As American imperialism turns from one theatre of intervention to the next, Cuba is once again restored to its traditional place in American propaganda as the archvillain menacing the supposedly otherwise stable bourgeois society. As it prepares for the coming confrontation of world capitalism between the U.S. and China, the bourgeoisie revives the familiar spectre of Stalinist communism and adventurist terrorism while preparing its State for more intensified internal repression directed at the proletariat. Meanwhile, the recent strengthening of the social-democratic current within the Democratic Party furnishes the opposing bourgeois faction with another occasion to resurrect the anti-communist mythology through which the American State has, for generations, stirred up its own capacity to direct intensified violence against the proletariat, while its reformist political programs cloaked in socialist rhetoric, offer nothing but a program to stabilize the very capitalism it is supposedly corrupting. Both parties profit from this spectacle. One inflates the menace; the other invokes the violated conscience of democracy. Each strengthens the State, while the false opposition in the streets pleads only for the restoration of a more humane administration of the same bourgeois order. Against this entire comedy, the communist position remains one of complete indifference. The proletariat has no democratic rights to recover, only the dictatorship of capital to smash through the reconstitution of its independent class movement.

The bourgeoisie proclaimed the "end of history" after the dissolution of the USSR. For Marxists, this was never a historical turning point, but merely another episode in the development of world capitalism. The Russian counter-revolution had long ago consummated its developmentalist regime of State capitalism beneath socialist phraseology; the collapse of its State form altered nothing fundamental in the global domination of the totalizing capitalist relations. Bereft of its traditional ideological adversary, American imperialism discovered another in "international terrorism", around which it organized two decades of military intervention, patriotic mobilization, and domestic repression. Today, as the contradictions of capitalist accumulation sharpen and inter-imperialist antagonisms once again dominate the world horizon, the old anti-communist vocabulary is restored to service. The spectres now invoked are not revolutionary communism, but the harmless shadows of bourgeois radicalism, social democracy, and anti-fascism, all denounced as "communist" precisely because genuine communism has remained absent from the historical stage for decades. It is easier for the bourgeoisie to prosecute one faction of capital under the name of communism than to confront the spectral reappearance of the proletarian movement that lurks on the horizon.

These currents constitute the indispensable street appendage of the democratic wing of capital. Their incessant appeals for activism, participation, electoral mobilization, and "community organizing" merely reproduce the oldest illusion of bourgeois politics: that the contradictions of capitalism may be resolved through a more democratic administration of the existing order. Their practical function is to dissolve the proletariat into the amorphous category of "the people", subordinating class antagonism to the perpetual regeneration of the democratic State. As the contradictions of capitalist accumulation sharpen and preparations advance for a new cycle of inter-imperialist conflict, this democratic mobilization becomes the necessary complement of an expanding repressive apparatus. The bourgeoisie prepares at once for external war and for the inevitable return of internal class conflict. In the temporary absence of an independent proletarian movement, it manufactures substitute antagonisms, moral panics, and fictitious enemies, rehearsing in advance the ideological forms through which tomorrow's class struggle will again be mystified.

The bourgeois State has never waited passively for its enemies to appear. It manufactures the conditions under which repression presents itself as an obvious necessity. During the years of the so-called War on Terror, hundreds of FBI informants and undercover agents penetrated mosques, community organizations, and online forums, not merely to uncover conspiracies but to provoke them into existence. In one widely reported case, an informant entered a California mosque offering access to Tomahawk missiles and other military-grade weapons in the hope of identifying willing participants. In Portland, federal agents spent months cultivating Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a nineteen-year-old, before supplying him with what he believed to be a functioning explosive device for the city's Christmas tree lighting ceremony, arresting him only after every essential element of the supposed plot had been furnished by the State itself. Scores of similar sting operations followed the same pattern: targets selected from politically isolated or vulnerable individuals, plans suggested by informants, weapons supplied by the authorities, and spectacular arrests presented afterward as proof of an ever-present terrorist menace. These were not exceptional abuses but ordinary mechanisms through which the capitalist State enlarged its police powers while cultivating public consent for their expansion. To imagine that such methods have disappeared because the designated enemy has changed would be to mistake a permanent function of the bourgeois State for a passing historical episode.

The same operation now reappears under a different ideological banner. According to the bourgeois Center for Strategic and International Studies, "left-wing extremism" accounted for thirty-five attacks and thirteen fatalities between 2016 and 2025, with 2025 identified as the first year in which left-wing attacks supposedly exceeded those of the right. Yet the report itself records one hundred and fifty-two right-wing attacks resulting in one hundred and twelve deaths over the same period, while further separating jihadist and ethnonationalist violence into distinct categories, an accounting procedure that artificially narrows the apparent disparity, lending statistical weight to the political narrative being constructed. The figures themselves are of secondary importance. Their purpose is not scientific inquiry but ideological preparation. Just as yesterday, every social contradiction was subsumed beneath the universal category of "terrorism", today an eclectic assortment of anti-fascists, social democrats, anarchists, environmental militants, and imaginary communist conspiracies are assembled into a new internal enemy against which the State's coercive apparatus may once again be enlarged. Genuine communism, absent from the historical scene for decades, is invoked only as an empty name beneath which the bourgeoisie prosecutes conflicts internal to its own social order while preparing the instruments that, tomorrow, will be directed against the re-emergence of the independent proletarian movement.

The killing of Charlie Kirk, the assassination attempt against Trump, both which left many questions unanswered and the transformation of Luigi Mangione into the latest commodity of individualist political spectacle serve as pretexts for a renewed bourgeois offensive against the chimera of "far-left terrorism". As such on July 16th, the U.S. State Department convened a conference of over sixty countries to combat “left-wing terrorism”, despite political violence from the left being significantly less than that of the right, let alone that of any proletarian or faux-communist tendency. The opening of the conference invokes the long-extinct Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, Weather Underground, Tupamaros, and Shining Path, so as to evoke, in the mind of the world's bourgeoisie, the terror of "communism" or a conspiracy to undermine Western civilization and civilization as such. It works well for the bourgeois in the larger preparation for war against a false communist rival imperialism and against the domestic working class it wants to keep from affiliating with a real communist party above all else.

The American State has designated four European anarchist and anti-fascist groups as global terrorist organizations: Antifa Ost in Germany, the Informal Anarchist Federation in Italy, and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Self-Defence in Greece. The Department of State has offered a reward of up to ten million dollars for information on these groups to disrupt their finances and operations. This coincides with the regime's order designating "Antifa" a domestic terrorist group at home, and with the signing, the previous year, of NSPM-7, which creates a federal task force to combat what it calls domestic terrorist groups characterized by "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government".

While, yesterday, the administration was focused on combating street anarchists and anti-fascists, today, the focus shifts to the electoral war with the Social Democrats and to red-baiting, drawing up battle lines ahead of a potential move on Cuba as preparation for war with China continues. Mirroring the McCarthyist "Godless Communism" mania of the second Red Scare, the regime of capital has increased its anti-communist rhetoric under the guise of protecting civil and religious liberties, with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declaring on camera: "We know what communists do around the world. They remove God. They close the churches. They punish the believers". A paper released by the U.S. State Department on Cuba's "communism" names the DSA, BLM, the Amalgamated Labor Union, and Code Pink as exports of the Cuban regime's supposed communist revolution, subverting American capitalism from within. The Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) has been sanctioned, and three Cuban nationals connected to the institute are held in federal custody awaiting deportation on the charge of having "ties to the transnational communist subversion network". This coincides with the U.S. government increasing spending, by hundreds of millions of dollars, on programs to combat China's imperialist influence in the Caribbean and Central America, being chiefly concerned with underwater telecommunication cables and ownership of trade ports along the Panama Canal, and with an internal State Department document, obtained by the Associated Press, proposing to spend upwards of half a billion dollars on disrupting Chinese influence worldwide to secure American capitalist imperialism against its Chinese rival.

The Red Scare Has a History

American anti-communism is not a method born of the Cold War, nor of any electoral season. It is, first and foremost, the domestic policy of American capital toward its own working class, a policy that predates, by decades, any State abroad against which it could later be pointed during the cold-war period. This domestic policy became a matter of international strategy the moment the Russian Revolution gave it a State to strike at: American troops landed at Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok, and American capital funded the White counter-revolution. The same logic later governed the decolonized world, where Washington fought to bring each newly independent State into its financial orbit and to forestall any proletarian revolution within it, collaborating, where useful, with the forces of global Stalinism toward that same end, as the two carved the planet into rival imperialist blocs. The turning of this strategy on Cuba, Vietnam, or Venezuela does not mean these States embodied the workers' power it claimed to fear, only that each is a national capital administering its own proletariat, that Washington wishes can capture a greater share of the surplus extracted from the proletariat in these countries. This is the same discipline it has always applied at home.

Long before Lenin, before any Cuban had ever heard of Marx, the American bourgeoisie had already built the physical apparatus of class war against labor on its own soil. After the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 spread across a dozen States, which had to be put down by federal troops and State militia, cities across the country raised fortress-like armories in their own downtowns to house National Guard units for the suppression of labor. The Great Railroad Strike and the Paris Commune, both erupting in the same decade, already prefigured the panic the bourgeoisie would later attach to the name of Bolshevism; but the armories themselves were not raised against a specter. They were the infrastructure the bourgeoisie built in direct response to a real uprising of American workers, and the ideology of anti-communism was fitted to that infrastructure only afterward.

The pattern repeated with the Espionage and Sedition Acts and the Palmer Raids after the first imperialist war, when the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was crushed for refusing the nationalist intoxication, and again in 1947, when the largest strike wave in the country's history was answered by the Taft-Hartley Act, compelling every union officer to disavow communism under the threat of losing legal recognition. In each case the repressive apparatus preceded the threat it claimed to answer.

The fear behind these episodes has never been feigned; the domestic press erupted in panic about "Communists" a full fifty years before the Bolsheviks existed to be blamed for anything. But the same class also fears something nearer home: the historical instability of its own position within production. Marx showed, in the twenty-seventh chapter of the third volume of Capital, that the joint-stock company already accomplishes, within capitalism itself, "the abolition of capital as private property", turning the owner into a mere claimant on interest, a "self-dissolving contradiction" that hollows the bourgeoisie out from within. Layered onto the present crisis of overproduction, this old fear and this newer unease fuse into a chronic readiness to see danger everywhere, in a mayor's rent-control bill as much as in a picket line, in a DSA canvasser as much as in Antifa Ost. But the true, real, and pressing “red terror” is that of the bourgeoisie—whether democratic or fascist—that the working class, instead of submitting to preparations for capital’s broader confrontation with China, will organize itself and rise up in every country in defense of its class interests, all the way to the revolution for communism.

It has always been the mark of vulgar, textbook "Marxism" to measure the class nature of a regime by the registry of deeds, who owns the factory? Once it answers "the State", it concludes triumphantly: socialism! Our doctrine has never reasoned this way. Marx founded his critique on capital as a social relation, the subordination of living labor to accumulation, and the persistence of wage dependence regardless of who signs the paycheck.

As we noted in our 2017 article On the Death of Fidel Castro, Capitalism had already been established in Cuba for many decades before Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement took the road to power. The island's anti-colonial movement, born in opposition to the US economic domination that had steadily imposed itself since Cuba's formal independence from Spain in 1898, never possessed the character of a struggle against feudal or semi-feudal structures, of the kind that shook large parts of Asia and Africa in the same period. It was, from the outset, a struggle within the bourgeois horizon, waged not to overturn Cuban capitalism but to redistribute the share of the surplus value extracted from the Cuban working class: the young Cuban bourgeoisie, itself a product of decades of capitalist accumulation on the island and raised, generation after generation, in subjection to US capital, had by the 1950s accumulated enough of its own weight, in sugar, in land, in a native professional and commercial class, to find in that very history and in those very forces of accumulation the determination to separate its fate from that of its powerful neighbor. This was a bourgeoisie chafing at its subordinate position under a bigger bourgeois, not a proletariat seeking to abolish class rule as such, and every stage of the movement it produced, from its earliest manifestos to the guerrilla war itself, bears that origin. Leadership of this national anti-colonial movement remained firmly in bourgeois hands throughout, even though it was the Cuban proletariat that fought most courageously against the crumbling regime of Batista, the dictator and guardian of American economic interests. The working class could not contest that leadership for two reasons: the absence of a Communist Party capable of pointing it toward its own historical tasks, and an international context in which the working class of the capitalist metropoles, paralyzed by the hegemony of Stalinism and reformism, could offer no support to colonial and dependent peoples fighting to throw off bourgeois domination.

That proletariat, and the sub-proletariat of the countryside, was nonetheless numerous and central to the events of 1959. Our current wrote, at a meeting in Rome in March 1961, that of a working population of roughly two million, a million and a half were pure wage earners, of whom 800,000 were agricultural workers; 500,000 of these depended on the sugar industry alone, working only four months a year at harvest, with seasonal unemployment during the "tiempo muerto" reaching fifteen to twenty percent. It was this mass of extremely poor and permanently unstable agricultural labor that filled the ranks of Castro's guerrilla war in the countryside, but the revolution also drew on urban struggle, largely erased from the later Castro-Guevara historiography: sabotage, violent action, and above all the strike, the proletarian weapon par excellence. The Cuban bourgeoisie, absent a revolutionary leadership to contest it, harnessed this working-class commitment entirely for its own project of national affirmation.

Sugar was the spine of that project and of the economy it inherited. By 1957 it accounted for more than three-quarters of Cuban exports, a monoculture entrenched by decades of American ownership; by the mid-1950s most of the island's cultivated land and two-thirds of its refining capacity belonged to US capital. This dependency was not without its convulsions, sugar prices having once collapsed by more than seventy-five percent in the 1920s, and it extended to nearly every article of daily consumption: Cuba imported almost everything from its northern neighbor, exporting raw sugar only to buy it back as finished goods, running a half-billion-dollar deficit through the whole of Batista's second dictatorship, a deficit covered by loans from the very creditor extracting the interest. Relative prosperity in some cities, and a literacy rate and per capita income among the highest in Latin America, sat beside the extreme poverty of the sugar workers, alongside the gambling and prostitution economy that grew up to service American tourism across the Straits of Florida.

It was against this domination, more than against Batista's person, that elements of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, having exhausted their hopes for peaceful democratic change, turned the opposition to violence. The armed assault on the Moncada Barracks on the 26th of July, 1953, marked the definitive rupture, though even this did not yet place Castro's movement in open conflict with Washington. Sectors of the US administration initially welcomed the opposition to an increasingly unstable Batista and even weighed supporting its turn to armed struggle. The absence of any proletarian revolutionary content in this struggle is confirmed by the "Moncada Program" itself, read out only after Castro's initial capture and trial: restoration of the 1940 constitution, land redistribution to small peasants through compensated State expropriation, a thirty percent profit-share for workers in large enterprises, fifty-five percent of sugarcane revenues for the colonists who grew it, and confiscation of embezzled State assets. Fidel himself insisted, in his own defense, that none of this exceeded the bounds of the existing constitution, invoking two of its articles that outlawed large landed estates and obliged the State to employ all means at its disposal to provide work for the unemployed; he summarized his own programme, in that same defense, as directed toward six points, "the land problem, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education, and the problem of the people's health", alongside "the achievement of public freedoms and political democracy". Not one of these six points touches the wage relation, the profit driven firm or market exchange relations as such; every one of them is the ordinary content of a bourgeois reform programme, the kind any liberal constitutionalist of the period could have signed without embarrassment, and it was on this ground, not on any socialist ground, that the movement first built its legitimacy, years before Washington's hostility pushed it toward Moscow.

Three and a half years of guerrilla war followed the Granma's landing in December 1956, opening the road to power. The programme did not change on the way to Havana or in the early days after January 1, 1959: the new regime's initial measures nationalized ninety percent of Cuba's weak industrial sector and some seventy percent of its land, expropriations aimed at holdings above 405 hectares that struck overwhelmingly at US companies and citizens. This, not any prior social antagonism, is what produced the rupture with Washington through 1960, and with it the American economic blockade that would stunt Cuban capitalist accumulation for the next half-century. It was this enmity between two national capitals, not a conflict between opposing classes, that pushed Havana into alliance with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw bloc, and with it the adoption of a "socialist" facade that changed nothing in the underlying relation of production. Cuba's place in the international division of labor remained what it had been: the Soviet bloc bought sugar above market price in exchange for oil, and by 1978, nearly thirty years after Castro took power, sugar had climbed to eighty-seven percent of total exports, agrarian diversification having failed under this external imposition as thoroughly as it had failed under the Americans.

The Soviet Union’s relationship with Cuba and other anti-colonial movements reflected a broader process in which the overthrow of colonial rule produced national capitalist States aligned with one or the other blocs of finance capital rather than proletarian revolutions. In Cuba, Russian subsidies, cheap oil, concessional credit, weapons, and industrial investment helped sustain the new State, while Havana became a key intermediary for extending Russian influence abroad through the training, coordination, and export of militants, military advisers, and intelligence-linked cadres to Soviet-aligned insurgent movements across Latin America and Africa. Cuban military missions and training programs, often materially supported by Soviet financing, equipment, and logistics, helped sustain allied governments and insurgencies in places such as Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua, thereby extending Soviet geopolitical reach and reinforcing financial and strategic dependencies on the broader Soviet bloc. This unfolded within a wider Cold War context in which the United States also actively shaped post-colonial outcomes, supporting decolonization when it aligned with its interests while opposing movements that threatened Western strategic or economic positions, often through rival factions, coups, military aid, and integration into Western markets. As a result, many post-colonial States were formed not only through internal class dynamics but also under competing external pressures from both superpowers, each structuring the emerging order to expand its own influence. In these cases, the colonial bourgeoisie was displaced, but the working class did not take control of production; instead, a new national political and bureaucratic stratum administered the economy and controlled the distribution of surplus. Russian aid and Western engagement alike created forms of dependency, whether through trade, credit, energy, military assistance, or financial integration, that differed in mechanism but similarly tied national development to external power blocs. Thus, political independence often changed who controlled the State without transforming the underlying capitalist relations of production: foreign colonial domination was replaced by national State control, while wage labor, capital accumulation, and class divisions persisted under the structural influence of both the Soviet and American systems.

