On August 15, Trump and Putin met in Alaska, with the American president announcing: “We are on the right track, I will push NATO and Zelensky to reach an agreement.” A little over a month later, at the UN General Assembly, Trump himself declared: “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and regain all of Ukraine in its original form. With time, patience, and financial support from Europe and, in particular, NATO, a return to the original borders from which this war began is a very real option.”

The president who boasts of having ended seven wars, aspiring to the Nobel Peace Prize, who wanted to resolve the war in Ukraine first in 24 hours, then in 100 days, shows with these contortions the only truth that the Party has always affirmed, namely that all “great men,” including the presidents of the most powerful states in the world, are nothing more than ‘poor puppets’ moved by powerful economic and social forces, and that their boundless egos, fed by hordes of hacks and sycophants, can do nothing in the face of the upheavals caused by the crises of the capitalist mode of production, let alone the convulsions of class conflict.

The various rounds of waltzes performed by the leaders of the bourgeois states, such as the one in Alaska between Putin and Trump, must not therefore deceive the international proletariat about the possibility of agreements that will put an end to the ongoing wars: despite the handshakes, the prospect is not one of a reduction in inter-imperialist conflicts, but rather their aggravation, leading to general war.

At the root of the wars of capital is the need for massive destruction of surplus goods, means of production and proletarians in order to overcome economic crises, which are always caused by overproduction that finds no outlet in markets that are now saturated. Only in this way can capitalism begin a new cycle of plunder and exploitation, based on a new balance of power and a new distribution of access to energy sources, raw materials, and world markets. The current trade war is nothing more than an expression of this need.

Therefore, the political color with which the leaders of any capitalist state cloak themselves is irrelevant, as their ideologies are only the necessary propaganda to push the proletariat to shed their blood for purely bourgeois interests.

In the age of imperialism, every state presents itself on the world stage as a bandit ready to rob or defend its booty, its sole interest being the division of world markets in a way that is as favorable as possible to the interests of its capitalists. But, given that each state is characterized by a different economic weight, and therefore political and military weight, and that the size of each contender is directly linked to different stages of development of the various national economies, it is inevitable that the old capitalist powers are being pressed by the new ones, which demand a more “equitable” division of markets and spheres of influence.

In this way, the old capitalist powers, often referred to as the West, corresponding to the area of Central and Western Europe and North America, together with a few other countries in the rest of the world, such as Japan, have been joined by new emerging capitalist countries that have seen their economies develop in recent decades, most recently identified in the so-called Global South. In this context, the main antagonism on the world stage is between American and Chinese imperialism, between an old capitalism that maintains its global privileges by virtue of a dominant position conquered through the wars of the last century and a rampant capitalism that demands a new configuration of the world order, with other minor powers attempting to carve out their own space for maneuver based on their economic, political, and military weight.

The prospect of a clash between the United States and China is the general context in which the events of the conflict in Ukraine are also taking place. Among the causes that led to that war, we must consider the attitude of the US towards Russia, with American imperialism attempting to weaken it by supporting Ukraine’s armed struggle and hitting Russia with ever-increasing economic sanctions, in order to significantly reduce the weight of Russian imperialism in anticipation of its future involvement in the global conflict; without ruling out the possibility of a real collapse of the current Kremlin regime, with the replacement of a leadership more inclined to comply with Washington’s dictates. With the danger of Russian intervention eliminated, or its potential greatly reduced, the US could have better dealt with its number one enemy: China.

With the attempt to defeat Russian imperialism militarily having failed on the ground and no decisive results having been achieved on the economic war front, the need not to divert important resources from the Pacific front, which will be the main theater of the coming war, seems to be pushing the US to change course in the Ukrainian affair.

“Trump’s War”

The attempt to reach an agreement with Russia, or at least to establish a dialogue between the two imperialisms, clearly expressed in the recent meeting in Alaska in August, is therefore the result of an imperialist dispute involving the whole world.

The difficulty in reaching an agreement lies in the involvement of other actors who are moving in the opposite direction to ending the war on terms that, given the current state of the conflict, are favorable to Russia.

First of all, Ukraine’s position must be considered. Since the beginning of the war, we have rejected the false claims of Ukrainian nationalism, according to which this was a defensive war against Russian aggression for national freedom and independence. Instead, it was an imperialist war on both sides, in which the Ukrainian bourgeoisie sold its proletariat to the Western bourgeoisie to use as cannon fodder in the ongoing war against Russia. The fact that, despite the Russians’ territorial gains and a disastrous situation in the army, there has not yet been a clear Ukrainian defeat on the ground is due to the fact that it can still count on the support of most European states, which are opposed to the cessation of hostilities.

This has led to a hardening of the negotiating position of the Ukrainian political leadership, which, in the event of a Russian-American agreement, would be forced to accept conditions similar to an outright surrender, a surrender that the battlefields, at least for the moment, have not yet decreed.
Furthermore, despite their different nuances, European states have ended up complying with Washington’s demands and supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia, with tens of billions in arms supplies and economic aid. In addition, American pressure to break the energy link with Russia and resell its own energy products at much higher prices has caused European countries to lose the advantageous economic relationship they enjoyed due to the low cost of Russian energy products and has caused European industry to collapse due to rising energy prices, with no prospect of compensation, since the banquet around the semi-destroyed Ukraine, with a possible division of its resources, would mainly benefit the Americans and Russians.

A possible agreement between Russia and the United States could steer the war towards its end, given the latter’s economic disengagement, while Ukraine may find itself unable to continue the war on its own, and with European countries unable to sustain military and economic support for the war itself. But the war remains a big business for the bourgeoisie, which can make huge profits through the arms industry. The continuation of the war in Ukraine is therefore moving towards a reduction in American economic commitment, but with the costs of the war being largely offloaded onto the Europeans, according to a scheme that would see Europe buying weapons from the Americans to continue the war against Russia via Ukraine.

This is the so-called PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List), the new mechanism recently developed within NATO to provide Ukraine with the military equipment it needs. Essentially, this mechanism involves NATO allies, i.e. European countries, paying for American weapons, which are then delivered to Ukraine.

In a nutshell, the Ukrainians make the list, the Americans supply everything, and the Europeans pay for it all—a real bargain for Washington.

The continuation of the war in Ukraine will therefore be paid for almost entirely by Europeans and, not surprisingly, discussions have resumed on using Russian reserves frozen by Western countries after the invasion of Ukraine, estimated at over €200 billion in Europe, in favor of Kiev, which needs over €60 billion a year for military needs alone.

But it is not only American interests that are flooding Europe with weapons; the continuation of the war is also excellent business for the American economy from an energy perspective, with the possibility of increasing Europe’s dependence on the United States. The agreement between the US and the EU on tariffs had already led to an agreement on the sale of American energy products, oil and gas, with the United States requiring EU countries to purchase $750 billion worth of these products over three years. In early September, at the meeting of the so-called “willing,” President Trump warned Europeans to stop buying Russian oil, a position he reiterated in his speech to the UN. Thus, after severing its energy ties with its Russian neighbor, Europe finds itself forced to accept American energy products, which are more expensive than those previously purchased from Russia.

Furthermore, in addition to being forced to accept harsh conditions in negotiations on the issue of tariffs, Europeans must face the prospect that the possible evolution of the US trade war could consist of forcing Europe to join the trade war against China in exchange for support for sanctions against Russia.

Placed at a clear disadvantage, Europeans are suffering the blows of their overseas “ally,” which is interested in bringing down an economic and commercial competitor. On the other hand, for American imperialism, the war in Ukraine has been aimed not only at Russia but also at Europe from the outset.
With “Biden’s war,” as Trump has always called the Ukrainian conflict, having failed to break Russia on the battlefield, and with sanctions in place, continuing the war is still good business for the Americans. It is ‘Trump’s war’, which retains all its imperialist character of plunder, with only a few changes to the previous script: the Ukrainians continue to provide the cannon fodder, the Europeans bear the costs of the war, and the Americans cash in.

Only the proletariat can stop the ongoing massacres

However, the continuation of the war will inevitably reshuffle the cards for the actors involved, most likely in an even more unfavorable way for Ukraine and its supporters, as the situation on the ground remains disastrous for Ukraine, confirming Russia’s advance and the relentless destruction of the Ukrainian army. News coming from the war fronts and from Ukrainian towns and villages means that we cannot rule out the possibility of an internal collapse of the Ukrainian army, which must withstand the impact of the Russian advance despite a shortage of military personnel due to the enormous losses suffered in combat and the difficulty of replacing those losses because of widespread opposition to recruitment, i.e., to serve as cannon fodder, which is increasingly taking on the appearance of a real internal conflict, with the Ukrainian military structures having to use brutal methods to force men to enlist in the army. Unfortunately, resistance to the violence of the Ukrainian state apparatus remains confined to purely individual acts, although there is no shortage of more or less organized episodes of opposition to forced mobilization. The data provided by the bourgeois press itself is nevertheless consistent: according to the State Prosecutor General’s Office in Kiev, the numbers of soldiers who left their units without authorization and those who deserted in 2022 were 6,900 and 3,500, respectively; in 2023, 17,600 and 7,800; in 2024, 67,800 and 23,300, while in the first seven months of this year, already 110,500 and 15,300, most of whom were mobilized in recent months.

This situation is certainly taken into account by the Americans and contributes to the new US administration’s stance on the ongoing war, while in Europe some heads of state are not averse to the idea of sending their own troops to Ukraine, and in the meantime everyone is preparing rearmament plans.

The increase in arms spending inevitably brings with it a change in the policy adopted so far in some European countries on the issue of military conscription. This is the case, for example, in Germany, which began reviewing its military recruitment policy in late August. The reform of conscription in Germany stipulates that, starting next year, all new adults will receive a letter from the army, requiring them to indicate their interest in a period of service and undergo a medical examination. Those who choose to enlist will have to stay for at least six months, with the possibility of extending their service in exchange for bonuses. Once their service is over, they will remain available as reservists.

For now, a compromise has been reached between those who would like to maintain voluntary service and those who support compulsory conscription.

In the meantime, however, preparations are underway, including medical examinations and financial incentives to encourage enlistment. The goal is to increase the German armed forces from the current 182,000 to 260,000 (plus 200,000 reservists) by the end of the decade.

No less important are the plans to increase the armed forces of other European countries, such as Poland, which is aiming for an army of half a million men, including professionals and reservists.

As the Ukrainian conflict has shown, there is a need for mass armies.
In such a context, there can be no illusions about the fate of the European proletariat, or indeed of the proletariat throughout the rest of the world, who will be sacrificed by their own bourgeoisies in a war that is currently being prepared.

The only way to avoid ending up as cannon fodder, as indicated by the massacres of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, is for the proletarians in uniform to fraternize with the proletarians on the other side of the front and turn their weapons against their own bourgeoisie and its state.

Once more, the weight of the contradictions of capitalism proved unbearable for the proletariat, and towards the end of August, millions of Indonesians took to the streets, tearing away the perfumed veil of the bourgeois state—the so-called organization of all citizens in the interests of all citizens—and revealing what lies behind every so-called democracy: the dictatorship of capital.

Across the country—from Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Makassar, etc.— mostly unorganized elements of the working class (urban workers, ojek drivers, delivery riders, street vendors, rural migrants, and sectors of the urban poor), along with students, have clashed with the state over the 50 million rupiah monthly housing allowance granted to parliamentarians, more than ten times the Indonesian minimum wage. Although passed last year, it has become a symbol of bourgeois privilege amid rising food and fuel prices, stagnant wages, higher taxes, and the 306 trillion rupiah (about $18.5 billion USD) austerity package imposed by Prabowo Subianto. Together, these measures have produced a cost-of-living crisis so severe that protesters declared that the government had “made life impossible.” The Indonesian upheaval is not an anomaly, but another symptom of the global disease of capitalism: a system that enriches parasites while bleeding the masses dry.

On August 25, students from Indraprasta PGRI University demonstrated in front of the MPR/DPR/DPD complex demanding the dissolution of parliament. In Medan, thousands of students, workers, and drivers have faced police violence while protesting new tax policies. In Pontianak, students stormed the provincial assembly before being arrested. On August 28 in Jakarta, unions and the Labor Party marched for higher wages and an end to outsourcing, until students broke through the parliament’s fences. That evening, 21-year-old motorcycle taxi driver Affan Kurniawan was struck and killed by a Brimob armored vehicle. His death was confirmation of everything the protesters were fighting against, a microcosm of the proletariat under capitalism: a worker, barely able to survive, crushed by the state as he resisted conditions that had made life unliveable.

