significant” reductions (by how much?) in emissions of this or that polluting substance or compound, without any objective follow-up. More importantly, the targets are set so far in advance that capital can adjust to any “broken promises” and current leaders and executives are no longer in office, so they cannot be held accountable for their actions. A striking example of this is the commitment to “achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.”
This statement is almost as ridiculous as those of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party—that is, the claims that under its leadership China will be an “advanced socialist society by 2050.” In the first case, time will prove the unsustainability of such a goal. In the second, we let out a good laugh. Meanwhile, today, it is China that is accused of not signing the climate agreements that other countries are signing. In the West, of course, the infamous propaganda of the various national bourgeoisies immediately throws itself headlong into the debate. They do this so they can boast of being among the good and democratic states, rather than among the bad and authoritarian ones. For Marxists, however, the contradiction lies between China’s younger capitalism—an economy heavily based on coal and whose manufacturing growth no climate agreement can afford to stifle—and the more mature capitalisms of the West.
As long as capitalism exists, no “dialogue” between organizations, corporations, or bourgeois states can save the planet; nor will objectives and laws approved by parliaments. Millions of tons of waste will continue to be dumped into the ocean every year, polluting the waters, coasts, and lands where the proletariat works under the whip of capital. And while workers’ living conditions continue to deteriorate in the face of the capitalist crisis, petty bourgeois moralists still dare to reproach them for not doing their part to save the planet, for not reducing their personal “carbon footprint,” for buying plastic straws instead of biodegradable alternatives. Ultimately, the fact that the climate issue appears to be secondary (not to say tertiary, and so on) to the global bourgeoisie is demonstrated by the intensity with which wars continue to be fought around the world. If capitalist production pollutes, war does so even more. Yet, no one has ever been concerned about the environmental consequences of bombings and massacres that destroy and pollute in an uncontrolled manner.
Only the revolutionary uprising of the working class, led by its class party and fighting for nothing less than the destruction of bourgeois relations of production, can stop the devastating fury of capitalism. Only when this antagonistic form of the social production process is a thing of the past, and the contradiction between city and countryside is resolved, will a society rise from the ashes of capitalism, a society that is truly capable of addressing the climate issue and all the important commitments it requires.
We continued our presentation of the Introduction to the Study on Civil War in Germany by reading Chapter Two, focusing in particular on two paragraphs: Unification but Unresolved National Question in Germany and the German Proletariat. The first paragraph opens with a brief explanation of the importance of the national question in Marxist theory for the rise of the proletarian class struggle, before moving on to the specific case of Germany. Linked to the need to form a single internal market within which economic trade is free, the modern unitary state and capitalist mode of production emerged dialectically, each move predicating and necessitating the other. This relation usurps the decentralised feudal state. Naturally, then, capitalism cannot exist without its own apparatus, the state. This is the organ that expresses and protects the ruling classes—bourgeois—interests. However, the transition from the feudal state to the centralized nation state was also an objective for the proletariat in the initial phase. Therefore, from its earliest stages, the socialist movement and later the communist movement established the conditions, times, and places in which it was appropriate for the proletariat to give their full support to bourgeois revolutionary movements, national uprisings, and wars. The process of national reunification of German territory (which in the first half of the 19th century was still divided into a myriad of small states) was particularly complex. The intricate social composition was compounded by a deep political division in the country, resulting in a situation of severe fragmentation. Only in 1871, with the Franco-Prussian War, was unification achieved. Although this was a progressive phenomenon for Germany’s economic development, it still left the national question far from resolved. Now formally united under Prussian rule, Germany was still an amalgamation of reactionary states and principalities.
