In the third volume of Capital, we read how credit appears to be an attempt to overcome the limits of capital. Marx speaks here of credit “as the main lever of overproduction and exasperated speculation in commerce, which forces the process of reproduction to its extreme limit.”

In this process, the so-called interest-bearing capital, i.e., capital that is lent by the owner to the industrial capitalist, plays an essential role. “With the development of interest-bearing capital and the productive system, each capital seems to double and in some cases triple because of the different ways in which the same capital or even the same credit title appears in different forms in different hands. Most of this monetary capital is purely fictitious.”

Capital needs continuous and unstoppable valorization, but this is based on the antagonistic nature of capitalist production and therefore on the effective development of the productive forces which, under capitalism, must guarantee its constant growth; growth which is, moreover, a limit to this very development, but which is sustained and accelerated by the credit system; “but at the same time, the credit system accelerates crises, the violent eruptions of this contradiction and, therefore, the elements of the dissolution of the old mode of production.” (quoted from Book III, chapter 30).

This is a difficulty, a critical point in the reproduction process that seriously hinders it when, for whatever reason (including any strictly financial crisis), there is a lack of credit, “it is not the mass of inactive capital (i.e., temporarily outside the reproduction process) seeking investment, but capital hindered in its reproduction process, which reaches its peak just when the lack of credit also reaches its peak.”

Here is described the unstoppable process of the capitalist crisis, its nature which is essentially intrinsic to the production process itself. In the background are the strictly financial crises that thrive “up to the purest and most colossal system of deception and gambling, as well as the exploitation of social wealth by the few.” (ibid.).

For Marx, credit is one of the main instruments with which capital attempts to overcome its own limitations.

As far as the process of reproduction is concerned, through credit, all available and potential capital, i.e., that held not by capitalists but by other subjects, pushes production beyond its limits. And when credit decreases and its availability declines, whatever the reason, then the crisis appears as a credit and monetary crisis.

In short, our doctrine closely correlates credit crises with capitalist crises, but essentially highlights the latter as the trigger for the former, which, however, increase its scale and severity. Our doctrine definitively clears the field of justifications based on a lack of morality, references to individual greed, ‘errors’ caused by the accursed ‘hunger for gold’, and the short-sightedness of bankers and financiers who failed to see the crisis coming in time, but rather traces ‘the crisis’ back to the dynamics of capitalism.

At the time when “Das Kapital” was conceived and written, crises broke out at fairly regular intervals, but they were not so serious or widespread. In the last century, however, crises occurred at longer intervals, but with far more disruptive effects. The concept that has always been expressed by both the economic authorities of states and bourgeois theorists of all schools, however, is that the contagion spread from finance to the “real” economy.

Marx harshly denounces this theory, which is based on the belief that capitalism is in itself a neutral system that develops the potential of labor and technology to the fullest and finds the synthesis of its impartial functioning in the “market,” where all the contrasts between producers and users are harmonized. Crisis due to “excessive speculation and abuse of credit”.

This is the thesis that completely reverses the cause-effect relationship that was expressed in 1858 in relation to the search for causes by the British Commission tasked with drafting a report on the serious crisis of that period, and it is the theoretical principle of all bourgeois analysis.

As with the 2007 real estate crisis in the US, the fall in business investment due mainly to excess production capacity, i.e., overproduction, precedes the bursting of the credit bubble, which first masks it and then, when it bursts, seems, wrongly, to be the cause.

Similarly, the theoretical and practical solutions implemented to prevent the disaster from happening ‘this time’ are the most diverse and imaginative, except for special cases that have allowed the most powerful imperialism to operate beyond the limits of its own national debt.

The credit cycle that develops beyond the needs of production and is also used extensively for financial speculation is, however, a phenomenon already known in Marx’s time, well known since the days of “Das Kapital”: speculative activity is carried out to obtain levels of profit that would not otherwise be achievable. Marx already pointed out that “all capitalist nations are seized by a frenzy in which they want to make money without the mediation of the production process.” This iridescent world, without material substance, without the production of goods and the mechanism of capital valorization taking place, is essentially no different from the great financial crises of the 20th century and those of the new millennium.

A common feature of every credit crisis, whether it concerns production or pure financial speculation, is what Lord Keynes called the liquidity trap: a condition in which, even with very low interest rates, credit is not used, money is not spent or invested for productive purposes, but hoarded.

This behavior on the part of monetary capital holders occurs in all credit crises. We read in “Accumulation of Monetary Capital,” Book III of “Capital,” Chapter 26: ”As regards the hoarding of money by the banks during the crisis of 1847 […] As the Bank was forced to raise its interest rates more and more, apprehension became widespread; provincial banks increased their cash reserves and likewise their reserves of banknotes […]. The result was thus a general hoarding […]’.

But the fall in fictitious capital, i.e., government bonds, shares, and in general any other type of speculative-financial investment, does not entail the real destruction of capital, but simply “a transfer of wealth from one hand to another,” which means that crashes in the financial sector are not destructions of capital, which can restart the cycle of capital accumulation and, in essence, the real economy.

The solution implemented each time to remedy or at least keep the crisis process under control is always to transform private debt (“debt” is the other side of “credit”; where there is one, there is obviously also the other) into public debt, or, as they say, “sovereign” debt. The state commits resources that it has, or does not have, and which it obtains in the usual ways, through tougher taxation, the issuance of debt securities, and so on, thereby increasing the conditions for a further crisis.

This is true in general, but in the post-World War II period, a very particular condition of the global imperialist alignment made it possible for a state to exceed the limits of the financial crisis and allowed it to implement containment measures that in other circumstances would have caused an otherwise uncontrollable crisis, similar to that of 1929.

It is clear that in this situation, the dominance of the dollar as the general currency of account is essential for the United States, and it is essential to maintain in every way the political (which also means military) conditions that this privilege of being the world’s leading imperialist power allows. How long this can last cannot be quantified at present. But the process of erosion is not stopping, and the American warlike attitude is becoming more rigid.

The future is therefore necessarily “war,” when, together with the conditions of general and irreversible crisis of capitalism, US financial dominance will also collapse.

Our revolutionary work regularly examines the productive and commercial situation of capitalism, according to the various states and their economies. Here we want to mention the other component of the crisis, the one linked in particular to finance; and if we want to deal with the capitalist crises of this post-war period, we must start from the end of the 1960s. As in 1929, the epicenter is still the state of the first world imperialism, and for even a brief description of these turbulences, the starting point is the financial events in the US.

It was during this period that the post-war economic growth phase came to an end and the US economy returned to its propensity for debt. The use of ‘interest-bearing capital’ grew increasingly impressive, and in parallel with the growth of credit leverage, financial instability grew. In the period from 1945 to 1975, there were no banking crises in the US, but they reappeared in the following decade. With the abandonment of the Gold Standard in 1971, the process of financialization proceeded unchecked, and the dollar became the legal tender, flooding the world. Its role was consolidated in 1973 with the oil crisis, and having become the world currency in place of gold, it also assumed the role of a safe-haven currency in all the financial storms that shook other countries. Similarly, the system of laws and regulations that had been built to prevent a new 1929 was dismantled, removing the limits on speculative banking activity.

And so began the bankruptcies of American savings banks, with the usual system of “recovery,” state intervention that inflates public debt. In the rest of the world, crises continue to erupt. In the 1990s, Japan’s financial bubble burst, entering a period of stagnation that lasted more than a decade; in 1997, the countries of Southeast Asia entered a crisis, known as the “Asian Tigers” crisis, a stock market crisis caused by unbridled speculation, and the following year Russia was also hit hard. Large amounts of capital fled the Asian and European stock markets and took refuge on Wall Street, triggering the dot-com bubble in 2000, the “new economy” with dizzying speculation on emerging technologies.

A frenzied credit cycle that drastically reduced the basis of production due to the objective need for profit, a cycle that no longer allows, in general, the profits that a decaying system needs to continue to survive.

The stock market crash of the “new economy” was quickly reabsorbed, after the usual gigantic transfer of money from the “fools” to the “clever,” and the American recession of 2001 ended after the usual system of large amounts of liquidity made available by state finances. This monetary policy was made possible, at this stage, by two particular conditions: low levels of inflation, and therefore interest rates at their lowest levels for the period, and the role of the dollar as an international reserve currency.

The US trade balance has been in deficit since 1976, and any economic system in these conditions of credit expansion would have paid for it with a deep debt crisis, which was avoided precisely because of the role that the US currency plays in the world. Thus, the United States of America was able to afford to issue currency (currently in dematerialized, digital form, but this does not change the substance of the process at all) without budgetary constraints.

In the early 2000s, low interest rates, linked to the enormous availability of money, fueled both credit and the real estate bubble, a sector in which huge amounts of mortgages were taken out.

When, starting in 2006, real estate prices began to fall physiologically, the crisis erupted due to the inability to honor the mortgages that had been taken out. First, for the financial institutions that had opened those positions, and then for the exposed banks that first entered into “distress” and then collapsed; the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers is a striking example.

This was the subprime mortgage crisis, i.e., mortgages, or the granting of funds, without collateral security; the year was 2008. Once again, the use of a sophisticated rescue system, again at the expense of the state, made it possible to absorb the crisis, which lasted over a year. However, the crisis spread to Europe in the following years, when “sovereign debt grew, with widening yield spreads on bonds (the famous ‘spreads’) and credit default swap risk insurance between these countries and other EU members, mainly Germany”; in other words, when the countries with the highest debt (relative to GDP) began to pay unsustainable amounts to honor the fiscal terms of the financial mechanism of “insurance” against “default,” in simple terms, “bankruptcy.”

The story of this secondary crisis ends with the usual solution, the 2011 agreement to increase the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), established in 2010 with a budget of €750 billion, by more than €1 trillion. The euro thus remained stable against the currencies of the EU’s main trading partners.

This story, from 2008 to 2011, clearly shows how the explosion of the crisis in the economic sphere produces an even more violent cascade of crises in the financial sphere, which then spread beyond the national borders of the area where it first occurred.

We will only briefly mention here the production and financial crisis caused by the Covid pandemic, which was formally recognized in December 2019 and exploded in 2020, with the suspension of most economic activities, violent effects on commodity markets, and a whole series of effects that, two years after the declaration of the end of the emergency and the resumption of capitalist activities, had still not been completely overcome in 2025, and have instead led to an increase in the availability of funds for states to control and emerge from the emergency.

The construction sector in China, under the same conditions as the subprime crisis, also led to the bankruptcy of the Chinese real estate giant Evergrande, which was the symbol of the country’s economic growth, collapsing in the face of more than $300 billion in debt following the real estate crisis. The similarities with the bankruptcies of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two financial giants that provided the infamous unsecured mortgages, are obvious.

Evergrande was unable to honor its exposure in 2021, its liquidation was decreed in January 2024, and it was delisted from the stock exchange in August 2025. In a chain reaction, other real estate giants, such as Country Garden and Sunac, were overwhelmed by the crash, leaving millions of buyers with mortgages to pay and apartments not delivered.

Since 2021, after four years, the effects have not yet been fully absorbed. And many provincial administrations still find themselves in a kind of financial trap, unable to pay off the debts accumulated during years of construction boom.

It is a classic mechanism of capitalist crises. “Governments don’t invest, businesses don’t build, families don’t buy,” as the economic pundits declare, believing they have discovered who knows what.

Of course, the Chinese state has other powerful resources, but we see this as confirmation of the financial crisis following the production crisis. This is exactly as predicted by our economic science.

The contradictions in the field of finance and in the production process have certainly not diminished; on the contrary, they are emerging with ever greater virulence. Government debt is growing at an ever-increasing rate, and interventions in the field of finance continue to increase it, without any reversal of the trend. Wars and clashes testify to the irreversible severity of the crisis, now in its twentieth year.