Cuba, an island of eleven million people whose economy, sugar in earlier decades, today an uneasy mix of tourism, nickel, biotechnology, medical-service exports, and remittances, still starved of energy and hard currency, remains as dependent as ever on a world market it cannot set terms with. The State became the collective, national administrator of Cuban capital; the years of Russian subsidy changed the address of its dependence without touching its substance. The collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s tore away that support, and with the persistence of the American blockade the island fell into the "special period": GDP collapsed thirty-six percent between 1990 and 1993, annual meat consumption fell from thirty-nine to twenty-one kilos per person, fish from eighteen to eight, and the fuel shortage crippled sugar production itself even as it forced Havana to give over land to food crops for local survival. Out of that crisis came the 1994 "mercados agropecuarios", legal markets for privately or cooperatively grown produce, the authorization of dollar circulation alongside convertible and non-convertible pesos, an opening to foreign investment and tourism, and self-employment licensed across nearly a hundred and fifty trades; the private sector's share of workers rose from eight percent in 1981 to twenty-three percent by 2000, figures that say nothing of the black market that has boomed, uninterrupted, since the crisis began. None of this, nor the low-cost Venezuelan oil that followed, brought the Cuban economy any real improvement. The ban on strikes held throughout, Guevara himself ruling out their legality as early as 1961 on the grounds that workers accustoming themselves to collective labor could not withhold it to press economic demands, and in 2008 the regime raised the retirement age, from fifty-five to sixty for women and sixty to sixty-five for men, on pensions already meager and paid in non-convertible currency, one anti-proletarian measure among many, indistinguishable from what any bourgeois government elsewhere in the world was doing at the same moment. The passage of power between brothers changed nothing either, being no more than the impossibility of disturbing the vast network of interests built into the State machine that has kept the regime alive this long, a regime now drifting toward a Vietnamese model of market liberalism under one-party rule.

The arrangement Havana struck with Chávez in 2000, Cuban doctors, teachers, and other services exchanged for subsidized Venezuelan crude, became over the following decade the principal external support of Cuban accumulation. It was subsequently incorporated into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA, Chávez's attempt to construct a regional economic bloc outside the U.S.-led system of hemispheric integration. ALBA rested on preferential State-to-State exchange, with Venezuela's oil wealth underwriting trade among governments that sought to build an independent regional imperialist power to break from Washington's domination. Cuba could therefore continue importing fuel and other necessities without possessing the export earnings or access to credit that would have been required to purchase them at world market prices, while Venezuela received Cuban medical labor and other services in return. The arrangement allowed the Cuban State to remain solvent and reproduce its economy despite its chronic shortage of foreign capital, but it did so by making the island increasingly dependent upon Venezuelan oil and the Venezuelan State's ability to subsidize the exchange. By 2024, Venezuelan crude and fuel shipments to Cuba had fallen to roughly 32,000 barrels per day, from 56,000 the previous year, as Venezuela's own production and refining problems worsened. The subsequent collapse of the Venezuelan lifeline has therefore exposed the underlying weakness. Cuba remains a small, capital-poor national economy dependent upon imported fuel, machinery, food, technology, and foreign exchange, and the disappearance of the Venezuelan subsidy has left Havana searching for another external source of credit and productive inputs.

China and the New Industrialization Drive

Rather than following through on the original 1959 Agrarian Reform Law, which sought to break up Cuba's large estates, impose a 402-hectare land ceiling, redistribute land to small farmers and create a broader domestic agricultural economy, Castroist Cuba increasingly retreated from that model as it became integrated into Soviet imperialism. Since the Spanish colonial period, Cuba's agriculture had been organized around large export plantations producing staple commodities, above all sugar, for an external market. The revolution abolished the private plantation owner but did not break with the plantation economy. Soviet integration instead modernized it under State management: guaranteed markets, subsidized prices, petroleum, machinery, fertilizer and credit allowed Cuba to maintain large-scale sugar production, with sugar still accounting for roughly 80 percent of export earnings by the 1980s. Soviet oil supplied the energy required to mechanize and consolidate these enterprises, allowing Cuba to postpone the development of an independent agricultural class and the domestic market that an actual agrarian revolution could have produced. By the beginning of the 1990s, genuinely independent farmers controlled only about 9 percent of agricultural land. The collapse of the USSR consequently exposed the dependence of the entire model. Large monocultural farms were particularly vulnerable to the disappearance of imported fuel, fertilizer and machinery, forcing Cuba toward animal traction, organic fertilizers, crop diversification, urban agriculture and smaller-scale production. FAO records the number of oxen teams rising from fewer than 100,000 before the crisis to roughly 300,000 afterward. What the revolution had left unfinished was therefore pushed back onto the agenda by necessity: the development of agriculture capable of reproducing itself without the permanent subsidy of an external imperial power.

Venezuelan oil temporarily postponed that transformation. Chávez's subsidized petroleum supplied roughly a third of Cuban oil consumption for years, allowing the State to sustain an energy-intensive agricultural and industrial structure that had become impossible after the Soviet collapse. When that relationship deteriorated, the pressure toward smaller-scale, less petroleum-dependent production intensified. The later usufruct reforms transferred increasing amounts of State land to farmers and cooperatives, and by 2017 the non-State sector was cultivating roughly 83 percent of Cuba's agricultural land even though the State still formally owned around 79 percent. This contradiction between State ownership and increasingly decentralized commodity production has now become the basis for a wider private sector while the State continues to collect land rents. The newly announced June 2026 reforms allow private, State, mixed and individual legal entities to obtain long-term rights to use agricultural land; permit usufruct holders to employ wage labor; allow cooperatives to conduct direct foreign trade and obtain external financing; permit producers and buyers to negotiate prices without State mediation; and open agricultural input markets to domestic and foreign private firms. The importance is not simply that there are more private farmers. An increasingly complete circuit of commodity production is emerging: farmers require machinery, tools, fuel, irrigation and fertilizer; they produce for a domestic market; private intermediaries distribute those commodities; and the resulting accumulation generates demand for further investment. Non-State businesses accounted for 55 percent of retail sales by value in 2024, up from 44 percent in 2023. Washington is simultaneously attempting to accelerate this development by opening channels for qualifying independent Cuban businesses to obtain U.S. financial services, agricultural equipment and access to the U.S. market, while directing fuel supplies toward private firms and away from State-controlled enterprises. The crisis has therefore transformed what was once a survival mechanism into the beginnings of a more autonomous agricultural bourgeoisie and domestic market.

The energy question connects this delayed agrarian transformation directly to industrialization. Cuba's historical problem was not simply that it lacked oil; its agriculture and industry were organized around a model in which the means of reproducing production were repeatedly supplied from outside: first through Spanish and later international markets, then through Soviet petroleum and industrial inputs, and finally through Venezuelan oil. External energy allowed the State to preserve a large-scale export economy without developing the full internal chain of agricultural and industrial production that would support a relatively independent capitalism. Cuba is now attempting to reconstruct precisely those missing links. The turn toward solar generation, decentralized irrigation, biological inputs and smaller-scale agriculture is not merely an ecological response to scarcity. Chinese-financed photovoltaic projects, solar-powered irrigation and other renewable-energy equipment offer a means of electrifying production while reducing dependence on imported petroleum. At the same time, Havana is attempting to revive the industrial means of production themselves. The modernization of Antillana de Acero, Cuba's principal steel complex, includes a new electric arc furnace and related equipment, with initial plans for roughly 62,000 tons of steel billets annually and a rolling mill designed for approximately 226,000 tons of finished products, principally reinforcing bar. The significance extends beyond steel: rebuilding such an industry requires reliable electricity, transportation, imported inputs, credit and financial infrastructure. China has become increasingly important precisely because it now possesses a scale of industrial and financial capital capable of supplying these requirements in a way that neither the Soviet Union nor Venezuela ultimately could. Chinese financing is therefore appearing not only in renewable-energy generation but in the machinery, infrastructure and productive equipment required to reduce Cuba's dependence on imported fuel and rebuild domestic productive capacity. Havana is simultaneously cautiously opening the economy to larger private firms, foreign investment and private financial institutions, while the United States attempts to direct its own capital toward the emerging private sector and away from GAESA. Cuba's industrialization is consequently becoming a struggle over which foreign capital will supply the means of production: Chinese capital entering through State-directed infrastructure and industrial partnerships, U.S. capital entering through an expanding private sector, or Cuban State and military capital attempting to retain control over the strategic circuits. The agrarian revolution begun in 1959 but arrested by the consolidation of State agriculture and external dependency is therefore returning as part of a broader capitalist transformation. Cuba is being forced to develop the domestic agricultural production, internal market, energy system and industrial productive capacity that its dependence on Soviet and Venezuelan oil previously allowed it to postpone, leaving the central question of the next stage not whether Cuba will industrialize, but which imperialist capital will finance and structure that industrialization.

GAESA, the Cuban Ruling Apparatus, and the U.S. Pressure Campaign

The internal counterpart to this external struggle is the structure of Cuban State capitalism, organized through the military-owned conglomerate GAESA and ultimately controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces. The distinctive feature of the Cuban State is that the Cuban military-political bourgeoisie, organized through the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), upon its revolution, as always happens, constructed a new State machine in the aftermath of the revolution, an armed camp from the outset, designed to secure and reproduce its own political and economic power. That apparatus was first consolidated as a permanent military-political structure for defending the revolution and was heavily armed, trained, and logistically sustained by the Soviet Union, which supplied Cuba with tanks, aircraft, artillery, and other heavy equipment. It later evolved into an expeditionary force integrated into Soviet-aligned global strategy, with Cuba deploying roughly 300,000 troops abroad over the course of the Cold War, including major interventions such as tens of thousands in Angola and over 15,000 in Ethiopia. The revolutionary movement that defeated the Batista regime and displaced the old foreign-capital order subsequently transformed its military organization into a permanent State apparatus capable of defending the Cuban capital from subordination to Yankee capital, projecting power abroad, and eventually administering economic accumulation and directing the surplus from Cuban worker exploitation back into it's State apparatus.

This helps explain the later development of GAESA. Emerging as a major economic institution during the crisis of the 1990s, GAESA provided the armed forces with a mechanism for generating and controlling foreign exchange through tourism, retail, logistics, finance, ports, and foreign trade. It is therefore more than a conventional State enterprise: it represents a form in which political command, military organization, and economic management are fused into a single apparatus of accumulation. The Castro leadership did not stand outside this process but organized it. Figures embedded in the ruling family network, most notably Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, Raúl Castro’s former son-in-law and head of GAESA until his death in 2022, embodied the fusion of political authority, military command, and enterprise management.

Seen in this light, the Cuban military-economic apparatus should not necessarily be understood as an obstacle to the further development of Cuban capitalism. Its historical function has been precisely to preserve the autonomy of the Cuban State and create the institutional capacity through which capital can be accumulated without surrendering control of the economy to American finance capital. The recent opening toward private agriculture, private firms, foreign investment, agricultural credit, and more autonomous market activity can therefore be understood not as a retreat from one supposedly "socialist" system, but as the evolution of a developmentalist State capitalism into his more highly developed form.

Lenin, Finance Capital, and the Export of the Means of Production

This is where Lenin's conception of imperialism becomes useful. Lenin identifies five defining characteristics of imperialism, including the concentration of production and capital into monopolies, the fusion of bank and industrial capital into finance capital, the growing importance of the export of capital, the formation of international monopolist associations, and the division of the world among the major capitalist powers. The point is not merely that China lends money to Cuba, but that accumulated capital seeks profitable outlets beyond its national boundaries and, in doing so, carries with it the machinery, technology, infrastructure, corporations, banks, and contractual relations through which that capital is reproduced. Lenin's discussion of foreign loans is especially relevant because he emphasizes how the borrowing country receives less than the nominal value of the loan while the banks and industrial firms of the lending country secure commissions, contracts, orders, and control over economic development. The export of capital therefore links finance to the export of commodities and the means of production: a loan can finance a railway, power plant, factory, port, telecommunications network, or electrical grid, while the firms of the creditor country supply the equipment and obtain the contracts necessary to build it. Cuba's growing dependence upon Chinese finance and Chinese industrial goods fits this pattern, just as Mexico's integration of manufacturing into North American production reflects another configuration of the same world economy. The rivalry between these forms of external capital is not a rivalry between capitalism and socialism. It is rivalry among capitals organized through different States and financial systems over markets, productive assets, infrastructure, and spheres of influence. The Cuban State can bargain for better terms, diversify its creditors, and use Chinese capital to industrialize; none of this abolishes the relation of capital. It changes the national configuration through which that relation operates. The Venezuelan period was an unusually favorable form of dependence because subsidized oil allowed Havana to reproduce itself without paying full world-market costs. The Chinese period is potentially more transformative because it can involve the direct export of capital and means of production into the Cuban economy. But for the Cuban worker the essential question remains unchanged: whether the factory, power plant, hotel, port, or telecommunications network is financed by Washington, Beijing, Moscow, or Havana, the abolition of exploitation cannot be identified with the replacement of one national capital by another. Lenin's imperialism describes the struggle among those capitals. The task of the proletariat is to abolish the social relation that makes that struggle necessary.

The False Socialists, and the Management Capital Will Need for the War to Come

Today, the ruling bourgeois faction brands the Democratic Socialists of America as “communists and radicals”, even as the President met, months earlier, with New York City's newly elected DSA mayor, Zohran Mamdani, calling him "a very rational person", predicting he would make the city "great again", and declaring he expected to be "helping him, not hurting him". As our current has argued elsewhere, Mamdani is no real threat to capital but rather its agent, ensuring social peace through democratic and reformist illusion. The bourgeois right gleefully paints the bourgeois left as a "great red menace", reviving Cold War hysteria against a Soviet rival that no longer exists, precisely when it needs a domestic enemy to justify the repressive apparatus it is building for a foreign one. The left meanwhile can present itself as the defender of the working class and democracy against fascism and oligarchy to its own base. The two really do help and need each other. This theater is easier to stage because the Democratic Party's own base has been narrowing to precisely the layers our current has always identified as the classic recruiting ground of petty-bourgeois radicalism: less the labor aristocracy of an earlier period, and more the intelligentsia and a middle class that capital is steadily grinding down. Accumulation evaporates this stratum as surely as it dispossesses the worker, but it does not thereby become useless to capital; in the general interest of capital as a whole, this same middle class, precisely because its own ground is dissolving beneath itself, remains, as history has shown again and again, the most effective material the bourgeoisie has for mobilizing the discontented masses behind a restoration program that never once touches the wage relation.

Nothing in the mayor's program changed between the meeting and the denunciation; what changed was the electoral calendar, and, with it, capital's calculation of how much anxious rhetoric was useful ahead of the midterms to discipline and beat down the minds of the proletarian. A social-democratic administration promising rent control, city-owned grocery stores, and free buses disturbs no fundamental interest of capital, because it proposes to redistribute the fruits of exploitation more generously without for one moment touching exploitation itself. Such a program still requires that labor be bought and sold as a commodity, that the enterprise, public or private, cover its costs and reproduce itself through the sale of what it produces. The firm asks only one question of whoever holds office: will the wage relation continue, will production continue to be organized for sale rather than use? To this the social democrat answers yes as readily as the free-market conservative, differing from his rival only on the method of distributing what is extracted.

But a further determination is at work beneath both the cordiality and the denunciation. A capitalism preparing for a protracted contest with a rival bloc does not merely tolerate a competent administrator of urban discontent. It needs one. Affordable rent, subsidized transit, a mayor who can tell a restless population that their government hears them, are a form of social insurance capital purchases cheaply against a working class too embittered to accept the sacrifices open rivalry between blocs will demand: rationed resources, redirected industry, sons and daughters called upon in the name of the nation. Our current has documented this function twice already. In 1914 Europe's mass workers' parties answered imperialist war not with class struggle but with the Union Sacrée, war credits, and national unity. They repeated the same betrayal between 1939 and 1945, subordinating the workers' movement to coalition governments and the national war effort. Reformism never transcended wage labour, and its failure opened not the road to revolution but to reaction, which inherited both the paternal State reformism had built and a working class already disciplined for national sacrifice.