The second paragraph opens by referring to the historical phase in which the proletariat, not yet a “class in itself,” fought for this primary objective. This began with the bourgeois revolutions (French, English, and German) and ended with the birth of the Party, its revolutionary doctrine and its historical program. In Germany in particular, this “ideological” process was at a higher level than elsewhere, which gave rise to a vigorous current of ideas that reflected current events and, at the same time, a particular intellectual vitality. The phase of organising the proletariat into a class and then into a party was followed by a phase in which the proletariat, with its now conscious vanguard, prepared to impose its own dictatorship: the Paris Commune. With the bloody repression of the Commune, the European bourgeoisies believed it had definitively buried the fighting proletariat. On the contrary, it was precisely from the Commune and the Franco-Prussian War that the proletariat began its most powerful rise. As Marx predicted, the Franco-Prussian War and the defeat of the Commune shifted the center of gravity of the labor movement from France to Germany. As Engels, whom we have quoted, so aptly described, the German proletariat was able to make the most of this opportunity.
The Australian Labour Movement
During the General Meeting in May, we continued our examination of the Australian Labour Movement. The transformation of capitalism from infancy in the mid 19th century to the full-blown crisis of the 1890s reveals how emerging antagonisms propelled workers toward collective resistance.
Between 1850 and 1870, Australia shed its pre-pubescent, penal-colony conditions: convict and indentured labour, the gold-rush influx, and primitive accumulation. This gave way to a nascent capitalist society dominated by British control. By 1860, disparate colonial economies coalesced under a surge of exported British capital, notably after the US civil war. In turn, this fueled an extraordinary rise in production between 1861 and 1889. Yet, this growth was anchored on wool exports rather than a sustainable domestic market. This locked the colonial capitalists into dependency and left domestic, colonial industry underdeveloped.
With the decline in gold production, attention shifted to agriculture and budding manufacturing in port cities. Immigrant labour, state-aided infrastructure (particularly railways which accounted for nearly 80% of state investment), and British finance capital underwrote rapid urbanisation. By 1891, two-thirds of the population lived in cities. Manufacturing grew at over 8% per year, yet remained subordinate to pastoral development. Industrial employment swelled, demanding an expanding proletariat to the harsh realities of capitalist exploitation.
The 1890s crash, triggered by speculative bubbles, falling wool demands, and the collapse of British loans, plunged the economy into depression. Production contracted sharply, unemployment soared, and employers reneged on worker concessions. In this contraction of overproduction and capital centralisation, labour recognised its class position. The first major period of strikes in the 1890s marked the emergence of the proletariat in a future open conflict with the bourgeoisie, bringing forth a need for its Party.
The water crisis in South Asia is not an “environmental emergency,” but a direct expression of capitalist relations of production and interstate competition for control of vital resources. In a region where agriculture employs over 40% of the workforce and accounts for a significant portion of the gross domestic product, control over water is a matter of survival for the local bourgeoisie.
Afghanistan and Iran: Water Sovereignty Versus Ecological Collapse
The issues surrounding the Helmand River, which originates in Afghanistan and ends in the Hamun Lakes on the Iranian border, perfectly illustrates this contradiction. A 1973 treaty that was never fully ratified provided for a minimum supply of 26 m³ per second to Iran. But the reality is that no treaty can survive the capitalist dynamic of resource appropriation. Afghan dams—particularly Kamal Khan and Bakhshabad—drastically reduce water flow, contributing to the collapse of the Iranian ecosystem downstream.
In May 2023, tensions led to armed clashes. On the one hand, the Taliban claims absolute “sovereignty” over the country’s water resources. On the other hand, Iran, threatened by desertification, threatens to use force. The Hamun marshes, once covering over 4,000 km², have shrunk to less than 10% of their original size in just over two decades. This has had devastating effects on the population and agriculture.
International mediation attempts, like those by the UN Environment Program, have proven to be completely irrelevant. Diplomacy is powerless in the face of the dominance of capitalist production and the resulting disruption of the biosphere’s equilibrium.