We are not prophets of doom, nor do we presume to provide “precise dates” for the economic collapse of this world based on profit at any cost. But we cannot fail to see how close the day of reckoning is, how the continuous wars and clashes, “political” effects in the broad sense, in this terminal phase are destroying all the political and economic certainties of the world and reopening the conditions for the resumption of class struggle.

What is still missing is the party of revolution, the Communist Party; without which any movement of the class without reserves, however violent and courageous it may be, has no hope of defeating the monster of world war. 

For many years, we have been closely observing the current prolonged period of general capitalist crisis, during which major economies are heavily experiencing a crisis of commodity overproduction—a phenomenon that slows and clogs the cycle of reproduction of invested capital. An enormous mass of produced goods cannot find an equally enormous solvent market (one with sufficient money for purchase); crises manifest in their criticality when warehouses overflow with unsold goods.

From our Marxist analysis, we know that to escape this situation, capital lays off thousands of workers deemed redundant and closes hundreds of factories. If this is not enough, capital destined for commodity production is left with two possibilities: a general reduction in real wages or, as a last resort, a world war that can destroy both commodities and the ”surplus” population, the majority of whom are proletarians. A typical example is World War II, which ended in 1945 and allowed for a rapid recovery of the capitalist cycle, remembered as the ”economic boom”. This intense restart lasted until 1973, after which crises of varying intensity followed, succeeded by increasingly weak recoveries until reaching the current situation of general crisis, characterized by more factory closures and an army of laid-off proletarians.

We Marxists know well that it is impossible to transform this into a ”capitalism with a human face”—one capable of self-regulation and rational production organization to mitigate the disastrous consequences of its crises. Capitalism cannot be reformed due to its specific characteristics, including ruthless competition between various capitalisms that cannot renounce any trade war to defeat rivals. We also know from painful historical experience that various capitalisms align immediately only to fight the proletariat should it organize to overthrow one through extreme struggle.

In capitalism, war is a necessity rather than the insane decision of a crazed head of state; everything is calculated, and only the final result is uncertain. In any case, the proletariat is always the sacrificial victim of these maneuvers. From trade war to fought war, the step is short. Actual warfare must be carefully prepared in timing and manner, and allies must be found; its extension reflects the depth of the capitalist crisis. The casus belli is found or invented at the appropriate moment. ”Public opinion” has long been prepared for this scenario by talk of a ”Third World War in pieces,” considering the quantity and cruelty of ongoing conflicts.

Currently Active Conflicts

According to authoritative research centers, there are currently an estimated 56 to 59 active wars. A third international institution puts the number of ongoing conflicts at over 100. Based on their statistics—essentially an accounting of death—bourgeois institutes classify conflicts as follows:

• Interstate Conflicts: Rare but extremely devastating, such as the case between Russia and Ukraine.
• Intrastate Conflicts: Civil wars pitting armed groups against the government, as seen in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen.
• Non-state Violence: Clashes between unofficial armed groups, such as cartels in Latin America (Mexico and Colombia).
• Unilateral Violence: Intense and repeated deliberate attacks against civilians, particularly frequent in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

These are categorized by intensity—Extreme, High, Turbulent, and Low or Inactive—and color-coded on dedicated maps and atlases. The data and statistics provided by these observations outline a future scenario, particularly regarding major interstate conflicts that are expected to mark a new distribution of areas of influence and economic dominance among current capitalist powers.

Geostrategic Scenarios

The primary actors in these considerations are the USA, China, Russia, India, and Turkey, followed by other lower-level economies. In 1884, during the expansion of a still-young capitalism, 14 European powers and the United States met at the Berlin Conference to divide zones of influence in Africa to avoid wars among European countries over colonial partitioning.

Now, a senescent capitalism updates previous geostrategic theories. The United States remains a central subject with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which originally sought to prevent European interference in the American continent. Today, this doctrine has been expanded by President Trump—an efficient champion of American imperialism—who claims influence over Canada and Greenland to control future strategic maritime routes in the Arctic opening due to climate change. China, Russia, and the EU are also participating in this ”Race for the Arctic”.

Further steps in this U.S. project include claims on Panama and its strategic canal, and military pressure on Venezuela under the false pretext of fighting drug traffickers—a move that hides American interests in vast, untapped (or rather, ”to be plundered”) raw materials. The old motto ”America for Americans” has transformed from a national defensive strategy into one of geopolitical expansion. Reports suggest U.S. interest in reclaiming the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan (near Kabul), which was returned to the Taliban in 2021. According to President Trump, this site is close to a Chinese nuclear weapons facility—a claim denied by those who would not tolerate a ”stars and stripes” airbase in their backyard.

On the other side, the 2005 ”String of Pearls” theory describes China’s maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean, aimed at securing a sequence of dual-use (civil and military) ports to protect trade routes essential for flooding the planet with commodities. Complementing this is the CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) launched in 2015, linking China to the Pakistani port of Gwadar to create a commercial and energy alternative to the South China Sea routes, which are subject to potential American naval blockades under the guise of ”protecting” Taiwan’s independence. This is part of the broader BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) extending into Africa and Europe.

Conclusion

While Russia is intent on resolving its situation in Ukraine, other imperialisms are weaving economic and military alliances, as their smaller size prevents them from playing a primary role in the next war scenario. The development of the overproduction crisis will dictate the timing and manner of events, which will inevitably result in a brutal destruction of commodities and proletarians.

However, the latter can change this destiny, but only through proletarian revolution. Only through this path, under the guidance of the Communist Party, can the world proletariat rebel against the yoke of the agonizing capitalist system, get rid of misery and war, and reach Communism—the only world possible for human existence as a joyful coexistence with other living beings and the preservation of nature for the future of the human species

On the occasion of the national general strikes called on different dates by the grassroots unions and the CGIL, the party distributed the following leaflet among the participants in the related demonstrations, reiterating the party’s historic position on the matter.

*****

In view of the general rearmament proclaimed by the major imperialist states, a prelude to the spread of conflict on an increasingly global scale, the ruling class in Italy, and the state on its behalf, is also gathering and directing economic resources towards war mobilization (rather than hospitals and schools!). But, while on the one hand it is preparing to put further pressure on the conditions of the proletariat, it is also aiming to appease the middle classes and the worker aristocracy in order to secure their support. This is why the recent Budget Law provides for more substantial tax advantages for higher incomes, while they are practically negligible for the majority of proletarians.

A general strike has been called for November 28 by grassroots trade unions to protest against this Budget. This strike has then been undermined by the CGIL, which has instead called for mobilization on December 12.

This behavior, which they would like to justify with difference in “platforms” put forward, is unacceptable because it divides workers and weakens the struggle!

Inversely proportional wage increases (higher for the lowest paid)!

Full wages for the unemployed!

These are the basic demands of a single platform that must be put forward by a united trade union front!

It is clear that, faced with the prospect of a war economy, where the conditions of the working class will be severely attacked, it is essential that it unites in a single organization: a class-based union which, against the sacrifices demanded in the name of the national economy and war mobilization, pursues a policy aimed at the uncompromising defense of workers’ living conditions!

By taking this path, the proletarian class will once again find its Party, capable of leading it on the only viable path to its emancipation, which does not pass through parliamentary democracy, but moves towards communist revolution!

Florence, November 28 and December 12, 2025 

This issue continues the publication of summaries of the reports presented.

Trade union subservience to the interests of imperialism

The purpose of this report was to demonstrate how the bourgeois regime, having reached its imperialist phase, needs to subjugate the trade union movement to its own class interests and does so in almost identical ways in all countries with advanced capitalist development. “National approaches,” where they exist, are limited to details of form rather than substance.

The bourgeoisie can no longer propose the physical destruction of proletarian organizations and is forced to recognize their existence. However, in addition to creating its own white and yellow unions, it also attempts to influence “red” workers’ organizations from within through reformist leaderships that are always ready to collaborate with the enemy class. In the absence of a strong revolutionary party and a truly class-conscious proletariat, these collaborationist leaderships gradually developed until, on the eve of the First World War, they became dominant both politically, in the parties of the Second International, and in the trade unions.

So, after presenting, through a series of quotations from our classic texts, the position of revolutionary Marxism and the party on the trade union question, we moved on to analyze the behavior of the CGdL (General Confederation of Labor) throughout the war.

Through careful documentation, it was demonstrated how the CGdL trade union leaders, since the period of Italy’s neutrality, had declared themselves ready to go to war alongside the coalition of “democratic” nations, handing over the proletariat to the class enemy and pushing it into the global carnage. During the war, this “sacred union” became increasingly close. But the same thing happened in all the other belligerent countries.

It was during the war that the theory of common interests between the two antagonistic classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat) under the “impartial” arbitration of the state began to take hold. As we will see in the next reports, fascism appropriated this concept for the theorization of the corporative state.

We then moved on to the next chapter on the fate of the proletariat in the plans of imperialism.

The war had definitively marked an irreversible historical watershed; social democracy was now a cornerstone of bourgeois conservation at all levels, and the trade union policy directed by the social democratic bonzes would be equally reactionary.

At the same time, a revolution had recently broken out in Russia that threatened to spread throughout Europe and bring down all the plans for the new imperialist order that had emerged from the war.

Therefore, in order to prevent the rekindling of a genuine class-based trade union movement on a national and international scale, the victorious imperialist states created their own International Labor Organization as part of the League of Nations system, which the collaborationist trade unions promptly joined.

In November 1919, the US government, pursuant to Article 424 of the Treaty of Versailles, opened the first session of the International Labor Conference in Washington, where it was decided that a Council composed of 24 members would be appointed to head the International Office: 12 representatives of bourgeois governments, 6 representatives of industrialists, and 6 trade unionists of the worst opportunism. This was another international preview of the corporative system.

Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, the yellow trade union international had been restored, which did not fail to declare itself in favor of the International Labor Office, thus adhering, with an indissoluble bond, to the needs of world imperialism.

The cycle ended with the complete subjugation of the trade union headquarters to the respective national bourgeoisies, with their use for the patriotic mobilization of workers. And this too was a goal that the bourgeoisie achieved at the international level.

March on Moscow, second phase

Denikin, considering the first phase of the operation to strike Moscow and the heart of the Bolshevik revolution to be successfully concluded, moved on to organizing the central phase of the complex maneuver. He needed to conquer the city of Kursk, considered a valuable point for the subsequent assault on Moscow. He therefore assigned a large part of his troops to this task, which were opposed by those of the Red Army, in a clear imbalance: the Red Army had a clear superiority in artillery, twice that of the White Army, even if with little ammunition, but the White cavalry had a frightening supremacy over the Red cavalry, with a ratio of 7 to 1. The Cossack cavalry was decisive in those endless steppes.

Kursk was conquered by the Whites on September 19, creating a conspicuous gap in the Red lines that Denikin tried to extend towards Voronezh using the cavalry of the Škuro Wolves. Meanwhile, the devastating incursion of the Cossack Mamontov into the Red rear continued to such an extent that, overloaded with booty from their raids, the Cossacks decided to abandon their assigned front and return to their home territories. Shkuro conquered Voronezh, and the Red Army realized the absolute necessity of equipping itself with adequate cavalry. We read a few pages from Trotsky’s “Military Writings” on the analysis of the military situation and the surmountable difficulties in equipping themselves with cavalry forces, especially now that Denikin was threatening to conquer Tula, home to the historic military arsenal and only 195 km from Moscow. From Trotsky’s “The Steel of Tula,” we read his analysis on the matter.