Communists have no reason to defend the capitalist left against the accusation of "communism", an accusation which degrades the name far more than the accused have ever threatened bourgeois society. The bourgeois State now denounces rent control, municipal reforms, and every democratic nostrum with the same vocabulary once reserved for those who opposed imperialist war and for the great proletarian struggles of the past, not because these movements menace the wage relation, but because a bourgeoisie driven by renewed accumulation and recurring crises of overproduction is compelled to sharpen the antagonism between its own fractions. As capital centralizes, the interests of the great bourgeoisie increasingly collide with those of the ruined or declining petty bourgeoisie, each seeking to shift the burdens of crisis onto the other. Yet this contradiction has never stood outside capitalism. On the contrary, it has historically furnished bourgeois politics with its very dynamism, renewing the perpetual alternation between parties and programmes while leaving untouched the foundations of wage labour, commodity production, and the State. No conspiracy is required. It is sufficient that the ruling class, through the ordinary functioning of its political and ideological organs, reproduces the ancient comedy of democracy against oligarchy, by which the American proletariat has for generations been enlisted behind rival bourgeois camps, each promising to save society from the other while jointly preserving the dictatorship of capital. The communist position is therefore one of complete intransigence. We defend neither the democratic faction falsely denounced as communist, nor the repressive apparatus that imagines itself defending civilization from subversion, nor the desperate adventurism that mistakes provocation for revolution. Against every faction we affirm the same invariant programme: the abolition of wage labour, of the enterprise, of commodity production, and of the State that guarantees them, whatever colours it flies, whatever language it speaks, whatever personnel administers it.

The Philistine's Question

Look at the numbers, the Philistine says! How on earth will our tiny party ever hope to catch up to these relative Goliaths of opportunism? By avoiding the sordid activist rat-race to begin with. We can, with absolute certainty, state that it is only our current which remains not only authentically communist but genuinely anti-capitalist; therefore, it is only our party which truly represents the interests and historical aims of the proletarian class in today's society, no matter how small we may be. Where is the proletarian? It only appears and expresses itself as a class, here in our party. Outside it, it is merely individual workers scattered to the wind. Therefore, there is no competition to be found. The Marxist doctrine of social crisis guarantees the restoration of a mass proletarian movement, and it is on these historical grounds, not on the passing fashions of bourgeois politics, that our Party has systematically and patiently carried out its work of revolutionary preparation. Within the all-consuming bourgeois world, countless imposters have come and gone, each demonstrating an immature and spurious understanding of the revolutionary social science of Marxism. When the next social crisis once again compels the working class masses into struggle, these programmatic fictions will be brushed aside by the proletariat with no greater effort than that required to flick an ant from one's skin. Behind the aesthetics and the game of appearances played by these Stalinist parties, lies not a proletarian program but a program of a radicalizing petit-bourgeois middle class.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation ran a national ticket in 2024 that outperformed every prior self-proclaimed “socialist” presidential campaign in decades. The Communist Party USA's membership rolls are climbing for the first time in a generation. A brand-new American Communist Party is finding an audience before it has finished writing its own founding documents. Each presents itself as a more hardcore alternative to the Democratic Socialists of America, yet each alleged break turns out, on inspection, to be almost entirely rhetorical. What we have is not a movement of the proletariat but the continual downward spiral of the American middle class, disillusioned and reaching for answers to questions which the existing political establishment cannot give, yet still unwilling to give up their childish attachment to the fairytale of bourgeois democracy hoping deep down to fix and right the wrongs of the bourgeois world they desperately want to preserve so they can continue to live their comfortable individual bourgeois lives filled with all its personal interests, hobbies and shopping habits. Our Che Guevara t-shirt wearing heroes have arrived once more! So for the activist intelligentsia it is out of the fryer and into the pan.

The PSL and CPUSA co-organize with the liberal DSA sects, endorse the same Democratic candidates, and converge on the same liberal demands, progressive taxation, expanded voting rights, government budgetary reform of the military, reached by the same petitions, performative protests and canvasses, so-called "organizing". The ACP leans elsewhere: less ballot line, more podcast promotionalism, and leader-worship, plus an open nationalism its own program calls "socialist patriotism", what members and critics alike call "MAGA Communism” filled with its petit-bourgeosis nostalgia for the traditional nuclear family. It is hard to imagine a more repugnant distortion of communism than reading these groups' so called programs which reek of the most turgid liberal nationalism and reformist drivel. It is no wonder they repel the actual proletarian like noxious bile despite all their attempts to appeal to the “masses” and to “meet them where they are at” by spewing abject ignorance and stupidity. Each group waving its own large red flag, competing with each other to catch the eye of the latest generation of organizational window shoppers and weekend warrior radicals, to herd the imagined masses into their respective tiny corrals and bleed their membership dues for their petit-bourgeois political ends: DSA's dead end cul de sac fenced by the Democratic Party, or PSL's and CPUSA's and the ACP's boosteristic "Marxism-Leninism".

Underneath the differing veneers, lies a single convergence: everything these organizations offer, the marches, the branded merchandise, the uninspired activist mantras parroted in the streets, is theater performed by imposters who have stolen the costumes of communism and Marxism while repudiating its script. None of these groups are ahead of the organic party at all, because the thing they are growing is not a real party, something they have no comprehension of.

History has run this experiment before: these are typical bourgeois party machines, built to contain and administer a layer in motion, and machines of that kind are no match, over time, for the one thing they cannot manufacture, an organic party welded to an invariant program that is defended and prepared for the true resurgence of the proletarian masses to social struggle. It does not herd the declassed middle classes toward itself to cobble together some sort of engine to prevent the social catastrophes capital promise, it is constituted by the same historical process that produces that very crisis in the first place, and will be there, unchanged, when the machines built to contain that crisis have each in turn been ground up by it. We weathered the counter-revolution. They perpetrated it.

All these groups owe their basic orientation to the same unresolved question: what to make of the Soviet Union, in its time, and China today. Stalinism and its Maoist descendants treat one or both as viable "socialism"; Trotskyism has held the former USSR, and China today, to be a degenerated workers' State worth defending.

They’ve all abandoned the real communist program, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the abolition of wage labor, mercantile exchange, and the profit-driven firm as the actual content of communism. No, they worship the State owned enterprise and the proliferation of reformist pandering. State capitalism as socialism, as a guarantee on a future job for the middle classes and their radicalizing parties.

The Dying Middle Class’s Activism & Stalinism: Pragmatism and Empiricism

The Revolution will not be made from more petition signature collecting, mutual-aid drives, neighborhood cleanups, phone banks, promotional videos, feel-good protest sign-holding, self important seminars, “educational programs”, and flag-waving. Nor from any dosage of terrible “community building” or other “survival programs” aimed at falsely ameliorating the ills of the bourgeois world while wasted deep in its social swamp. No level of personal self sacrifice and heroics can overcome hardcoded material conditions that keep the masses inert. They want social connection; they want to end alienation without destroying what alienates them, capital. Utopianism in a nutshell.

Activism and Stalinism represent two complementary expressions of the same bourgeois deviation: the substitution of empiricism and pragmatism for dialectical materialism and the invariant communist program. Both conceive the party not as the organic historical expression of the proletariat's determined course of development toward communism, but as an apparatus to be consciously constructed, expanded, and managed through activism, recruitment, tactical innovation, and organizational technique. This conception reflects the outlook of the middle class, whose social position is defined by instability, competition, and the constant need to defend its status through individual initiative, social networking, and continual innovation in method. For them, communism is State-run enterprise, higher-order democracy, and the miserable "full employment" of society.

As the middle classes are increasingly proletarianized, its insecurity and alienation find expression in an endless search for practical interventions that promise to ameliorate social dislocation without abolishing its material basis. Pragmatism and empiricism are therefore not merely philosophical errors, but the characteristic outlook of strata whose existence depends upon adaptation to changing conditions and which judge truth according to what appears to work in the present. Dialectical materialism, by contrast, is the theoretical expression of the proletariat as a historical class, it is its worldview and reality. It evaluates politics not according to immediate utility or organizational success, but according to the objective development of the capitalist mode of production and the historical movement of class struggle. The communist program is therefore not a tactical instrument to be revised according to circumstances, but the historical continuity of the proletariat's struggle arising from the material contradictions of capitalism itself.

For the opportunists, the question thus ceases to be whether the party expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, but instead becomes whether the party apparatus can be expanded, strengthened, and rendered more effective within bourgeois society itself in defense of present conditions as a means to “prove” the functional practical value of the party machine, to win more adherents and dependents. In this framework, activism appears less as the political expression of the proletariat deceived than as the moral and psychological compensation of declining middle strata clinging to their social existence, while Stalinism elevates the same pragmatism into a doctrine of party-building, statecraft, and national development, thereby subordinating communist principles to immediate success and reformist demands. As Bernstein declared, "The movement is everything; the final goal is nothing". Against this, we insist that the revolutionary party cannot be fabricated through voluntarist activism or organizational engineering; it emerges organically from the historical movement of the class itself, whose trajectory is determined by the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production rather than by the empirical calculations of self-appointed genius militants who perpetually evaluate the "situation" and seek to "seize the moment" through heroics at the opportune moment.

Historically, this outlook became dominant because the postwar expansion of capitalism created the broadest and most materially secure middle strata in modern history. The destruction of productive capacity during the Second World War inaugurated an exceptional period of accumulation that enormously expanded managerial, professional, academic, technical, and administrative layers. These strata required political forms corresponding to their social interests: reformism rather than revolution, democratic administration rather than class dictatorship, activism rather than programmatic continuity. The Democratic New Deal in America, Social Democracy in Europe and its developmental Stalinist counterpart in the East. It all worked to stabilize capitalism and its middle classes, for later liquidation under the law of capital accumulation, all that it required was a few world wars to secure its temporary existence. The same sort of suicidal, live for today mentality is still spewed everywhere by the middle classes amid their rampant denial of the massive preparation across society for the next great imperialist war. In the past their growing numerical and ideological weight drew substantial sections of the proletariat into organizations and movements whose politics reflected not the independent historical interests of labor but the mediating role of the expanding petit-bourgeosis and the labor aristocracy under imperialism. The mass parties of social democracy, the bureaucratic apparatuses of Stalinism, and later the proliferation of activist organizations all corresponded to this historically specific phase of capitalist development just as they are unfolding today on a similar razor’s edge.

Today the material foundation of these politics is steadily disappearing. Monopoly capitalism progressively eliminates the relative autonomy of the middle strata through concentration and centralization of capital, reducing them toward the general condition of wage labor while simultaneously stripping them of the privileges that once distinguished them. Their political radicalization is therefore the expression of an incoherent class strata struggling for its own survival rather than the emergence of proletarian politics. Their activism seeks not the abolition of capitalist social relations but the mitigation of their own insecurity, alienation, and downward mobility.

As this process of leveling continues, these intermediary strata lose not only their economic independence but also their political independence. Their organizations increasingly find themselves absorbed into, subordinated by, or destroyed within the dominant parties of capital. In the United States this tendency appears in the continual gravitational pull exerted by the Democratic Party over every activist and reformist current. Some continue to struggle within it, hoping to democratize or transform it, while others advocate a “dirty break,” imagining that organizational separation alone can preserve the same activist politics under a different institutional form. Yet both remain products of the same declining class who will either bind themselves to the Party of the bourgeois or to the only true party of the proletarian, the International Communist Party.

Determinism, Our Small Party and the Brain of the Class

The relationship between party and class is not one of representation but of organic function within a single historical body: the class supplies the material force and terrain of struggle, while the party, as its most conscious and continuous organ, supplies the direction that force could not generate on its own. This is the relation our tradition names the reversal of praxis, whereby the collective, doctrinally continuous action of the party outweighs the sum of its individual militants because consciousness runs from the organized whole back down into the parts rather than upward from isolated wills. The party is therefore organic rather than voluntarist or merely organizational: its conception rests upon the same material understanding of consciousness that underlies our understanding of the human organism.

The brain, or encephalon, is the material organ through which the organism receives stimuli, retains and processes experience, and develops the perceptions and knowledge necessary for its continued existence. What we call the psyche, or “mind,” is not a separate substance or autonomous faculty, but the highest function of the plastic encephalon: the utilization of acquired knowledge and experience in relation to the organism’s needs. Consciousness is therefore not an independent source of action standing outside material reality, but a determined product of the organism and its conditions of existence. As we explained in For a Dialectical-Materialist Theory of the Psyche, the psyche “exclusively designates the highest function of the plastic encephalon,” its noetic activity, or the use of acquired knowledge in satisfying needs and preserving the organism. The encephalon also processes knowledge of which the individual is not consciously aware; it “knows much more than we are aware of knowing.”

This conception belongs to a broader materialist understanding of causality. Democritus grounded early atomism in a world governed not by chance but by necessity; Spinoza argued that nothing in nature is contingent; and Laplace later gave classical determinism its most famous formulation, imagining an intelligence capable of calculating the future from complete knowledge of the forces and positions constituting the present. Though limited by the science of their periods, these thinkers shared the rejection of arbitrary will as an explanation of nature.

Dialectical materialism develops this insight beyond mechanical determinism. Matter is not an inert substratum awaiting an external force; motion is the mode of existence of matter itself. Consciousness is consequently a development of material nature: the brain is a product of natural history, the psyche a function of the brain, and consciousness continually formed through the organism’s interaction with its environment. Society is no exception. Capitalism is not an eternal or natural order requiring an external act of will to abolish it, but a historically determinate mode of production generated by definite conditions and contradictions. Its supersession therefore arises from its own development rather than from an arbitrary decision imposed upon it from outside.

This has direct consequences for revolutionary politics. If individual consciousness is materially determined, then revolutionary politics cannot be understood as the sum of independent individuals freely arriving at a common understanding. Bourgeois society furnishes individuals with the knowledge and practical automatisms necessary for reproducing existing relations. The worker experiences exploitation and the contradictions of capitalism, but immediate experience does not automatically provide the historical knowledge required to understand and overcome them.

The party therefore preserves knowledge that existing conditions do not yet require the individual proletarian to possess. Its indispensable task is to maintain invariant doctrine and the accumulated historical experience of the communist movement, providing the political leadership through which scattered struggles can be unified into a single historical direction. It does not wait for spontaneous consciousness to generate doctrine; it preserves the historical knowledge required for future stages of struggle before that knowledge becomes immediately functional for the mass of the class.

This is also why the party may be small without being historically insignificant. Its numerical strength rises and falls with objective contradictions: at one moment it may consist of a handful of disciplined militants; at another it may become a decisive political force in revolutionary crisis. Its size is not the measure of its function. It neither isolates itself from the proletariat nor dissolves itself into it, but meets workers in the concrete struggles imposed by bourgeois society while bringing to those struggles the continuity of Marxist doctrine.

The party itself remains subject to historical determination. It cannot will revolutionary circumstances into existence or substitute organizational enthusiasm for the development of capitalism’s contradictions. What distinguishes it is therefore not freedom from determination but the possession and continuity of communist doctrine within determination. Its strength and possibilities fluctuate with bourgeois society, while its task is to preserve and develop the accumulated knowledge of the movement through theoretical work, historical study, and intervention in the struggles of the class.

The importance of this continuity becomes clearest in periods of crisis. Individual consciousness is necessarily limited by the knowledge and experience available under existing conditions. When those conditions change, inherited forms of knowledge may no longer provide adequate responses. Crisis therefore has a cognitive dimension: what once appeared natural or permanent can become visibly inadequate. Yet crisis does not automatically produce revolutionary consciousness. It creates the necessity for new knowledge without guaranteeing that the resulting response will be correct; reformism, nationalism, religious reaction, desperation, and revolutionary politics can all emerge from the same social rupture.

The party’s function is to ensure that the necessary knowledge does not have to be invented at the moment of crisis. Like individual memory, which preserves knowledge whose immediate utility may have disappeared, the party carries historical experience across periods in which its practical relevance is not yet apparent. When changed conditions make that knowledge necessary, it can be reactivated rather than rediscovered.

This gives the party a historical continuity that no individual consciousness can possess. Its militants remain finite biological organisms, but the doctrine they collectively maintain can survive the disappearance of particular individuals and generations. The party is therefore the reservoir of the attitudes and positions that the communist social person of the future will adopt: not an ideal consciousness existing above the class, but the material continuity of knowledge accumulated through the class struggle.

From this follows the specific meaning of the reversal of praxis. Consciousness does not simply rise from isolated individuals and become collective through agreement. The accumulated experience and doctrine of the historical movement are organized in the party and, through its continuous action, return to the individual militants who compose it. The individual does not first construct communist theory from immediate experience and then contribute it to the party; rather, the party provides the theoretical and practical framework through which immediate experience becomes intelligible.

Its collective action can consequently be conscious and coordinated toward a historical goal in a way no isolated militant or eclectic mass organization can reproduce. The party’s consciousness is not the arithmetic sum of its members’ consciousnesses, but the historical continuity connecting their activity to the accumulated experience of the movement. Its power can therefore be vastly greater than its numerical strength, because its strength lies not simply in the number of militants but in the doctrine and historical experience organized through them.

The materialist theory of the psyche thus provides the basis for the materialist theory of the party. Just as individual consciousness is a determined function of a material organism situated within definite conditions, revolutionary consciousness must be understood as a historical process embodied in a material organ capable of preserving knowledge beyond the limits of individual consciousness. The party is that organ: not an ideal consciousness hovering above material reality, nor a voluntary association of individuals, but the organic continuity through which the class preserves invariant doctrine, transmits historical experience, and develops the political direction necessary to transform the contradictions of capitalism into a conscious historical movement.