Pakistan-Afghanistan: Water as the Currency of Betrayal
The Kabul River basin, on which a significant part of Pakistani agriculture depends, is at the center of another dispute. Afghanistan, now controlled by the Taliban, has announced the construction of 12 dams that will reduce the flow to Pakistan by 16-17%. There is no formal agreement between the two countries on the management of shared water resources. Islamabad, which for years hosted the Taliban as a strategic reserve, is now paying the political price for that alliance. Capital has no loyalty.
India and Pakistan The Indus Water Treaty and the Existential Threat
The 1960 Indus Water Treaty was brokered by the World Bank. It gave India control over the eastern rivers and Pakistan control over the western rivers, with restrictions on India’s use of the latter. But with growing demographic pressure, water scarcity, and climate change, the technical margins of the agreement have turned into geopolitical trenches.
India has built hydroelectric dams on “Pakistani” rivers. These are formally within the limits of the treaty, but are perceived by Islamabad as hostile acts. Per capita water availability in Pakistan has fallen from 5,600 to less than 1,000 m³, placing the country in the category of “severe water scarcity.” The Indus River system supports 90% of agriculture, 26% of GDP, and over 40% of Pakistan’s workforce. Any reduction in water flow means famine, unemployment, and social disintegration.
The founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafiz Saeed, has long incorporated the water narrative into jihadist propaganda, linking Indian dams to the need for “defensive jihad.” The phrases used are “water terrorism,” “economic destruction,” and “nuclear cause.” These reflect the underlying logic.
The attack on Pahalgam and India’s subsequent unilateral suspension of the Indus Water Treaty represent a very serious escalation. The statements made by the World Bank and humanitarian agencies regarding “concerns about food security” do not change the material reality. Water, privatized, divided, and weaponized, has become a political lever of power. The bourgeois state, in whatever form, manages resources according to the laws of accumulation and permanent war.
Water Is Not a Commodity, It’s an “Asset”
In South Asia, control over water resources is now indistinguishable from territorial control, economic warfare, and political domination. There is no such thing as “cooperative management” under capitalism. The war for water is a war between bourgeoisies, fought on the backs of the working class and peasantry, who are sacrificed for the interests of conflicting imperialist blocs.
Rational planning of water distribution comes up against insurmountable barriers posed by bourgeois state fragmentation. Political borders, imposed by imperialism and defended by military force, fragment river basins that constitute natural geological units. The contradiction between the physical unity of natural resources and the artificial division of bourgeois states is one of the most visible aspects of the irrationality of the capitalist mode of production.
The case of the Indus river is emblematic. It is divided into “Pakistani rivers” and “Indian rivers” by a treaty imposed in 1960, its basin is managed according to competitive rather than complementary principles. The hydrological unity of the system is negated by the existence of competing states, each with its own exploitation and management plans. The same logic applies within states between regions, provinces, and administrative units competing for the same resource.
A particularly aberrant aspect of this fragmentation is the classification of hydrological information as a “state secret.” Data on river flows, rainfall, dam storage capacity, and planned releases are considered strategic information, subject to manipulation and concealment. India has classified detailed data on the flow rates of the Chenab River as confidential, while Pakistan has concealed information on actual consumption in the provinces. Afghanistan does not share reliable data on withdrawals from the Kabul River basin.
This absurdity reaches its peak with “militarized” dams. The management of reservoirs is under military control and data on water releases is classified as a national security secret. In India, the Baglihar Dam is considered a “strategic asset,” and in Pakistan, the Tarbela Dam is under partial control of the army. Floods resulting from sudden and uncoordinated releases have caused hundreds of casualties in recent years, but the data essential to preventing such disasters remains inaccessible.
The political economy of water under capitalism reproduces all the contradictions of commodity production. Water is simultaneously an essential use value and exchange value, a common good and a strategic commodity. In 2023, the World Bank explicitly labeled water as a “strategic tradable asset,” reducing the issue of access to a mere price calculation, ignoring its fundamental biological and social function.