Following new military developments, the two sides took three weeks to realign their units. Following a non-aggression agreement with the Bolsheviks, Makhno’s Insurrectionary Army had reorganized itself for an anarchist and independent Ukraine, which was a serious problem for Denikin, who meanwhile controlled the whole of Ukraine. To counter this danger, because Makhno had reached Mariupol on the Black Sea and was heading for Taganrog, the headquarters of the White forces, Denikin had to divert troops, including those in reserve, to block him.

Meanwhile, on the central front line, the White attack began on Kursk and then on Orel, opening the way to Tula. The Soviet command ordered a slowdown in the White advance to give the forces defending Orel time to organize a strong defense. The battle, which began on October 13, developed with extreme intensity throughout the theater of war. The turning point came when part of the 13th Red Army defending Orel deserted, causing the collapse of the Soviet defenses.

The White troops advanced with great caution towards Tula, thanks to the Red opposition, while in the Orel sector the situation was very fluid and uncertain. In the eastern sector along the Volga, the Red Ninth Army had taken control of the strategic Povorino-Caricyn railway line, which was essential for all White supplies. Denikin ordered an immediate and powerful counterattack, which took more than three days of fierce fighting to resolve in his favor. By mid-October, the counterrevolutionaries controlled a vast territory from Kalinin, Kiev, to Odessa, with over 50 million inhabitants.

It was a moment of extreme crisis, because in the northwestern sector Petrograd was under attack and in Moscow the evacuation of the Soviet government was being prepared.

On the history of trade unions in France

In the previous report on the trade union movement in France, presented at the general meeting in May 2025, we addressed two aspects of the economic organizations that emerged in the 19th century, namely mutual aid organizations for workers and trade union organizations specific to workers. We then summarized the economic and social situation of the main European countries (Great Britain, Germany, France) at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century with the emergence of four types of labor unionism (British collaborationist unionism, French anarchist unionism, German unionism, which was Marxist in origin but evolving towards reformism, and the communist unionism of the Communist International). In this second report, we described the characteristics of the French labor movement as analyzed by Marxists, before addressing in a future report the trade union forms that emerged after the Commune of 1871. The main aspects covered were the revolutionary alliance between the bourgeoisie and the French proletariat until February 1848, the importance of the petty bourgeoisie, the breeding ground of anarchism, parasitic financial capitalism, and finally French imperialism and the conquest of the colonies as a source of corruption for part of the proletariat.

“Capitalist production therefore develops technology and the combination of the social production process only by simultaneously undermining the sources from which all wealth springs: the earth and the worker” (Marx, Capital, Book I, Chapter 13, Large-scale industry and agriculture)

Data provided by the SOFI   report  which monitors the state of food and nutrition security in the world and is published annually by the FAO, states that in 2024, approximately 800 million people (or slightly less), or about one-seventh of the entire human family, suffer from hunger, with an estimated 11 million deaths per year from hunger, malnutrition, or related causes: practically the figures of what can be considered the bloodiest of humanity’s unfought wars.

In the early 1950s, the Party devoted a series of articles to the agrarian question, as a re-exposure of the marxian rent theory, focusing on the sixth section of the third book  of Capital, confirming that it is “precisely in the field of the agrarian question and its theoretical assumptions,” the central reason for marxist criticism of the capitalist mode of production, namely its inability to develop “the technique and combination of the social production process” without “at the same time undermining the primary sources of all wealth: the land and the worker” (cf. Marx, Capital, Book I, Chapter 13, “Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture”).

Marx writes in the third book of Capital:

”Large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, managed industrially, operate in common. While they are originally divided by the fact that the former mainly squanders and ruins labor power, and therefore man’s natural strength, and the latter more directly the natural strength of the land, instead they later join hands, in that the industrial system in the countryside also sucks the energy out of the workers, and industry and commerce, for their part, provide agriculture with the means to impoverish the land.”

And ”on the other hand, large land ownership reduces the agricultural population to a continuously decreasing minimum and contrasts it with a continuously growing industrial population concentrated in large cities; thus creating conditions that cause an unbridgeable rift in the organic social exchange prescribed by the natural laws of life, as a result of which the strength of the land is squandered and this squandering is exported through trade far beyond the borders of one’s own country.”

Published between 1953 and 1954 in Il Programma Comunista (and later collected in the volume “Mai la merce sfamerà l’uomo – la questione agraria e la teoria della rendita fondiaria secondo Marx” [Commodities will never feed man – the agrarian question and the theory of land rent according to Marx]), it is in these articles that we find, on the basis of solid Marxist science, the harshest criticism of capitalism as a form of production far removed from the Ricardian idea of linear development and continuous progress and which, instead, exhausts the resources of the soil and makes the problem of feeding the entire world population unsolvable.

“The more capitalism cultivates and civilizes, the more it creates hunger,”  

“Capitalism brings nothing but hunger” (Commodities will never feed man).

More than fifty years after the Party restated the theoretical cornerstones of the agrarian question, the essence and limit of the current mode of production, bourgeois science itself is now forced to take stock of two centuries of capitalist “development” supported by the consumption of fossil fuels as the dominant energy resource, admitting retrospectively, despite itself, and in hindsight, the unsustainability of the capitalist system.

However, the bourgeois regime resolves the serious contradictions within the capitalist mode of production within capitalism itself through the implementation of unlikely reforms, plans, and projects that inevitably fail because they fail to identify the real cause that, in a system that produces beyond belief, starves millions of people.

Marx’s theory of rent, which considers both differential and absolute rent, ”irrevocably establishes the historical limitations of the capitalist way of resolving the relationship between production and consumption in human communities: their food needs will never be resolved by the process of capital accumulation, no matter how much the technology, the organic composition of capital, and the mass of products obtainable from the same amount of labor time, may develop. The modern antagonism between social classes necessarily corresponds to the formation of surplus profits, the emergence of absolute rents, the anarchy and waste in social production. The equation capitalism equals hunger is irrevocably established. […] Although the sphere of food production is fundamental to the dynamics of any society, Marx’s theory of rent is central to the description of the capitalist mode of production: we would say that, from a revolutionary and anti-possibilist point of view, it is the decisive part.” (from “Commodities will never feed man”).

The theory of rent therefore demonstrates beyond any doubt that in the chaotic and senseless capitalist mode of production, based on an indefinite number of individual commercial acts, which involve the waste of a large part of the social product, it is impossible to satisfy needs according to social utility. Capitalism is the era of the satisfaction of artificial needs and the dissatisfaction of primary ones.

”The foundation and development of modern capitalist industrial production, by mobilizing immense new productive forces, have also brought about countless new types of needs and new forms of consumption among human beings. But this does not detract from the fact that the fundamental basis for the satisfaction of vital needs in society is the natural product of agricultural land.

The relationship between agricultural and industrial production offers one of the most obvious demonstrations of the senselessness and absurdity that underlie the capitalist system and the bourgeois era.” (Terra acqua e sangue [Earth, Water, and Blood], Battaglia Comunista, no. 22, 1950)

The theory of rent, in establishing the market price of wheat, i.e., the “fundamental crop” and therefore of foodstuffs in general, demonstrates that, despite the “grandiosity of capitalist production, it is not possible to feed the human species, however high the level of productive forces may become.”

The machinery of the capitalist system, in which the size of surplus value depends on the organic and technical composition of capital, incessantly and inexorably pushes capital and labor towards industry where, despite the general historical decline in the rate of profit, determined by ever-improving technology, the social mass of profit can grow enormously with the growth of global capital. The prices of industrial manufactured goods are falling, making it possible to access ancillary goods that were prohibitive to the majority of human beings in the age of craftsmanship.

This process is, however, blocked in agriculture not only by the private monopoly of land but also and mainly by the mercantile leveling that determines prices based on the costs of the most barren land and the unfavorable population-land ratio, i.e., the fact that land is a finite and non-reproducible resource. The market price that regulates agricultural products is ‘pegged’ to the production price under the most unfavorable conditions (i.e., it depends on the production price on the worst land) plus another margin of increase that represents the absolute rent. For most people, feeding themselves or accessing quality food becomes a luxury.

The theory of rent must apply, however, not only to agriculture, but to all natural forces.

The same rule that applies to the least fertile land also applies to “the most despicable mineral and therefore the least fertile mine, regulates the general market,” that is, “they regulate the international price well” that “the rentier of cultivation” of the most valuable fuels and minerals “will make us pay dearly” “the warm nest of capitalist super-profit on the raw materials of civil and military death” (from ‘Nel dramma della terra parti di fianco’ [In the drama of the earth, go alongside], from “Il Programma Comunista”, May 14-28, 1954).

As mentioned above, the rigorous Marxist theorems on rent are therefore able to account for recent phenomena (previously announced by the party), typical of capitalism in its monopoly and imperialist phase, because, from the moment they were enunciated, they were applied not only to agriculture but to all natural forces: they therefore also apply to the economy of coal- or gasoline-powered machines; hydroelectric power, and nuclear power, all of which are bases for superprofits, monopolies, and parasitic income, which exacerbate the imbalance and disharmony inherent in the capitalist social form.

Already in “Vulcano della produzione o palude del mercato?” (Volcano of production or swamp of the market?), published in Il Programma Comunista, no. 13, July 9-23, 1954, and no. 19, Oct. 15-29, 1954, we wrote:

”It should be noted that surplus profit in agriculture is not the only type of surplus profit that appears in a typical capitalist society, and it is transformed into rent enjoyed by the class of landowners, one of the three basic classes in our model.

Excess profits and analogous rents are enjoyed by those who dispose, with the same title deed, to agricultural land, water resources, mines, deposits of all kinds, and building land, as well as various buildings and manufactured goods necessary for industrial entrepreneurs.

In all these cases, the organization of bourgeois society, based on the security of private property, forms and guarantees a series of monopolies that are inherent in its nature. It is therefore not the free competition that is the basic characteristic of bourgeois economics, but the system of monopolies, which allows a whole range of products, including the most important ones from agricultural land and the extractive industry, to be sold at prices higher than their value, i.e., the sum of the social effort they cost”.

The agrarian question in real Marxist terms therefore does not only mean land, peasants, and landowners, but also means the theory of rent, or the distribution of surplus value, in the forms of modern monopolistic and parasitic capitalism. Thus, anticipating today’s inevitable historical scenarios with the force of theory, the goods, other than than agricultural ones,  that cannot be reproduced capitalistically, such as natural resources, oil for instance, are identified.

Thus, in the capitalist system of production, the price of agricultural products is determined not only by the value of absolute rent but also by the law of ‘worst land’ (i.e., the benefits of technological progress and increased productivity are blocked in this sector by the rent barrier, which prevents any compensation between industrial and agricultural prices). This also applies to energy resources, which are different in quality and energy power and are distributed in differently accessible geological areas and therefore have extremely different extraction and marketing costs, resulting in an enormous differential rent.

With its development in capitalism, therefore, the dominance of rent increases more and more, and, at the same time, also the tribute that the proletarian class pays in the form of excess profits to the owner class.

The Party anticipated, decades in advance, the ‘ecological’ problem, i.e. the conflict between capital and nature that today’s bourgeoisie so hypocritically cares about, predicting the impossibility of maintaining a balance between the human species and the rest of the world under capitalism:

“It’s a matter of seeing whether the cycle of exchanges between the natural environment with its reserves of matter and energy and the living species tends to achieve a dynamic equilibrium (theoretically indefinite), or tends to fall into a progressive imbalance and thus become unsustainable, in historical time, leading to the regression and end of the species” (from “Mai la merce sfamerà l’uomo” [Commodities will never feed man]).

The phase of capitalism studied by the Party more than fifty years ago (while even the false “Italian Communist Party” pursued production and employment policies at the cost of damaging the environment and human and animal health) was already the phase of ecological and environmental disasters, exploitation, erosive depletion, and plundering of natural resources.