Under the long counter-revolution, every generation has produced its own batch of modernizers, fixers and updaters of Marxism. Unable to explain the defeats of the proletariat through the objective course of class society's development, due to their position outside the party as small circles of individual critical "thinkers", they have one after another, in their personal genius, decided that, in order to save humanity, they must take the Marxist doctrine, "back to the drydocks", fixing what appears broken to their discerning academic minds. Yet, isolated as they are, they can never conceive of the doctrine in its entirety, and always repeat errors they cannot see, errors already surgically treated by our Marxist forefathers long ago.

It is the recurring social position from which the deviation is generated: declassed intellectuals, students, and professionals formed by the individualist culture of the bourgeois academy, claiming Marx as one of their own while moronically dismembering his work. To the relativist philistines, Marxist theory is merely the construct of a few great “thinkers,” one opinion or perspective among many, a “grand narrative” in need of improving if not deconstructing altogether since it’s all a product merely of its time and all men being equal they only need to treat Marx with the same mediocrity that permeates their every fiber, the dialectical and materialist worldview essentially inconceivable by brains which have been thoroughly blended, shaken and stirred by the bourgeois academy. They serve up a theoretical cocktail filled to the brim with different ingredients that refreshes and brings relief to all those troubled with the heavy weight of the moral and social responsibilities that come with holding a true revolutionary Marxist materialist praxis. Who needs systematic historical evaluation of the complex real events of the counter-revolution when you can selectively pick and pull facts to establish theoretical platitudes based on bourgeois common sense which professes to know all to well the lessons and consequences of the Russian Revolution? This is the essence of the historical mutilation that is “When Insurrections Die” by Dauve in End Notes 1. You know what the revolution really needs? Supposedly another hack to fix the errors of the Italian Communist Left.

The reductive conceptualization of “value-form” critique, “real subsumption”, a-political anti-“work” refusalism and "anti-programmatism" merely conceals an old proposition: that capitalism can be abolished without the conquest of political power, without the dictatorship of the proletariat, without the communist party, and without the historical continuity of the programme. It is the immediatist and anarchist refusal of political mediation updated with the appropriation of select positions long defended by our tradition in order to create a blase demoralizing theoretical corpus to convince its readers against all of Marxism's essential conclusions, prognosticating their adherents return to the nihilist and defeatist bogs from which these petit-bourgeosis vitalists have emerged baptized and born again.

Empirio-Monism and Immediatism

The philosophical roots of this revisionism had already been identified by Lenin long before communization emerged. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he grouped Georges Sorel alongside the Machists, Bogdanovites, and neo-Kantian pragmatists in their common rejection of materialist theory of knowledge. Empirio-monism reduced knowledge to the organization of human experience rather than the reflection of an objective material world, treating scientific concepts as instruments constructed by thought instead of discoveries about independently existing reality. Objective truth was thereby dissolved into the organization of experience, practical utility, and conceptual coherence, replacing Marxist scientific realism with an idealist epistemology in which consciousness ultimately determines the terms of reality rather than reflecting its material development. It was precisely this philosophical tendency that Lenin identified in Sorel. Discussing Sorel's attempt to reconcile Poincaré with Le Roy, Lenin highlighted the shared premise between the empiro-monists and Sorell "everything that is not thought is pure nothing", and that science does not mirror nature but merely "corresponds with the mechanisms created by us". Once scientific theory is reduced to conceptual construction rather than the reflection of objective material processes, the question of whether thought corresponds to an independent reality is dismissed as meaningless. Truth becomes a property of ideas themselves rather than of the material world they seek to explain. We have relativist nihilism and solipsism, the philosophical weapons of bourgeois counter revolution bashed against the heads of the proletarian the world over. Communization ultimately reproduces this same idealist method so popular in bourgeois universities today: theory follows the changing forms of consciousness, subjective lived experience, and historical appearance instead of expressing the objective development of capitalist society and the determinate laws governing its movement.

The first modern expression of this refusal in the practical, political sphere appeared in Sorelian syndicalism. Sorel presented himself not as an enemy of Marxism but as its saviour against the parliamentary degeneration of the Second International. Yet in the process, he rejected the very foundations of revolutionary Marxism and established the foundations of the tradition our Party calls “immediatism” and in which Lenin refers to as “left-wing communism” in the Infantile Disorder. Historical necessity gave way to voluntarism, political organization to the myth of the permanent general strike as the revolution itself, and the conquest of power to the immediate action of the producers. For Sorel, the revolutionary "myth" was valuable not because it corresponded to objective reality but because it inspired moral conviction and collective action, displacing scientific analysis with cultural and psychological mobilization. The revolution thus ceased to be the organized overthrow of the bourgeois State made possible by determined objective developments and instead became an ethical act of refusal, a transformation of consciousness rather than the political conquest of power. The same inversion that characterized Bernstein from the right characterized Sorel from the left: both abandoned the material continuity of the communist programme in favour of an immediate tactical solution. One trusted the ballot; the other the mythic general strike.

What Sorel exhibits here, and what every heir of his down to the communizers exhibits after him, is the petty-bourgeois thought's characteristic infection: an obsession for the latest fashion, for the most recent patent, for the last brain-wave. The revolutionary syndicalists of Sorel's own school, widely represented across Latin Europe and within elements of the I.W.W. in North America, proclaimed themselves the repository of the final revolutionary discovery, the supersession of party and programme by the union, direct action and the general strike.

The early Marxist Left in Italy confronted precisely this current. Against Arturo Labriola, Orano, Olivetti, De Ambris and the entire syndicalist milieu, it rejected the substitution of the trade union for the political party, insisting that the general strike became revolutionary only insofar as it was subordinated to the conquest of political power by the communist party. The syndicalists mistook a tactical form for a historical principle, replacing the dictatorship of the proletariat with the autonomy of economic organisations, and dissolving the political movement into the immediate struggles of the workshop. In doing so they merely reproduced the bourgeois cult of novelty under revolutionary colours.

The Bolsheviks refused the same seduction. However enticing syndicalism's slogans appeared against the visibly decaying revisionist socialism of the Second International, they anchored themselves instead in the unfashionable granite of an already established programme, refusing to mistake the latest tactical innovation for a new theoretical foundation. Communization is only the latest terminus of this same chase: another patent taken out against Marxism by authors who, lacking any grasp of its programme, can only wage war against phantoms of their own invention.

Ordine Nuovo & the German-Dutch Left Follow Suit

After Sorell, the deviation reappeared following the First World War in the factory-council theories of Ordine Nuovo. Gramsci and his collaborators mistook organs born within the economic struggle for the sufficient organs of proletarian power itself. Against this illusion, in Seize the Factory or Seize Power, the Italian Left insisted that no socialist transformation can begin before the conquest of political power by the proletariat as a class. Factory councils possess revolutionary significance only insofar as they are subordinated to the dictatorship of the proletariat and its political organ, the communist party. Detached from that programme, they become instruments of self-management of capitalism rather than of revolution. The immediate administration of production cannot replace the prior destruction of the bourgeois State. Here already is the molecular endpoint every immediatism reaches by a different road: a half baked scheme at best, in which each workshop, each council, each locality pursues its own immediate, unmediated relation to production, with no organ capable of subordinating these particular interests to the general historical progress of the movement. Capitalist small-scale production is itself already a molecular phenomenon, an atomized field of disconnected private producers; a proletarian politics built the same way, factory by factory, council by council, local spontaneous insurrection by insurrection, cannot fight this fragmentation, it reproduces it. History has proven this lesson well.

Yet, the German-Dutch Left transformed this error into principle. Opposition to opportunist parties became opposition to the party as such. The communist programme was dissolved into the spontaneous movement of the workers, and organization itself came to appear as an alien force imposed upon the class, which was itself conceptualized as the mere sociological collection of individual workers. The continuity of doctrine gave way to the immediacy of personal experience. Truth, a reflection of the individual's cognition, shared within the organ of the workers' council which merely reflects the most popular opinion of the constitutive individuals, bourgeois empiricism and democratic fetishism as the only authentic organs of knowledge and political expression of the apparently wholly spontaneously self-knowing class of autonomous individuals. Here lies the immediatist's essential confusion, mistaking the count of heads for the criterion of correctness, when the party's actual authority rests on something the referendum cannot supply: what our tradition calls the theory of rightness.

Dialectical Materialism Vs Solipsistic Nihilism

As we stated in our 1960 text, written in response to Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, A Condemnation of the Renegades to Come, the “theory of rightness” describes the relationship between the communist party, its programme, and the historical movement of the proletariat. The party does not derive the correctness of its political line from the immediate opinions or consciousness of the masses; it begins instead from the invariant Marxist programme and the accumulated theoretical and historical experience of the communist movement, using these to determine its strategy and tactics, making predictions and prescriptions to the class ahead of events. The party therefore precedes the masses politically without standing outside the class: it maintains contact with their struggles and seeks to raise their revolutionary capacity rather than adapting its political direction to their existing level of consciousness. Practice does not create the party’s programme after the fact; rather, the historical development of the struggle tests whether the party has correctly grasped the movement of the class and the conditions of its transformation. The party’s authority therefore rests not upon democratic ratification but upon the correctness of its programme and tactics, a correctness established theoretically in advance of events and verified only afterward as the masses pass through the historical experience the party has already anticipated. Legitimacy is not counted but demonstrated over time, in the political graveyard of the parties and tendencies whose false forecasts are discarded by the objective course of the class struggle.

Communization's lead theorist Gilles Dauvé claims that "presenting a possibility as a historical necessity always contains the risk of cultivating a mapped-out vision... determinism is teleology for the materialist". This rests on the same indeterminist confusion that the Communist Party has long identified as characteristic of bourgeois philosophy. Marxist determinism neither attributes a purpose to history nor predicts revolution as a prophetic certainty. It simply affirms that social development proceeds according to objective causal laws, in which the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production necessarily generate recurring crises, class antagonisms, and the material conditions for proletarian revolution. To deny historical necessity because it supposedly implies teleology is to sever causes from their effects, reducing history to a succession of contingent possibilities, individual immediate moments, in which revolution becomes merely one conceivable outcome among infinite others, rather than the objective tendency arising from capitalism itself. This rejection of necessity belongs to a long philosophical tradition stretching from the Young Hegelians through Nietzsche, Bergson, Sorel, and, later, Deleuze and Guattari, each displacing the motor of history from the objective development of material relations to subjective will, myth, desire, creativity, or lived experience. Communization inherits this same idealist current, locating the abolition of capitalism not in the historical development of class struggle and the conquest of political power but in the immediate ethical transformation of everyday life and the spontaneous affirmation of a human community against social mediation. The “insurrection” and the “revolt” of humanity, the “mythical” general strike only needs more communization believers.

Communization's appeal to probability, rather than necessity, is on inspection equally hollow. Probability was long defined as the ratio between the cases favourable to an event and the total number of cases, all assumed "equally probable", a definition that is circular, since "equally probable" means nothing other than "having equal probabilities". Even Poincaré conceded that a satisfactory definition of probability was beyond the mathematician's reach, that something in it remained irreducibly mysterious. Modern probabilism does not resolve this circularity but inverts it into a virtue, celebrating indeterminacy against the "dogmatism" it attributes to causal necessity. Marxist determinism needs no such apparatus: causality is not a chain of discrete events awaiting a probabilistic connector but runs like a rope, no single fibre spanning its whole length, yet their combined tension transmitting the pull unbroken from one end to the other. The class struggle propagates the same way, unevenly, through advance and retreat, but never severed. Only the party holds this thread through counter-revolution's darkest phases, tracing continuity where others see only rupture, because only the party is built to carry a theory of rightness across a defeat rather than surrendering it to one. As the Party argues in The Probabilities of the Revolution, probability is not the opposite of necessity but the form through which necessity manifests itself in complex historical processes: the exact timing of revolutionary crises cannot be mechanically predicted, but their objective causes remain no less real. By rejecting this causal continuity for an open-ended philosophy of possibility, communization abandons historical materialism for the "weak thought" bourgeois ideology embraces to deny the objective necessity of class struggle and the party's role as the thread connecting past defeats to future resurgence.

Because the party precedes the masses in this way, its internal discipline cannot rest upon the fluctuating opinions of its membership, nor upon pedagogical or formal democratic mechanisms, but upon fidelity to the historical programme itself. Its cohesion arises from the proletarian vanguard's instinctive and voluntary adherence to that programme, expressed in devotion, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and revolutionary continuity rather than the educationist cultivation of individual opinion. The party "links up" with the masses not by lowering itself to their prevailing level of consciousness, as opportunism imagines, but by raising the revolutionary temperature of the class through its intervention, transforming the shapeless working masses into a genuine historical class organized for political struggle as its forces grow in sync with the developing capitalist crisis.

Here communization reproduces the old immediatist illusion in a new shade. Having rejected both the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, it nevertheless assumes that the immense social coordination required to abolish wage labor, value, exchange, and class society will arise spontaneously from the proliferation of "communizing measures", as though conscious political organization could be dispensed with while its practical results somehow emerge of their own accord.

The theory of "rightness" rejects precisely this magical conception. The historical movement does not abolish the need for conscious organization; it produces the need for the only organization capable of anticipating its course and directing the transition in accordance with the invariant programme, the organic Party. Likewise, a workers' council, commune, or any other localist body that merely aggregates the present opinions of its constituent individuals possesses no comparable criterion of truth; it can only ratify what is already believed in the moment. It is therefore condemned to stupid immediacy, incapable of anticipating the course of history or extending its power beyond isolated centres; it just exists in the present moment like a zen monastic. Every defeat of the proletarian movement strengthened the immediatist conviction that political mediation and organization itself was the source of failure. Yet history demonstrated the opposite: wherever councils remained without the centralized leadership of the revolutionary party and the conquest of political power, economic revolt petered out leading to nothing other than a new method of managing the capitalist firm. We are supposed to be led to believe that it is the “bureaucracy”, the Party, domination and power itself which reproduces capitalism. When in reality it is the continued existence of fragmentary productive units forced into exchange relations. Relative economic autonomy and liberty is exactly the basis of the peasant proprietary economy which gave rise to capitalism itself and it’s what the communizers in all their monastic zeal imply in their proposals.

The Bugbear of “Bureaucracy” and the Modernizers Revelations

The error of this fixation on the bureaucratic bogeyman cannot be overstated. As we argued in On the Thread of Time: The Batrachomyomachia, the moment bureaucracy is elevated from an administrative function within definite class relations into an autonomous historical subject, Marxism's material analysis begins to disintegrate. The article rejects the notion that "bureaucracy" constitutes a class or mode of production in itself, insisting instead that "bureaucracy has never been a mode of production", but only "a form, an apparatus, a network of agents serving a dominant class". Once this distinction is abandoned, the Russian counter-revolution ceases to be explained through the historical defeat of the international proletariat, the isolation of the revolution, and the penetration of bourgeois influences into the workers' movement, and is instead reduced to the abstract triumph of "bureaucracy" or "power". The critique shifts from class content to organizational form, transforming Marxism into a moral condemnation of administration, authority, and centralization as such. This theoretical slide first found systematic expression in Socialisme ou Barbarie, survived in the Trotskyist theories of the "bureaucratic caste" and "bureaucratic collectivism", and today reaches its logical conclusion in communization and the broader anarchist milieu, while persisting in diluted form within the liberal reformist labour left through its worship of horizontalism, decentralization, and anti-political activism. Having severed political forms from their class content, these currents can only conclude that every centralized organization reproduces domination, so that the revolutionary party and the dictatorship of the proletariat appear not as the indispensable instruments of communist revolution but as the primary obstacles to it.

Communization's claim that the defeats of the twentieth century inaugurated entirely "new conditions" or a fundamentally new stage of capitalism demanding the revision of the communist programme rests upon this same philosophical error. The "real subsumption", globalization, social factory, and total integration of the proletariat into capital that it presents as unprecedented historical developments are nothing other than the fuller unfolding of capitalist imperialism already charted by Marx and developed systematically by Lenin. The concentration and centralization of capital, the extension of the world market, the subsumption of every sphere of life beneath commodity production, and the continual transformation of social relations were never unforeseen ruptures requiring a new doctrine, but precisely the historical tendencies classical Marxism anticipated. Yet the declassed intelligentsia and labour-aristocratic milieu emerging from the defeats of 1968 could no longer conceive of their own historical role within this process. Confronted with the temporary stabilization of imperialism, they mistook a conjunctural defeat of the proletariat for its permanent historical integration into capital, reproducing the bourgeois mythology of the "end of history". From this, followed a retreat into bourgeois naturalism and humanism and its associated idealist obscurantism: political revolution gave way to ethical self-transformation, the dictatorship of the proletariat to the immediate dissolution of identities, and scientific historical materialism to the empiricism of lived experience. How bold! How brave! Our renegades! Instead of recognizing that capitalism was merely confirming the trajectory already explained by Marx and Lenin, communization trumpets to the cheer of every bourgeois that Marxism itself had been superseded, the working class defeated!

A Return to Bourgeosis Naturalism

The philosophical tendency Lenin identified in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism did not disappear with Machism but re-emerged after the Second World War in the neo-Hegelian current of Western Marxism, a tradition today perpetuated by obscurantist celebrities such as Slavoj Žižek, who continue to attempt to relocate the center of Marxism from the objective movement of material relations to philosophy, subjectivity, and ideology. Against the materialist conception of history, thinkers such as Lukács increasingly shifted emphasis from the objective laws of capitalist development toward consciousness, reification, and subjective praxis, reopening precisely the idealist problems Marx had overcome. Lenin opposed this neo-Hegelian revival separately from his earlier polemics, rejecting attempts to subordinate Marxism to Hegelian philosophy and insisting that dialectical materialism remained the indispensable scientific foundation of revolutionary theory. The Situationist International inherited this Western Marxist turn and became one of communization's principal intellectual antecedents. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord famously defined modern capitalism as a condition in which "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation". Although presented as a critique of capitalist social relations, the emphasis shifts from the objective relation of exploitation to its forms of appearance, mediation, and lived experience. Capital increasingly is presented not as an objective social relation rooted in the extraction of surplus value but as a domination of consciousness to be overcome through recovering authentic experience.