Private ownership of water manifests itself in various ways. We see state concessions to private companies, distribution monopolies, dams built with private capital but defended by public armies. In Nepal, water concessions to Indian multinationals allow them to control flows that could irrigate Bihar. In Pakistan, Chinese capital finances dams that leave Sindh dry. In Afghanistan, European consortia are planning water collection projects that will starve the Iranian Helmand.
The water market in the region is already up and running. Water is bought, sold, traded, valued, and financed like any other asset. Water futures were introduced in 2020 on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, transforming a vital resource into an object of financial speculation. The agricultural industries of Punjab, India, the mines of Balochistan, and transnational bottling plants compete for the same aquifers on which millions of farmers depend.
Private ownership, whether in the form of individual rights to water or in the form of state sovereignty over water basins, prevents any rational planning. The coordination efforts promoted by institutions such as the Mekong Commission or the International Conference on Indus Waters remain formal, lacking real power and subordinate to the logic of competing national interests.
The Indus Treaty was presented as a model of cooperation, but its very structure reveals the impossibility of transcending competitive logic. It does not provide for integrated management of the basin, but only its division. It does not incorporate principles of intergenerational equity or sustainability, but only fixed withdrawal rates. It does not recognize the rights of local communities, but only those of states.
The solution will not lie in the signing of new or better treaties, nor in the intervention of supranational institutions. Only the international revolution of the proletariat, by abolishing the regime of property and commercial production, can liberate water—like every other resource—from the logic of profit, returning it to the human community.
The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, transcending national borders, will enable the unified management of river basins according to scientific rather than commercial principles. Planned production will eliminate the contradiction between the unitary nature of resources and political fragmentation. Hydrological data, released from military and commercial secrecy, will be made universally available. Hydraulic research, currently subordinated to the interests of profit or power, will be reoriented towards the conservation of resources and the satisfaction of collective needs.
The abolition of private ownership of the means of production will include water, which will be managed as a common good with a rational distribution criterion based on the real needs of communities and ecosystems, not on purchasing power or military force. Large-scale irrigation plans, currently subject to profit motives or national prestige, will be rethought in terms of the general interest of the productive masses.
Centralized planning will not only be technical, but also social. It will enable us to overcome the structural waste of water imposed by market laws and competition. Agricultural and industrial production will be reorganized taking into account overall water availability, not immediate capital appreciation needs.
In arid and semi-arid areas, the revolutionary dictatorship will be able to impose restrictions on population and production concentration in water-vulnerable areas, overcoming the anarchy of settlements and economic activities that characterizes capitalism. Parasitic megacities that have sprung up in desert areas for reasons of real estate speculation or political prestige, such as Karachi or Dubai, will gradually be reoriented toward a balance with available resources.
Only international production planning, free from the laws of value and profit, can solve the problems that capitalism has created and continues to exacerbate. Water, restored to its status as a common good, will be removed from private and state ownership, returning to what it naturally is: a fundamental condition of life, not a commodity to be sold.
To complete this overview, we will provide two tables showing the average annual increases in industrial production from period to period.
TABLE 1
Country
INCREASES IN INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION
1950 – 2024 (source: OCSE)
1973/1950
2007/1973
2018/2007
2024/2018
2024/2007
2024/2007
USA
4,3 %
2,5 %
0,3 %
-0,1 %
1,1 %
0,1 %
Japan
13,1 %
1,6 %
-1,9 %
-1,9 %
-20,9 %
-1,4 %
Korea
16,4 %
10,5 %
2,9 %
1,8 %
48,5 %
2,5 %
Germany
8,5 %
1,7 %
0,6 %
-2,6 %
-9,2 %
-0,6 %
France
6,1 %
1,0 %
-1,3 %
-0,9 %
-12,3 %
-0,8 %
United Kingdom
2,7 %
0,7 %
-0,7 %
-3,1 %
-20,9 %
-1,4 %
Italy
7,5 %
0,8 %
-3,2 %
-1,1 %
-22,9 %
-1,5 %
Belgium
4,2 %
2,5 %
2,1 %
2,4 %
30,3 %
1,6 %
Spain
10,2 %
1,2 %
-4,1 %
-0,1 %
-22,8 %
-1,5 %
Portugal
6,7 %
2,0 %
-2,8 %
-1,6 %
-23,3 %
-1,6 %
The first table concerns the old imperialist countries and is divided into four periods: 1950-1973, 1973-2007, 2007-2018 and finally, 2018-2024. The last two columns have already been shown. Industrial production in 2024 is contrasted with 2018 and in 2007 (2008 in the case of Germany). In the first period, immediately after post-war reconstruction and when industrial production had returned to its pre-war peak, the increases were not simply sustained but accelerated in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Spain. Spain had just finished a civil war. The increases range from +16.4% in South Korea to +8.5% in Germany. To be clear, this means that over the course of 23 years, production increased by an average of 16.4% per year. The figure for France, 6.1%, is lower, but still very respectable. Finally, the United Kingdom has a modest 2.7%, in line with its age and the lesser destruction it suffered. America, already overflowing, still recorded an annual surge of 4.3%!