The Capital, the “cold monster of materialized labor,” has harbored within itself a curse that inextricably links science and technological progress to the subjugation of man rather than his true liberation, and to the indiscriminate exploitation of nature and animals rather than their peaceful cooperation with the human species. In capitalism, “the conscious and rational treatment of the earth as eternal common property, as an inalienable condition of existence and reproduction of the chain of successive human generations, is replaced by exploitation, by the squandering of the earth’s energies” (Book Three of Capital).

We wrote in “Trajectory and catastrophe of the capitalist form in the classic monolithic theoretical construction of Marxism” published in Il Programma Comunista no. 19 in 1957:

”Denying Ricardo’s contemporary counter-revolutionaries, who flirted with the feudal Middle Ages, and our own contemporary counter-revolutionaries, who flirt with the now antiquated society of Capital, any right to give life to objectified labor, to the mechanical Automaton, we dishonor him for the reason that Ricardo dishonored him; but the dialectical greatness of our construction is that once the cycle that Ricardo saw as eternal has been closed in a new revolutionary cataclysm, the cold monster of materialized labor changes its face, its task, and its destiny; it takes on (if we dare say so in the presence of a wonderful formulation that Marx believed in after turning off some dazzling lights) a new and human soul, resurrected from the tears and mourning of generations crushed by class systems, breaking the curse that bound science and social oppression, and allowing the bond between the knowledge of the species, conquered in an unspeakable series of struggles, and the secure well-being of social man, of man as a species, free from misery and from individualistic, privatist, and subjectivist infamies. Perhaps Karl Marx also had to pay a tribute to romanticism on our behalf when he turned living labor into a dead object, and then redeemed it with prophetic language as a gift of happiness and life. But this was not Hegelian coquetry, as he later wrote without regret, but powerful experimental science, if today we respond with his pages to the shortcomings and ravings of a social form that has reached putrefaction. And they vibrate with truth, and although centuries old, they shed a light that is unknown to the elucubrations of this time.

Let it be understood by us and our readers that fixed capital, machine, automated system of machinery, production plant, instrument of production in capitalist form, objectified or dead labor are, in the course of this discussion, equivalent terms.”

There are no miraculous interventions to stem hunger under the yoke of Capital; commodities will never feed man. Only a communist economy, freed from mercantile constraints and planned as a project for the liberation of man, will ensure the fulfillment of his needs and fruitful coexistence with nature and all its resource

It is the Party’s perspective, visible to the “explorers of tomorrow,” that is the only one possible for the realization of true salvation: Communism understood as a unified social plan measured by physical quantities not of individuals, not of a class, nor even of an entire society, but of the species, “defined by a life without death, which cultivates, manages, and transmits to itself the organized nature, the equipped shell of the planet, without solutions of time.”

From the point of view of a higher economic formation of society, the private ownership of the globe by individuals will appear as absurd as the private ownership of one man by another. “Even an entire society, a nation, and even all societies of the same era taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and they have a duty to pass it on improved, as boni patres familias, to subsequent generations.” (Marx, Capital, Book III) 

The Need for the Unified Commission

Starting with the Industrial Relations Act of 1988, the following two decades were a necessarily prolonged period of repeated and substantial changes to industrial legislation. In fact, the working class had become increasingly passive: union membership had fallen from a peak of 60% in the 1960s to 20% in the early 2000s.

The WorkChoices Act (2005) was the first attempt to attack workers.

It was declared “the most fundamental reform of the industrial relations system in over 100 years.” Howard, the then Liberal Prime Minister, said it was “a more flexible, simpler, and fairer workplace relations system for Australia.” In simple terms, the new body focused on “strengthening the Australian economy” through the introduction of a “more decentralized system of workplace relations.”

It shifted the balance of power away from unions toward established bargaining units to support company bargaining, while increasing the power of the state apparatus.

Employers’ organizations, the ACI and the Business Council (BCA), gave their full support to these measures and urged their evolution towards the deregulation of workers’ rights.

But after the defeat of the Liberals and following significant mobilization against the new law, the elected Labor government of Rudd proposed the introduction of an “alternative.”

And so, in 2008, with the mass slogan in support of the labor law “Your rights at work deserve to be voted for” (which was modified from the original workers’ slogan “… deserve to be affirmed through struggle”) against the labor law, the Labor government launched a unified commission with tighter control over industrial relations.

By centralizing authority, the state ensured that disputes were channeled into a single institutional channel, limiting the risk of mobilization escalating into open struggle. For businesses, a single national arbitrator would reduce uncertainty in negotiations and disputes.

“This bill provides a simple, national workplace relations system for all Australians… a system that ends the uncertainty, confusion, and division of the past and creates the stability and confidence we need for the future” (Julia Gillard, then Prime Minister, speech introducing the Fair Work Bill to the House of Representatives, 2008).

Fundamental to this was the strengthening of the role of trade unions as agents for the enforcement of state-level standards. The new law established state involvement in the increasingly fragmented relations between workers and employers.

This is now the labor law that covers all workers in Australia.

It defines the following roles of the bodies (the FWC and the Fair Work Ombudsman), national minimum employment standards (pay, working hours, working conditions, etc.), company bargaining procedures, strike procedures, and the role of the Ombudsman in applying financial penalties, as well as the means of appealing to federal courts for punitive intervention.

The body first explicitly establishes how industrial agreements should proceed (sector/industrial agreements have been suspended and only company agreements are now permitted). A Commission oversees the role of trade unions as bargaining agents, which negotiate the details of the industrial agreement on behalf of employees with employers. They must therefore be “independent” from employers. Industrial agreements can only commence after formal notification and explicit consent from the employer or through the support of a majority (50%+1) of employees, administered and validated by the union bureaucracy under state supervision. This supervision is conducted by the Electoral Commission (AEC), which also administers federal and state parliamentary elections. The bargaining report is then submitted to the FWC, which regulates and supervises it, before making the final assessment and formalizing the agreement. The state therefore acts as guarantor of the unions and enforcer of all agreements.

Bargaining must also be conducted in “good faith” by both parties and therefore requires union action to be “fair.” What does “fair” mean? Explicitly, employees may strike for only two reasons: 1) in support of contractual demands and 2) in response to employer action against industrial bargaining.

This means that strikes may only occur if permitted and strictly only in relation to industrial bargaining.

The law therefore prohibits, for example: collective bargaining, sympathy strikes, “political” strikes, blockades, and wildcat strikes. The law specifies that legal strikes cannot take place if they “endanger the life, personal safety, or health, or the welfare of the population or any part thereof; or cause significant damage to the Australian economy or any important part thereof.”

If deemed illegal, the Commission may issue back-to-work orders against striking workers, and the ombudsman may impose fines on union leaders or involve state law enforcement agencies. However, such measures can only be enforced through the federal courts by means of an injunction. Once such an injunction is received, the matter will be prosecuted separately as a criminal offense.

Employers are granted the right to dismiss their employees upon notice when the union has first initiated union action, regardless of how disproportionate it may be.

A provision relating to the “nominal expiration date” provides for the revision of agreements every four years (or at agreed intervals). Once approved, workers may not organize or take union action on any matter covered by that agreement during this time interval, unless authorized by the Commission. Once the agreement expires, a new one must be negotiated to replace the previous one. In practice, this freezes wages and conditions (except as provided for in the agreement, which usually provides for annual percentage increases) for up to four years, ensuring “industrial peace” for the duration of the agreement, and unlocks the right to strike only once the nominal expiry date has passed and industrial bargaining has been agreed to commence. This remains valid unless, once again, it is permitted by the Commission.

If industrial bargaining cannot be approved, either party may request arbitration in court. An independent commission, external to the workplace, meets to hear arguments from both sides. Once this formal arbitration process has begun, the union is legally prohibited from taking any further industrial action, including strikes, work stoppages, overtime bans, or slowdowns. The Commission then issues a binding decision, effectively resolving the dispute and imposing the terms of the agreement, which all parties must abide by for the duration of the agreement.

The court as an instrument of bourgeois repression

This is the current state of labor relations in Australia. Workers can only work when employers allow them to, and they can only strike when the commission allows them to.

As we noted in our recent article on Australian Federal elections (TIC#5):

”The Act has imposed severe restrictions on wage bargaining and drastically limited union action, effectively criminalizing most strike strategies and amplifying the advantages of employers… the worsening living standards of the Australian proletariat are not the result of mismanagement by a few, nor are they a failure of government. Rather, it is the byproduct of the absolutely inevitable contradictions within the capitalist system, in which the bourgeois order directly opposes the immediate and historical goals of the proletariat.”

Only recently have more serious actions been taken against the commission. Let’s take a case from 2024 to show the way forward for workers.

On November 21, 2024, 1,800 Woolworths and Lineage workers launched indefinite strikes at five distribution centers and cold storage units. The strategy was to align company contract negotiations across the five centers during the Christmas period to demand: a 25% inflation-indexed wage increase and changes to AI productivity.

This system evaluates workers based on a speed parameter, whereby managers can punish and dismiss those who do not meet targets. Woolworths (together with Coles) holds 37% of the country’s food market. Striking workers managed to block 75% of Woolworths’ production.

In particular, the Dandenong South warehouse saw 200 workers go on strike. It is responsible for 40% of Woolworths’ production. Interestingly, Woolworths moved this warehouse from Hume, where it was heavily unionized, eliminating 700 jobs, with employment now halved at the new location. The Dandenong warehouse has seen 85% of its workforce join the United Workers Union (UWU) since it opened. Only 10 workers were members of the Shop, Distributive, and Allied Employees Association (SDA), a notoriously yellow union.

Despite the UWU’s dominance, only a small group of militant non-affiliated workers (not members of the UWU or SDA) engaged in picketing. The union quickly withdrew its official support (advising picketers to avoid “illegal acts”) and entered into intense negotiations with the employer.

Woolworths’ anti-strike tactics are noteworthy. They locked out workers, erected bollards on the main driveway, and installed security guards who reported the movements of workers and supporters to management, who could then alert a temp agency (Programmed) to transport scabs when security reported a possibility of picket line breaches.

In addition, throughout the action, workers and supporters were reported and monitored by the police.

The FWC ruled against the workers, arguing that the UWU was not negotiating in “good faith” with Woolworths and that the pickets were “obstructive” and undermined the negotiation process. The ruling deemed the picket illegal.

The strikers, however, carried out “illegal” actions without the support of the union, turning away supply trucks and scabs who wanted to enter the workplace.

Woolworths, in support of the Commission, whose “return to work” order had not been complied with by the striking workers, sought enforcement in the Federal Court.

Notifying the strikers of a federal injunction would have allowed the police to remove the strikers by force.

Most of the UWU workers involved in this case were urged by the union to stay away from the picket line. Although the injunction was still pending, for many it already seemed to have been served, awaiting enforcement by the police.

Anticipating that the police would disperse the picket line, some strikers decided to stay, risking arrest and fines. But at the last minute, an agreement was reached between the UWU and Woolworths (and its company union, the SDA).

The workers finally voted to accept a deal that included an 11% wage increase over three years, along with some cash payments and gift cards to workers.

If workers are to learn from this event, they must abandon all trust in the power of the Commission. Furthermore, the fetishistic compliance imposed on the union to maintain “good faith” negotiations with the exploiters must be eliminated. These traitors and agents of capital who conform to the state when the bosses demand it must be removed from the unions and replaced with a strong base that intrinsically understands the deterioration of living conditions and the necessity of political struggle.