Here the influence of empirio-monist and neo-Hegelian assumptions becomes apparent: alienation is understood less through the material relation between capital and wage labour than through the mediation of consciousness itself, reducing revolutionary politics to the dissolution of ideological forms rather than the conquest of political power. The revolutionary problem consequently becomes one of breaking the "spell" of representation, uncovering an authentic natural human community supposedly concealed beneath capitalist appearances, captured in the Situationist slogan of finding the "beach beneath the street". In this way, the material struggle over State power gives way to the immediate transformation of lived experience, preparing the theoretical ground for communization's claim that revolution consists in the direct abolition of capitalist social relations without the mediating role of the revolutionary party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the transitional political struggle through which Marxism has always explained the path to communism. In abandoning the objective material development of society as the basis of revolutionary science, this tradition also abandons the materialist understanding of class rationality itself. Consciousness ceases to be the product of the historically developed human brain interacting with an objective world within a human society defined by definite class antagonisms and instead becomes the privileged site of generalised human emancipation.

Italian Operaismo and the later writings of Jacques Camatte supplied communization with its final conceptual elements. Operaismo dissolved the critique of exploitation into a generalized refusal of work and the notion of the "social factory", while Camatte progressively dissolved the proletariat itself into an undifferentiated humanity subsumed by capital. After the defeats of the 1970s, these currents increasingly abandoned the workers' movement for the bourgeois academy, where figures such as Antonio Negri became integrated into the post-1968 French philosophical establishment surrounding institutions like the Collège international de philosophie and the broader milieu of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other post-structuralist theorists who were enlisted into the ranks of the French State to establish the philosophical basis for the further attack on Marxist conceptions, amid the so called “deindustrialization” and the opening of the new phase of renewed capitalist economic crisis and State restructuring in the period.

There the political defeat of the proletariat was recast as a philosophical virtue, translated into the language of postmodernism, cultural theory, and identity, far removed from the terrain of class struggle. Although communization rejects Camatte's abandonment of class struggle in its most explicit form, it preserves the essential movement this entire degenerated camps uninspired defeatist thought. The proletariat no longer appears as the historically constituted class but a group which simply must abandon "work" and the "worker" as an identity category for the revolution to succeed. A fighting ideology for a vacillating intelligencia to justify their class treachery and abandonment of the proletarian cause to serve the bourgeois in salaried university positions. Yet for the masses of workers who have to work to live or face the jack boot of the capitalist State police or starvation in the streets such a fantastic tale holds little weight.

From the genius mind of Camatte, whose thought would go on to inspire the noble anarcho-primitivist tradition, moving innumerable trust fund kids and declassed youth of the white middle class across North America into lunatic buckskin-wearing antics “rewilding” & evading “domestication” in the wilderness now consumed with apocalyptic wildfires on an annual basis, came another novel theory of new “stages” of capitalism that fundamentally changed the game. We are told that under the first stage of formal subsumption, capital merely takes hold of an existing labour process without transforming it; the worker retains a certain exteriority to capital, a residual identity against which the affirmation of labour as the basis of a future society could still make sense. Under real subsumption, by contrast, capital remakes the labour process, and with it the worker, entirely in its own image: the working class no longer confronts capital as an external antagonist but is itself constituted, reproduced, and defined by capital's own movement. From this, Théorie Communiste draws the conclusion that the worker's very identification as a worker, and the struggles waged on that basis, no longer point beyond capitalism but circulate within it, since the category "worker" is now nothing other than a moment of capital's own reproduction. The affirmation of labour, once the rallying point of “programmatism”, is thus recast as complicity: to organize as a class is, on this account, merely to perform one's assigned function within real subsumption, to willingly perpetuate capitalism itself, reinforcing the very relation it claims to negate. The solution? The declassed middle class should get comfortable with their proletarianization and potential pauperization, idolize the lumpen and become lifestyle anarchists, anything but organize and constitute itself as a class. Through Camatte's theory of domestication, Zerzan's anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization, and Kaczynski's anti-technological philosophy, an anti-civilizational milieu emerged that increasingly abandoned the Marxist question of class and programme in favour of humanity's flight from civilization itself. While neither Camatte nor Zerzan advocated the nihilistic violence later embraced by eco-extremists, their rejection of industrial society, domestication and progress became part of the wider intellectual atmosphere from which groups such as Individualists Tending toward the Wild (ITS) selectively drew, combining these themes with anti-humanism, misanthropy, and an explicit celebration of indiscriminate violence. Parallel currents within insurrectionary anarchism likewise displaced the proletariat and the communist party with diffuse networks of affinity groups, spontaneous attack, sabotage and permanent revolt, treating insurrection not as a moment within a historical programme but as an end in itself. Despite their differences, both tendencies converge in replacing the communist movement with immediate acts of negation, abandoning the Marxist conception of revolution as the organised political conquest of power by the proletariat in favour of fragmented resistance against "civilization", "technology", or "authority" as such.

Back to Tribal Primitivism or Proudhondian Peasant Capitalism?

Modern communizers have attempted to salvage this tradition by stripping it of its most overtly extremist conclusions and presenting it in a more theoretically respectable form, but the underlying method remains unchanged. What once appeared as the cult of immediacy in Sorel or the councilists now returns clothed in the language of "communization", horizontalism, and local autonomy. As this current diffused into the milieu surrounding The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, and adjacent anarchist circles, its practical horizon steadily contracted toward mutual aid, affinity groups, occupations, autonomous zones, and prefigurative forms of life, converging in practice with the logic of liberal non-profit volunteerism and community activism. The movement itself becomes everything, the end nothing; survival within capitalism gradually replaces the revolutionary conquest of power as the practical horizon. When these fragmented experiments predictably fail to overcome the social totality, the explanation is never sought in the absence of centralized political power capable of generalizing the revolution, but instead in the supposed incompleteness of the rupture itself, demanding only a purer immediacy next time.

This outlook ultimately reproduces the very Proudhonism Marx spent decades demolishing, while lacking even Proudhon's willingness to confront the concrete economic implications of his own proposals. Marx's critique was never directed merely against exchange or money in isolation, but against the illusion that commodity production could be abolished while society remained divided into autonomous producers. Later, the same methodological weakness resurfaced in Socialisme ou Barbarie, where the party rightly criticized the councilist fetish of self-management for mistaking the administration of separate enterprises for the abolition of capitalist social relations. Modern communization inherits precisely this illusion, but evacuates even the serious engagement with the material problems of reproduction, planning, and social coordination that earlier heterodox currents at least attempted. Its categories remain aesthetic and moral rather than economic. Separate productive units, local communes, occupations, or neighbourhood assemblies are simply presumed to dissolve the value relation by virtue of their form, despite every historical experience demonstrating the opposite.

This contradiction appears clearly in the historical experiences communization celebrates. Revolutionary communes, workers' collectives, neighbourhood assemblies, and local organs of self-management are treated as anticipations of communism because they begin to suppress money, wages, or commodity exchange within their immediate sphere. Yet wherever these experiments remained isolated, they were compelled to reintroduce mediation between independent productive units. The experience of the Spanish collectives demonstrates this with particular clarity. Labour-time accounting, barter, local currencies, and exchange between enterprises did not arise because the revolutionaries lacked sufficient revolutionary enthusiasm. They arose because separate productive units necessarily confront one another as separate economic entities unless production is consciously organized on the scale of society as a whole. Exchange reappears wherever political centralization is absent; the molecular fragmentation of both economic production and social forms inevitably reasserts itself the moment no centralized organ exists capable of holding the whole together, exactly as it did in every council-communist and factory-council experiment before it. This was already the substance of Marx's critique of Proudhon: abolish money while preserving independent producers, and the value relation simply assumes another form. Modern communization merely repeats the error while refusing even to investigate its determinate economic consequences.

Secret societies composed of individuals in positions of power, formed for the purpose of influencing elements of bourgeois society, have existed and grown for centuries. Freemason societies emerged from English trade guilds of aristocrats, the gentry, master craftsmen, artisans, and petty professionals like doctors and lawyers in the early 18th century, forming Grand Lodges as male-only, but otherwise “egalitarian” spaces for discussion and debate over science and philosophy. More importantly, Freemasons sought to use the Lodges to trade skill knowledge and improve their own standings and the reach of their class outside the censorious influence of the British monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. Class rifts between the aristocrats and gentry and the petty-bourgeois elements split the Masons into two different factions in the mid-1700s, namely the “Modernists,” made up of the former, and the “Ancients,” of the latter. The split emerged as a consequence of the British aristocratic class’ fear of the rapid rise of the Ancients, whose lodges were known to be hotbeds for the lower-middle-class early bourgeoisie to promote anti-taxation sentiment and republicanism; desiring to maintain their class positions and marginalize the nascent organizations of the small capitalists, the Hanoverian monarchy began influencing the Freemasons through the Modernist precursors, directly leading to the split.

In modern times, far from the days of such monarchical and religious domination, these societies are deeply integrated and numerous throughout the ranks of the mature bourgeoisie at elite educational and religious institutions, designed to eliminate competition from outside bourgeois elements. Such groups, including Yale University’s Skull and Bones, the University of Virginia’s Seven Society, California’s Bohemian Grove, the Catholic Opus Dei, and many others operate on the same principles; strictly and entirely bourgeois formations whose purpose is no longer to question and subvert kings and aristocrats, but to facilitate, manipulate, and ultimately preserve the vast wealth of capital, with only the veneer of the Freemasons’ philosophical lineage left to provide a cover of the Lodges’ lofty historical bourgeois ideals. It would be a mistake to fetishize the secrecy of the venue itself. Whether the bourgeoisie assemble at private islands or within the corridors of Capitol Hill or corporate boardrooms, the particular setting is of secondary importance to the class function it serves. In the period before the maturation of the capitalist firm and the consolidation of monopoly capital, the Lodge was a necessary instrument by which a rising class could coordinate with its aims beyond the reach of monarchy, church, and public alike.

Thus, we arrive at the present day, and the recent revelations made public by a June 2026 leak of the Dialog organization, founded in 2006 and currently led by two men: Peter Thiel, the chairman of technology-development company Palantir; and Auren Hoffman, former CEO of mobile device location data broker SafeGraph. Both men and their companies are extraordinarily wealthy and heavily invested in the sphere of data aggregation and analysis; while Palantir provides software to integrate and analyze massive data assets, SafeGraph functions as a data-as-a-service (DaaS) company, gathering high-resolution geospatial and location datasets that clients feed into platforms, even including those of Palantir itself. Of these two figures it is Thiel who most fully embodies the fusion of private capital and State power emblematic of every modern capitalist State government. Palantir, seed-funded by the CIA’s venture arm in the years after the 2001 9/11 attacks, has grown from a minor intelligence contractor into a pillar of the American surveillance State; its federal contracts swelled from some $4m in 2009 to over $500m in 2024, and then nearly doubled again to almost $1b in 2025 alone. This ascent has proven utterly indifferent to which faction of the bourgeoisie occupies the White House; under Biden, Palantir CEO Alex Karp trumpeted his loyalty to the Democratic Party even as the firm’s contracts multiplied, and across both Trump administrations, Thiel bankrolled the campaigns of Trump and of his protégé, Vice President J.D. Vance, a former employee of Thiel’s own investment fund, while Palantir burrowed ever deeper into the machinery of the State. Under the current Trump administration it has been enlisted to weld tax, immigration, and medical records together into a searchable apparatus, furnish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with the means to hunt and deport, and keep a strict watch over the US government’s own workforce. Asked directly whether such tools amount to surveillance, Karp answered that the data of the State’s enemies flows into Palantir’s product and that he “completely” supports it. Thiel, repudiating even the democratic illusion of bourgeois liberalism in professing that he no longer believes “freedom and democracy are compatible,” and Karp have built a surveillance machine inlaid with a doctrine of “hard power” in permanent war, the killing of workers abroad and their absolute surveillance worldwide.

The revelations of June this year exposed some interesting movements of the tech-dev bourgeoisie that spell an ominous development our Party has forecasted for decades. The leaks provided a list of over 200 registrants, nearly 100 of them first-timers, that spans the world’s most powerful governments, companies, and militaries, including, but certainly not limited to, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Affinity Partners CEO Jared Kushner, Senators Ted Cruz and Cory Booker, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and General Alexus Grynkewich, and many more. 2025 plans for a Dialog campus near Washington, DC were also within the leaked information. Among the topics to be discussed at the organization’s Dublin retreat in August were the typical bourgeois individualist and spiritualist fares, including leadership vanity, “money buying happiness,” political party- and cult-building, and a meeting space for all of these powerful individuals to form relationships with one another, mirroring the Masonic interpersonal mingling spaces with a modern sheen. Of the utmost importance here, however, are sessions titled “Battlefield Technologies,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” and “Navigating World War III,” a few confirmations among many of our Party’s analytical observations of the state and trends of global capitalism and world politics since the end of the Second World War.

It must be emphasized, however, that these sessions reveal the impotence of the ruling class before the movement of its own system. That the most powerful capitalists, statesmen, and generals on Earth can do no more than convene panels to “navigate” a great conflict they are unable to prevent is a confession of their inadequacy. Marxist economics, divorced from all pretenses presuming direct bourgeois control over the particulars of the international movement of capital, notes the presence and heightening of the many contradictions present in every part of capitalist economy, spawned solely from capitalism’s inability to overcome crises of overproduction without some form of conflict. Capital accumulates without limit or plan, and as it does, the mass of dead labor, machinery, plant, fixed capital, grows relative to the living labor that alone produces new value, and the rate of profit tends to fall. The bourgeoisie answers the falling rate by producing yet more, more cheaply, on a still greater scale, until the world market can no longer absorb what has been produced. As such, capitalism enters a crisis with too many commodities, too many factories, and too much capital desperately seeking a profitable outlet. Capitalism cannot resolve this contradiction from within, only destroy the excess and begin again; throughout history, the supreme instrument of that destruction is war. War annihilates commodities, production facilities, and whole cities of accumulated capital, liquidating the surplus population of workers that the shrunken market can no longer employ through horrific violence on a mass scale. Out of the devalorization it accomplishes, it clears the ground for a fresh cycle of accumulation.

In the United States, the global hegemon for eight decades, massive debt growth and the increasingly-obvious erosion of any ability to even maintain interest payments for, let alone pay off, such debt has driven the country into a period of economic redirection toward domestic manufacturing, tariff-led export reduction, and military buildup, which threatens to push the world into a period of warfare between the great powers not seen since 1945. What we are currently witnessing is the buildup to this period, a militarization of the economy: the redirection of large swathes of capitalist society’s productive powers toward guns, bombs, shells, warships, and armed aircraft and drones, presented by the capitalists to the working population as the prosperity of new jobs and security through nationalistic propaganda. For one example, US budgeting for shipbuilding alone has drastically surged by nearly 250% since its 2025, in its 2026 budget, directly related to military ventures in Iran and the coming showdown with China in the Pacific. The declining hegemon, unwilling to concede its position and unable to sustain it by economic means alone, is drawn toward the settlement of accounts by force. The various ongoing proxy conflicts of the decade, from Ukraine, Iran, and Palestine to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Myanmar, provide a grim snapshot of the sheer brutality and abject depravity of the violence to come. As the shadow of war looms ever greater over the globe, the world’s bourgeoisies have played a direct role in reorganizing their nations’ economies in preparation, and Dialog’s sessions, no doubt explicitly addressing the American and European need for powerful and well-funded armed forces, could not more clearly highlight this awareness.

In the face of the coming storm, our Party reaffirms its position, held since the days of the First World War: armed conflict between States cannot be abolished while its cause, capital, remains in command of production. Ceasefires and peace talks are at best tragic illusions, and at worst a mere interval of rearmament between one round of slaughter and the next, a breathing space in which the ruling classes gather their strength; the worker is taught to identify with “their own nation” in peacetime no less than in war. Against the fraternity of the exploiters gathered at Dublin, the proletariat must forge its own weapons, prepared in advance: the revolutionary party that gathers the lessons of the class’s struggles and directs them toward the conquest of power; class unions revitalized as organs of combat and oriented resolutely away from the ruling class and its parties rather than chained to them; and, as the end toward which both are bent, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which alone can break the power of capital at its root. Workers of all countries must refuse the false unity of the nation and recover that of class, across every border the bourgeoisie has drawn. No matter the epoch, the enemy is not the worker in the opposing trench or barracks, but the ruling class in its own country. The proletariat must take their ongoing battles over wages, hours, and conditions into a general struggle against rearmament and militarization, and ultimately for the revolutionary transformation of imperialist war into civil war against the bourgeoisie in every land. Either the bourgeois war for the preservation of capitalism, a system of production that kills workers and destroys their livelihoods as an intrinsic part of its cycles, or the international communist revolution for its abolition; there is no third option. As the capitalist order prepares for war between nations, the proletariat must prepare for war between classes.