It is also very clear that, for all forms of capitalism, there is a sharp slowdown from period to period, ending with negative growth in the last period of 2018-2024. The exceptions are South Korea (+1.8%) and Belgium, which beats South Korea with an average annual growth rate of 2.4%! The second table shows the periods for Eastern European countries. In the next article, a third table will list countries with young capitalism, such as Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey, etc.
TABLE 2
Country
INCREASES IN INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION
1988 – 2024 (source: OCSE)
2007/1998
2007/1998
2018/2007
2018/2007
2024/2018
2024/2018
2024/1998
2024/1998
Poland
78,9 %
6,7 %
52,7 %
3,9 %
29,3 %
4,4 %
253,0 %
5,0 %
Hungary
84,8 %
8,0 %
20,6 %
1,7 %
4,5 %
0,7 %
132,9 %
3,4 %
Lithuania
55,0 %
5,0 %
28,3 %
2,3 %
29,7 %
4,4 %
157,8 %
3,7 %
Latvia
57,5 %
6,7 %
24,0 %
2,0 %
-0,6 %
-0,1 %
94,1 %
2,8 %
Estonia
107,5 %
8,4 %
32,0 %
2,6 %
3,7 %
0,6 %
183,9 %
4,1 %
Romania
44,2 %
4,2 %
53,5 %
4,0 %
-8,9 %
-1,5 %
101,8 %
2,7 %
This second table details the periods of 1998-2007, 2007-2018, 2018-2024. The starting year, 1998, is the year in which all these countries, which experienced a recession with the crisis of overproduction that led to the collapse of the Russian empire, returned to pre-crisis production levels. For each period, we have two columns. The first indicates the total increase between the two years and the second indicates the average annual increase for the period calculated from the total increase given in the first column.
In the 1998-2007 period, Poland saw a total increase of 78.9%, which corresponds to an average annual increase of 6.7%. For Hungary, we have 102.9% and 8.2%. For Estonia, we have an increase of 107.5% and 8.4%. For Latvia, we have 57.5% and 6.7%. For Lithuania, we have 55% and 5% For Romania 44.2% and 4.2%
Moving from one period to the next, there is a steady decline in growth rates, which even turned negative in the last period for Lithuania (-0.1%) and Romania (-1.5%). In fact, Romania has been in recession since 2019. It is interesting to see the total increase since 1998. Poland leads the way with a total increase of 253% and an average annual increase of 5%. Followed by Estonia with a total increase of 183.9% and an average annual increase of 4.1%. Hungary and Lithuania follow with total increases of 155.7% and 157.8% respectively, corresponding to an average annual increase of 3.7% for both countries. Then comes Romania with 101.8%, corresponding to an annual increase of 2.7%. Finally, Latvia saw a total increase of 94.1%, equal to an average increase of 2.8%.