By the end of the month, demonstrations had spread to over thirty provinces. Between looting and attacks on the homes of parliamentarians, government offices and police stations were set on fire. In Makassar, the regional assembly was burned down; in Surabaya, the Grahadi government building was burned down; in Bandung, a police station was burned down; in West Nusa Tenggara, the parliament was burned down; in Cirebon, the DPRD building was burned down. Police and army invaded the streets, the Marines and Kostrad were deployed, and public transport was suspended. Protesters waved brooms to “sweep away the dirt of the state,” carried signs demanding police reform, and shouted slogans such as “your sweet promises cause diabetes.” Some waved the Jolly Roger from One Piece as a symbol of treachery, others relaunched the hashtag #IndonesiaGelap. True to their nature, the watchdogs of capital made a tactical retreat: revoking the allowance, announcing ridiculous measures on labor, even offering free transportation for a week — concessions aimed solely at stabilizing the situation and maintaining the flow of capital.

These clashes, this repression, and the subsequent retreat must not and cannot be explained by appealing to bourgeois liberal moralism. The narrative of a particularly evil “conservative” military figure, of a “declining democracy,” or accusations of corruption and “personal greed” is an idealistic fairy tale that disarms the working class and masks the reality of class dictatorship as a problem of administration and personality. To combat such falsehoods, it is important to assert that this struggle is intelligible and can only be pursued through the analysis of the historical-material conditions of Indonesia, using the Marxist method and the program of the international communist party.

The August uprising was not a random explosion, but the continuation of a wave of similar protests that began in 2019. In September of that year, tens of thousands of students launched the Reformasi Dikorupsi protests, the largest student movement since 1998. In 2020, protests against the Omnibus Law mobilized workers and unions against deregulation. In 2022, cuts to fuel subsidies and a 30% price increase sparked nationwide demonstrations.

Each of these movements, and many others before them, arose from the rotten economic legacy of the post-1998 “reformasi”. Promising abstract notions of democracy, the reformasi actually only reorganized bourgeois rule after Suharto’s fall during the Asian financial crisis. Politicians of that period paved the way for IMF “restructuring” by cutting subsidies, privatizing state-owned enterprises, and dismantling labor protections. Indonesia was chained to its role in the imperialist chain: exporting coal, palm oil, and nickel, while providing a huge pool of cheap labor. Global brands reaped profits by threatening to move to Vietnam or Bangladesh if wages rose. Later, Joko Widodo pushed through omnibus labor laws, intensified expropriations for megaprojects, and consolidated the military’s role in civil society.

By mid-2025, the crisis had reached a new peak: inflation was close to 4%, and basic necessities such as rice and cooking oil had risen by more than 15%, affecting the poorest most of all. Over 60% of Indonesia’s workforce, comprising 140 million people, remains confined to the informal sector, condemned to insecurity and starvation wages. Behind them are millions of rural workers dispossessed by mechanization, debt, falling agricultural prices, and land confiscation by agribusiness. Even 38–40% of workers in the formal sector survive on stagnant wages of 3–5 million rupiah per month, barely enough to reproduce life in the cities, where rent and food devour almost all of their income.

To make matters worse, it is structurally impossible for that 60% of the proletariat to organize. “Freedom of association” is defined by Law No. 21/2000, which requires ten employees contracted in the same workplace to form a union — completely useless for those who do not have a single employer, a common workplace, or the legal status of “employee.” This clear collusion between capital and the state reclassifies them as partners, creating a scattered mass of atomized gig economy workers, legally deprived of the basic means of collective defense. This legal straitjacket is reinforced by history: the massacres of 1965–66 not only wiped out hundreds of thousands of communists and militant workers, but also eradicated an entire culture of proletarian organization.

After, before the eyes of the whole world, almost one hundred thousand Palestinian civilians were killed by the Israeli army and bombs, not counting all the bodies still lying under the rubble; after more than a thousand Israeli civilians were also slaughtered or kidnapped, providing the opportunity to start an even more extensive massacre; after cities have been reduced to rubble, with hospitals destroyed and no means to treat the wounded, with hunger and malnutrition due to the blockade of food supplies affecting and killing especially the weakest, the elderly, and children; after the world has had to witness this immense tragedy, after all this, does peace flourish?

Camp David 1978: under American auspices, Begin and Arafat sign a peace treaty, shortly after which Sadat is assassinated and the war resumes. Oslo 1993: a new peace agreement is established and signed by Rabin and Arafat. Shortly thereafter, Rabin is assassinated and the war resumes.

No one really believes that peace will come out of Sharm el Sheikh, as it did not on previous occasions. Rather, there will be an armed truce in which, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Israel will suspend its bombing and withdraw from the city of Gaza, while continuing to occupy a large part of the Strip.

Hamas, having secured immunity for its militants, should surrender and hand over its weapons, and only then should food supplies, under UN guarantee, finally enter and be distributed to the exhausted population.

Israel will certainly take over a large part of the territory, further confining and isolating a large part of the Palestinian population that will not leave the territory, in an area that will resemble even more than before a huge concentration camp.

Once Hamas is excluded, the administration and management of the Strip would then be established under the tutelage of the United States and the Arab countries aligned with it. This will mark the beginning of reconstruction, fueling the appetites of American companies and their closest Western allies. It is no coincidence that Italy’s Meloni, proposing to send the Carabinieri as an intervention force, is eager to be present at the signing of the agreement and to join the game.

During the major strike on October 3, the party distributed the following flyer at related demonstrations:

AGAINST WAR, NOT PACIFISM BUT CLASS MOBILIZATION!

Comrades, workers,

The massacres and destruction of entire cities being razed to the ground, which we are witnessing in Gaza today and have been witnessing in Ukraine for a long time, are closely reminiscent of the imperialist world conflict of the last century.

Genocide in particular is nothing new in bourgeois society, which has never hesitated to carry it out, even if it has very often been minimized, denied, and hidden with the complicity of the press. This time, that has not been possible.

The trade war, with the imposition of import tariffs promoted by the United States and then mirrored by other imperialist powers, and the ongoing clash over energy supplies, are also precursors to the armed conflict that is brewing.

It is the end of the illusion of progress and peaceful development that capitalist society claims to bring. Everywhere, there are calls for rearmament, and in the face of the US, China, and Russia, even “peaceful” Europe, led by Germany and France, is preparing for war, allocating increasingly large portions of state budgets to this end, taking them away from what would be needed for an acceptable life for the working classes. In a few years, they will be ready, and there will soon be incidents that will trigger warmongering propaganda to induce the proletariat to take sides. Soon, images of death and destruction, which do not seem too far away, together with news, even false news, will be part of everyday life in our countries, with young proletarians enlisted and sent to the front.

But this fate is not inevitable. If the working class is able to react by refusing solidarity with its own states and ruling classes, mobilizing against the sacrifices imposed on it and with a view to its own emancipation through revolution, the rush towards war mobilization can be stopped.

Comrades, workers,

Neither demonstrative actions, however courageous, such as those recently staged by the so-called “flotilla,” nor the feeble pacifist propaganda supported by the parties of the so-called left, will put an end to the massacres we are witnessing. Only the preparation and unfolding of the revolutionary movement of the working classes can stop the third imperialist war. Only with the revolutionary overthrow of the regime of Capital (a regime of exploitation, death, and destruction) can all wars finally be stopped forever.

There can be no peace as long as the regime of Capital remains alive.

Workers must orient themselves towards this perspective and mobilize, rebuilding their economic defense organizations and rediscovering the leadership of the class-based political party, against the false left-wing parties and collaborationist unions.

Florence, Friday, October 3, 2025

International Communist Party

Perhaps the most harmful ideological legacy of the Stalinist wave of opportunism that we must combat is the notion that there are or have been countries that have achieved socialism or, even by that extent, communism- the notion of so-called “socialism in one country” or “real socialism”.

The reality is that the October Revolution in Russia, remained isolated and failed to spread to the industrial powers of the world, becoming incapable of fulfilling it’s original task of transforming society from capitalism to socialism. This mainly due to the revolutionary’s defeat in Germany and Italy. This is, of course, the result of complex socio-political factors that can never be attributed to any singular individual.

Stalinism personified the counter-revolution at the international level, with its violent repression within the Russian party and the communist parties that had joined the Communist International. Stalinism is certainly not the cause of the defeat of the revolution in the last century, but it is the means by which the International degenerated, abandoning the revolutionary perspective. And, the Russian party under Stalinist leadership, instead of admitting with dignity the temporary defeat of the proletarian movement and calling for its regrouping and the continuation of the struggle, boasted of having supposedly achieved socialism in Russia. The Russian Party, in doing so, denied one of the fundamental principles of communist doctrine that had been laid out in Principles of Communism by Marx and Engels in 1847: Communism cannot exist in a single country. Capitalism is global, as such, the destruction of capitalism must also be global, along with the establishment of communist society.

The state organs of both the “Socialist countries” and the classical bourgeois countries have used their superstructures to wage relentless propaganda in order to instill in the masses the idea that socialism has, in fact, been realized, to the point that this has become the generally accepted understanding. The consequence of this is that we as proletariat are faced with two main attitudes of socialism, both equally harmful and paralyzing for the proletariat movement. The first being, that socialism has been achieved by Stalin, Ceaușescu, Tito, Mao, or any other regime of the “socialist” bloc, and that this “socialism” is positive and should be replicated. The second, being, that socialism as it has been realized has in fact proved to be an affront to human freedom and civilization, and therefore any reference to this perspective should be silenced without hesitation. A variation of this second position is the admission that the “communist” regimes of the 20^th century were not actually communist, but communism, as stated in Marxism, is a utopian idea that is impossible to achieve in the ‘real world’.

As a result, we are faced with the enormous challenge of showing workers the deceptive nature of such notions and combating the false belief that communism has been ‘put to the test’ and that the struggle for actual real communism must be abandoned. Our party has always strongly refuted these claims and, as long as necessary, will continue to repeat our arguments. The correct approach is to reaffirm what communism means in the Marxist conception and to show how this definition cannot in any way be applied to any of the nations that have ever claimed the title of communist. We quote from The Principals of Communism by Engels in 1847

By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.

Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries.
(Engels, 1847)

Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.

There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone.
(Engels, 1847)

In regards to the form of the proletarian state, which will ensure the transition to socialism and communism, Marx clearly states that the dictatorship of the proletariat is mandatory, it will come to an end with the extinction of classes and the political state, the organ of the dictatorship of one class over another.

My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society’ (Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852)

Although the entire Marxist doctrine is clear on both points, opportunist have found ways to distort them, suggesting that the dictatorship of the proletariat is actually socialism, or even that Lenin supported the concept of Socialism in one country. This opportunistic distortion could be supported by statements such as:

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world—the capitalist world—attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states.
(Lenin, On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, 1915)

When people depict the difficulties of our task, when we are told that the victory of socialism is possible only on a world scale, we regard this merely as an attempt, a particularly hopeless attempt, on the part of the bourgeoisie and of its voluntary and involuntary supporters to distort the irrefutable truth. The final victory of socialism in a single country is of course impossible.
(Lenin, Third All-Russia Congress Of Soviets Of Workers’, Soldiers’ And Peasants’ Deputies, 1918)

I know that there are, of course, wiseacres with a high opinion of themselves and even calling themselves socialists, who assert that power should not have been taken until the revolution broke out in all countries. They do not realise that in saying this they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the working classes carry out a revolution on an international scale means that everyone will remain suspended in mid-air. This is senseless.
(Lenin, Report On Foreign Policy Delivered at a Joint Meeting OF the All-Russia Central Executive Committee and The Moscow Soviet, 1918)

In the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, what Lenin means by “Victory of Socialism in a single country is of course impossible.” is that the success of the socialist revolution, that is, the victory over the national bourgeoisie and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, cannot progress in transforming society if it remains isolated, even though a revolution can take place in a single country at a single moment. Lenin describes this concept in such detail that any attempt to distort his words cannot be considered simple ignorance, but opportunism.

Complete and final victory on a world scale cannot be achieved in Russia alone; it can be achieved only when the proletariat is victorious in at least all the advanced countries, or, at all events, in some of the largest of the advanced countries. Only then shall we be able to say with absolute confidence that the cause of the proletariat has triumphed, that our first objective—the overthrow of capitalism—has been achieved.