Deportation Campaigns Update

Over the past few months, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its internal deportation wing, Immigration and Customs enforcement (ICE) have caused quite the stir in the bourgeois press; namely murdering yet more immigrants in their drive to discipline the proletariat and manage the surplus army of labor.

The recent deaths of Lorenzo Salgado, a small construction owner, on July 7th and Joan Sebastian Guerrero on July 13th, a delivery driver, whom were killed back to back by federal agents shows the recent escalation of the immigration efforts headed under the hospices of the conservative wing of the bourgeoisie. These developments occurred right after the recent surge in deportations at the end of June which resulted in 10,000 arrests in a span of 5 days at the request of the Trump administration to ramp up arrests to 2,000 a day- a doubling of last year's quota.

Instead of the high profile campaigns which hit the urban centers during the previous year and up to the beginning of the current one, the administration has opted for more low profile campaigns. Despite the clamoring of the ‘left’, who made boastful declarations about the apparent success of the so-called ‘general strike’ which occurred in Minneapolis, the terror facing immigrant workers continues for the most part uninhibited.

On the judicial side of this development, the supreme court voted 6 to 3 against Trump’s drive to deny birthright citizenship to children of immigrants while still upholding the end of the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Syrians, and other nationalities. This follows the end of the TPS for the hundreds thousands of Venezuelans from last year and shows that the State is continuing to clear the way for further removal of immigrant workers. This trend is likely to continue as legal hurdles to expedite deportations are increasingly established; from the removal of protective statuses, mass deportation hearings, and appointed deportation judges which are but symptoms of capital's need to streamline the process with which it can shed unneeded workers as the economy begins its downward spiral into another overproduction crisis.

Deaths continue to rise within the ICE detention facilities, to a total of 56 by June, the conditions within these encampments are well documented to be deplorable, with detained immigrants deprived of even the most basic necessities and healthcare, resulting in deaths and permanent damage to their bodies—not to mention the rampant physical and sexual abuse done on detainees by the prison operators. On top of this, the detained immigrants are forced to work under slave wages; in some cases as low as $1/day to get what they need from commissaires which price gouge items.

Hunger and labor strikes on the part of detained immigrants have occurred at detention centers in New Jersey, Washington, and California. The facility in Delaney, New Jersey was the epicenter of a 300 strong hunger and labor strike that began in May and lasted until, in June, it was violently ended by federal agents and GEO group contractors. The response from workers and other elements to protest and support the effort was met with the usual repressive reaction from the State with its police forces. Likewise the local democratic party apparatus played the counterpoint by confronting the situation with its toothless due process in the courts, effectively shrouding the event in a political smokescreen.

What we are witnessing here is the complex of federal, local and private entities acting to coordinate the infrastructure for detaining and holding immigrants destined for deportation. It takes a grotesque form through the relationship between the State and private contractors which profiteer from this arrangement through multi-million dollar contracts based on guaranteed payouts per number of beds, low wage labour, and cutting corners on materials and staffing for maintenance. It is the logic of capital in action. Firms profit from providing carceral services at the lowest price–nothing new in the United States.

In 2025 alone, the biggest private prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic made $2.1 billion and $600 million dollars, respectively. This industry, beyond enriching the firms directly involved, also serves the interests of American capitalism as a whole which is contending with an economic downturn that has forced it to discipline and control the supply of the low ‘skill‘ wage markets–that is the labour power that due to its place of origin is cheaper than the native labour power and which requires less training to put to use in the process of capital accumulation. In short, the proletariat is attacked by the needs of capital and it finds itself for the time being defenseless in spite of the apparent support by its ‘allies’.

False ‘Friends’

The primary 'opposition' presented by bourgeois ideology to the terror which is inflicted upon immigrant workers is, of course, the Democratic party and its team of tail riders: the activists and pseudo Marxist parties, who propagate the idea that the terror can be ended through immigration reform or, according to the more radical elements, that the State's immigration enforcement apparatus can be abolished while the State itself is left whole.

Whereas Democrats have rallied under a more humane angle sporting their usual crocodile tears and whose calls amount to restrictions on force, removal of ICE agents masks and implementation of body cameras. Some have even gone far and put signs on public parking lots that bar ICE agents from parking. They have also called for legal pathways to certain sections of immigrants noting their importance to the economy. Their main critique boils down to the State machinery built for the forceful deportation, always a violent endeavor, to be put under control. Like putting a muzzle and leash on a wolf instead of slaughtering it. We need only to look at their track record, which we have covered in detail in previous issues, to see that the Democrats have never shied away from imposing the same terror against the immigrant population when the needs of capital required it. Even when they render some palliative care from time to time, to certain sections of immigrants (DACA, TPS, etc) we should not confuse the matter as an act of charity but as a response by a faction of the bourgeoisie which finds it more useful to integrate certain immigrants for the purpose of stabilizing capitalist relations. In fact, if we observe the political program of the Democrats as it pertains to the immigrant question we will soon find them in good company with their comrades in the Republican party.

During the Biden administration, we saw the ‘New Democrat Coalition’, which is the largest Democratic coalition in the House of Representatives, advocate for "stronger and smarter border security and modernization of the immigration system". For the Democrats, it's a matter of protecting the border more efficiently with the latest technology and proper staffing at the entry points. By modernizing, they refer to the legal channels that allow certain immigrants (e.g. agriculture, educated) to gain some level of protection and normalization, that is, those who ‘meet the needs of American businesses’ in order to ‘meet labor market demands—because it’s good for business and for consumers.’ Don’t we also see here the same objective by the republicans at controlling immigration? Both attempt to restrict the influx of immigrant workers, one has taken a draconian approach by increasing the intensity and number of removals from the interior, the other has opted to normalize a pathway to allow certain sections in provided they are needed in industries. Despite the approaches and the terror unleashed by the more reactionary faction, both directions of the bourgeois wings ultimately serve their master–capital.

On the other hand we have the ‘leftists’, rallying around the ‘Abolish ICE’ slogan, that is to dismantle this State machinery. Upon first glance this message might seem to merit support, it appears to speak to the immediate needs of the immigrant proletariat but fails under the most basic of scrutiny. What does abolishing ICE entail to these pseudoradicals? ICE or the DHS is a body of the State no different than the military, police, prison or its courts. In short, it is a part of the complex machinery of the State of which historic necessity has imparted the American bourgeoisie to develop. For ones who claim heritage to Marxism, it is quite odd to abolish part of a State and not the whole apparatus which is but a logical conclusion and impossible otherwise. More accurately it is the historic lesson imparted from the great French Commune of 1871. Therefore, to stealthily divert the historic mission of the Proletariat with subpar substitutes is to substitute the Proletariat as the historic subject for revolution with other subjects. To whom these subjects are we will soon see.

These ‘leftists’, can be described not by what they proclaim to be but by their activities, that is, the object of which these organizations conduct their efforts. For these opportunists’ radicalism entails its attachment and its sanctification to the democratic regime and parliamentary methods. In essence, it clings to the belief in the State as a neutral arbiter of society. It is no sheer coincidence that we find no better environment for these putrid ideas than the bastions of the bourgeois ideology, the universities with its declassed students and the petty bourgeoisie. From here we can start to understand why ‘Smash the State’ transmutates to the ‘Abolish ICE’. For the petty bourgeoisie, whose needs align with the Proletariat in relation to the immigration campaign in so far as it seeks to establish stable conditions for its own survival. That is, a stable market and cheap labor power of which the recent campaigns had jeopardized. It is their inter-class alliance that ultimately gets prioritized over working class independence that guides their activity and which puts the petty bourgeoisie at the head of their movements as we can see at their promotion of economic blackout by small businesses affected by their loss of cheap labour. We are not afraid to point out the limitations of this alliance: the small bourgeois having no program of their own vacillating between the bourgeois and proletariat upon the giving economic conditions are a doomed class with no political perspective. For them, their social relationship to the proletariat is no different to the big bourgeoisie despite their monopolistic tendencies for they both depend on extracting surplus value from the proletariat. Even, the small shopkeeper whose only employee are themselves, suffer an ironic faith by exploiting themselves pushed to the brink of economic failure because they, who produce commodities, find themselves in markets that imposed economic realities that push their small capitals to annihilation.

It is not surprising that we do not see demands for workers for higher wages and workplace protections, instead we see worker’s rights which in this day and age mean the rights of the commodity owner of labour-power, for these demands will antagonize or alienate certain sections of the petty bourgeois. Their class position as purchasers of labour power demands that they purchase this surplus producing commodity at the lowest possible price-one which immigrant labour power satifies. Workers gain nothing from sacrificing their political needs to these classes of property owners whose pathetic appearance in relation to the bigger monopolistic capital firms never aims at their liberation but subservience to their own pathetic capitals. While these ‘parties’ pay lip service to understanding the State as a tool of the ruling class, or part of it, it functions as a social dam to channel the tide of proletariat frustration to the democratic regime which is painted as the solution for the brewing crisis.

The Historic Epoch

Let's draw back briefly on the history of this immigration apparatus our party has undertaken. To reveal to these historical characters their impotence in understanding the situation, beforehand blinded by their class prejudices. How their poles of resistance are nothing but a dead end for the defence of the immigrant workers and to an extension all workers. For our part, we are no better than them for we too are prejudiced but for our class against all others.

American History, and to an extent any nation dealing with importation of labour power, has shown that once a cycle of capitalist production wanes its treatment of these sections of workers is similar to its dealings with an overproduction of commodities- their expulsion or destruction. We can recall othermass episodic immigration expulsions: the 1930s repatriation campaigns during the Great Depression, Operation Wetback after the Korean War, and now the ICE campaigns that started in 2008, peaked in 2012 under the Obama administration and once again are picking back up. However, the American bourgeoisie has found itself needing to extend its control of the influx of immigrants pouring into the United States outside its national borders. Initiatives such as Frontera del Sur in 2014, under the Obama administration, extended immigration operations down at the Mexican and Guatemalan borders, with cooperation of its nation’s bourgeois, to limit the unprecedented number of migrants coming from central and South America. These developments that this recent terror campaign and upsurge in deportations, along with the development of infrastructure both internally and externally in the US, is but the latest chapter of the economic crisis gripping the United States.

This has come to fruition despite the change of heads and tactics. Because what is in front of us is not simply the machinations of one man however it may present themselves to us but rather it is the needs of capital that ultimately are served by controlling and managing the cheap sources of labour. The ‘material’ for the accumulation of capital. As the bourgeoisie grapple with the economic contradictions it will not be the Democrats or the other opportunist parties who cling on its teat, but rather workers who in response to the attacks of capital to living conditions will come to confront the whole complex of capitalist reproduction. We already saw how immigrant workers have begun to move at the JBS strike despite the limitations and sabotage by its union. In fact, this is the thing they fear! The spread of class militancy that might awaken the American proletariat. And in that fight it will be the message and guidance of its party who will bear in concrete language its demands:

Higher wages and better working conditions!

Shorter workday!

Class strike!

End of Wage Labour!

In the absence of a general working class movement, bourgeois law has come to give grace to the immigrant worker. It presents itself as the only way forward for the demoralized and terrified immigrant who has come to this nation out of necessity and where they find themselves entangled in social relationships foreign to them, insofar as the form is different from their place of origin, and who naturally harbors suspicion towards these apparatuses. This is no coincidence; the immigrant worker more so than their native counterparts, have become subject to the more intensive exploitation by the domestic capitalist class who ruthlessly look to accumulate profit at highest rate possible, undercutting domestic workers by entrapping immigrants who can more easily be relegated to intense work in industries paying low wages, conditions which the bourgeois State and its legal apparatus maintain. The law, or the legal relationships that define present capitalist society, has its basis solely in the interests of the class of wage labor exploiters and finance parasites, thus any judicial movement must jump, prance, and somersault into these beloved courts of the exploiters and seek their sympathy.

Its omnipresence seeps into the plethora of experiences of the immigrant worker facing the State apparatus, from judicial proceedings, immigrant hearings, and deportation cases. It can be seen in the news on immigration policy updates, the billboards of immigrant lawyers, and current cases in the grand supreme courts that set the norm for all within the boundaries of the United States. To what degree should workers pay attention to these proceedings? What does it entail for the current horizon of the unmobilized worker’s movement? For the small minority of militant workers? The fact of the matter is that little can be done at this stage besides clarifying the matter. Not because we wish so, but by the lucid fact that the class is largely inert and atomized. However, it will be through this clarity that will inform the future struggles of the immigrant workers, who have the capacity to be the most militant element, as shown through historical experience, and who have upon them the great hurdles of overcoming the inertia of class defeat which can be gained to some degree through their struggles to protect their interests, but alongside this path will be the old and developed forms of class containment- reform and legalistic channeling. This series of articles aims at investigating the legal form, historical conditions, and rights that are “granted” to immigrants- a subsection of the broader working class.

Background

Pashukanis’ The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924) is a work developed in the last episode of class struggle following the 1917 revolution, one which laid a materialist investigation of the legal relations by expanding on Marx’s understanding of the legal form which arose with the rise of bourgeois society in contrast to the bourgeois theories of law like those of John Locke with ‘natural law’ and Hans Kelsen’s “positive law” which reflect the two episodes of the rule of capital. The former maintained a connection between the legal relation and the principles of the new historical class which justified itself by ‘reason’ or its philosophy of justice against the feudal order. On the other hand, the latter saw legal relation as a science that sees itself solely concern with the practice of law and cleave itself from the philosophy of justice with its ‘irrational ideal’ or ‘judgements based on emotional factors’ including the social reality of law which aim at looking at jurisprudence as what it is. This reflects the two periods of bourgeois society, the first ‘natural’ law was the epoch of the bourgeois revolutions as this class attacked the order of the feudal aristocracy envisioning a break of the relations impeding the development of individual property and capital - i.e. capitalism with it came new forms of understanding how to manage society including law. Once the bourgeois order had stabilized at the end of the 19th century, the investigation of the law form was relegated to justifying the social relations it had ushered and the maintenance its State apparatus including its judicial arms to simply practicing law since it had no other class to attack for supremacy, just the proletariat to subjugate. Pashukanis’ seminal work ought to be read by those inquiring into the legal developments of bourgeois society still dominating today. It is Marxism's response to bourgeois ‘legal positivism’ by investigating the legal relationship outside the narrow limits of jurisprudence connecting the law form with the social relationship integrating the historical character of law and tying it with the elements of bourgeois society, particularly commodity production. In fact, it is this connection that closely ties the legal relations to commodity production that would eventually come in conflict with the Stalinist counterrevolution's theory of ‘Socialist’ and ‘Proletarian’ Law’, which eventually got its author purged in 1937. While recognizing the class character of law, it would be hostile to the assertion that law as a historical form will cease to be, just like the State under communist society for the elimination of commodity production removes the social basis for the necessity of exchange-based value and the necessary legal framework to assume such economic activities. Thus, ‘socialist’ law found it better to base itself on the legal positivism of the bourgeoisie, obtaining a ‘normative’ character that serves the general norm of a commodity producing society based on wage labour.

Law: Historical Manifestation of Social Relations

The atom of the law form begins with the subject, a peculiarity within a commodity producing society as Pashukanis notes in The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924).

He states that idealists “start with some general idea and develop the concept of the subject, i.e. in a purely speculative way, dogmatic jurisprudence uses this concept in a formal manner. For it, the subject is nothing more than ‘a means for the legal qualification of phenomena from the perspective of their suitability or unsuitability for participation in legal relations’”. In contrast, materialism asks the question of how man becomes a legal subject. The legal form of the subject which is bound by historical conditions. Therefore, one begins with looking at the social relations which in our era is the society of commodity producers, whose outward manifestation is the commodity, an object that besides its utility carries with it the language of exchange or simply value-social labor embodied.

In this world of commodity producers, mutual recognition of the rights of private proprietors rests on the economic relations between commodities, as embodiments of human labour and through mutual acts of exchange between equivalents. It is only through generalized bourgeois exchange relations that the concept of general rights can manifest. Prior to this development, in the limited, autocratic feudal economy, with commodity production taking a secondary role in production, rights were confined to the collective or groupings of men in association such as guilds, estates, cities, etc. They manifested themselves as privileges conferred within those collectives and recognised in the individual in so far as the extent of their activity in the associations. That is, the medieval right was constrained to the social organisms, not to the subjective individual. Only when commodity production was generalized, a home market developed and each individual producer engaged through this economic relationship of exchange and where the labour of man was elevated to equals on the general social sense (i.e. value) could rights extend beyond the narrow confines of feudal economic ties.

Law as exercised in our modern society, a legal authority of the State and its dominant class, produces the guarantees of peace necessary for exchange and transactions of capitalist society. Its public nature lends it a mask of justice which its general will means but the impersonal interest of the bourgeois class. This universal character which aims to paint justice as fair and equal to all citizens is but the legal reflection of a society of independent producers who relate to one another as producers of commodities. Thus the framework of law stems from these objective conditions that exist outside the legal confines of the judicial system. Therefore, it is not a contradiction that economic inequality exists outside the logic of the law so that we may find the worker and capitalist are both equal under law with rights. The social relation of labour and capital is never questioned but guaranteed under jurisprudence.