For the purposes of constructing the table, the dates of the periods indicated are those of most countries. However, some countries may have different start and end dates for their periods and therefore different durations, which explains why a smaller total increase may result in a slightly higher annual increase, as in the case of Latvia compared to Romania.
To get a more accurate picture of the real industrial growth of these countries, we need to compare it with the peak reached before the great crisis of overproduction in the 1990s. Romania, for example, only managed to surpass its 1988 peak in 2017, because it saw entire sectors of industrial production, such as steel, collapse. Russia for example, has never recovered from the peak it reached in 1989. For other countries, however, there is no doubt that joining the European Community has benefited them and enabled them to experience a real industrial boom.
International Trade
Exports
We have tabulated exports in current dollars. After a decline in exports in 2019 and 2020, there has been a recovery in exports in subsequent years. In 2024, exports in current dollars increased compared to 2018 for almost all countries, with the exception of two: Japan (-4.2%) and the United Kingdom (-1.8%). The winner is China, with a total increase of 43.1%. For the others, the increase ranges from 24% in the United States to 7.8% in Germany. But in reality, these increases are mainly due to inflation.
TABLE 3
EXPORTS IN BILLIONS OF CURRENT DOLLARS
Source: OCSE
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2024/2018
China
2.499
2.499
2.590
3.357
3.544
3.379
3.577
43,1 %
United States
1.666
1.643
1.429
1.758
2.066
2.018
2.065
24,0 %
Germany
1.559
1.489
1.378
1.628
1.676
1.702
1.680
7,8 %
Japan
738
705
641
757
747
718
707
-4,2 %
Italy
549
538
498
616
659
677
674
22,8 %
France
582
571
487
585
620
651
639
9,8 %
South Korea
605
542
512
644
684
632
684
13,0 %
Belgium
468
448
422
552
626
568
535
14,5 %
United Kingdom
454
435
376
429
462
455
446
-1,8 %
We have therefore included a second table expressed in 2019 dollars.
China remains the winner, but with a more modest increase of 13.6%. All others are in negative territory, with increases ranging from -24% in Japan to -1.6% in the United States. This result is more in line with what we saw for industrial production, which suffered a sharp decline in all these countries.
TABLE 4
EXPORTS IN BILLIONS OF 2019 DOLLARS
Source: OECD (calculated based on UN wholesale prices)
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2024/2018
China
2.472
2.499
2.662
2.950
2.678
2.640
2.807
13,6 %
United States
1.648
1.643
1.468
1.545
1.561
1.577
1.621
-1,6 %
Germany
1.542
1.489
1.416
1.430
1.266
1.330
1.319
-14,4 %
Japan
730
705
659
665
564
561
555
-23,9 %
Italy
543
538
512
541
497
529
529
-2,6 %
France
575
571
500
514
469
509
502
-12,8 %
South Korea
598
542
527
566
516
494
537
-10,3 %
Belgium
463
448
433
485
473
444
420
-9,1 %
United Kingdom
449
435
386
377
349
356
350
-22,1 %
It is interesting to note that the United States has become the second largest exporter of goods, replacing Germany since 2010, thanks mainly to hydrocarbons. It is surprising that Italy has overtaken France and ranked fifth, starting in 2020. Apparently, France has not recovered from Covid. Otherwise, Italy, France, Korea, and Belgium are very close in terms of the volume of their merchandise exports.
The third table shows the annual increases for the years 2018 to 2024. Without going into detail, we find the same trends in industrial production. This trend is even clearer if we express exports in constant dollars, eliminating the effect of inflation.