We have achieved this objective in one country, and this confronts us with a second task. Since Soviet power has been established, since the bourgeoisie has been overthrown in one country, the second task is to wage the struggle on a world scale, on a different plane, the struggle of the proletarian state surrounded by capitalist states.
(Lenin, Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Government, 1919)

When we started the international revolution, we did so not because we were convinced that we could forestall its development, but because a number of circumstances compelled us to start it. We thought: either the international revolution comes to our assistance, and in that case our victory will be fully assured, or we shall do our modest revolutionary work in the conviction that even in the event of defeat we shall have served the cause of the revolution and that our experience will benefit other revolutions. It was clear to us that without the support of the international world revolution the victory of the proletarian revolution was impossible. Before the revolution, and even after it, we thought: either revolution breaks out in the other countries, in the capitalistically more developed countries, immediately, or at least very quickly, or we must perish. In spite of this conviction, we did all we possibly could to preserve the Soviet system under all circumstances, come what may, because we knew that we were not only working for ourselves, but also for the international revolution. We knew this, we repeatedly expressed this conviction before the October Revolution, immediately after it, and at the time we signed the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. And, generally speaking, this was correct.
(Lenin, Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921)

Let us now demonstrate that a socialist or communist society does not and has never existed anywhere in the world in its modern form, following the overcoming of capitalist society, while we are aware of the existence of “primitive communism” experienced by humanity at the dawn of time.

“No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Soviet Socialist Republic implies the determination of the Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the existing economic system is recognised as a socialist order.” (Lenin, The Tax in Kind, 1921).

These are Lenin’s words at a time when the USSR was effectively a dictatorship of the proletariat, the only form of state capable of transforming society into a socialist one and dying out in the transition to communism. It was only after the proletarian state had become a classical capitalist state, abandoning all class-based and internationalist policies. It was only after it had become a state no longer capable of changing society in a revolutionary way that the leaders dared to call the state socialist. In 1938, Stalin said “The USSR has already eliminated capitalism and established a socialist system”. Just a year before launching into an imperialist war in which we cannot in anyway see a difference between the meaning of the actions of the USSR and it’s allies and that of it’s adversaries. As far as proletariat movement is concerned, All acted according to the rules of a capitalist state in all respects.

If we want to draw a parallel with the biological taxonomic rankings, we should view the “capitalist/Western” bloc and the “socialist/Eastern” bloc not as two distinct Kingdoms but rather as two species of the same genus, capitalism. As we will demonstrate, the “socialist” countries of the 20^th century are in no way drastically different from their capitalist counterparts. Not only because state capitalism is also well present in western economies, but also because both economic structures, statist and liberal, shared the essential characteristics of capitalism as defined in Marx’s epoch-making analysis.

Two types of economic systems that can intersect and coexist. Two seemingly opposing systems within the same mercantile system. Despite the embargoes, treaties, and alliances aimed at isolating the two parts of the world, the capitalist economy is so interconnected globally that it can overcome any barrier. It is not that the “socialist” countries hid their exchanges with capitalist nations or framed them as accidental; on the contrary, they were intended and purposeful. The so called “socialist” countries produced goods that must be exchanged as commodities with the opposing bloc. This is an undeniable fact. And as commodities, these goods which embody the surplus labour of workers crystallized in material form, are exchanged for the universal commodity; money, a form that is decidedly incompatible with communist society. In addition, these blocs were very fluid. As demonstrated in World War II and the following Cold War, the Soviet Union and it’s satellites changed consistently changed sides according to their changing interests, which never coincided with the interests of the proletariat.

From this, arises the question, ‘How can capitalism exist without the capitalist?’ We will look at this question under the assumption that there were no capitalists in any of the “socialist” countries, which is not entirely true. IT is true that in his economic exposition, Marx’s generally speaks of the capitalist class as consisting of individual capitalists. This is simply because that was the general form that capitalism took in his day and was therefore the most suitable premise for an analysis of the mechanisms of capitalist social relations. However, he did not fail to mention that notion – of incredible historical significance for our task – that insofar as the state employs wage labour, it acts itself as a capitalist, as even the individual capitalist is only the personification of their impersonal capital. The idea that it is not necessary for individual capitalist to exist in order for capitalist production and wage labour to exist, creating the same social relations as capitalism with the individual capitalist, is present from the outset in our fundamental conceptions of political economy, and is the key to clarifying the question of “socialist” countries, also called actually existing socialism. The fact that the state is the sole employer, i.e., the sole capitalist, rather than one of many capitalist in collaboration, is only a matter of quantitative, not qualitative, differences. In both cases, workers assert themselves as a class by selling their labour power to Capital, so that in both cases, the social relations are capitalistic in nature. The fact that a more centralized economy would be easier to transform into a communist economy if in the eventual success of the working class’s conquest over capitalism, does in-fact, not make that economy more communist.

Bourgeois economics deals only with numbers, statistics, and lifeless graphs in it’s analysis, remaining incapable of revealing the nature of the social relations presupposed by Capital, which is why it can arbitrary draw lines of demarcation to separate apparently different ‘types of economies’ using completely inconsistent criteria. The same assessment was in fact used by soviet economist who claimed that the greater industrial growth of the Soviet Union and it’s satellite states was due to the miracles of socialism, making a mockery of the entity of Marxist political economy. However, we can actually use the data provided by these bourgeois economists to dismantle their conclusions and prove our Marxist view of the world. Marx described the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalism, and this is the simple key to understanding the difference in the growth orates of different national economies. The rate of profit in England was already falling in Marx’s time. In Russia, it took decades for the capitalist economy to become properly established. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the second half of the 20^th century, the younger capitalist economies of the Eastern world grew at a faster rate then those of the West. This growth has nothing to do with socialism. It only has to do with the same mechanisms that caused Germany and Japan to surpass England in development rate in the early 1900s, and no one would call their economies socialist.

Previously, we acknowledged, for the sake of clarity, the idea that the capitalists had effectively disappeared in “socialist” countries. We now return to this concept. Lenin clearly presented the situation in his works following the October Revolution, stating that while it was relatively easy to get rid of the big capitalist, the much more difficult challenge through the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the elimination of small-scale capitalist and small farmers. As long as these exist, there can certainly be no talk of the abolition of classes.

Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.

And classes still remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.
(Lenin,Economics and Politics In the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,1919)

Stalin subsequently employed precisely the same method as the Socialist Revolutionaries whom he himself had previously criticized! These small capitalist continued to exist throughout the entire duration of the Soviet Union, long after the dictatorship of the proletariat had ceased to exist and had taken the form of a classical capitalist state. The same can be said of all the other “socialist” countries, with the main difference being they had not experienced the dictatorship of the proletariat. For all these other “socialist” countries, the reason that made their rate of development remarkable is the same that kept their small-scale production so widespread, namely their relative underdevelopment. Some sectors, particularly certain branches of food production, were still dominated by small capitalist, by peasants who were able to produce a surplus to sell as a commodity. In fact, as Marx describes in Capital Volume 2, those industries in which the resulting goods are more perishable and can withstand less in the form of stocks are generally less suited to the modern capitalist economy, which makes it more difficult to take them out of the hands of the petty bourgeoisie. Of course, capitalism finds a way, and has since found many ways to incorporate such goods into it’s circuit. After all, capitalism itself is the greatest enemy of the petty bourgeoisie as it continually concentrates capital in relatively fewer and fewer hands.

Returning to the last point, we said that, unlike the Soviet Union, the rest of the “socialist” bloc did not experience the dictatorship of the proletariat, a necessary stage in transition from class society to socialism and communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat can only be established when the civil war of the workers against the national capitalist class, if successful, imposes it’s own proletariat state. While, in Russia, this did indeed happen when it made it’s revolution in 1917, it was then paralyzed in it’s expansion internationally. Where are the communist revolutions of the other supposedly socialist countries? Not in the so called anti-fascist, democratic, or popular “revolutions”, nor the simply established puppet “communist” government, but explicitly in the communist revolutions, with the clear goal of destroying existing social forms. The answer is that there have been none. And, without a real communist revolution ensuring the conquest of power by the proletariat, the discussion about whether a country or a region has ever been socialist or tended towards socialism is completely useless. All that really happened in the “socialist” countries after the victory over Germany and the division into “socialist” blocs sanctioned by the Yalta agreements was an export of red flags and banners, sentimental anthems, fossilized bureaucracy, opportunistic tactics, and (in short) everything except for revolution. There can be no communist transformation of society without open war declared by the proletariat on the bourgeoisie. There can be no communism without the abolition of classes, private property, the commodity form, and the state itself. Stalin’s claim that the USSR had achieved socialism in it’s essence or Ceaușescu’s promise to achieve a ‘multilateral’ socialist economy are nothing more than the most infamous and disgusting blasphemy against millions of workers who fought for nothing less than total destruction of society as we know it today and their fight to replace it with a truly classless society. We shed not a tear when we hear their patriotic hymns celebrating the great achievements of “socialism”. We continue on the same path as always, fully aware of the enormous task that lies ahead.

On September 27th and 28th, the party’s periodic Generail Meeting was held, in an inevitably mixed format, both in person and online, given the planetary distribution of the party’s forces. As always, the vital themes of party doctrine were addressed, not with the intention of finding new and decisive solutions to the absence of broad proletarian movements, the sole prerequisite for a revolutionary period, but rather to reaffirm the cornerstones of the doctrine of the party of the revolution, to confirm, also in light of recent acquisitions and developments, the correctness of the party’s method and perspectives, according to the imperative of invariance transmitted to us by previous generations of militants of the Left.

The topics discussed included the trade union issue, the military issue, the preconditions for revolution in Germany, organic centralism, the trajectory of the capitalist economy, and the history of the Left. Below we present summaries of the reports, which will be published in full in future issues of our publications.

Organic Centralism through Party Correspondence

The series of reports on the functioning of the Party’s center, and in general on its internal life, continued with a series of excerpts from our internal correspondence covering the period of the reconstitution of the Party from 1952 to the end of the 1970s; invaluable material that allows us to observe in depth the already existing fraternal relations that will characterize future communist society.

The speaker emphasized that this method of operation, unique to the Communist Party and reached at a certain stage of its development, is not the result of a brilliant discovery by an equally brilliant “Leader,” but

“originates from the dialectical organic nature of social relations, even in their contradictions, and is not a method to be used only within the Party organization, as if the Party were something suspended in mid-air. The Party must operate according to organic centralism also in its relations with the class and outside its ranks in general.” (Letter of June 5, 1966)

This fundamental thesis has, as a corollary, the idea that

“function develops the organ, and therefore it is the function that determines the corruptions of its forms; therefore, it is not the obsessive codification of the organ’s forms that ensures better function.” (Lettera del 27 Novembre, 1966)

The organization of the Party could be geometrically described as a,

“bundle of lines lying in a plane and emanating from the same point O, the origin of the bundle, which would be the center. The base or periphery (p) are the points of the plane, p, p1, p2, p3, etc., and the link between the center and periphery (-) is the system of rays O-p1, O-p2, O-p3 and so on. If one of the points p is chosen as some new origin and, by creating a circular correspondence, attempts to replace the original system with a new system or a new bundle of lines, p-p1, p-p2, p-p3, then that person has placed themselves outside the system, and it is simply a matter of acknowledging this, otherwise the entire Party would fall apart. Marx, in his polemic with the anarchists, referred to these concepts when he said that the General Council of the First International had to be much more than a simple ‘mailbox’.” (Letter of April 13, 1967)

However, comrades should not be misled by the geometrical example; this operational strategy of the supreme organ that will guide the new Red October is not an “a priori”, theoretical construction, but is precisely the result of a long historical process marked by the lessons of the counter-revolutions. “It was an exceptional qualitative leap from ‘democratic’ centralism to ‘organic’ centralism […]. In the Third International, the conditions matured for moving from a party formed by various organizations […] to a party based on a homogeneous foundation. The victory of the counter-revolution materially interrupted the achievement of this further leap. The party must rise again starting from the highest point of its development to which history has forced it: the positions of the Communist Left, ‘organic centralism’. […] The party no longer needs any legal form to express its existence and its authority: these derive from the program and the way in which it implements the program.” (Letter of February 19, 1966)

Since the working class organized itself into a political party, opportunists of all kinds have been searching for the infamous guarantees, for insurance against degeneration, to the point of distorting the very content of organic centralism, turning it into a strict scheme consisting of a more or less extensive series of “behavioral” norms.

“The entire history of our movement indicates, on the contrary, that, although the principles upon which the organization is founded are clearly stated once and for all, the organ Party must constantly acquire them and make them flesh of its flesh and blood of its blood, translating them into practical action, into a correct interpretation of the reality in which it moves and fights, in terms of correct organization, etc. In this sense, the theoretical work of the party never ends, but unfolds in the continuous effort to make its tactics, its organization, and its practical action adhere to its principles and the program. It is in this living work, that characterizes the very existence of the Party, that errors of all kinds can and do actually occur.” (Letter of March 2, 1972)

The report then addressed the issues of the authority of the Center and the relationship between the Center and the periphery, and how the crises that periodically afflict the Party should be resolved; these are vital issues that will require further study.