In fact, law or jurisprudence just like the State vanishes under the negation of the labour-capital relation that is communism. The basis of its upholding, commodity production, turns the legal form into a husk, as soon as production comes under the control of humanity and is geared to satisfy life’s wants behind a collective plan. This is because like the State apparatus which is used to exert the social power of one class over another withers away under the proletarian dictatorship once the bourgeoisie stops existing as a social class, relegating its oppressive duties to the dustbin of history. Law in a similar form vanishes as the legal relationships of subjects stemming from exchange value and individual proprietors are historically eliminated.

For workers, whose economic position deprived them of the tools, land, materials, or means of production, they possess nothing but their ability to work or their labour-power. Their rights are recognized as bearers of this commodity and in the bourgeois legal sense it is this quality that is recognized. But class domination goes beyond the official arena of State authority, as Pashukanis notes. It includes the “dependence of the government on banks and capitalist groups, workers dependence on employers, and a staff of the State apparatus personally connected with the ruling class” which escape the legal expression in clear terms. If in the beginning of the 20th century the material expression of class dominance was multifaceted, today it has taken grotesque forms with an a gross increase in the entanglement between the financial sector and the State apparatus, open corruption and financing of political parties (e.g. AIPAC), integration of unions into the State for legal recognition as guarantees of labor peace. Under these conditions, legal norms often come in contradiction with the objective social reality of capitalist economy so that it is often the case that the practice of law is entirely out of touch with reality. To investigate the current court battles in the supreme courts regarding the attacks by the capitalist class against the immigrant worker, it is not enough to limit oneself to the judicial theaters that have the pretension of solving the class contradictions, but to the economic reality plaguing the United States of an abundance in labour-power.

[To be continued]

On Wednesday, June 24, a violent earthquake with a seismic moment (Mo) of 7.2, followed by a second of 7.5 with its epicenter underground in the State of Yaracuy, struck northern and central Venezuela. Although the geophysical epicenter was located in the State of Yaracuy, where fortunately the damage to infrastructure was less severe, the destructive wave unleashed its true fury on major urban centers and coastal real estate developments: Caracas, La Guaira, Tucacas, Morón, and Puerto Cabello.

While the propaganda of the bourgeois press and local reformism shed crocodile tears invoking “national unity” and “patriotic solidarity,” the harsh reality of capitalist production relations imposes itself on the rubble.

Far from being a geological fatality, the material tragedy clearly demonstrates the communist thesis: nature ends up doing the dirty work that imperialist wars usually do, with the violent destruction of the productive forces and constant capital, which senile capitalism desperately needs, suffocated by its cyclical crises of overproduction.

Historical antecedents of the cynical recurrence of bourgeois negligence

The seismic history of the bourgeois Venezuelan republic is marked by catastrophes whose high human costs reflect the absolute subordination of housing construction to real estate rents and employers' profits.

1812 and 1900: Since the great earthquakes of the 19th century, the overcrowding of the workforce in vulnerable structures has highlighted the total indifference of the ruling classes towards the living conditions of the underprivileged.

The earthquake of July 29, 1967 (magnitude 6.5) set the modern precedent. The collapse of residential buildings in densely populated areas like Altamira and Los Palos Grandes (Caracas) exposed urban land speculation and the criminal use of cheap materials by the construction bourgeoisie. Nearly sixty years later, the geography of destruction is being repeated in the same municipalities of the capital and extends along the central coast, demonstrating that under capitalism there is no scientific memory, only the memory of dividends.

It is the Blood of the Workers that Fertilizes the Soil of the Tourist and Industrial Centers

Scientific estimates and initial local reports confirm the massive collapse of housing, hotel, and service infrastructure. The greatest damage is concentrated in the Capital District and the State of La Guaira (declared a disaster zone), as well as along the coastal axis of Tucacas, Morón, and Puerto Cabello. There have already been over 2,500 deaths, thousands injured, and a frightening figure of over 50,000 missing beneath destroyed structures. But the death toll will continue to rise until it almost coincides with the number of missing.

For capital, this leap in scale in death, from thousands to tens of thousands, is not a brake: it confirms the scope of the "freed up space" and the future surplus workforce that will be willing to accept the most miserable conditions in the reconstruction contracts that national and international construction companies will win.

Statistically, the human massacre has an unmistakable class connotation. It was, is, and will be primarily the blood of workers that was shed in these events. While the bourgeoisie and the upper bureaucracy took refuge in safe villas built according to rigorous engineering standards, the urban proletariat and service sector workers were buried alive.

The collapse ferociously hit the overcrowded public housing complexes of Caracas and La Guaira, as well as the hotel and commercial facilities of Tucacas and the Morón-Puerto Cabello axis, where workers flock to boost the regional tourism and port system. The wave of death and destruction unleashed by the earthquake did not strike a "happy world", a "paradise", but rather a region where the salaried population lives tormented by starvation wages, unemployment, inadequate nutrition, access to potable water, stable electricity, and an efficient healthcare system; in other words, a country where the full social impoverishment effect of the capitalist economy is visible.

False Solidarity and the Reconstruction Affair

After the disaster, the orgy of reconstruction will immediately begin, a lucrative banquet in which the imperialist powers and the factions of the local bourgeoisie will compete for shares of capital valorization in strategic areas for the bourgeois leisure market and manufacturing logistics.

1. The currency market exposes mercantile cynicism

While the population was dying under the rubble, the market economy demonstrated its total humanitarian indifference. Between June 24 and 30, the official dollar exchange rate published by the Central Bank of Venezuela soared from 621.52 bolívares to over 633.36, an increase of almost 12 bolívares in less than a week. This de facto devaluation, in the midst of the worst emergency of the century, demonstrates that the law of value and financial speculation know no respite or mercy.

In Venezuela, the government, business leaders, trade unions, and opportunists of all stripes had already demonstrated their "humanitarian" solidarity—that is, with the bourgeoisie—with the concerted declaration on May 1st not to increase paltry wages.

Meanwhile, as an example of business humanitarianism, 30 workers at the Catania supermarket in Puerto Cabello had to resign en masse when the owner tried to force them to work even though an adjacent building was tilted and at risk of collapsing onto that commercial premises.

2. The urban planning of disaster

In the coming days, bourgeois parties will unleash a sterile media polemic over the quality of materials and violations of building codes. This is an ideological smokescreen. The debate conceals the fact that many of these mega-constructions should never have existed. The capitalist mode of production irrationally attracts extremely high population concentrations in cities like Caracas and high-rise constructions devoid of any technical sense, with the sole purpose of maximizing land yield. This gigantism is particularly grotesque in the tourist area of ​​La Guaira and the coastal axis of Tucacas, Morón, and Puerto Cabello. These mass tourism developments, marina complexes, and vacation towers criminally attack the landscape and the environmental balance, having been erected on vulnerable lands solely for the purposes of money laundering, real estate speculation, and the appropriation of economic surpluses by the ruling class.

3. The imperialist landing of the United States

The emergency aid deployed by the United States government is not for philanthropic purposes. In the current context of occupation and de facto political tutelage in Venezuela, following the kidnapping of President Maduro last January, the US administration controls and blocks funds from Venezuelan oil sales abroad. Therefore, US imperialism controls the money and—under the guise of humanitarian assistance channeled through international agencies—will directly manage the awarding of multi-billion dollar contracts for the reconstruction of roads, ports, hotels, and housing. US construction companies are landing on the central and western coasts, along with their partners and front men from the local bourgeoisie (both from the traditional opposition and business cliques linked to the Bolivarian Republic, unconcerned about Maduro's replacement by Delsy Rodríguez) to share the spoils of rebuilding damaged infrastructure and reviving the lucrative beach tourism industry.

It is no coincidence or even a sign of philanthropy that the International Monetary Fund and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) announced, almost simultaneously and rapidly, the creation of special funds to finance the reconstruction of collapsed infrastructure. Multinational financial capital operates with the speed of a vulture: where reformism and civic sensibilities see a human tragedy, imperialist technocrats see an extraordinary window of opportunity to revive cycles of accumulation and credit servitude. These "emergency" credits are not donations; they constitute new sovereign debt that will fall directly on the shoulders of the Venezuelan working class through future austerity plans and regressive fiscal reforms. The IMF and the CAF intervene to protect the profits of the large construction monopolies, ensuring that the Venezuelan bourgeois State has the liquidity needed to pay the contracts of the multinationals and their local bourgeois partners, while implementing new mechanisms of financial blackmail.

The Real "Double Blow" is the Double Exploitation of Workers

The June 2026 catastrophe brings the cycle of wage labor exploitation to a close. It will be proletarian labor, faced with extremely precarious working conditions and starvation wages, that will have to clear the rubble and rebuild every luxury hotel, every port, and every destroyed building. Once reconstruction is complete, the laws of the capitalist market and its paltry wages will once again prevent them from accessing tourist infrastructure and decent housing.

The working class's only response to the speculative barbarity of the disaster is to break with the electoral farce, break with the traitorous union leaderships, and organize strikes for wage increases, pension increases, and shorter working hours. These will be increasingly widespread, coordinated, and united struggles, culminating in an indefinite general strike to achieve these goals, culminating in their revolutionary culmination in the seizure of political power by the working class, organized in genuine class-based unions and led by the International Communist Party, for the purpose of destroying the system of wage labor exploitation, which transforms the death of proletarians into oxygen for Capital.

What fuels violence in schools? The school shootings that occurred one after another last April brought long-standing debates in the US to Türkiye. Bourgeois authorities, attempting to profile children with the potential for armed violence, have resorted to solutions such as developing stricter control mechanisms in schools and labeling children deemed "socially maladaptive" as fitting the profile. The consequences of the education system, the family institution, and military strategies aimed at creating aggressive soldiers and competitive workers result in violence becoming even more widespread in working-class neighborhoods. Children who would be sent to the front lines are not only sent to school, but many are trained in a violent manner using numerous techniques to prepare them for combat on the battlefield. Much of this training returns to the children as physical and psychological violence from the adults around them.

There are some commonalities in school attacks of this type worldwide: easy access to weapons for children, the presence of adults around them who portray the violent tendencies of patriarchal culture as something to be proud of, and teachers' statements about the children having psychological problems. In capitalism, children, constantly pitted against each other, confined to patriarchal gender roles, and forced into isolated existences where they form their own values ​​within their virtual groups, become either killers or victims as a result of their isolation. This system controls large masses in working-class neighborhoods by teaching them to attack or to submit. Situations like school attacks are a consequence of the military propaganda applied, the investment in war technologies and the training of professionals who develop and use these technologies, and the rise of militaristic discourse in society, resulting in us seeing more violence in our daily lives: at home, at school, at work...

Children's safety is impossible under capitalist conditions! Within the exploitative capitalist system, children often develop numerous psychological problems: at home under the paternal authority representing the State, at school under the authority of the curriculum and educators, in competition with their peers, and in an environment where those who cannot adapt due to capitalist individualistic relationship patterns become isolated. In urban life, where there is little opportunity for young people to socialize healthily in safe spaces, they develop inadequately both physically and mentally. It is understandable that young people are angry, but the target of this anger is not their classmates or teachers, but the capitalist system itself. While this system transforms a group of young people into aggressive criminals, it turns many more into defenders of bourgeois culture who resign themselves to their fate or spend their lives pursuing petty interests.

The disorganization of the working class makes it easily manipulated; it prevents workers from engaging in class struggle by keeping them mired in internal conflicts. From childhood, people are categorized according to gender, race, intelligence type, and many other factors. The "self and the other" mentality is meticulously crafted by the system. Both constructs are used to create the "reasonable" individual who will ensure the continuation of capitalist society, either through violence or submission. The capitalist State operates through violence and obedience. The only way to resist it is to involve future workers in a culture of struggle through worker organizations and trade union activities. Students gain a better understanding of the conditions of their worker relatives and teachers, develop empathy, and form opinions about their own futures. Most importantly, they realize that the real harm comes from the capitalist system and its apparatus.

The truce signed on June 17 between Iran and the United States—a "remote" signing at the end of negotiations that excluded Israel—like the one signed last October for Gaza, also imposed by the US on its vassal Israel, and by Qatar and Turkey on their Hamas mercenaries. It will not usher in a new era of peace, nor a more modest return to the previous level of inter-imperialist tensions, which are still contained and have not erupted into an open regional conflict. The same will be true, if there is one, for a future truce in Ukraine.

We will not see a "new Middle East" feared by US and Israeli imperialism, nor a step toward the "more just" multipolar world touted by rivals to US imperialisms, competing with it for the division of world markets, that is, the surplus value extracted from the proletariat of all countries. These are truces that—like the conflicts they are suspending—are steps toward a new war between global imperialisms, the third with which capitalism is driven to afflict humanity.

The propaganda of the opposing sides confuses the working class and makes it difficult to understand the true nature of the conflict, into which all national bourgeoisies want to lead them, above the struggle to divide the spoils, to shed their blood in the imperialist war and not in the revolution for their social and political emancipation.

The first, most blatant lie, is that the US military intervention was aimed at overthrowing the Iranian regime. As with what happened in Venezuela in early January, what matters to them is the direction of the flow of oil and its revenues. Furthermore, those capitalist regimes—of "Bolivarian socialism" for 27 years and the Ayatollahs for 47—have proven to offer the best guarantees for the repression and subjugation of their own working class, and for diverting that of surrounding countries.

In South America—from Chile to Colombia, from Ecuador to Bolivia—the proletarian revolt is simmering and periodically flares up, challenging the bourgeoisie and threatening its investments, both domestic and international. The "Arab Spring" of 2010 and 2011 demonstrated that the same process is underway from the Maghreb to the Mashreq.

If the Iranian working class were to organize and mobilize against the Ayatollahs' regime, as it happened in Egypt under Mubarak, a social conflagration could spread throughout the region, breaking down the barrier between the Shiite and Sunni worlds, which the national bourgeoisies had propped up to divide the proletariat. The bourgeoisies would seek to replace their political personnel, as inevitably happened, in the absence of a connection between the proletariat and the international Communist Party, in Tunisia and Egypt fifteen years ago, allowing the continuation of bourgeois regimes.

But these struggles of the proletariat, in a historical phase of irreversible crisis of overproduction of the world capitalist economy, require roots in those countries and the leadership of the Communist Party.

The Israeli-American military intervention, now being clear to everyone, has strengthened the Iranian regime, but this, far from being a failure, was one of its objectives from the very beginning.

The conflict began on February 28, a month and 20 days after January 8-9, the days when the Iranian uprising was drowned in blood, with the regime itself admitting—and boasting—over three thousand victims, six thousand according to the most reliable sources. A rather belated rescue! Or, rather, self-interestedly belated: they waited for the regime to finish the job.

The war emergency aided the repression of an already dispersed movement, rallying the bourgeois opposition and the opportunist left around the regime in the name of "defense of the homeland"—the only untouchable principle of every opportunist party under which the interests of the working class can be trampled—and leaving even more alone the young proletarians, hundreds of whom were executed in recent months.

Reza Pahlavi and Maria Machado shared the same fate: useful before military interventions to make people believe the objective was the overthrow of the regimes; sidelined an hour after the operations began. Is it any wonder that the ruling class claims one thing while doing the opposite?

The monarchists—well-funded and aggressive against other opposition political forces—who seized control of most Iranian emigrant demonstrations and called for US and Israeli military intervention, disappeared on the second day of the war. After announcing Ali Khamenei's elimination, Trump, with his usual display of bravado, demanded a say in the appointment of his successor, implicitly confessing that he was not interested in overthrowing the regime but only in a quiet change of its top officials: as in Venezuela.

Just as the colectivos (paramilitary gangs) operate in Venezuelan cities, so in Iran the Pasdaran's repressive apparatus must remain operational to maintain capital's order. Every bourgeois State ("special detachments of armed men", Lenin, "State and Revolution") is the machine of oppression and control of capital, both international and national, in a given country.

The repeated declarations of support for the Iranian rebels by the US and Israel already had the opposite objective: they aided the repression by accusing them of being at the service of enemy powers.

The second lie is that the war was the result of the ineptitude and folly of President Donald Trump, who threw himself into it without a strategy and incapable of extricating himself from the mess he had gotten himself into, thereby damaging the entire world economy and that of the United States itself.

This mystification is fueled by the interests of capitalist States opposed to the USA, from Iran to China, but also by European imperialisms, by political-business clans opposed to the Trump lobby within the United States itself, and by opportunist left-wing parties everywhere, incapable even of distinguishing facts from words.

The American bourgeoisie—which placed Trump there—has a strategy, beyond the internal conflicts of views and interests among business clans. The target of its wars is its main rival in the imperialist contest, China, certainly not Iran.

By knowingly engaging in the Iranian conflict, the United States set in motion a series of consequences that it knew would harm its global adversaries, while benefiting itself. This is nothing new: it's the exact same pattern as what happened in Ukraine.

For 15 years, US capitalism has made the hydrocarbon extraction industry one of its pillars, thanks to the extraction method from oil shale. This technology has turned the United States, traditionally a major net importer of oil, into the world's leading oil and gas producer, the fourth-largest oil exporter, and the largest gas exporter.

Shale oil extraction has increased from 0.2 million barrels per day in 2009 to 8 in 2023. Without hydrocarbons, the US industry would still be producing less than it did in 2007: in 2024, it would be 7.6% below the 2007 peak, a worsening compared to the -5.5% recorded in 2022.

Supremacy in the world hydrocarbon market is the linchpin of the strategy of decadent US imperialism and the war against Iran was an important and successful step in its pursuit, despite what the entire bourgeois international press self-interestedly says.