We continue to see similar scenarios. In all sectors, even small disputes continue to highlight the role of the Commission. Miners in the Longford dispute organized pickets when the commission ordered them not to, and when they did (for over 700 days), they received fines of over $1 million against the union and union leaders themselves for “unfair” practices such as blockades.

Another case is that of Hutchison dockworkers unionized by the MUA, who were told not to picket after being fired via text message. They picketed, leaving ships full in the bay, refusing truck movement, and went on strike for 5 days before the Commission came back and forced the company to rehire the workers. Similarly, railway workers who were members of the RTBU Sydney union were told not to strike because it would cause significant damage to Sydney’s economy, with the union agreeing for fear of fines and entering into negotiations with the government.

With this in mind, we can see some first steps toward strengthening the court.

This latest move was an excuse against the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). In 2024, an “independent” investigation found that the union had been involved in illegal gang activity and workplace unrest against non-union workers and management. The government introduced the Fair Work Bill (2024) to put an end to the alleged corruption and “unfair play.”

Interestingly, the bill was reportedly in the works before the investigation began…

The bill amended the 2008 law to give the commission the power to overturn the union and replace its leadership. This is one of the most severe actions taken by the Australian government against a union in recent decades. Now that this bill has been passed, it sets a precedent for even more violent attacks in the future.

Why the CFMEU? Given the inevitable intensification of class contradictions, workers will progressively militarize and agitate as their living conditions worsen, taking up a political struggle. CFMEU members are the most obvious in this process. In contrast, the UWU quickly sided with the FWC in the Woolworths case. The most militant members of the CFMEU, aware of the opposing interests of its opportunistic leadership, may have ultimately ousted them for adequate representation of their class demands.

For the union rank and file, the growing conflicting interests of its leaders and the search for scapegoats for poor company agreements against the government began to become increasingly intolerable. Instead of denouncing the state, the union acted as a guarantor of social peace, demanding better administration from the government. In this way, it tied its members to the fate of the national economy and to the reformist illusion that the system could be corrected. Therefore, as the economic demands of its members increased, the desperate defense of their living standards would reveal the subversive content of their leadership and the need to take up political arms. In its most advanced stage, capitalism-imperialism inevitably sharpens political consciousness, as its very development clashes directly with the foundations of the bourgeois order.

Necessarily seeking an excuse to expand its powers and curb the militant process of the union, the court removed the leaders. It limited the possibility of bringing workers into the real political arena, as they now seek instead to restore their “stolen” leadership through the courts.

The court limited a possible threat, but at the same time strengthened itself for similar cases in the future.

It will be the coming years of worsening economic crisis that will dispel these illusions in the state in general and force the proletarian masses once again to face the harsh reality of capitalist society: declining purchasing power of wages, job losses, insecurity, poverty.

The phase of continuous growth in capitalist profits has come to an end. In Australia, we are witnessing a persistent decline in production. This, amid inevitable ups and downs, marks the steady and progressive decline in the rate of profit. Therefore, as the state increasingly supports private debt and necessarily cuts social programs, the force of the bourgeoisie will compress the living conditions of workers.

Marx revealed the nature of the capitalist economy, demonstrating that the goal of capitalist production is neither the direct satisfaction of society’s needs, nor the act of selling or buying, nor even “money” understood as a universal commodity, but rather the production of surplus value to be used, on the one hand, for the capitalist’s private consumption and, more importantly, since capitalists are simply capital personified, for reinvestment as additional capital in perpetual and ever-larger cycles of reproduction and accumulation. Money and commodities are simply forms that Capital temporarily takes on, while labor power (a commodity in itself) is the only source of surplus value. The unique ability of labor power to produce surplus value stems from the fact that the capitalist derives a greater use value from it than he has to pay for its exchange value. That is to say, the value of the goods (or services) produced by the worker in, say, a month is greater than the value of the goods he needs for subsistence in the same month. As a general rule, wages consist only of the equivalent of the goods the worker needs for subsistence (which is determined historically and socially), never the equivalent of all the work performed by that worker in that period of time. Capitalism needs surplus labor—labor for which no equivalent has been paid—in order to survive.

To increase profits, the capitalist must constantly shift the balance in favor of unpaid hours over paid hours. There are many methods he can employ: increasing productivity, extending the working day, reducing wages below the subsistence level, and so on. One of these methods is the one we will analyze in this article: the use of voluntary labor. This is, in essence, work performed without pay (except for some purely symbolic “benefits”). What could this be if not music to the ears of capitalists? The rate of exploitation of voluntary labor is not 100%, as it might seem at first glance. A 100% rate is that of an 8-hour working day in which 4 hours are paid and 4 are not, which is still a rather weak ratio compared to what it actually is in the context of the high productivity of modern industry. The rate of exploitation of voluntary labor is in fact incalculable, since there are no paid hours; this is perhaps the most wonderful equation for the capitalist and his obedient accountants, in which the entire arithmetic of bourgeois political economy culminates!

Of course, this does not mean that volunteering can ever become the general form of capitalist production: wage labor will always remain the only dominant social form of production in capitalism. Volunteering is only sustainable for certain social strata, such as young people who still live with their family and therefore have their livelihood secured, or people who have a job and volunteer in their limited free time. Therefore, it will always remain a niche in the grand scheme of social production. This is also reflected in the available data, as only 12.3% of the adult population in the EU was engaged in formal volunteer work in 2022. However, it is important to emphasize the degree of exploitation in this type of work, despite it being an exception.

Shortly after the bourgeoisie appeared on the historical scene, its “philanthropic” branch also made its appearance, the pious bourgeoisie, those openly interested in the moral and spiritual elevation of human society. Of course, what could be more noble than leading by example and encouraging the propertyless masses to also achieve this elevated moral state of altruism, of “working-class philanthropy”—philanthropy without capital? This is the nature of the discourse on volunteering: the lack of remuneration ennobles the work; it is a sign of honor. After all, the appreciation and esteem of the community are worth more than any sum of money! Not paying these volunteer workers is a favor on the part of the capitalist who employs them, allowing them to see beyond the petty greed characteristic of the less noble members of society.

Volunteer work is, in reality, just another form of capitalist exploitation. Within the capitalist system, it is in no way more noble, but, on the contrary, more miserable. We can understand this phenomenon even better if we take a closer look at the types of work usually found in volunteer programs.

To be continued

The Political and Economic Context

In the context of the austerity package presented by the new Bolojan government (the faction of capital that emerged victorious after this year’s elections), the main trade union organizations are responding with their own “package” of reforms. The main objectives concerned the reduction of the budget deficit, which stands at 9.3% of GDP, one of the highest in the EU. The main targets of the austerity measures are public sector workers, who will see their salary bonuses significantly reduced, their salaries frozen for two years and, in some cases, an increase in working hours. It is natural that such a project is accompanied by the rhetoric of the capitalist class, which presents the situation as if the nation were in danger and all citizens had to make a collective effort to save it from ruin. First of all, it should be noted that this debt has been largely covered over the years by loans granted by capitalists at considerable interest rates: even a budget deficit can be a profitable business!

In 2021, the Romanian state was in a relatively favorable budgetary position compared to today, with a public debt of €142.5 billion and annual economic growth of 5.7%, conditions that allowed it to obtain loans at interest rates of 2-3% (for a total expenditure of €3.4 billion, representing 1.5% of GDP and 3.9% of state expenditure); the situation in 2025 differs significantly. In the first four months of 2025 alone, Romania spent more than €4 billion on debt, €600 million more than in the whole of 2021! In percentage terms, these expenditures accounted for about 8% of total government spending during this period (1.1% of GDP). Romania’s economic growth rate in 2025 is also significantly lower than three years ago, estimated at between 1.6% and 1.8% by the European Commission.

The shift to a precarious budgetary situation is largely due to the global economic crisis, which Romania cannot escape. However, the Romanian case has specific conditions that deserve attention. Romania’s position as a state located on the eastern front of NATO and the EU and the dependence of Romanian capital on European capital mean that any political instability or attempt to move closer to Eastern capital (represented by Russia and China) worsens the existing crisis. For this reason, both during last year’s election circus and this year’s, when the elections were repeated, the Romanian stock market fluctuated depending on which faction seemed likely to win (declines if the “sovereignists” seemed to be winning, rises if a pro-European victory seemed likely, which is what ultimately happened). Already after the first round of the presidential elections, the state was unable to find creditors on the market, even though it was willing to pay interest rates above 7.5%. Long-term rates reached 7.8%. However, the reasons for the crisis are not so much determined by the so-called “political crisis” of the last year, as some pro-European or sovereignist activists claim. The trend toward higher public debt had begun in Romania even before the “political crisis.”

Romania entered the EU’s excessive deficit procedure as early as 2020, but failed to meet the targets agreed with Brussels until 2021. In 2024, Romania’s deficit was the highest in the EU, at 9.3% (the target was 2.9%). The average annual interest rate in those years was above 6%. The EU forecast for Romania’s deficit this year is 8.6% (the target is 7%). In March 2025, public debt exceeds 55% of GDP, Romania pays the highest interest rates in the EU (7.8%, slightly decreased after the presidential victory of the “pro-EU” faction) and also has the highest level of inflation in the Union. The bourgeois press blames the so-called “political class,” which allegedly has an interest in spending public funds on social assistance to keep its electorate loyal. Similarly, economists argue that the “recipe” for success is to reduce government spending. A similar motivation (blaming the political class) can also be found among union leaders. The difference is that the latter do not preach austerity, but oppose it in a superficial and demagogic way. All these factions have one thing in common: they defend the system that enslaves workers, capitalism. The difference lies in tactics, not content.

So who is responsible for this deficit? If we believe the media, the shortfall was caused by too many civil servants, as well as by the corruption of politicians. Some more honest bourgeois journalists mention tax evasion, estimated at 10% of GDP. But who benefits from non-payment of taxes? Who bribes politicians? Certainly not public sector workers! It is members of the capitalist class, who want to share less surplus value with the state, going so far as to hire workers without contracts, create ghost companies, and avoid any state control. For example, the ANAF (National Agency for Fiscal Administration) has discovered that tens of thousands of Romanian companies are registered at the same address!

Since any “moralizing” action by the state could also affect a few bourgeois, we are constantly told that “we are all in the same boat.” All bourgeois economists with a shred of sincerity recognize that the increase in VAT on all goods, as well as the tax on bank turnover, will result in the additional costs being shifted onto the shoulders of workers through price increases. The increase in housing prices (which have already reached an unaffordable level), together with the increase in VAT (from 9% to 21% for homes under €130,000 and from 19% to 21% for others) and the increase in loan rates, will further worsen the housing problem.

The liberalization of the energy market, eliminating state subsidies for electricity consumption, will even lead to a doubling of energy bills for some consumers!

All these austerity measures are being applied in an already precarious context for many Romanians, so that, according to the BNS trade union, in 2024:

”- one in five Romanians was affected by poverty,

– one in six Romanians will not have access to essential goods and services,

– €382 per month will be the poverty threshold, with 3.5 million people living below this threshold,

– 14.5% of households will have accumulated arrears in paying their bills, compared to the EU average of 6.9%,

– Energy prices were the fifth highest in the European Union, at equal purchasing power”.

Reactions to the austerity reforms came from the most influential trade unions, such as Cartel ALFA, CNSLR-Frăția, SANITAS, and those in the education sector (ALMA MATER and SPIRU HARET).

Despite the supposed unanimous opposition to austerity, the measures taken by Romanian unions to counter the fiscal package imposed by the government do not seem to go beyond small strikes lasting only a few hours. However, these protests have brought thousands of workers onto the streets, involving workers from sectors such as environmental hygiene, education, finance, and healthcare, with threats of further protests also coming from the Bucharest Transport Company. Most of the protests had a single demand: to maintain bonuses, such as those granted to workers operating in arduous conditions. There were calls to “tax capital and large properties, not workers”.