Franco-Prussian War: the consecration of Germany as a capitalist power

The presentation of the lntroduction to the study on the civil war in Germany in the years 1918-1923 continues. During this Generai Meeting, the first part of the chapter on the Franco-Prussian War was presented: the consecration of Germany as a capitalist power, and the beginning of the imperialist phase.

The economic situation of Germany in the early 19th century was then described as a country that lived mainly from agriculture and a technically backward handicraft industry. Industriai development was substantially hindered by the profound territorial fragmentation of the country (300 states and 1400 feudal territories), which was drastically reduced by the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon put an end to the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire, unleashing a politica! upheaval and a series of profound social and economic transformations: while the rising bourgeoisie increasingly pressed for territorial, and therefore economic and consequently political unification, the feudal pyramid was crumbling, with the abolition of serfdom that in turn led to the “liberation” of agricultural labor, making it available for the developing industries.

The guilds, which strictly regulated city trades, were also dissolved, making markets more open and competitive. The simplified borders and reforms introduced by Napoleon, such as the new civil and commerciai codes, began to favor internal trade, eliminating barriers and outdated regulations that had previously hindered economic development.

In this context, Prussia’s hegemony over the other German states was consolidateci thanks to a combination of factors that positioned it not only as the leading military and politica! power, but also as the economic engine that would drive Germany towards industrialization and unification.

lt was Prussia that first implemented a reform program aimed at establishing factories in German territory; however, the results of this strategy were modest due to the stilI existing profound fragmentation, which was successfully addressed in 1818 through a reform of the customs system.

In 1834, the Customs Union (Zollverein) was finally created. To optimize the customs union, starting in 1840, massive investments were also made in improving transportation. But the real “great leap” in the German economy occurred following the victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.

This date marked the beginning of a powerful and unprecedented era of development, fueled by several factors, such as the abolition of all barriers with the creation of an immense single market; a huge injection of capital from the war indemnity imposed on France (5 billion gold francs); and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, regions rich in iron ore and coal deposits which, together with those of the Ruhr, laid the foundations for the supremacy of German heavy industry.

Almost ten years after the UN, the OECD has also abandoned the presentation of industrial and manufacturing production indices in order to focus exclusively on GDP trends, which remain the only point of reference for a parasitic and decaying capitalism; now, only fictitious accumulation through speculation counts.

The United States, mired in a deindustrialization that has desertified the productive regions that once made American capitalism prosperous, now with a deep state and trade deficit, has stopped following the principles of liberalism. These principles, which characterized the entire post-war period, are now a way of operating on the world market that is no longer suited to times of deep crisis and commercial, financial, and productive conflict between states, relying instead on pure power relations, throwing the weight of their national markets onto the world market, but with the help of a still dominant military force.

The crisis of global capitalism continues to disrupt the rules and balance of power between imperialist powers. It pushes states into trade conflicts and, in some cases, even into open recourse to violence to reestablish their supremacy. The cases of the imperialist conflict between Russia, the US, and Europe are paradigmatic of this process towards total conflict. But this is a remedy worse than the disease. The inter-imperialist war being fought in Ukraine could ruin more than one national economy. The same applies to the United States: far from leading to a reindustrialization of the country, the economic policy pursued by the new administration may instead accelerate the crisis and lead to a disastrous financial collapse.

Before examining these points in more detail, we present our usual overview of the economic situation. However, this will be reduced, since, as already mentioned, the indices compiled by the OECD are no longer available. We therefore turned to the indices compiled by Eurostat, but these only cover Europe. However, they presented problems because they compile different types of indices, including unconventional indices in which the increase refers to the previous month rather than the same month of the previous year. Among all these indices, it was necessary to verify the correct ones by comparing them with the OECD indices.

We were able to retrieve the indices for the United States, but those for Japan, the United Kingdom, India, South Korea, and the other countries of America are missing. Let us consider inflation trends for the United States, Europe, and China. China has shown an almost deflationary curve since April 2023, reflecting the crisis of overproduction it is experiencing, which is currently manifesting itself in a trade war between the major car manufacturers.

As for the United States, there has been a slight increase in inflation since May 2025, rising from 2.4% to 2.9% in August. Due to the heavy customs duties imposed on a large number of imported products, inflation can only increase. To a certain extent, foreign companies exporting these products and American companies importing them will have to reduce their profits in order not to pass on the full cost of the tax to consumers.

However, with taxes ranging from 15% to 50% in the best case and 100% in the worst case, imported products will have to increase in price. Inflation of more than 3% is therefore to be expected. Currently, average inflation in Europe has stabilized at around 2.4%. In general, inflation in Europe ranges from less than 1% in France to 2.2% in Germany. In contrast, in the United Kingdom, which is outside the European Union, inflation remains very high, with all the difficulties this causes for the British working class, exceeding 4%.

Looking at the US industrial production indices, it can be seen that after a period of depression from March 2023 to November 2024, there is a slight recovery with increases of around 1%: the lowest point is 0.7% and the highest, in January 2025, is 1.4%. The tables below show that, based on the first eight months of the year, the increase is positive at a modest 0.8% compared to the peak reached in 2018, while in 2024 it was still negative at -0.4%. However, this seven-month recovery remains very modest.

Increases in US industrial production (percentage values)

US manufacturing production (percentage values)

A notable driver of industrial production is mining, mainly the extraction of gas and oil from shale. However, when it comes to manufacturing production, the data indicates that it is still below the 2007 peak, at -7.6%. In other words, for 18 years, manufacturing production in the United States, as in other major imperialist countries, has not emerged from the 2008-2009 recession, and there is little chance that the US government can do anything about it.

As for Germany, another major imperialist country, even though it is a medium-sized power like other European countries, it has been in full recession since 2019, with increases ranging from -3.4% in 2019 to -4.7% in 2024. The trend in monthly increases shows a long depression with a slight improvement in recent months, with a positive increase of 2.1% in July 2025. But comparing this increase with that of July 2024, when production fell by 5.4% year-on-year, shows that production is still in recession. And the situation is not likely to change, considering that the industry has lost 114,000 jobs since the beginning of the year. The main sectors of German industry, chemicals, machine tools, and the automotive sector, are under severe pressure from Chinese competition and American tariffs. The heart of German industry is being hit hard, and the German automotive industry, like that of other European countries, is in danger of disappearing.

The new German government wants to revive industrial production through major infrastructure projects, particularly in the transport sector. Years of cutbacks in this sector have left Germany with infrastructure that is not only obsolete but also inefficient. The old Teutonic precision of train timetables is no longer there, and the situation is worse than in Italy, which has seen an improvement in recent years. The communications infrastructure subsystem is also showing problems; the failure to expand to fiber optics while maintaining copper twisted pair connections results in mediocre internet connection performance. On the other hand, the German government has little debt compared to other European countries, and therefore has much more room for maneuver in this regard and can therefore make substantial investments. The military crisis in Europe and the need for rearmament by NATO member states has come at the most opportune moment; the government’s indication to increase the military budget will also be used as a stimulus for German industry.

Italy has also been in recession since 2019. The latest index for 2024 indicates -3%. The situation is even more critical when looking at past trends. However, there has been a slight improvement since February 2025, but the increases remain negative, meaning that production continues to decline, albeit to a lesser extent. Trump’s taxes can only exacerbate the situation.

Last in the series is France. The situation appears to be better; instead of being in a real recession, there is almost stagnation: +0.2% in 2022, +0.6% in 2023, and +0.2% again in 2024. And if we calculate the average of the indices for the first seven months of 2025, we get +0.4%. However, just like in other European countries, production is significantly lower than the peak reached in 2007: -11.5% for 2024 and -10% for 2025, but only over 7 months. If the next 5 months are negative, production will return to the 2024 level, or even lower.

The table below, compiled on the basis of Eurostat statistics, shows the increases in the various countries of the European Union, plus Turkey, from 2019 to 2024. The last two columns show the increases in 2024 compared to 2018 and 2007. Consider the last two columns in particular. It can be seen that all the old capitalist countries have production levels well below the peak reached in 2007 and also below those of 2018: after the great recession, the two years of recovery were 2017 and 2018. Among the old imperialist countries, only Belgium is an exception, thanks to the dynamic capitalism of Flanders.

Percentage increases in industrial production 2019-2024

Almost all Eastern European countries have high growth rates. Compared to 2007, we have: Poland +97.3%; Lithuania +66%; Estonia +37.7%; Latvia +23.3%. Another European country stands out, surprisingly Denmark with +34.1%. Further investigation is needed to understand the reason for this. Norway recorded +10% compared to 2018, but -5.5% compared to 2007, yet it is a major gas producer in Europe. Turkey, a non-European country, recorded a significant increase of 111%. This is a young capitalism that has become imperialist in Lenin’s sense.

Finally, some data on international trade. Exports from the main imperialist countries were tabulated from June 2024 to July 2025. China stands out from the others with increases of up to 12.5%. However, in recent months it has fallen to the average of the other countries with increases ranging from 4.5% to 7.1%. Most countries recorded negative increases until February 2025. Starting in May 2025, all countries emerged from recession, with increases returning to positive territory, some exceeding China, others slightly below, while China’s increases represented the average. It should be noted that these figures are expressed in constant dollars and therefore do not take inflation into account.

CONCLUSION

The current US administration, in line with its predecessor, aims to reindustrialize the United States and reduce the trade deficit. To this end, it intends to use the stick and play on currency devaluation, believing that tax cuts for the upper middle class will encourage them to invest, which is an illusion. Industrialists only make productive investments if they are sure they can profit from the sale of their goods, but the US and global markets are already saturated.

To subsidize tax cuts, the Trump administration needs to tax imported products, but the federal government’s deficit far exceeds the revenue that can be generated from this. And tax cuts only make the situation worse. The US public debt is becoming truly colossal, reaching at least $36 trillion today. As a result, the federal government’s financial needs are growing exponentially year after year. At the same time, the current administration’s economic policy is undermining confidence in the dollar, which has been the foundation of the global financial system since the end of World War II. To make the manufacturing industry more competitive, the government is pushing down the dollar, which has depreciated by about 10% against a basket of reference currencies since the beginning of the year. This translates into a 10% decline in US government bonds held by foreigners. However, over the last 10-15 years, foreign ownership of Treasury securities has been declining: from 60% before the great crisis of 2008-2009, it has fallen to the current 30%.

US economic policy only accentuates this mistrust. This was evident during the mini-crisis in April, when the dollar failed to play its role as a safe-haven currency as risky assets suffered on the stock market. And for the first time, there was a capital flight, just as in developing countries during a crisis. To avoid an increase in interest rates on long-term loans, which serve as a benchmark for interest on debt, the government is increasingly resorting to short-term loans. This makes lending even more risky, as loans must be renewed more often with ever-increasing amounts.

Under these circumstances, there will come a time when the US government will no longer be able to renew its debt on the world market. The federal government will then find itself bankrupt, inevitably leading to a massive bond crash that will spread to all nations, and the immense financial house of cards will collapse. Central banks will try to intervene as they did in 2008-2009, but at the end of this upheaval, they will not be able to regain control of the situation.

The future of capitalism is a crisis worse than that of 1929. And it can only come out of it with a new terrible world war that will destroy all surpluses, settle all outstanding accounts, and redefine the “borders of the world.”

But this is not the solution for the proletariat, nor for humanity as a whole. The future of humanity must not be this, we are certain of that. The old Mole continues inexorably with its great work of digging to bring the world proletariat back on the track of revolution!

Taking up the title of the issue of Comunismo, 10/1982, we wanted to retrace, in issues 433 and 434 of our newspaper, the line expressed by the Party and its conduct in trade union activities since the Second World War.

The article we wish to republish today was published ten years later, in 1992. It clearly outlines and further clarifies what was expressed in the text at the time, reconfirming the continuity of the trade union tactics expressed then, which cannot be improvised or modified at every turn.

In the text we are republishing in this issue, “Terms of the Party’s Trade Union Activity,” some important points are defined:

First of all, the distinction between “reactionary unions” that operated at the time of the Second International and in the early post-war period, led in a counter-revolutionary direction by chauvinists and opportunists, but still potentially recoverable by a communist leadership; and on the other hand, once the workers’ unions of the time had been repressed and dissolved, the “regime unions”, created with the advent of fascism within the corporations, and then reconstituted after World War II, “tailored to Mussolini’s model,” as we described them at the time.

