Capitalism: an already nauseating corpse

Marxism views history as a series of modes of production and of relationships between human beings determined by them, from primitive communism, organic and natural, through to the societies based on class divisions. The capitalist epoch established itself on the basis of modern production techniques which utilised the discoveries of science and concentrated the workers in great factories. The modern proletariat, deprived of any means of subsistence, was to become a seller of its own labour power.

However, under capitalism improvement of the systems of production generates increasing misery and insecurity instead of being a condition for well-being. The enormous accumulation of commodities produced, for the most part useless or dangerous, and which the market cannot absorb, generates the phenomenon of over-production, of poverty amongst wealth, which is such a defining characteristic of capitalism.

In addition, the increased employment of machinery and relative reduction in the number of workers produce the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: the more Capital’s unrestricted growth seems to make it a force which entirely dominates society, the more its power and vitality is reduced. This mechanism which underlies the economic crisis means it is impossible to remedy.

It is this ‘agonal’ state of capitalism which forces States to have recourse to imperialist war: it is just to postpone its own demise that on the one hand the global bourgeois class pushes for an increase in the extortion of surplus value from the working class, and on the other, to precipitate humanity into a third imperialist war, in which the workers will be lined up against each other on opposite sides of the barricades; intimidated or brainwashed into fighting for ‘their’ country, and thus for ‘their’ bourgeoisie, rather than for their own, international class.

The crisis in 1929 led the imperialisms to declare war on each other during the second world massacre: only after destroying people, cities, machinery, commodities did they manage to get a new cycle of accumulation underway again. This demented cycle of growth drew to a close in the mid-seventies, when the current crisis really started.
 

AND THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS CAN AND MUST FREE ITSELF OF IT

There is only one force within capitalist society which can deal the death blow to this regime, the working class, the class that not only already produces all of the wealth but which also, having once freed itself from its political and economic subjugation to capital, is the bearer of the new society, communism, which from within the capitalist shell is pushing ever harder to emerge into the full light of day.

But today, due to the immense difficulties encountered on its centuries’ long path to emancipation, the global working class, despite the conditions being objectively mature, is forced to start once again from nothing.

The revolutionary bid for power in the first two decades of the last century produced a world communist party, the Third Communist International, and basing itself on the radical intransigent theses of left Marxism, it achieved victory for the revolution in Russia and took power in the name of the world communist revolution.

The revolutionary wave, the mainstay of which was proletarian defeatism in peace and in war, would eventually be defeated, thenceforth the working class would be assailed on all sides by lies and betrayals – worse even than those that caused the degeneration of the Second social-democratic International – which made it forget its class interests and the hard lessons of the past.

Stalinism, Maoism and Castroism, along with the theory of socialism in one country, would all end up concealing capitalist and bourgeois parties, states and economies, all of which were total capitalist, under the banner of communism.

In parallel the communist movement would support the demand to defend bourgeois democracy and would ally itself with the forces of anti-fascism, the degenerate communist parties turning into the most eager defenders of parliaments, constitutions and bourgeois justice.

The trade union movement was dragged into this vortex of submission to capitalist institutions too. If previously it had been inspired to fight not only immediate economic battles around jobs and wages but also to realise its true purpose by fighting for the long-term goal of the emancipation of the working class from capital, it would now jettison this view.
 

WHY THE CRISIS IS BOTH NECESSARY AND USEFUL

The crisis of capital doesn’t, in the final analysis, represent a crisis for the working class, even if it will be hardest hit by its consequences. Properly understood it represents the mortal crisis of its social and historical enemy and is the premise for the revolutionary overthrow of the present regime, and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Comrades! We must start again from square one!

The working class has its stock of theory, its vision of the world along with a century and a half of lessons learnt in the course of many defeats and a few, great victories. Everything it has been taught, by enemies and false friends, over the last eighty years has proved to be lies and falsehoods; however, it has never been betrayed or deceived by authentic Marxism, whose correct predictions about capitalism’s crash are before the eyes of all.

The present task is reconnection with the original communist doctrine and with the International Communist Party; the party which alone is the depositary of this doctrine, and which alone is capable of deploying it within the organisation and wielding it in the realm of political activity.

On the plane of the immediate struggle to defend working conditions, wage levels, etc, the international proletariat will need to find the strength to respond to the sustained attack it is being subjected to by reequipping itself with a class trade union organisation, which having as its aim the unconditional defence of the workers will once again reject any co-responsibility with the bourgeoisie for the economy in the name of ‘the national interest’. This union, organised on a territorial basis as well as by trade, will include workers of different trades, nationalities and political opinions, the employed and the unemployed, and bring together workers currently kept separate in individual workplaces. This will favour the coordination of battles fought for common objectives and lead to greater unity.

The great task that awaits present and future generations of workers is a stirring prospect; the communist emancipation of mankind from this thoroughly rotten and decrepit society.