One protest that deserves special attention is that of education workers, who, despite representing a public sector that has been underfunded to date, have been among those most affected by the new package of measures.

Protests by Education Workers

The Federation of Free Education Trade Unions, the Federation of Education Trade Unions “SPIRU HARET,” and the National Trade Union Federation “ALMA MATER” have declared their opposition to the state’s economic measures, but with what means? Protests aimed at prompting social dialogue, not actual strikes. Thus, on June 18, 2025, in pre-university schools, higher education institutions, central university libraries, and research institutes, union members protested during their workplace activities, wearing a distinctive sign (armband, badge, etc.). Education unions are opposed to the unpaid increase of two hours per week in teaching hours (currently 20 hours for teachers and 16 hours for educators), the elimination of allowances for teachers with doctorates (a 50% increase in the national minimum wage), and staff cuts at national research and development institutes, measures that are part of the new government’s overall austerity package.

The protest on June 18 turned into a “work-to-rule”, with no interruption of workers’ activities. This form is often applauded by the bourgeois press because it does not disrupt the normal functioning of businesses. But for this very reason, such a strike will have no effect. As long as the reproduction of capital is not affected, the capitalist class will not feel threatened in any way.

These are the same unions that two years ago blocked the general education strike, without any of the teachers’ demands actually being met. The strategy used by these unions, and others, is to demoralize the proletariat by sending it on strikes, protests, and demonstrations that are preordained to fail, thus trying to convey the idea that it is not strong enough and that its demands should not go beyond negotiations with employers.

A significant fact related to this event is that, after the strike was called off, there were voices among the workers calling for the creation of new “free” unions, which shows that a section of the Romanian working class understands the role that the current unions play in keeping the proletariat in wage slavery. However, as of this writing, we do not know whether any steps have been taken in this direction to revive the working class’s economic struggle organizations by independent groups of proletarians.

Teachers’ protests continue, involving thousands of workers who are threatening a new general strike at the start of the fall school year.

Cartel ALFA, BNS. And “fiscal equity”

On June 12, 2025, the Cartel ALFA National Trade Union Confederation organized a protest at the Cotroceni Palace, seat of the Presidency of the Republic, to draw attention to the fact that the Romanian state intends to put financial pressure on the working class in an attempt to save itself from the economic crisis into which the country is slowly sliding. Of course, the economic crisis itself cannot be prevented by state intervention due to the nature of the capitalist system, but the state clearly has an interest in emerging from the crisis with as manageable a financial balance as possible.

Some of the Confederation’s demands – taken from the statement on its website – are as follows (bold not ours):

“- A fair tax reform, in which the burden is distributed correctly between capital and labor;

– The immediate suspension of austerity measures;

– A real and inclusive social dialogue, with the participation of all actors – trade unions, entrepreneurs, and civil society;

– An active Presidency, which mediates social conflicts and guarantees social justice.”

The response of the Cartel ALFA trade union confederation to the inevitability of the crisis (presented not as a logical consequence of the infernal cycle of capitalist overproduction, but as the mismanagement of a backward administrative apparatus) with the aim of “improving and modernizing social dialogue at all levels” is, in essence, a call to improve the method of managing state resources. In other words, the union leaders do not speak for the proletariat, but for the bourgeoisie; Cartel ALFA represents another arm of capitalist society, but one that is all the more insidious, considering the role that the leaders of this union must play at the moment, namely that of representatives of the workers.

We are therefore dealing with the same democratic illusions that the proletariat falls victim to in the absence of a revolutionary communist leadership. It would not be a question of classes with completely opposing interests, but of several groups that should sit at the same discussion table, with the “democratically” elected president as the referee.

Furthermore, the confederation informs us that “the response of the authorities consists of austerity measures, despite clear evidence that the deficit problem is essentially determined by the inability to collect taxes and by a backward tax system that does not ensure sufficient revenue to adequately support public infrastructure and the expenses necessary for the functioning of the state apparatus.”

It also states that public services are underfunded and that the state apparatus, far from being too bloated, is undersized compared to the European Union average. Problems of underfunding in sectors such as education, health, and railways are indisputable. For example, budget funding for railways, which has been minimal to date (infrastructure and trains that are decades old), was lower in 2025 than in the previous year, putting the company at risk of bankruptcy. In response, the state railway company CFR introduced a 4-day working week, with a salary reduction of €262 for 1,431 employees in sections with reduced traffic.

The tax system is also in a deplorable state, so it would take at least two years to implement progressive taxation, which is now being attacked by business federations. Various studies, funded by capitalists, show that the flat tax has been very beneficial for Romania! However, these studies fail to mention that Romania is one of only four EU countries without a progressive taxation system. The flat tax, together with legislation that prevents workers from organizing and going on strike, has helped transform Romania into a fertile ground for capital investment. Another great help to capitalists has been the low cost of labor they enjoy in Romania, given that, in 2025, Romanian workers’ wages (including social contributions) were 37% of the EU average.

The appeal of another trade union confederation, the National Trade Union Bloc, proposes a more detailed comparison of taxes in European countries and also brings a package of more concrete proposals, but these do not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois horizon. This, in the spirit of “European civil values,” justifies its opposition to austerity measures (we are not yet in a crisis serious enough to induce union leaders to support austerity; on the contrary, they pretend to show support for the politically unorganized proletariat through economic demands) with slogans linked to state reform, with the goal of “progress,” “modernization,” and “efficiency.” Thus, in addition to the demand to maintain VAT at its current level, the BNS proposes stricter controls against undeclared work (700,000 Romanians currently work without regular contracts and without any social insurance), a reduction in the high allowances of board members, and the taxation of multinationals on profits (as well as a ban on the outsourcing of profits to parent companies).

Of course, higher taxation of capital and the streamlining of the state apparatus will never be our demand! “Compromises on both sides” often mean compromises only for workers. We do not dream of a fictitious harmony between capital and labor, but of the abolition of capitalist relations of production. However, this does not mean that demands aimed at improving the living and working conditions of the proletariat and the economic struggles to implement them are not important. On the contrary, we recognize their necessity in uniting the proletariat in the defense of wages and their rights. Certainly, the historical role of trade unions is not exhausted, nor will it be following a socialist revolution.

In the imperialist era, economic struggles are transformed—much more rapidly than in the past—into political struggles, since their development and generalization come into direct conflict with the foundations of the capitalist regime. Consequently, any trade union organization is immediately confronted with the question of its attitude toward the capitalist state. It must either agree to limit the proletarian struggle within the bounds of legality—thus restricting and stifling it in order to preserve the existing order—or go beyond the limits of bourgeois legality and enter the revolutionary camp. This implies the extension, intensification, and generalization of the workers’ struggle to defend their living conditions.

We stated in our 1945 Platform that the trade union function is only complete when the class political party leads the trade union organizations.

The Romanian proletariat finds itself in a critical situation. In the absence of its own organ, the class political party, it is forced to kneel and capitulate in the face of the continuation of its exploitation in even more cruel ways. But this spiral of deterioration in its conditions will continue until the proletariat is forced by hunger and other deprivations to reclaim the class-based organizations of economic struggle, led in the future by the Communist Party.

Why? In the imperialist era, and because of the weakness of the communist movement, the state manages to contain the most combative sectors of the workers’ movement and to control the trade union form, so as to turn it against the proletariat. If the attitude in the infancy of capitalism was to combat any attempt at proletarian organization, this turned, after the victories won by workers on the economic front, into tolerance towards trade unions and finally into their organic integration into state structures. Thus, the trade union is transformed from a weapon of the proletariat into its leash, one of the many ties that bind it to the bourgeois state.

What is to be done? The class party, the International Communist Party, as the social brain of its class, has a duty to facilitate the process of rebirth of class unions.

In Romania, after the collapse of the Ceaușescu regime, the state replaced state unions with formally independent unions. For this reason, the possibility that a fraction of militant workers will grow numerically within a union and then take control of the organization (by force) is low, but not zero. However, whether the class union is reborn from the reconquest of existing ones or from scratch, the Party will organize communist factions within it with a view to taking over its leadership.

As a matter of fact, the mass of Romanian workers still sees the current trade union federations as weapons to defend their working conditions; the role of communists is to be present in the current unions, strongly opposing any decision by the union bureaucracy that is contrary to the interests of the working class.

In the capitalist era, higher education does not exist solely for the pursuit of knowledge and scientific progress. Universities, whether private or public, are first and foremost businesses. The commodities they offer the market are education and research. Universities exist to produce specialized workers for the labor market, while simultaneously producing research and new technologies that serve the interests of state and private corporations. Graduate students, as workers in training, see their labor utilized by the university in the production of research or as agents in the educational process.

The industrial research complex is a rather lucrative business. Earlier this year, the University of Michigan reported that it had received nearly $2.04 billion for research in the last fiscal year, including $1.17 billion from the federal government. The university’s financial success also directly benefits the companies that collaborate with it and ensure its operation. Michigan companies received $97.7 million from the university for their goods and services; those in Washtenaw County—where the University of Michigan is located—received $66.7 million on their own.

The interests of the university administration and those of graduates frequently conflict. The university has an interest in maintaining and expanding its profit margin, which derives from grants and funding from both private and state sources. Graduate students, who work while receiving scholarships, are de facto university workers and represent economic actors fighting for the improvement of their immediate material conditions.

The Graduate Employees Organization

The Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) is a union representing more than 3,300 graduate employees and graduate students at the University of Michigan who assist with teaching and research. It is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT-Michigan) and the AFL-CIO.

The process of forming GEO began in 1970, when the University Teaching Fellows’ Union collected enough signatures to file a petition for elections with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC). However, in 1971, the MERC rejected their petition, arguing that the Teaching Fellows “did not constitute an appropriate collective bargaining unit,” and that even if they could be considered university employees, they would have to be part of a unit that included Research and Staff Assistants. Organizing efforts were temporarily abandoned until 1973, when the Organization of Teaching Fellows (OTF) was formed to protest a disproportionate 24% increase in tuition fees. Although the university administration averted an OTF strike by granting salary increases to Teaching Fellows, the OTF joined forces with the university’s Research and Staff Assistants to form the Graduate Employees Organization, which was recognized on April 15, 1974.

Throughout its more than fifty-year history, the GEO has been involved in numerous struggles against the university administration, including the fight for its first contract in 1975, the battle to affiliate with the American Federation of Teachers from 1976 to 1981, as well as various contractual improvements and protections for workers.

Specifically:

– From 1983 to 1993, it fought for graduate student contracts, including measures against discrimination, extended dental coverage, significant salary increases, and tuition waivers.

– From 1993 to 1996, GEO fought against the administration’s plans for “GradCare,” which would have eliminated a range of health benefits for teaching assistants and forced them into a significantly worse health plan that simultaneously violated the distinction between employee and student worker, thereby threatening GEO’s continued existence and legal recognition. Under the threat of a strike, the administration backed down, and the concessions made to GEO included a wage increase (3% per year for 3 years) and a ceiling of $80 on the registration fee.

– In the 1996 contract, the union successfully negotiated further salary increases, equitable treatment, and training for international Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs), as well as equal employment opportunities for students regardless of gender or race.

– In 1999, following a two-day work-to-rule action and the threat of a prolonged strike with the solidarity of the Teamsters and construction unions, GEO secured a new contract that included a guaranteed 10.5% wage increase over three years and moved 500 lower-paid members to higher pay grades, thereby securing a 25% pay raise for them.

– From 2000 to 2012, GEO achieved further gains, including child care subsidies (2002), inclusive health care rights for transgender people (2006), a 13.2% wage increase over three years along with expanded health coverage (2008), and a dedicated office for disability issues (2011).