In order to gain credibility and consensus among the working class, the CGIL (named with the I meaning “Italian”) had to formally refer to the tradition of the old CGL, and the workers rallied around it, forcing it into tough struggles that flared up after World War II. The unavoidable reference to this tradition meant that communist militants were able to organize within it, waging bitter battles against the piecards, as we have already described, even considering the possibility of a “reconquest by force,” at least of its basic structures.

The article then describes how, starting in the 1970s, with the onset of the economic crisis, the CGIL, inaugurating its ‘policy of sacrifice’ in defense of the ‘national economy’, gradually revealed its characteristics as a ‘regime union’, opposing every episode of struggle expressed by the working class and closing every window of opportunity for communists to intervene within it.

The struggles, even on a national scale, that arose in some sectors of public employment (hospitals and schools) and transport (railways and air transport), conducted in contrast to the directives and actions of the union bosses, had expressed the need for autonomous organizations opposed to those of the official unions. Following the powerful 35-day strike at Fiat, which was betrayed and ultimately crushed by the CGIL, the Party decided to make its position clear: “out and against the regime’s union, for the rebirth of the class union.” The Party’s commitment in the trade union field, while retaining its willingness to intervene in any expression of the workers’ struggle, thus shifted its attention, given the situation that had arisen in Italy at the time, towards “rank and file unionism,” in which it recognized the tendency towards class reorganization against the collaborationist policy of the regime’s union.

Terms of the Party’s union activity

From Il Partito Comunista 202/1992

With regard to trade unions, the Party expresses positions that are principled in nature and concern the need for large economic organizations open to all wage earners.

Through its organized faction within them, the Party attempts to acquire decisive influence in them and, in the revolutionary phase, their very leadership. In this way, a link is created between the Party and the class (a transmission belt), through which it exercises its proper function of guiding the revolutionary movement.

The conquest of such influence over the intermediate proletarian organizations is achieved by demonstrating that its line is the most coherent and consistent in defending the conditions of the working class, as opposed to the line and leadership expressed by other political movements also organized within them (reformists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc.), against which a political struggle is waged. This should be clearly evident to all proletarians when put to the test.

We are dealing here with purely economic organizations, trade unions, whose irreplaceable function has always been emphasized by the Party, which is unaffected by the constant oscillations of others. Various intermediate bodies of a political nature, such as councils or soviets, will likely be necessary in the phase leading up to the conquest of power.

So much for the principles. Another question is the assessment of the current trade unions, our attitude towards them, and the tactics adopted by the Party in different circumstances.

In this regard, the Party’s action is linked to the interpretation of facts and the study of different situations, which is not immune to approximation and requires progressive clarifications and corrections.

First of all, we must consider the differences between countries in terms of the history of the formation of proletarian organizations, their organizational characteristics, their modus operandi, and the politics that inspired them in the face of the battles fought and defeats suffered by the proletariat. For example, Anglo-Saxon “unionist” trade unionism has very different characteristics from industrial trade unionism in Italy and France.

The Party’s assessments and tactics towards the current trade unions will therefore probably not be identical in all countries and circumstances.

The Party’s recommendation to no longer organize within the CGIL and to rebuild the class-based union “outside and against the regime’s union” is not a general principle of action for the Party, but rather the result of an assessment of the situation in Italy, which may still be refined or even revised as events unfold.

First of all, a distinction must be made.

Lenin rightly castigates the extremists who proceed to form “revolutionary” unions, abandoning the masses organized in the unions to the influence of counterrevolutionary social-democratic leaders, agents of the bourgeoisie. Communists must work even in the most reactionary unions, with the aim of taking over their leadership in favorable circumstances, ousting the old leaders, and overturning the policies that guide them.

But it is necessary to distinguish between “reactionary unions” and “regime unions.” The former are workers’ unions led by “chauvinists and opportunists, often directly or indirectly linked to the bourgeoisie and the police,” as Lenin says. Such leaders engage in actions that sabotage workers’ struggles and, above all, intervene to divert them from their class-based and revolutionary course. However, these unions retain their working-class character, are useful and used for the class struggle, and it is possible to organize communist workers within them and agitate for their slogans. Under favorable circumstances, they are susceptible to being won over to class action and the leadership of the Party.

Such was the nature of the CGL in Italy before fascism. Once this organization had been destroyed by fascist gangs and the state police, the bourgeoisie did not leave a vacuum: it set up the “fascist” union, the regime’s union, an emanation of the state. This was a compulsory union, whose structure emanated from above and was inaccessible to any class-based influence. Its inalienable principles were social collaboration, according to the principles of fascist corporatism, and therefore, by statute, communists were barred from joining. Although in some cases it showed itself to be in defense of workers’ demands, this organization was no longer a true union, and the Party instructed its members not to organize within it.

The CGIL (the added “I” stands for ‘Italian’), rebuilt after World War II, was declared by the Party to be the “heir to fascist trade unionism” and “tailored on Mussolini’s model.” In fact, it too was a direct emanation of the regime and established itself by stifling attempts at worker organization in the red sense of class.

However, there were needs linked to democratic propaganda and anti-fascist mystification that meant that this union formally took up the tradition of the former CGL, with which the majority of workers identified themselves. The Italian working masses considered the CGIL their combative red union. This allowed the Party to organize within it, agitating the principles of anti-capitalist class struggle, pointing out to workers the need for the union to “return” to class politics, and even attempting to conquer grassroots structures such as the Chambers of Labor, territorial bodies, or Shop Committees, factory bodies.

Even then, however, a second possibility was already on the horizon: the reconstruction of the class union from scratch. It was impossible at the time to predict which of the two possibilities would historically prevail.

In the period that followed, from the post-war period to the present day, the CGIL has gradually abandoned any formal reference not only to politics, but also, and above all, to the way in which the class-based trade union is organized and structured.

There was unification with the CISL and UIL, unions of separatist origin and emanating from employers, and the introduction of the delegation to employers for the collection of union dues, which the Party rejected, placing our militants outside the confederal union apparatus, as many of us were prevented from joining.

The economic crisis of the mid-1970s accelerated this process. Together with the launch of the “policy of sacrifice,” the CGIL’s organizational structure became increasingly tight and impervious to any class influence, to the extent that episodes of struggle in contrast with the collaborationist policy were increasingly forced to rely on the organization of workers outside the confederal union, which instead used all means to sabotage such struggles. The CGIL became increasingly closed and inaccessible, even at the grassroots and factory level. Today, the platforms of demands and agreements negotiated with employers are no longer even submitted to the approval of workers’ assemblies. All decisions are made in a sphere to which workers have no access.

The confederal union, which today has even ratified anti-strike laws, has become an organization separate from and opposed to the working class, a body of officials paid to push through any attack by capital and block any reaction by workers. Only a tiny minority of workers have access to its apparatus, those who, normally in order to gain personal advantages, sell themselves out by embracing that policy.

Under these conditions, it is impractical and illusory for the working class to expect communists to work within these organizations with the aim of ousting “corrupt and sell-out” leaders and winning them back to a class-based policy. For some time now, there have been no forums within the union where the Party can wage its battle. All access is barred to us, even if we had a membership card in our pocket and even if we gathered the support of many workers.

Of course, we participate with our positions in demonstrations, strikes, and the few workers’ assemblies that the union still calls, but this does not mean “working in the union.”

On the other hand, since the late 1970s, it has been clear that any attempt by workers to move away from the policy of collaboration has manifested itself through organizations outside and opposed to the confederal union. COBAS expresses this tendency. Meanwhile, internal opposition within the CGIL has proven to be nothing more than attempts to cover up, recover, and betray discontent.

Lenin speaks of “reactionary unions,” that is, organizations belonging to the working class even if led by corrupt and sell-out leaders. In these, it is possible, indeed essential, for communists to work to disavow the actions of the leadership and, in favorable situations, to win them back to class politics and the leadership of the Party. Today in Italy, however, we are faced with “regime” unions, which, although not yet declared “state” unions as under the fascist regime, are now intimately integrated into the institutional apparatus of capitalist power and no longer belong to the working class. They are closed and impenetrable structures, like any other institution of the regime, in which we find workers who are “registered” but not organized. They are tools that cannot be used by the class.

This leads to the conclusion that it is impossible to work from within to make them susceptible to class politics, and therefore to our formulation of the need to rebuild the class union from scratch, outside and against the regime union.

It is true that, despite widespread discontent, the majority of workers continue to follow the non-directives of these unions and do not yet express the need to abandon them in order to rebuild the class-based union. But the Party has the task of anticipating this need.

It is also to be expected that, faced with strong pressure from workers, these unions will find themselves in the position of not disavowing and formally placing themselves at the head of widespread struggles, when it is not possible to restrain them or isolate and repress the most combative elements. In such cases, the regime’s union could play its role by taking over the leadership of the movement and adopting some of its demands, but only in order to try to control it, limit it, divert it, and defeat it. The alternative of abandoning it to its own devices could lead to the most dire consequences for the regime. This happened, for example, in the case of the magnificent strike against layoffs, which was carried on relentlessly for a month by Fiat workers in 1980 and finally stabbed in the back by the CGIL.

The Party’s task in such situations would still be to point out the need for an organization independent of the regime’s union to lead the struggle.

We reiterate that these considerations relate to the situation in Italy, where the Party has had greater opportunities to engage in trade union activity to date, while we believe that the study of the situation in other countries, where we are also present but with limited forces, has not been sufficiently in-depth. This study is crucial for defining our positions on trade union tactics. It will have to retrace the history of trade union organizations to date, defining the forms and ways in which they are structured, how they are organized in factories and at higher levels, their links with political parties, the politics that inspire them, and their degree of integration into the state apparatus. It is necessary to understand the trends that are expressed within them and the actions of any opposition to the policies of the leadership groups, as well as the real possibility that grassroots organizations could become susceptible to class action.

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Another point we would like to clarify concerns the definition of what is meant by a “class union.” This is in response to those who would like to reduce the problem to a mere question of organizational forms. Many argue that it would be necessary to start again from “grassroots democracy” because the abandonment of democratic consultation with workers was the reason for the degeneration of the union. They also deplore the fact that a body of well-paid officials, removed from factory work, has replaced volunteer worker activists.

It is true that the regime’s union, which promotes anti-worker policies, is structured in such a way as not to be subordinate, but rather to systematically impose its will on the working class. But even in the class union, “grassroots democracy” will be a fetish and will have to be subordinated to the need for timely and unified action by the whole movement, as well as to the defense of the class line and action against the corporatist and reactionary pressures that will inevitably arise even at the grassroots level.

It is true that the regime’s union can only be based on an apparatus of well-paid and corrupt officials, but even the class union, while based on voluntary activity, will need full-time and therefore salaried leaders in a large and centralized organization.

Another point. It is not our task, nor anyone else’s, to discover new forms of organization, thinking that therein lies the key to solving the problem of rebuilding the class union. It is possible that, in a phase of recovery, the class will express forms of organization different from the traditional ones, which we cannot predict today. It is not, therefore, the COBAS that are the object of our interest because they manifest original forms of workers’ organization, but because they express the tendency towards reorganization against collaborationist politics.

What we anticipate is the need for a return to class politics and action on the part of purely economic organizations of wage earners alone, structured in a centralized manner to ensure the unity of action of the movement, based on factory organizations, but also necessarily external, of a territorial nature.

We will return to these last points in a future article.

As a form of class collaboration, arbitration originated in 19th-century England. However, the conditions necessary for the existence of conciliation and arbitration were already in place before the Westminster regulations of 1867, 1872 and 1896. The Elizabethan laws of 1562–1563 aimed to fix prices, impose maximum wages, restrict workers’ freedom of movement and regulate training. These laws provided that the assessment of wages could be sanctioned by mediators appointed by the state. Nevertheless, the concept of industrial arbitration is more clearly articulated in the Master and Workmen’s Act of 1824, ‘for the resolution of disputes that may arise between employers and workers engaged in cotton production’.

It was only within new federated governments under the British Empire that arbitration as a means of ensuring class cooperation was institutionalised: in the American colonies, New Zealand and Australia. In these colonies, the limited scope of local markets necessitated the security of production for export, which was maintained by relatively small working-class populations living close to production sites. This security was achieved through the courts. State-imposed ‘agreements’ bound the otherwise unstable labour force to controllable parameters. It was claimed that these compulsory industrial agreement tribunals could achieve a so-called ‘fair’ resolution, which would exclude any hint of worker mobilisation by channelling it along ‘appropriate’ paths.