TABLE 5
ANNUAL INCREASES IN EXPORTS IN DOLLARS 2019
Source: OCSE (Calculated based on UN wholesale prices)
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
China
5,5 %
1,1 %
6,5 %
10,8 %
-9,2 %
-1,4 %
6,3 %
United States
3,2 %
-0,3 %
-10,6 %
5,2 %
1,0 %
1,0 %
2,8 %
Germany
3,3 %
-3,4 %
-4,9 %
1,0 %
-11,5 %
5,1 %
-0,8 %
Japan
1,3 %
-3,3 %
-6,7 %
1,0 %
-15,2 %
-0,6 %
-1,0 %
Italy
3,9 %
-1,0 %
-4,9 %
5,8 %
-8,1 %
6,3 %
0,1 %
France
4,3 %
-0,8 %
-12,3 %
2,8 %
-8,9 %
8,6 %
-1,4 %
South Korea
1,0 %
-9,4 %
-2,9 %
7,5 %
-8,8 %
-4,3 %
8,6 %
Belgium
4,4 %
-3,2 %
-3,2 %
12,0 %
-2,5 %
-6,2 %
-5,3 %
United Kingdom
2,7 %
-3,0 %
-11,3 %
-2,4 %
-7,4 %
1,8 %
-1,6 %
Imports
The United States leads with $3.267 trillion, followed by China with $2.585 trillion. Further behind, in third place, is Germany with $1.421 trillion worth of imported goods. Then, with less than half that amount, come France, Japan, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Italy, and finally Belgium with $514 billion.
If we look at the annual increases, we see that they are all negative in 2023 and 2024, with the exception of the United States and China in 2024. The figures are +6.6% for the United States and +1.6% for China. All others are therefore in recession.
Trade Balances
China ranks first, with an overwhelming trade surplus of $992 billion. Germany follows, more modestly, but still with a more than respectable surplus of $260 billion. Italy, Belgium, and Korea also have trade surpluses, but at a much more modest level of around $50 billion. Next comes France with a deficit of $111 billion, the United Kingdom with $292 billion, and finally the United States with a monstrous deficit of $1.202 trillion. It is thanks to this gigantic deficit that global capitalism continues to thrive. If America turns off the import tap, everything collapses.
Conclusion
We can clearly see that things are accelerating under the pressure of the crisis of overproduction. We do not know how far the new US administration will go to force reindustrialization and rebalance the trade and payments balance, but we hope it will go as far as possible, triggering a massive trade, financial, and overproduction crisis. The situation is such that it won’t take much for the entire building to collapse.
As we know, the international proletariat will only return to the path of class struggle and communism when the situation becomes untenable. The earth must open up beneath their feet.
We are pleased to announce the release of issue no. 98 of Comunismo (our italian long-form theoretical publication). English translations will be published in time. The titles, translated into English, are:
Capitalism and Peace Between States
The PCd’I and the Civil War in Italy in the Years of the Immediate Postwar Period: Sarzana-Roccastrada-Rome
Marxism and the Military Question – The Civil War in Russia: The Second Kuban Campaign
The Marxist Theory of Crises – The Theories of Surplus Value: David Ricardo, Part Two)
Recapping the Chinese Question: 7.3 – The Second Congress of the Communist Party of China; 7.4 – The Directives of the ECCI and the August 1922 Plenum
The Red Trade Union International: Announcement From Comunismo Between the First and Second Congress
From the Archive of the Left: 4 March 1923 – Office I of the P.C.d’I. to the E.C. of the Communist International. Reply to the Letter on Illegal Work
Those who wish to receive it can request it by paying €10, following the same procedure indicated for party press subscriptions.
We would also like to inform our readers that an “Association” using titles that could be confused with ours is publishing apocryphal (or perhaps it would be better to call them pirated) versions of our magazine Comunismo. This has the same format, the same cover design, and the same numerical progression of the year of publication and the pamphlet. In short, they present it as if it were their own. These gentlemen were, at the time, warned of the illegality and indeed the impropriety of such a publication and were therefore asked to desist. Perhaps, by acting this way, they hope to induce us to file a complaint in court so they can then accuse us of resorting to “bourgeois law.” No, we will not resort to bourgeois justice. We will continue to publish the real Comunismo, edited as always by the “Associazione la Sinistra Comunista,” with the same editor-in-chief and the same sequential numbering. Time will do justice to this petty-bourgeois frivolousness.