– In 2017, after threatening work stoppages and a possible strike, GEO secured a series of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), annual raises of 3.35%, a $700 ceiling on mental health copayments, two additional weeks of paid parental leave, and an hourly limit for international GSIs with visa restrictions.

– The “Safe Campus” strike in 2020 lasted two weeks and secured concessions on safety measures to combat COVID-19 infection, with GEO strikers violating the “no-strike clause” and the State of Michigan’s ban on public sector strikes.

– Following a five-month strike in 2023, the longest action in GEO’s history, during which the university attempted to force the union into submission through legal and extralegal means such as withholding pay and rigging votes, the current contract was ratified, resulting in record pay increases, a transitional funding program for graduate students, and concessions for parents, transgender workers, workers with disabilities, and international students.

GEO’s various functions are divided among a series of committees. These committees are responsible for carrying out the tasks delegated to them.

With the current contract set to expire in 2026, and with the federal government becoming increasingly aggressive regarding workers’ rights and the rights of immigrant students, GEO’s Contract Committee is already meeting, and goals for the next contract are being put forward by the various caucuses. In addition to ensuring job security for its members, GEO is paying close attention to its nascent Master’s Caucus and is working with its International Graduate Workers Caucus to safeguard the positions of international students threatened by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Most importantly, for the 2026 contract negotiations, GEO has resumed the fight to formally organize graduate research assistants and research fellows into the union as a separate bargaining unit. Although the assistants have been able to join the union as graduate students and have formed their own caucus within GEO to advocate for their interests, the state has repeatedly prevented them from being a separate bargaining unit within the union. This means that, although they benefit from certain contractual provisions of the union, they are not covered by certain aspects of the contract that apply to tenured faculty and teaching assistants, such as vacation policies, visa fee reimbursements, and access to emergency funds.

The student-worker distinction: are graduate students workers?

When referring to graduate student unions such as GEO, it is important to examine the ongoing debate over the legal status of graduate students as workers. According to the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, graduate students make up approximately 44% of the research workforce at both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, which play a key role in both funding graduate students and employing them.

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the National Labor Relations Board classifies graduate students as public-sector employees. This is because graduate students, if not compensated with wages or salaries, are often compensated for their work with fellowships which, unlike grants, require work performance, whereby students are required to work a set number of hours to receive funding or stipends from the university or the government. Therefore, graduate students not currently employed by the university as Graduate Student Instructors or Graduate Student Staff Assistants can join GEO because they are considered by federal law to be both public-sector employees and students.

Recurring Patterns

From universities’ attempts to deprive graduate students of their legal status as workers, we can see the same class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that occurs everywhere. Universities, like any employer, are always looking for ways to deprive their employees of wages and benefits; this is done to reduce production costs, which in this case means reducing the costs of student education and research production. If graduate students were to lose their legal protections as workers, then the university would have free rein to cut salaries and benefits across the board, while continuing to exploit their labor to generate billions of dollars in profit.

Isolating graduate students would further benefit the university (and the bourgeoisie as a whole) by dividing and isolating a section of the proletariat from the rest of the class and destroying its ability to form its own economic organizations, thereby preventing it from fighting for its immediate material interests and its survival.

However, simply organizing graduate students into their own union is not enough. Unless they take on a political dimension, their struggles will be limited exclusively to their immediate economic demands, without addressing the root causes of their exploitation within the capitalist system, forever condemned to pursue improvements that will soon prove ephemeral because they are easily swept aside by the bourgeoisie.

Graduate students, like every section of the proletariat, must be made aware of the class struggle against the bourgeoisie and their role within it. The only way to do this is to rebuild a strong class-based union as the body that links the class to its political organ, the International Communist Party. The economic struggles for immediate material demands waged by the unions must be guided and elevated by the theory, doctrine, and program provided by the Party, forged in the crucible of past proletarian struggles.

Sometimes even the sympathizers and readers of our press, the workers closest to us in the daily battle against opportunism and for the defense of the revolutionary program, allow themselves to be overcome by the anxieties of the current situation, and wonder why we do not also direct our activity towards the solution of what are commonly called “company problems.”

The disgust for the dominant political currents and their trade union affiliates has reached, in many workers, a degree that is sometimes violent, well justified by years of inconclusive struggles and bitter defeats. But what they find difficult to understand is that today’s situation is linked to an inexorable chain of past events, and that the problems of the proletariat are not limited to the company, the factory, or the city, but encompass the whole range of relations between the classes, the general events of the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class, and the degree of maturity of this struggle. It is precisely this overall vision that, among the tasks of the revolutionary minority, brings to the fore the uncompromising criticism of opportunism, the identification of the enemy lurking within the ranks of the working class itself, and the unmasking of the forces and ideologies that first corrupted and then destroyed the proletarian movement. If, like all movements in the throes of contingency and voluntaristic epilepsy, we were to derive our limited activity in the various fields of social and political organization from the philistine concern for “today,” considering revolution as the accumulation of a series of fragmentary and local episodes, each with its own progressive meaning in time and quality, we would achieve the furthest thing from the historical struggle between classes, and we would be all the closer to the political end of the organization; if we created in the proletariat, in the workers who are disappointed and forced by necessity to fight anyway, the illusion that, as the countless acrobats of petty politics say, we have up our sleeve, ready to be pulled out at the right moment, a recipe for “current events,” to be applied regardless of a general reversal of the proletarian movement, we would be doing nothing different from the traitors of the labor movement, we would be preparing new disappointments and new defeats for the working class.

The truth is that the situation is inexorably fixed in terms that leave no room for doubt: we are suffering the extreme and necessary consequences of defeat on the entire international front of the revolution. The bloody price of a reversal of the proletarian movement is the situation today: this is why proletarian organizations are enslaved to opportunism and corroded by betrayal; this is why, to refer to a “corporate” case, the internal commission is, by statute and in fact, an organ of collaboration with management, indeed a longa manus of management within the working class; and that is why, today, we do not present lists in elections; that is why the proletarian class groans under the full weight of capitalist oppression and cannot find the way to overthrow it. It is still this situation that limits the possibilities for revolutionary patrols to intervene in the struggles for demands. When the brain of the proletarian movement is sick, concern for peripheral organic dysfunctions takes a back seat to the preliminary problem of healing its motor center; it is not by starting from the limits of the company, but on the contrary by moving from an attack on the general relations between the classes to invest the whole of bourgeois society, that the conditions for proletarian recovery are set. Let the opportunists shout that we are not interested in the sad living conditions of workers, low wages, and unemployment; the fact remains that none of these problems can be solved, especially today, without solving the problem of the direction of the proletarian movement, its orientation, and therefore the elimination—not in individual and peripheral points, but centrally—of the leprosy of class conciliation. To resist the storm of opportunism and betrayal of principles is to defend, with the ultimate tomorrow of the class, its present as well; it is to prepare the solution to the overall problem of the relationship between capital and labor, and, at the same time, the problems of the “workplace.”

Therefore, until the recovery has taken place, and in active preparation for it, the first task remains that of getting the engine of the proletarian revolution working again after having “overhauled” all its delicate mechanisms. The weapon of criticism, of unmasking opposing forces and ideologies, and of reaffirming the communist program is the dialectical premise of the critique of weapons. There is no such thing unless the former has been exercised. 

Today’s Strikes

In 2023, data circulating on strikes in China showed a growing trend in workers’ struggles, with at least 1,794 “incidents,” strikes, or worker protests recorded by the end of the year, an increase compared to both the pandemic and pre-pandemic periods, with 1,389 struggles in 2019.

In 2024, however, there was a slight decrease compared to the previous year, with 1,509 strikes recorded, which was still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

2025 seems to confirm the level of 2024, with at least 540 strikes and protests recorded in the first four months of the year, mainly due to wage delays, factory closures, and layoffs, which are part of a worsening economic situation characterized by the trade war with the United States.

These rather sparse data, which may be incomplete in terms of numbers, do not provide information on the number of strikers, the duration of the struggles, etc. Therefore, it is not possible to identify in the current strike movement in China anything more than a few indications, which do not go beyond the obvious confirmation of the inevitable struggle of the proletariat and its growth in recent years.

In this context, the strikes at BYD, a giant among the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturers, involving thousands of workers, were particularly significant. The protests were triggered by sharp wage cuts and the failure to comply with the agreements signed in 2023 when BYD acquired the assets of the multinational Jabil. Thousands of workers in factories in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, and Chengdu went on strike between late March and early April 2025.

These strikes at BYD, given the importance of the group, the number of workers involved, and the fact that the strike took place in two different plants, may set an example for the hundreds of thousands of other Chinese workers affected by the crisis of capitalism.

In particular, the trade war with the United States is spreading protests throughout China demanding back pay or against layoffs in factories that are closing due to tariffs. According to estimates by Goldman Sachs analysts, up to 16 million workers are at risk of layoffs due to the collapse of exports following the increase in US trade tariffs.

Any worsening of the country’s economic situation will inevitably be offloaded by the Chinese bourgeoisie onto the shoulders of its own working class, pushing hundreds of thousands of workers into the arena of class struggle to defend their working and living conditions. A resumption of large-scale class struggle will require the Chinese proletariat to equip itself with the class-based tools that have already been used in the history of that sector of the world working class.

Looking Back at the Great Struggles of 1925-27

Exactly a century ago, an impetuous revolutionary movement began to shake old China. On May 30, 1925, in Shanghai, soldiers deployed to defend the international concession killed several workers and students during a demonstration.

This episode triggered a wave of strikes that spread from Shanghai to the main Chinese cities. In Canton, on June 23, British troops fired on a procession of workers and students, killing dozens. The proletarian reaction was immediate, with a general strike in Canton and Hong Kong. At least 100,000 workers left the British colony of Hong Kong en masse, moving to Canton, where some 250,000 workers were on strike and had practically taken control of the city. This was in June 1925, but it was in 1927, with the proletarian uprisings in Shanghai and Canton, that the movement reached its peak.

These episodes of class struggle in China have been repeatedly recalled in the writings of the Party, not to celebrate empty anniversaries, but because they constitute a fundamental experience for the revolutionary proletariat, not only in China, which, looking back at that period of disruptive rise in struggle and organization, can find examples to follow even today.

Looking back at that period of revolutionary upsurge, however, means identifying the profound differences with today’s economic and social changes, and therefore the different tasks that were set yesterday and today.

In that backward China, with a small working class compared to the boundless peasant world, where an anti-colonial national revolution was the order of the day, the Third International had clearly established in its Theses on the National and Colonial Questions that the true revolutionary movement was represented “by the poor and backward peasants and by the workers who are fighting for their liberation from all kinds of exploitation,” not by the bourgeois democratic nationalists, who were incapable of achieving their own bourgeois political and national goals. Therefore, even in backward countries such as the colonies, it was the proletariat that had to place itself at the head of the revolutionary movement, consisting mainly of the vast peasant masses, distrusting a Chinese bourgeoisie which, due to its economic role, having developed mainly as a comprador bourgeoisie, was closely linked to imperialism and therefore incapable of carrying through a genuine struggle for national independence. A fundamental condition for the Chinese proletariat to lead its struggle at the head of the revolution in China and in close connection with the purely proletarian struggle in advanced capitalist countries was the leadership of its Communist Party, strong in its political and organizational independence. Stalinism sabotaged this Marxist perspective by imposing the classic Menshevik tactic, leaving the bourgeoisie in charge of the national revolution and subjecting the young Communist Party to the bourgeois leadership of the Kuomintang through the entry of communists into the nationalist party, thus disarming the generous struggles of the proletariat.