Today as yesterday, the traitors of the working class tirelessly favour the ever-increasing involvement of the state. In an attempt to evade mobilisation and dismiss it as ‘destructive’ or ‘improper’, they instead offer to seek concessions from the ruling class in court. Of course, the bourgeoisie grants these reforms after sufficient discussion, away from the workplace, , so that workers give up mobilisation while they wait for legal proceedings to drag on, where, in the end, the initial request is approved as an empty shell. This is how the state and the bosses shape the framework: they seek to hinder, suppress and postpone any action by the working class that escapes their control.

In phases of expanded accumulation, the bourgeoisie can afford to mask its domination with a “social” veneer, strengthening the “welfare state” and consolidating its grip on the working class: arbitration tribunals, social assistance and working and living conditions become tools for integrating the proletariat into the apparatus of capital, for domesticating conflict.

However, this mechanism did not arise from strength, but from the defeats of the labour movement, when opportunistic currents and mediators from the middle or bourgeois class diverted the class struggle into institutional channels, offering workers “better deals” and removing the danger of open confrontation. Once incorporated, these concessions seem lasting, but with each recession, the mask falls and the same institutions that once promised fairness return to imposing bans and decrees, backed by police intervention and violence, to stifle unrest and break strikes. Integration and repression alternate, depending on the needs of the state and capital.

In this regard, we will examine the Australian labour courts, those of the Fair Work Commission (FWC), one of the most powerful and extensive courts in liberal democracies.

Why arbitration originated in Australia

The first significant growth of opportunism within the Australian trade union movement occurred during a period of great working-class mobilisation. As early as the 1880s, the Australian proletariat had distinguished itself as a significant force operating within the growing antagonisms of a growing capitalist society.

Following a major depression in Australia, where unemployment peaked at 33%, a period of significant labour mobilisation was triggered. Earlier, when the gold rush of the 1840s began to give way to cattle ranching as the dominant economic activity, unionisation developed significantly in the newly established sectors. Furthermore, workers, learning from the failed Eureka Rebellion (which was nothing more than a violent struggle by small producers), understood the need for collective struggle.

In the 1890s, the worsening economic situation led to major strikes. In particular, with the Maritime Dispute, a solidarity strike that spread from shearers to dockers and later to coal miners affected over 50% of Australia (mainly paralysing maritime trade, where lost exports accounted for most of the damage, as wool and coal reserves in ports could not be shipped to their destinations). These actions were a harsh lesson for the bourgeoisie.

The ruling class had to engage in significant repressive actions in which troops and police were ordered to “lay them out”, so a strike will not ‘be performed again’, mobilising resources to organise labour to replace the strikers. To this end, employers’ unions were created. Organisations such as the Victoria Employers’ Union (1865) and the New South Wales Employers’ Union (1888) were instrumental in promoting the creation of a national body: the Australian Chamber of Commerce (1901).

However, the workers’ mobilisation in 1891-92-94 had weakened the position of the bourgeoisie to such an extent that the petty bourgeoisie had almost resigned itself to the idea of having to witness the triumph of the working class. The middle class and the petty bourgeoisie were prepared to play a passive role in the wake of the proletariat in motion and growing urban unrest. The call for a “socialist 20th century” was frequent in the workers’ newspapers.

However, in the absence of a unified working-class vanguard organised into a political party prepared to lead the assault, the bourgeoisie and the large landowners were able to organise and defend themselves.

Counter-offensives against the workers prevailed, reversing previous wage increases with cuts of up to 30%. The middle class, now increasingly distant from the striking proletariat and its repeated defeats, absorbed the weakened workers and entered parliamentary politics. Thus, we witnessed the formation of state labour parties that successfully promoted conciliation tribunals as the main proponents of a legalistic method of resolving class conflicts.

The Labour Party, regardless of its organisational constitution as a “social democratic party”, with its reference point in the small and medium bourgeoisie, was and is materially the main defender of the capitalist system from which it only apparently protects workers.

Following the establishment of the Australian Federation, as the new parliaments were strengthened, legislation for the introduction of a federal labour tribunal for industrial agreements was successful thanks to the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904. This Act was originally agreed upon by the colonies in 1886 “so that disputes between employers and workers could be resolved in the future without resorting to the cruel and unscientific means that had usually been adopted in the past, namely strikes and lockouts” (from the Intercolonial Congress of Trade Unions and Trade Associations of Australasia).

Learning from recent experience, the new constitution and the new law gave the Commonwealth explicit authority to centralise industrial regulation within a federal court, with the power to resort to compulsory arbitration and punitive action.

The law articulated this power by creating theCommonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, giving it clear powers to prevent strikes and picketing, impose arbitration on agreements between employers and employees, and issue binding awards on wages and conditions of employment.

Compulsory arbitration requires that when an employer and its employees are in negotiations over pay, working conditions, etc., the dispute be referred to a state or independent tribunal, which mediates and ultimately issues a binding award on the terms of the contract.

The definition of “industrial dispute” in the Constitution was immediately expanded in the law to include disputes relating to employment on the railways, civil servants and state-controlled industries.

Punitive measures were provided for: trade union action could be prohibited, legally binding wages and working conditions could be determined and enforced through fines, imprisonment and the dissolution of trade unions. The permissible scope of trade union action was defined, channelling the demands of the working class into legal channels and restricting strikes. The centralisation of trade union affairs in the hands of the court’s executive bodies meant eliminating the influence of the mass of workers on final decisions regarding industrial action .

But the effectiveness of the courts required greater submission on the part of the workers and their effective use by the bourgeoisie. It would therefore have been ‘correct’ for trade unions or employers to only go to court when the other party agreed. Trade unions that refused would be punished with the utmost severity.

Workers attempted their first and hardest strike in 1917. The standard of living, which had only just been restored after 20 years, had collapsed again, with real wages falling by a third and unemployment exceeding 10%. During the war, the government introduced several laws to pacify and repress the most subversive elements of the working class with absolute bans and harsh repression of workers in struggle. It would have been possible to expel “foreigners” who had “endangered” the government, restricted all communications and compelled “any person to disclose any information” that would allow for the expulsion of members of the prevailing IWW and union leaders. These repressive rules were later extended to become a full-blown attack on workers, including a ban on symbols such as the red flag.

The Court was able to use this law to explicitly suppress the 1916 coal miners’ strike and prohibited members of the more radicalised Waterside Workers Federation from working in the busiest ports. However, driven by the introduction of a new labour-saving system on trams and railways, as well as years of increasing sacrifices related to the war, workers mobilised in a general strike

Under the 1904 law, the court reacted. It fined the strikers for almost 10 years’ wages, imprisoned the leaders and cancelled 22 trade unions. The event involved over 100,000 workers and all strikes and blockades were declared illegal.

Once again, the arbitration courts had revealed themselves to be an organ of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state, operating in concert with its armed organs and its reactionary auxiliaries

The law banning the red flag provided a pretext for unleashing the most reactionary strata against the workers. The most militant members of the working class and soldiers, increasingly influenced by Russian émigrés from 1905, marched against the ban. While the bourgeois press spoke of a ‘Bolshevik revolt,’ reactionary gangs composed mainly of former military personnel were mobilised in two assaults on the Russian Workers’ Hall. The police intervened not to defend the workers, but to regulate the disorder they were unwilling to tolerate, ensuring that it remained manageable. Once the streets were quiet, the courts completed the repression: legal proceedings undermined solidarity between workers and soldiers and stifled mobilisation before it could become a danger to Sydney, the industrial capital.

The new trade union officials who replaced the militant grassroots leaders admitted, after these defeats, the need to collaborate with the state. They favoured the use of “order”, confident that they would then be rewarded with better agreements.

The unprecedented production recovery after the Second Imperialist World War had forced a continuous intensification of mining. The Australia-Japan trade agreement of 1957 and the relaxation and then removal of the ban on iron ore imports (1960 and 1963) by Japan had made it possible for the Australian mining industry to grow to meet the demand for steel. The railways, ports and mines of the Pilbara developed; extraction increased dramatically in the 1960s as a result of Japanese industrialisation. In 1973, a generalised tariff reduction of 25% further focused attention on mining, which prevailed over the Australian manufacturing sectors that had previously developed.

The oil shock of the 1970s, which stalled Japanese demand, led to the first decline in production since the early 1950s and an increase in consumer prices of around 17%. Strikes in many industrial sectors became the indispensable tool for the working class to assert its demands. During this period, wages rose at a record pace; in 1974, they increased by about 26%, or about 10% in real terms (Reserve Bank of Australia Annual Report, 1975). To contain the skyrocketing cost of labour, centralised wage indexation was introduced.

When global demand for steel slowed in the mid-1970s, Australia’s dependence on iron ore and coal amplified the recession; a brief recovery in resources in the late 1970s gave way to another deep recession in 1982-1983, with unemployment reaching around 10% and the imposition of a “wage freeze” by the government. Rising prices and job losses hit workers’ conditions hard, exacerbating the conflict. This led once again to increased mobilisation.

Compulsory arbitration, which had been widely used until then, became increasingly ineffective. During this period, grassroots activists simply ignored fines and “suspension” clauses and called wildcat strikes while the courts attempted to enforce punitive sanctions. The government resorted to criminal measures, but this only increased the demands of the unions, leading to a series of strikes, some of which were general in nature. With consumer prices rising by 15%, tensions reached a peak in April 1974, with over 12% of the workforce on strike, mainly in the construction, manufacturing, mining and transport sectors.

At the same time, the court also tried to calm the situation with national wage increases and through sectoral wage agreements (Metal Trades, May 1974), and the introduction of gender pay equality. These measures, however, proved ineffective in containing the workers’ mobilisation.

A change of tactics on the part of the bourgeoisie was therefore necessary. As agreed by the trade union umbrella organisation (the ACTU) and the Labour Party, the previous sectoral/industrial collective agreements would be restructured so that they would lose their generalised character. Company agreements (contracts at company level, with a single employer) became increasingly common, compared to the previous agreements between all employees and employers in that sector.

A measure was also introduced: the Prices and Incomes Accord, which provided for a commitment to increase public spending and social welfare in exchange for a wage freeze. This agreement meant that new industrial agreements would preferably be determined directly at company level, gradually replacing the previous national/industrial agreements between the state, employers and trade unions aimed at defining general wages and working standards for entire productive sectors.

This downsizing reflected the cooling of the class struggle: worker resistance had fallen to such low levels that a centralised wage-setting body had become superfluous. Arbitration was therefore emptied of its substance and its application shifted towards company-level negotiations.

In 1996, the arbitration body was renamed the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and limited to the resolution of specific disputes.

The decline of trade unions and bureaucratisation went hand in hand in the years following the Agreement. The trade unions would become so hollowed out that incoming governments felt confident to go on the offensive. And after the 2008 crisis, it would have been easy to introduce significant change. In 2009, the Labour Party introduced the Fair Work Act, an initiative to “modernise” industrial relations.

From our French comrades

For several decades, French public debt has been steadily increasing due to abysmal deficits: under the Sarkozy government, public debt increased by 622 billion euros, under Hollande’s government by 425 billion, and finally under Macron’s government, the debt increased by 1087 billion, reaching a total of 3345 billion euros, equivalent to 113.9% of GDP.

However, debt is not a peculiarity of the French state; all states are burdened by debt. Just consider Japan’s debt, which reaches 229% of its GDP, Italy’s at 138%, and the United States, whose public debt reaches 120%, etc. And if we refer to private debt, then the level of indebtedness explodes: 208% for South Korea, 200% for Chinese imperialism, 182% for Japan, etc. The list is very long.

Bourgeois propaganda wants to make people believe that if the state is in debt, it’s the workers’ fault: their pensions are too high, public services cost too much, there are too many pensioners compared to the working population who don’t work enough, etc. The big bourgeoisie and its various governments, whether right-wing or left-wing, have no problems with lying and misrepresenting the truth.

The reality is that the capitalist system on a global scale is in crisis. The purpose of production under capitalism is not the satisfaction of human needs, but the accumulation of capital. Capitalists invest, and this investment must yield a profit; and if this profit is not sufficient, the capital is invested elsewhere, where the profit is higher. To realize a profit, it is necessary to sell the production, which then allows a new cycle of accumulation to begin. This leads to production for the sake of production. But there comes a point when production exceeds the capacity of the market, both national and international; goods accumulate on the shelves, inventories increase, production slows down and then stops, defaults and bankruptcies explode, workers see their standard of living plummet—in short, there is a classic crisis of overproduction typical of the capitalist mode of production. During the Ancien Régime (feudal era), agricultural crises occurred due to bad weather and poor agricultural yields, resulting in famines. Under capitalism, unemployment and misery are the result of an excessive abundance of goods!