Today, when a national revolution in which the proletariat would have to relate to other potentially revolutionary forces is no longer on the agenda in China, it is precisely the experience of its struggles and its organization in the 1920s that must be recovered by today’s proletariat, which is much more numerous than in the past, but crushed by the material force of a bourgeois state that ideologically paints itself deceptively red.

Within a few years, the small proletariat had organized itself into class-based unions, which at the first congress of Chinese unions in May 1922 had at least 200,000 members, while three years later, in May 1925, at the second congress, the number of members was around 570,000. This class-based organization had grown with the spread of strikes in the country’s industrial areas, which began in the aftermath of the First World War but gained strength and intensity from 1925 onwards.

Compared to the conditions of a century ago, the current economic and social context has seen a reversal in the proportions between the urban and rural worlds, with the formation of a large proletariat concentrated in huge metropolises, which continues to grow as farmers continue to move from the countryside to the cities. Above all, however, the tasks that this proletariat must perform have changed. It no longer has to shoulder the burden of a double revolution, placing itself at the head of the endless peasant masses, but must lead its own single-class revolution.

To accomplish this task, there are no last-minute innovations to learn and apply, but it is necessary to resume the path traced by those early Chinese proletarians who, a century ago, dared to fight their own class war, with the goal of seizing power. 

The double oppression to which the private property regime condemns women is a reality common to all countries, whether the most “backward” or formally the most “democratic” and modern; from the United States to Europe, from Iran to Afghanistan, from Africa to Latin America, working women pay a double price: in addition to the millennial oppression of women as women in class society, proletarian women also suffer the oppression of wage labour and the contradictions of a society dominated by capitalist relations of production.

While in some parts of the world women are still denied basic rights, such as the right to education and abortion, in all countries, including those that define themselves as the cradle of modern civilisation, the wages of female workers are, on average, lower than those of male workers performing the same tasks. Women are victims of systematic violence that bourgeois morality defines as “gender-based” and that its jurisdiction is unable to curb in any way.  

But it is precisely in the violent exacerbation of female exploitation under the rule of capital that the premise for the real liberation of women is also dialectically posited. The capitalist transformation of the economy has bred its own ruin, offering women the social and political means to strive for their own emancipation: the revolutionary struggle of the proletarian class, the only instrument of liberation from the yoke of capital, towards communism.

Women, workers, comrades!

In this world, where, according to the hypocritical bourgeois illusion, capitalism is supposed to have ensured universal well-being, while it is instead increasingly torn apart by poverty, wars, and the exodus of desperate masses fleeing conflict and famine; in a world where the proletariat spends its days in exhausting and alienating work, the condition of women can only become increasingly difficult.

The “democratic” reforms aimed at protecting women within and outside the now broken family have been and continue to be useless: women, still predominantly entrusted with domestic work, while still asked almost exclusively to look after children without any real social support, and whose motherhood is only formally protected, are also asked to work long hours in factories and offices, where they often perform heavy work for starvation wages.

Women, workers, comrades!

This world, now completely devastated by capitalist economics, which often fails to guarantee you even decent housing, sends your men to fight in infamous wars necessary to enrich the criminal bourgeoisie, speculates on the suffering of refugees to obtain cheap labour, and does nothing to alleviate the burden of your lives divided between hard work outside the home and caring for your children and family.

This society cannot offer any real improvement in your living and working conditions.

The vile regime of capital deprives you of the joys and satisfactions that all human beings could otherwise experience. It can offer you nothing but a parody of your emancipation, which sounds like a mockery to the proletariat.

Therefore, do not be deceived by the illusion of bourgeois feminism: without the destruction of the current property relations, true liberation of women is not possible. As long as the rule of capital, private property and wage labour exists, the true and full emancipation of women will never be possible.

The oppression of women can only end in a future classless and stateless society, that is, in communism. No reform within bourgeois society can bring about your real liberation, either as women, as workers, or as human beings.

The fragile rights wrested from the bourgeois state, such as the vote, divorce and abortion, are constantly being called into question under the capitalist system and do not eliminate the deeper causes of women’s subjugation in the family and society. They only achieve formal and legal equality, not real and organic equality. On the contrary, it is precisely in the much-revered and fallacious “civil equality” that the social subjugation of women is evident.

The liberation of women does not come about, as feminism claims, through the opposition of the “female people” to the “male people”, thereby preserving the status quo of current society. The demands of working women must be combined with, and added to, those of their own class, the wage-earning class, and converge in a common class struggle against the entire bourgeois society. Only under this banner can the women’s issue be fruitfully addressed and the specific demands of working women finally be victorious.

Women, workers, comrades: it is essential to hurl women’s demands against the bourgeois state!

The liberation of women is impossible without the abolition of all forms of private ownership of the means of production and distribution, without the conscious and voluntary participation of women in the organisation and implementation of collective life, that is, without communism.

The exaltation of the real essence of women as women, as well as that of men as men, is incompatible with the commodity form (labour power) to which capitalist society has reduced both.

Male and female workers must advance together and mobilise together: initially in defence of their living conditions and against capitalist exploitation, with immediate demands aimed at reducing their current suffering, and then tomorrow launching the final attack aimed at overthrowing the bourgeois state, the bastion of the oppression of the working class. Only in the context of the destruction of the apparatus of capital will working women be able to claim their rights as women and gain them for their new, true life. Unlike under the regime of class property, which, with its empty reforms, its fallacious legislation, its inconclusive jurisdiction and its hypocritical moralism, does not liberate them but also condemns them to double oppression!

Women, workers, comrades!

At this historic moment of serious and persistent crisis of Capital;

– Where the bourgeois state’s attack on the ephemeral rights won by workers through hard struggle has inevitably intensified;

– In which the “peaceful” national bourgeoisies, aware of the proletarian potential, seek to stifle the still faint stirrings of class struggle driven by the continuous deterioration of workers’ conditions;

– In which poverty and wars are forcing ever-increasing masses to flee from one part of the world to another, whose “global” character is only such for the business of the various imperialists;

– In which, once again, capitalism is plunging the working class into war to preserve its own existence; class struggle will need more than ever the contribution of women, who can offer that part of themselves that enriches and completes the battlefront and its determination!

Your presence is indispensable, both in the initial phase of the defensive struggle and in the subsequent and definitive struggle to seize power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the economic transition to socialism and finally for the transition to the society of the future, where humanity will be able to reclaim its life and vitality, communism.

As Lenin already stated, without the participation of women, the proletariat will find it hard to achieve its victorious revolution!

Without the mobilisation of women in the class struggle for communism, the confrontation with capitalism is more difficult to face and impossible to win, just as without the complete social and individual liberation of women, there can be no real step towards communism.

The proletarian world expects working women to fight to lift their humiliated and degraded lives to a new existence within the only social system capable of restoring and guaranteeing dignity and prosperity to today’s exploited.

The human species needs proletarian women to commit themselves with pride and courage to the struggle that will lead them towards a different future, in which they can fulfil themselves fully and joyfully as living beings free from the alienation of double oppression.

Women, working women, comrades!

This is the battle cry against oppression that only the class party can spread. It is the anti-democratic and anti-capitalist approach that emanates from the unchanging programme of the Communist Left, a comprehensive vision of the species’ general transition to a future society.

International Communist Party

Our comrades in Croatia distributed this leaflet among workers in struggle.

The year 2025 is slowly coming to an end. It has been a difficult year for workers in Croatia, especially for immigrants. Strikes in the food and beverage sector – at the companies Zvijezda and PIK Vrbovec – lasted for weeks and ended in victory for the workers, leading to the signing of new collective agreements.

Some foreign workers joined these strikes but were soon discouraged by the leadership’s lack of action. But there is no need to be afraid! The bosses are powerless in the face of the workers united. Do not believe the bosses’ lies, you have the right to strike and to organise in the workplace! And even if the capitalist state sides with the bosses, collective action by workers will not fail if it remains united. Centuries of class struggle worldwide demonstrate this fundamental fact.

We should all look on with admiration at Wolt’s delivery workers. Faced with deteriorating working conditions and falling real wages, they organised themselves and coordinated via WhatsApp groups, eventually calling a strike in July. As a result, Wolt’s management was forced to sit down at the negotiating table and start discussions. With the involvement of workers from Croatia and Asia, the delivery workers’ struggle became truly internationalist. Such struggles – based on class interests and not divided by nationality, race or immigration status – are the only way for workers of all backgrounds to achieve better working conditions, higher wages and a better life!

Do not fall into the trap of nationalism and racial division! Do not remain isolated from your class brothers and sisters! Anti-immigrant policies, which pit Croatian workers against foreign workers, are nothing more than propaganda from the bosses, aimed at destroying our class unity.

Delivery workers: organise your colleagues and get in touch with the existing movement! Contact grassroots trade unions for help. Factory, construction and service workers: take note and organise yourselves along internationalist lines! 

The International Communist Party

In past decades, all economists, analysts, and hacks in the pay of the bourgeoisie, reassured the public by extolling the development sustained by the German industrial system and economy, comparing it to a powerful locomotive hurtling toward a future of progress.

It was said that this locomotive was capable of pulling all the carriages attached to it, including the Italian one, in its impetuous race towards new goals of full employment and prosperity.

The economic indicators of that production system were taken as a benchmark, almost as if to extol and invoke a virtuous pursuit, particularly on the part of Italy.

The data on the German economy, published in recent days, show that this seemingly unstoppable race is now coming to an abrupt halt, with hopes pinned on overcoming the crisis and a weak recovery expected in 2026.

We believe that this crisis is the overproduction one: the massive amount of unsold and unsellable goods is clogging the tracks and threatening to derail the locomotive.

Data provided by bourgeois analysts indicate that after two years of recession, in 2023 and 2024, the much-coveted recovery did not materialize. On the contrary, in August of this year, they had to record a 4.3% decline in industrial, energy, and construction production, compared to the previous month, caused mainly by a sharp contraction (-18.5%) in the automotive sector. It should be remembered that the automotive industry as a whole is the most important and significant sector in industrial production.

Unable and unwilling to admit that this is a general crisis of overproduction, already widely described by Marxist analysis, they present a different narrative that tells of continuous growth, although with a few ‘hiccups’.

It all started with the severe financial crisis of 2008, followed by a modest recovery, which was in turn interrupted by the pandemic of 2020. The outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine, which began at this stage in February 2022, led to the loss of the significant Russian market and a sharp increase in energy costs, mainly due to the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in September 2022, which transported low-cost gas from Russia to Germany.

The Financial Times, processing and refining all the data from previous crises, states that German production in August 2025 fell to 2005 levels.

The relevant federal bodies and German industrialists are busy studying investments and programs to restart the ‘locomotive’, also taking into account the necessary transformations regarding the production of electric vehicles. In this regard, with the aim of reducing costs and maximizing profits, the Volkswagen and Mercedes car manufacturers, following the example of France’s Renault, have launched a project to build electric vehicles directly in China, taking advantage of its experience in this sector.

It is obvious that this sharp slowdown will have a particular impact on the Italian automotive sector, as the German industry absorbed 20% of car component exports from Italy, a share that is unlikely to be maintained.

As a result, the crisis in the Italian automotive sector is likely to be very severe in the near future because, in addition to the German crisis, there is a sharp 42.8% reduction in car production in Italy by Stellantis (formerly Fiat), where, among other things, many small subcontracting companies work as sole suppliers to the car manufacturer. These small companies will therefore be the first to suffer cuts and massive layoffs due to their small size and dispersion across the territory, and their workers will be more easily sacrificed on the altar of capitalist profit.

Only by relying on organized and effective class-based unions will workers be able to oppose their sacrifice and obtain adequate defense and economic compensation, the main of which will be full wages for laid-off workers.