From 1945 to 1973, following the massive destruction of the Second World War, the crises of capitalism did not extend beyond a national level for the United States and England, and the regional level for other countries; in fact, the crisis remained limited to one sector of production, while another sector of production took over. But since the great international crisis of 1973-75, overproduction crises have been international and recurrent. As a result of the increase in labor productivity, the rate of profit itself decreases, which translates into a general slowdown in capital accumulation and therefore in industrial growth. For example, industrial production in France grew by an average of 6% per year between 1952 and 1974, while between 1974 and 2007 the same annual growth rate fell to 1.2%, and today, after the great recession of 2008-2010, French industrial production has decreased by 12% compared to the peak reached in 2007. What is true for France is also true for world capitalism, whether it be the United States, Russia – which has become a secondary imperialist power – Germany, Japan, etc. And even the younger capitalist countries, such as China, which after experiencing frenetic rates of capital accumulation, are themselves affected by the crisis of overproduction. They therefore try to offload their crisis onto other markets, including the European one. And in every crisis, what does the bourgeois state do? It rushes to save the capitalist mode of production, along with the privileges and interests of the ruling class, whether the government is democratic or openly totalitarian (as in Russia or China). This is why it does not hesitate to incur heavy debt, as it did under Sarkozy. The essential thing for the bourgeoisie is to safeguard the banks, the stock market, the large monopolies, etc. Hence the general indebtedness of all states.

This situation has been aggravated by the economic policies pursued by the large financial and industrial bourgeoisie with support by their states. An entire sector of industrial production has been relocated to countries where the profit rate was higher because workers could be exploited more ruthlessly. This same democratic bourgeoisie then speaks without any shame about “human rights.”

Depending on the country, this offshoring has been more or less significant; France, for example, has lost 2 million jobs in industry, which obviously leads to a decrease in contributions and taxes, which has resulted in a structural trade deficit of almost 100 billion Euros per year. At the same time, large multinational corporations have begun to subcontract a whole part of their production to medium-sized companies where working conditions are harder and wages are lower.

This economic policy has allowed the global bourgeoisie to gain thirty years. However, the “remedy” proves to be worse than the disease. Sooner or later, the debt becomes unsustainable, and new imperialist monsters emerge, altering the balance of power on a global scale and leading to new imbalances.

To return to French capitalism, every year the French state pays almost 270 billion euros to companies without any counterpart or control. The famous multinational corporations are the ones that benefit the most, while making fabulous profits, profits that they then distribute to that group of parasites we call shareholders. Thus, in 2024, French companies paid shareholders the staggering sum of 68.8 billion euros, a record amount in Europe. Despite the crisis, since 2021 the amount of dividends has broken all records. This is a real plunder supported by the state and the various governments that have succeeded one another.

Well, as always, it’s the workers who have to pay the price. We still live in a class-based society, where the ruling class lives off the exploitation of the working class.

Capitalism has become a parasitic system that hinders the development of humanity and is plunging us into a terrible global crisis and towards a third world war, of which we are seeing the first signs today with the invasion of Ukraine by Russian imperialism, intending to resurrect Greater Russia, and the massacres in the Middle East perpetrated by the Israeli state, which is nothing more than an American Fort Alamo in the Middle East.

The solution exists; capitalism itself has produced it by socializing the forces of production. By replacing small-scale peasant and artisanal production with large-scale industrial production based on the collective labor of the proletariat, which owns neither the means of production nor the product of its labor, capitalism has developed on a large scale the economic basis of communist society.

There is only one thing left to do: expropriate the big financial, industrial and landowning bourgeoisie, abolish capitalist relations of production, wages and capital, suppress all commercial accounting and trade, and move to a communist management of production and distribution.

But to do this, the first step is to organize into genuine class-based trade unions, replacing the opportunist leadership with a truly class-conscious one; but above all, the proletariat must find its leadership in the International Communist Party, which aims at the overthrow of the big bourgeoisie and the transition to communism, that is, to a classless society where all relations of exploitation will have disappeared.

Despite China’s supposed “socialist” market economy, based on superficial theories that capitalism can be subservient to the interests of the working class through the wise art of government by a communist party in name only, the country has a thriving speculative financial market that has grown since the 1990s as part of the need for capital accumulation under the false pretense of economic growth and independence from the yoke of Western imperialism, but which has nevertheless definitively hinged the large Chinese economy on the turbulent events of the global market.

The reality of so-called state socialism, which has repeatedly attempted to repress the growth of the stock market, has ultimately been the creation of a model incredibly faithful to those found in other capitalist states. So much for the idea of socialism with Chinese characteristics, when there is no fundamental difference in its national capitalism.

The idea of liberating workers from imperialist domination through the construction of a national economy is just a smokescreen for the freedom of capital from its rusty chains of private property and equity in the verdant terrain of public responsibility and international speculation.

This speculative market was favored by the so-called harmonization of free market interests and state planning, ostensibly in the interests of “socialism” and the emancipation of workers, but despite self-interested talk of unifying all capitalist interests for the social good, the rather obvious result has been that the lords of speculative capital have demanded ever greater monetary and material enrichment from the state treasury, which has now tied its fate to the financial well-being of this parasitic bourgeois class.

History of the stock market in China

In Chinese history, there have been three different phases of stock market establishment by various ruling classes. The first was established following China’s opening up after the Opium Wars in the mid-1800s by foreign merchants to speculate on commodities, maritime shipping, and shares of British and other colonial companies.

Finally, in 1891, the first national stock exchange, the Shanghai Sharebrokers’ Association, was founded, later renamed the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

At the beginning of the Republican era (1911-1949), in the wake of significant financial instability, particularly at the beginning of speculative bubbles related to the rubber market, the Kuomintang (KMT) made strong attempts to control the burgeoning but fragmented and chaotic market left to it by the “warlord era,” which presented the additional problem of the issuance of many regional currencies for local war campaigns.

The KMT established the Chinese Central Bank in 1928 in an attempt to create a stable national currency, while also exercising tighter control over foreign investment and periodically closing the stock exchanges.

However, this attempt to generate stability was short-lived due to civil wars that led to excessive spending and money printing, forcing the government to resort to severe measures such as attempting to create a new national currency and closing the Tianjin and Shanghai stock exchanges in 1948.

After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took control of the state, the Shanghai Stock Exchange was closed permanently and securities trading was suppressed for decades.

Ultimately, the existence of an official stock market within China’s growing capitalist power was inevitable and had to reemerge due to the need to increase investment in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that national budgets could not meet through taxation or bond issuance.

This led to the re-establishment of the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges under the pretext of “disciplining” SOEs by presenting them to the market in a decisive and hammering manner to attract domestic savings towards productive investments.

Recent developments and the Brian Hwang incident

In stark contrast to the image of the stock market in China as a tightly regulated, subjugated lightning rod useful for public spending in pursuit of social good, or at least for strengthening the central government’s tight control, the actual result has been the concrete emulation of the speculative monstrosities that exist in virtually every capitalist nation, large or small.

The most recent estimate of the size of the Chinese stock market relative to national GDP is 63.4%, higher than the average for Germany and Europe, which is around 40%, but still lower than that of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Japan.

Also in 2024, there were record share buybacks by 2,153 companies amounting to 165 billion yuan, or about $22 billion, financed by a cash injection from state-owned banks amounting to 300 billion yuan.

A distinctive feature of the Chinese stock market compared to its Western counterparts is the high percentage of retail trading, known in financial jargon as “online trading,” i.e., the buying and selling of financial instruments (stocks, currencies, futures contracts, cryptocurrencies) on digital platforms provided by brokers, as opposed to speculation on institutional channels.

Retail trading accounts for about 70-80% of stock market volume, compared to about 25% in the United States and 15% in Europe.

The financial nature of Chinese capitalism is clearly demonstrated, but we still want to give an extreme example of the speculative and volatile nature of the stock market in China. We have already discussed speculative bubbles related to the construction sector in other articles.

We are talking about the gigantic speculative bubble in the ‘Education Technology (Edutech)’ sector, i.e., digital ‘learning’ platforms dedicated to schools, universities, and even corporate training, in particular the story of the investment company Archegos Capital Management created by Chinese Brian Hwang.

This company was able to invest huge amounts of capital in a seriesof Chinese technology stocks using a particular financial mechanism, the “total return swap,” i.e., cash in exchange for the total return on the contract and its coupons.

It was a highly speculative operation, which allowed Hwang’s company to borrow large sums from several Western banks without them being aware of the enormous financing granted.

When difficulties in the technology stock sector threw this totally debt-ridden structure into crisis, the banks performing the arbitrage function were forced to liquidate Archegos’ position, $14 billion in assets, once they realized how deep its debt was, with no possibility of honoring the open contracts, i.e., complying with the terms of the loan in “exchange” mode.

This caused a snowball effect, leading to a wider collapse and further problems in the Chinese stock market in general.

The fully capitalist nature of China needs no further description. Its capitalist model is identical to that of the West, based on the same system of exploitation and the same financial methods, and even the worn-out fiction of “state capitalism” falls apart in the face of the reality of the system. The Chinese state operates in exactly the same way as all the capitalist states of the world, with its economic and financial control bodies, central bank, and other apparatuses, and its fully capitalist nature leads China to compete in the imperialist arena with other states, without marking any difference from them in any field, especially in the class field.

The world revolution will also have to deal with this state monster.

In 1931, at the height of the social crisis caused by the Great Depression, an armed, reactionary paramilitary group known as the “New Guard” was formed in Australia.

Founded by Lieutenant Colonel Eric Campbell, a First World War veteran, lawyer and petty-bourgeois ideologue, the New Guard emerged in Sydney as an open defender of capitalism against the growing wave of working-class unrest and the spectre of revolutionary change. Although often presented in bourgeois historiography as a “quaint” moment of political extremism, the New Guard, like other fascist movements of the period, must be understood not as an anomaly, but as a concentrated expression of the bourgeois class’s terror in the face of the collapse of the capitalist system.

The 1920s and early 1930s marked a historic turning point throughout the capitalist world. The collapse of post-World War I stabilisation efforts gave way to a new global crisis: overproduction, financial chaos, mass unemployment and political unrest.

In Australia, an appendage of the British imperialist system of capital, the limitations of its protected economic model and its dependence on raw materials were laid bare. When the international financial system crumbled and demand for wool, wheat and minerals collapsed, the fragile foundations of its economy imploded. Within two years, unemployment reached almost a third of the workforce. All illusions of liberal prosperity were shattered.

The New Guard claimed (and we emphasise “claimed”) to have over 50,000 members, mainly from the threatened strata of the petty bourgeoisie and the well-to-do strata of the working class. Its base was concentrated among former officers, civil servants, small landowners, shopkeepers, skilled craftsmen and clerks, i.e. those whose previous stability had been directly undermined by the crisis. These strata, suspended between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, have no independent historical trajectory. In periods of capitalist expansion, they can identify with liberal democracy. In periods of collapse, however, their fear of proletarian revolution transforms them into shock troops of reaction; Their hatred of ‘socialism’ is hatred of proletarian equality; their desire for ‘order’ is the desire to preserve their threatened privileges under the capitalist hierarchy.

The stated aims of this organisation were a “loyal, monarchical and constitutional government”, national unity and the eradication of “Bolshevism”, by which was meant any threat to property, hierarchy and the imperialist state. It developed a highly structured command hierarchy, conducted military-style drills, and carried out acts of violence against left-wing meetings and trade union demonstrations.

While claiming to defend constitutionalism, its practices revealed a counter-revolutionary will ready to overstep legality when the state hesitated. This is not a contradiction, but the very essence of bourgeois democracy, which maintains its legal mask only as long as the class balance allows it.

The New Guard’s programme – monarchist, nationalist, anti-parliamentary but virulently anti-communist – represented the classic fascist synthesis: an ideological league composed of the panic of the middle class and the need for discipline of capital in its various components. Like its Italian and German predecessors, the New Guard never offered an original world view, but merely regurgitated the historical debris of a bourgeois society in decline. Campbell himself explicitly looked to Mussolini as a model and praised the Duce’s “corporate state”, hoping to import its organisational model to Australia. His subsequent attempt to form the Centre Party in 1933, after a visit to Fascist Italy, demonstrates the conscious ideological importation of the Italian model to Australia, albeit adapted to local parliamentary conditions. His most spectacular action took place in March 1932, when Francis De Groot, a member of the New Guard, cut the ribbon on horseback at the inauguration of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, an act intended to prevent Labour Premier Jack Lang and symbolically “restore” the authority of the Crown. But the New Guard was not born as an isolated phenomenon. Its growth corresponded directly to the intensification of capitalist contradictions. The depression in Australia had thrown hundreds of thousands of people (mainly proletarians) into unemployment and poverty, while the state apparatus sought to impose brutal austerity through the ‘Premiers’ Plan’. Labour governments, long compromised by their role as administrators of capitalism, teetered on the brink of collapse. Mass strikes, unemployed workers’ councils and communist-led agitation spread through urban centres. It was against this backdrop that the fascist reaction found fertile ground, not in a strong workers’ movement, but in its momentary disorientation and the hesitations of its political leadership.

The CPA (Communist Party of Australia) had managed to establish a foothold in industrial unions and unemployed leagues. The party helped lead strikes in Broken Hill, Newcastle and the coalfields and organised anti-fascist demonstrations in urban centres. For the bourgeoisie, this represented not a minor nuisance but a structural threat. Although still numerically modest, the CPA had succeeded in framing the capitalist crisis in class terms and had begun to link the spontaneous discontent of the workers to a broader revolutionary vision.

In the absence of a decisive proletarian victory, the ruling class prepared its response, not only with laws and ballot boxes, but also with truncheons and paramilitary organisation. In contrast, the ALP (Australian Labor Party), tied to the state and the ruling class by its loyalty to parliament, had neither the will nor the means to lead a revolutionary struggle. Its passive opposition created the vacuum into which fascism stepped.

The Communist Left has always maintained, in accordance with the Marxist docrtine, that fascism is not the product of ideological ‘extremism’ or irrational hatred, but a method of class rule. As we stated in 1921 and reiterated in 1926, fascism emerges when the bourgeoisie can no longer rule through liberal mechanisms. It is a defensive adaptation to revolutionary crises, aimed at preserving the capitalist economy, disarming the proletariat and mobilising the middle classes in reactionary forms. The New Guard played all three roles:

1. It served to defend capitalist production at a time when strikes and social unrest threatened discipline in the workplace.

2. It violently repressed expressions of proletarian class struggle, targeting communist and trade union meetings, trade unionists and unemployed councils.

3. It was created and directed by big capital, framing sections of the petty bourgeoisie, a historically vacillating middle class always ready to side with the strongest.

Although the New Guard failed to seize state power or consolidate itself as a mass fascist party on the Italian or German model, this was not due to any lack of intention or class character. Rather, it reflected the limited depth of the Australian crisis and the ability of the ruling class to continue to conduct its affairs through parliamentary means and the Labour apparatus. Campbell himself, after flirting with open fascism, was discarded by the bourgeoisie once his usefulness had ended. The reaction had achieved its goal: the labour movement was fragmented, the trade unions were contained and the bourgeois order was preserved.

In this sense, the New Guard should not be seen as a failed curiosity of Australian political history, but as a real episode in the international history of bourgeois counter-revolution. Its lessons are enduring. As long as capitalism remains intact and as long as the proletariat does not have its own revolutionary party, fascist forms – whether marginal or dominant – will return wherever the ruling class faces a crisis and needs a stick to ensure its domination.

The only way against fascism, as against liberalism, is proletarian revolution: the destruction of the capitalist state, the abolition of wage labour and the dictatorship of the working class, led by its communist party.

A leaflet distributed by our Romanian comrades to the striking workers in Bucharest

The Nicușor Dan-Bolojan administration has proven to be nothing more than an austerity government, a government of the capitalist class that oppresses the working class. The situation would have been practically the same regardless of who won the elections; neither the nationalist populists nor the so-called social democrats represent the working class in any way. Oppressing the workers is ultimately the function of the capitalist state, and it is therefore irrelevant under which political banner this happens. This is because the state itself is merely a structure of power and class domination, the organized capitalist class representing its own interests against the working class. Politicians are simply the representatives to whom the bourgeoisie delegates the daily management of the state and who sometimes exercise this power, either in the interest of a part of the capitalists or in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole. This is clearly demonstrated by the nature of these new austerity measures, which target only the most vulnerable segments of society. The education sector has been particularly hard hit, jeopardizing the future of both teachers and students. Their response to the austerity measures culminated in a mass protest on September 8th, in which over 30,000 education workers, organized in unions, marched in Bucharest. It is important to emphasize that not only teachers, but also students and parents participated in this protest, as they are all affected by the budget cuts. An emblematic moment was the cheering support from construction workers who were working along the protest route.

Once the protesters arrived at Cotroceni, a discussion took place between the union leaders and the president, in which the prime minister and the minister of education criticized the protests, calling them unpatriotic and “unrealistic”, reprimanding the participants for “disrupting the celebrations of the first day of school.” No agreement was reached between the president and the unions. However, as we had predicted, the leaders of these independent unions, unlike their base, are not so independent after all and succumbed to government pressure, or, more accurately, to the pressure of Capital, postponing further protests until October 5th, late enough to cool down the initiative. They also timidly stated that a general strike “cannot be ruled out.” This was only to appease the workers who, upon hearing the news, were loudly demanding a general strike starting immediately and rightly saying that the next protest would be too late!

Let’s talk about those ridiculous “criticisms” of the protests, formulated by those who should represent education workers, but who clearly boycott them when they fight for their own interests. Teachers, like all other employees who sell their labor in exchange for a wage, are part of the working class. It is not the level of education or the specific field of work that determines a person’s class. The only class contradiction in capitalism is that between those who live by selling their labor power – the proletarians – and those who live by buying and exploiting the labor power of others – the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class. We know very well that the interests of the working class, whether economic, political, or socio-historical, do not coincide at all with those who claim to be at the service of the “Nation,” and the “Homeland.”

These so-called “national interests” would unite the interests of the exploited with those of the exploiter, the capitalist whose sole interest is to obtain the maximum possible surplus value from the worker, acting as an agent of the infinite accumulation of Capital. All talk of sovereignty, meritocracy, competitiveness, national solidarity, and prosperity are empty concepts, used as a veil to cover the true nature of things, the nature of the capitalist system, and to present the interests of the capitalist class as the interests of the people as a whole. This is particularly evident in the rhetoric of war, where the bourgeois class sends the working masses to die in the name of the miserable “homeland.” Nationalist propaganda is fundamental for the bourgeoisie in order to deceive the workers and induce them to put the “nation” above their true class interests. Therefore, being called “unpatriotic” should not be an insult to us, since all that patriotism actually entails is a collaboration between opposing classes, which hides the antagonistic nature of their interests.

Daniel David also stated that teachers should want to go to work (and not protest!)

as an “act of morality,” because “not everything revolves around pay!” Indeed, how easy it is for a bourgeois to preach morality from his comfortable armchair, disconnected from the struggle of the common worker. For the bourgeois, “work ennobles man,” but only to the extent that its fruits go to them; not when he reacts, not when he rebels!

The capitalist economy can only be paralyzed if organized workers in multiple sectors go on strike. Only by interrupting its endless process of reproduction and accumulation do they have the power to exert pressure on capital and advance their demands. Simple verbal protests will therefore fade away without leaving a trace, as they do not harm capital. We fully support the general strike of education sector workers! We also encourage workers in all other sectors to participate. Do not give up!

By “postponing” the strike, the union leaders are showing their true colors. It’s no coincidence that these leaders, who are supposed to represent the workers, have salaries ten times higher than the workers they represent. In the capitalist system, this is essentially a bribe given to them so that, when tensions are high, they side with the interests of the capitalists. Some of them are even capitalists themselves. But there is nothing to postpone, and all the workers know it. No one else will fight for our interests if we don’t!

However, we must state the truth: as long as capitalism exists, cycles of crisis will continue to repeat themselves, periods in which the living standards of workers will worsen and the ruling class will become ever richer, exploiting our misery. The immediate struggle for economic demands is very important, but let’s not delude ourselves: the only way to end recurring crises, exploitation, and poverty is to end capitalism itself, once and for all.

The struggle for “how things were before” is a hopeless struggle, because the past was only slightly less miserable than the present. The goals of the workers must always be maximal, radical, and therefore communist. We fight for a communist society, a truly communist society, and not the farce that was Ceaușescu’s state capitalism with its red flags, which exercised even worse economic oppression than today, proving that it was not a system different from capitalism. Only in communism will education be placed on the pedestal it deserves, and human beings will finally be able to develop fully and reach their true potential, free from the economic yoke of exploitation.

For the abolition of the current state of affairs! For the abolition of the exploitation of man by man!

(continued from a previous issue)

3. Communism

Once the proletariat has seized political power thanks to its Party, now becoming the Party-State, it will proceed to, with the gradual transformation of the capitalist economy, definitively eliminate social classes and will gradually “deflate” the state, in addition to carrying out its own revolutionary political tasks (this being repression of the counterrevolution, exportation of the revolution to other countries, etc). We do not know how long the transition phase will last, but we can predict its developments on the basis of the study of historical trends.

With regards to the family unit and private property, we can safely say that the nuclear family, in its role as the productive-reproductive cell of capitalism, will dissolve into society itself, while the important role of the couple will remain, as it’s the highest evolutionary form of the family, it will no longer be bound by capitalism’s need to reproduce itself, but rather, determined by a high degree of development in the emotional and sexual sphere. The nuclear family’s reproductive function will certainly persist, but now on the basis of a new awareness of a higher “Species Plan”. The upbringing of children will no longer be the responsibility of the individual parents, and even more so, of the individual woman, but rather, will be taken on by society itself, so that every new child will be cared for by the older generations in the same way that biological children are care for in the modern family unit.

With regards to private property, we must further discuss the relationship between it and personal property…

Private property versus personal property

Let’s start with a quote from Marx’s Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844,

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labor and conversion into capital. In the place of all physical and spiritual senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”

This section of the text summarizes how private ownership of the means of production revolutionizes and alters the perception of personal property, leading to, on one hand, alienation (the estrangement of human beings from what they do to the point where they no longer recognize themselves), and on the other hand, to a sensory misconception of the nature of the goods they themselves produce. To clarify, let us consider an example:

1. In every class-based society, be it slave-based, feudal, capitalist, there is a division between those who work and those who own the means of production.
2. Direct producers, i.e. the slaves, serfs, and proletarians, are deprived of control over their work and its results, while the ruling class, i.e. the slaver owners, feudal lords, capitalists, appropriate the surplus production.
3. This separation is the fundamental element of alienation: workers do not recognize themselves in the product of their labour because it does not belong to them.

Since consumer goods are themselves product of general production, they will also be perceived as something alien or foreign, as if they were separate entities that can only be obtained through monetar exchange and no longer as a fair distribution of the product based on the specific needs of each individual. In primitive communism, personal property was limited to what today could be defined as the usufruct of a good, useful for the reproduction of the individual within a community, and there was no clear separation between personal and collective property, because the former was part of the latter. When class divided societies formed, personal property became true private property separate from that of the means of production, which in bourgeois society is protected and defended legally.

What will happen under communism?

By recomposing the individual in relation to society, now no longer divided into classes and fully in control of its productive forces, each individual as part of the community will appropriate the consumer goods such as food, clothing, housing, etc, that is necessary for their sustenance, within the framework of a centralized and rigorous “Species Plan”. We can be sure that no one will snatch food from under someone else’s teeth, not only because there will be abundance, but also because, as we have seen above, greed and avarice are in fact a historical product and not innate in human traits, as bourgeois morality propagates. It is therefore legitimate to think that everyone will care for both collective and personal property with the same carefulness, it being understood that the very word “property” will be relegated to the dusty dictionaries of what will be considered the “classist” phase of humanity.

We would also like to focus on another frequently debated topic, namely housing, which in a communist society cannot be separated from a more general urban plan aimed at bridging the gap between city and countryside and achieving a perfect balance between natural and social metabolism. From this perspective, housing will be distributed according to individual needs, although we cannot know at this stage exactly how residential areas will be divided up. What is certain is that everyone will have a roof over their head, with respect for their privacy and needs.

Finally, turning to the issue of transportation, it is reasonable to assume that the automobile, as a means of individual transportation, will be abolished or will be only used marginally, through the production and use of vehicles available to the entire community. Transportation, currently called ‘public transportation’, will connect the world in a dense network, and because production will be harmoniously regulated within the limits of human biological cycles, there will no longer be any rush to get to work within tight time frames. We will therefore achieve a fusion of personal time and work time, because every human activity, including what is now trivially called ‘hobbies’, will be functional to the organic activity of the species, eliminating the brutality of work as we know it under capitalism and recomposing intellectual and manual labour.