The blockade of gas, oil, and derivatives in the Persian Gulf has driven up prices. The US has replaced its own oil, gas, and refined products on the market. The new prices have enabled shale extraction, which requires prices above $80/b to be profitable, given the higher extraction costs. Refineries and oil terminals on the US coast have been working at full capacity since March, even tapping into strategic reserves to meet global demand. Venezuelan oil imports into the US have also increased sharply, from 100,000 barrels per day in December 2025 to 1.2 million in May and June.

So it was not US capitalism that paid the highest oil and gas prices, but European imperialisms, first and foremost Germany, and obviously China, the world's largest importer, which reacted by reducing imports by more than 20% for three months and eating into its internal strategic reserves.

For German imperialism, this is the second blow it has received from the United States. With the war in Ukraine, its progress toward recovering to pre-2008 crisis production levels was halted, remaining below that peak. With the sanctions on Russian gas and the destruction of the North Stream 2 pipeline, global gas demand has shifted, allowing the US industry to invest in both extraction and liquefaction facilities. Thus, the alleged quagmire Trump has entered into has been a paradise of profits for the US hydrocarbon industry.

Rising inflation, to the extent it remains contained—for now, the European Central Bank has raised interest rates by 0.25%, while the Fed has not—only partially curbs consumption, the second stage of capitalist production as defined in Marx's Capital, and, to a lesser extent, stage I, the production of the means of production, which is of greater importance to capitalism. A contained rise in inflation, by increasing the prices of all goods except wages, which require workers' struggle to raise—and thus, in any case, a slower process—increases profits and is healthy for the capitalist economy.

During the conflict, the United States sought to keep oil prices at the "right level": no higher than $100-110 a barrel. To this end, it suspended sanctions on Russian oil and, for a brief period, on Iranian oil as well. Now, following the fragile agreement of June 17, maritime traffic has partially resumed and the price has dropped to around USD 70/b.

But the crisis zone remains heated, ready to ignite. Maritime traffic through Hormuz is now divided into two routes: one in Iranian waters, the other in Omani waters; the first is controlled by Tehran, which requires the payment of a toll, while the second is militarily protected by the US. The Iranian regime is making compliance with the truce conditional on the cessation of Israeli military operations in Lebanon. A new spigot is turning on; whenever the conflict flares up again, the oil industry and US capitalism will celebrate while European and Chinese capitalisms will suffer again.

The relationship between US and Iranian imperialism must also be demystified from opposing bourgeois propaganda: there are no absolute contradictions between capitalist States. It is a matter of armed negotiation. Venezuela has provided an example of the nature of relations between regimes of the same bourgeois class: years of bombastic declarations on both sides have resulted in the replacement of a single man and the prostration of the rest of the regime. The ideology of "Bolivarian socialism" is no less false than the democratic ideology of the United States and European imperialisms.

In armed negotiations, of course, there are often killings, as between mafia clans. Saddam Hussein was supported by the US in the Iran-Iraq war, while selling weapons to Iran (the "Irangate" scandal), only to be abandoned in 1991 with the first Gulf War and eliminated in the second in 2003, which benefited Iranian imperialism, which expanded its influence into troubled Iraq, thereby establishing the so-called "Shiite corridor" that from Iran, passing through Iraq, Assad's Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, provided territorial continuity for the interests of the Iranian bourgeoisie all the way to the Mediterranean.

After the 2003 bombing, the United States has now granted a new favor to the Ayatollah and Pasdaran regime. Despite bombing several factories and industrial plants, they did not hit Kharg Island, which accounts for 80% to 90% of the country's oil exports. With Israeli cooperation, they eliminated numerous regime figures, but at the same time suspended sanctions on Iranian oil for almost a month, from March 20 to April 13, and a new 60-day suspension has been announced as a consequence of the ongoing truce.

The question arises as to what currency the unsanctioned Iranian oil will be traded in: yuan, as was the case with sanctioned oil, or US dollars. The same goes for the $24 billion in Iranian financial funds blocked abroad, which would be released. According to the US administration, they will be spent on US goods, but the Iranians have denied this important detail. The two regimes have been contradicting each other for months on nearly every crucial detail of the potential agreement.

Within the Iranian State, as in the United States and every bourgeois regime, whether authoritarian or democratic, there is an ongoing conflict, with one side opposed to agreements with the US. This is not a matter of ideology, but of pure profit. All this only confirms that between the United States and Iran there is not a struggle or an absolute opposition, but rather a negotiation conducted on the basis of power relations and business. The pattern is identical to what occurred in Venezuela, only with different power relations. A more difficult negotiation, with an uncertain outcome, but one that reaffirms the nature of relations between bourgeois States. Its prolongation, its interruption, or rather, its overflowing into military friction, is not a problem for US capitalism, but rather a resource.

Rising oil prices also benefit US capitalism because over 80% of it is traded in US dollars. Higher oil prices equate to greater demand for dollars, thus strengthening the US dollar, its role as the international currency, and thus US Treasury bonds, the gigantic US government debt.

The war, by emptying the arsenals, revitalizes the national war industry, another pillar of US capitalism. "The current defense budget is the largest in US history in nominal terms (close, in real terms, to the annual peak reached when the country was at war with Adolf Hitler): $1.5 trillion" (Le Monde Diplomatique, June).

War, it's true, has a cost, but for US imperialism, and certainly not only for it, it is a huge public investment: it strengthens the oil industry, it reinforces the financial dominance of the dollar, which supports the State debt, which fuels the war industry. It is necessary to impoverish working humanity to invest in weapons, new offensive systems, "artificial intelligence", and drones.

The blockade of Hormuz first damaged the so-called petro-monarchies of the Gulf. Iran's action succeeded in undermining the United States' alliance system in the region. They did not all pay the same price, which was very high for Iraq and Qatar, whose oil and gas exports are almost entirely maritime, but less so for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have pipelines that bypass the Strait of Hormuz and transport at least half of their exports.

US imperialism plays on rivalries between regional powers. Turkey is Iran's rival in Syria: in December 2024, it helped overthrow the Assad regime, which hosted the Iranian militias that had saved it during the civil war from 2011 to 2018 and was a key component of the "Shiite Corridor".

Israel is Iran's rival, but is now replacing it as its main adversary with Turkish imperialism, fearing its strengthening in Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean. It also opposes its influence in the Horn of Africa, with Ankara supporting the central government in Mogadishu and Jerusalem recognizing separatist Somaliland.

The UAE, which signed the Abraham Accords with Israel, also supports Somaliland, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militias in Sudan, opposing Saudi Arabia in both theaters.

Israel has woven an alliance with Greece, the UAE, and India: it supports Greece in its anti-Turkish efforts, for example in Cyprus, while the Indian giant opposes Pakistan, which has entered into a military cooperation pact with Saudi Arabia.

Israel meets half of its oil needs by importing it from Azerbaijan via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, which runs from the Azerbaijani capital on the Caspian Sea, through Georgia, and ends on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Nearly 70% of Azerbaijan's arms imports come from Israel.

In this latest conflict against Iran, Israel and Egypt have deployed troops, aircraft, and anti-missile systems to the UAE; Pakistan has done so in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, a geographic and oil giant (the world's leading exporter), is Iran's main regional rival.

Qatar, which for years was one of Hamas's three main financiers, also hosts the largest US military base in the Middle East. It now appears that most of Hamas's foreign leadership is no longer based in Qatar, but in Turkey, a NATO member.

In this tangle, ideology is merely a screen, a deception to ensnare the proletariat: for capital, there are no principles except that of profit.

Demolishing the mystification that the US war in Iran is the product of Trump's will and devoid of a strategy doesn't demonstrate the strength and vitality of this imperialism, but rather how its policies are a consequence of that capitalism's economic interests. Nor does it conclude that the imperialist war is provoked only by one part of the capitalist States, worse than the other, but rather that it is a consequence of the entire capitalist system and inherent to it.

If the United States' strategy is based on preventive wars, in preparation for a general confrontation, Chinese imperialism is preparing for this confrontation, pursuing interests of an identical capitalist nature and with its own specific policies. Here too, it's important not to get lost in the chatter of regime propaganda and instead focus on economic facts.

What is new is that US capitalism, beyond its partial successes in waging preventive wars, suffers from the intrinsic weakness of its senility, a weakness shared by all so-called Western capitalisms. In 1945, with 6% of the world's population, the US produced nearly half of the world's industrial production. Victory in the war marked the replacement of the pound sterling with the dollar as the international currency.

For decades, worn down by overproduction, this industrial supremacy has been in decline, while its financial supremacy, defended by military force, endures: today the US share of world manufacturing production is around 17%.

China has replaced the United States as the world's leading industrial power for years, with a share of manufacturing output now at approximately 28%. However, Chinese capitalism is no longer young, but fully mature: for several years, it has been displaying symptoms of clear-cut overproduction. This first became apparent with the bursting of the speculative bubble in the construction sector, which led to the bankruptcy of Evergrande, the world's largest construction group, which collapsed in December 2021 under the weight of over $300 billion in debt. The crisis in the sector hit other Chinese capitalist construction giants, leaving 20 million Chinese without homes that were paid for but not completed. Overproduction then manifested itself in other sectors: from steel (in 2023, China produced 54% of world production), which has declined for two years, to petrochemicals, batteries, and semiconductors. This has led to substantial deflation in the last two years.

Overproduction is leading Chinese capitalism to flood the world market with its goods, clashing with other senile national capitalisms, which over the past 50 years have remained afloat by moving an increasing part of their production to young capitalisms, first and foremost China!

While the United States and Europe are erecting tariffs, today the Chinese regime is championing “free trade,” the same propaganda trope that was typical of Wilsonian America after the First World War, criticized by Lenin, when the USA was then in the midst of vigorous capitalist development.

So, if Athens weeps, Sparta isn't laughing. While the United States may find an illusion of relief in the temporary successes of its war strategy to stem its decline, China has already rapidly consumed its capitalist youth and is facing the cancer of overproduction, which is bringing closer the hour of revolt of its immense proletariat.

In effect, therefore, all global capitalism is afflicted and attacked by the same disease: it is no longer able to accumulate the mass of capital that has become too great and must do everything possible to postpone, contain, and repress the class struggle. Capitalist States are increasingly throwing themselves into war and, with their reactionary ideologies, all united by nationalism, are trying to drag the wage-earning class into it.

Workers in every country must simply reject the ideological sirens that want them divided and aligned on one side or the other of the impending imperialist war. They must and can only do so in one way: by rejecting all solidarity with their own bourgeois regime, by refusing, today, any economic sacrifice in the name of their own bourgeoisie's national affirmation, and, tomorrow, the sacrifice of their very lives in the war of their masters' homeland. The only blood left to shed is for the international unity of the proletariat of all countries and for revolutionary emancipation from capitalism.

The propaganda agencies of US imperialism and the spokespeople for Venezuelan reformism have launched a noisy media frenzy following the attack and bombing, carried out between June 9 and 12, against an alleged camp of the transnational gang “Tren de Aragua” in Bolívar State, an action in which its “main leader,” Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias “El Niño Guerrero,” was supposedly killed. Presented to world public opinion as a supposed “victory for international security and humanitarian cooperation,” this joint performance by Washington and the Caracas government is nothing more than a crude ideological distraction operation.

Behind the smoke from the explosions and the supposed crackdown on drug trafficking lies a purely economic operation to clear land along the banks of Kilometer 88, Las Claritas, and its surrounding area—the territory with the highest concentrations of gold in all of Venezuela. The objective is not to protect the population or safeguard the Amazonian ecosystem; the objective is to forcibly expel irregular competitors to ensure that large transnational corporations gain absolute monopolistic control over the extraction and exploitation of mining in the area.

A Military Invasion Agreed Upon by the Bourgeoisie

The military action, carried out through tactically directed bombings by the United States armed forces with logistical support from the Venezuelan bourgeois government, constitutes an open military invasion of national territory. However, far from provoking the traditional sovereignty concerns, this landing enjoys the full consensus of all factions of the local bourgeoisie.

Under the new bourgeois government, installed after the kidnapping of the previous president on January 3, the local bourgeoisie (both the traditional bourgeoisie and the capital associated with the Chavista “civic-military” clique) has meekly accepted subordination to the Pentagon in exchange for securing a share of the pie. The restructuring of extractive industries demands order for private US investments; therefore, the military force of imperialism acts as the armed wing tasked with clearing the way so that multinational firms backed by Washington can operate without logistical obstacles in the coveted mines of Las Cristinas and Brisas.

Background of Transnational Plunder in the Orinoco Mining Arc

The handover of Venezuela's subsoil to international consortiums is not a new phenomenon in 2026. The Orinoco Mining Arc region has historically been the stage where global capital has tested its dynamics of dispossession:

- Anglo-Saxon and historical presence: Canadian, American, and European corporations have paraded through for decades, obtaining exorbitant concessions for the large-scale exploitation of gold, diamonds, and bauxite. The clearest historical example in Kilometer 88 and Las Claritas was that of the Canadian company Crystallex International Corporation, which operated the Las Cristinas deposits until their concession was terminated and a protracted international arbitration battle ensued. Similarly, the Canadian company Gold Reserve Inc. controlled the Brisas project for years and later re-entered the Las Claritas area under a mixed State-owned scheme through the company Siembra Minera.

- The shift towards other powers: During the hegemony of Chavismo, the bourgeois State reoriented the delivery of resources by granting massive mining concessions to transnational companies from China, Russia and Turkey under the figure of mixed companies that never altered the conditions of exploitation of the workforce.

The geopolitics of mining in 2026 reveals a violent realignment. Following the military clearing brought about by the US intervention, large North American capital seeks direct control. Private transnational corporations and consortiums, protected by OFAC licenses and Western financial capital, are positioning themselves to reactivate large-scale projects in Las Cristinas, displacing not only the local gangs but also sweeping away the remaining influence of Chinese and Eurasian State monopolies and interests. The current substitution of one power for another in the control of these deposits—estimated to have a potential value of billions of dollars—confirms that for capital, the territory of Amazonas, Bolívar, and Delta Amacuro is simply a prize in perpetual dispute.

The “Pranato” and the State: Partners in the Plunder

To justify the current intervention, official discourse feigns surprise at the existence of criminal gangs and organized crime structures. However, historical analysis demonstrates that mining governance in southern Venezuela has operated under a perfect “military-paramilitary-criminal” symbiosis.

The pranato is a system of criminal power in Venezuelan prisons. The main leader is called a pran. The pran rules within the prison and extorts money from others. The use of this term has spread in Venezuelan politics to refer to gangs that operate within and from the government or in neighborhoods controlled by certain criminal gangs led by a pran. The Venezuelan bourgeois government has relied on these gangs to control certain businesses or territories and to confront the protest movements that frequently arise due to economic demands or to confront the groups and parties of the so-called “democratic opposition.”

Since the late 20th century, and with particular force during the last two decades, the so-called "syndicate" (the criminal organization of the common criminals) has exercised real territorial control over the mines in close coordination with the regional and military authorities appointed by Chavismo. Historically, the criminal organization has had free rein to exploit, extort, and traffic, as long as it paid the corresponding fees to the heads of the ZODI (Integral Defense Operational Zones), REDI (Integral Defense Regions), and the local high command, even sharing the territory with demobilized factions of the Colombian guerrilla group ELN. When these gangs and irregular structures cease to be useful or attempt to increase their demands against the formal owners of capital, the State bourgeoisie does not hesitate to resort to massive military operations to displace them and replace them with corporate managers in suits.

The Government Manages the Interests of the Bourgeoisie in the Mining Business

The Ministry of Popular Power for Ecological Mining Development and Basic Industries and the State corporation MINERVEN do not operate as social or environmental protection agencies, but as the essential institutional structures for the administration, legalization and distribution of extractive surplus value in the Orinoco Mining Arc.

The actual role they play within the mining system in the region is defined under the following guidelines:

1. The Ministry as the Legal Window for Transnational Plunder: Far from its rhetoric of “ecological development,” the Ministry is the entity responsible for adapting the bourgeois legal framework to provide security for foreign corporations. Its key function has been the design and fragmentation of exploitation areas (such as Area 4, which includes Kilometer 88 and Las Claritas) to facilitate the creation of joint ventures. It is the body that processes the concessions and operating licenses that today seek to protect the arrival of US capital and that in the past protected Chinese, Russian, and Turkish monopolies. Its role is to normalize extractivism, operating as the operational arm that legitimizes handing over the subsoil to the plunder of the global market.

2. MINERVEN and the Marketing Monopoly: The Link to Variable Capital. The General Mining Company of Venezuela (MINERVEN), as a State-owned gold mining and processing corporation, fulfills the economic role of centralizing the precious metal. In practice, it acts as the cog that connects the brutal exploitation of the working class and artisanal labor force with the international financial system. MINERVEN is responsible for receiving, smelting, and distributing the gold extracted under inhumane conditions. Its economic structure serves to absorb the value generated in the mines through processing plants that impose poverty wages and nonexistent safety conditions on workers, guaranteeing the flow of gold bars to the reserves of the bourgeois State or to transnational markets.

3. Enforcers in the “bourgeois consensus” and mining governance. Within what they promote as the “civic-military union,” these institutions have been fully aware of the extortion and violence scheme of the “syndicate” (the pranato) and the Colombian guerrillas. Both the Ministry and MINERVEN have validated and coexisted with irregular governance in southern Bolívar, serving as a legal smokescreen while the regional authorities appointed by Chavismo and the military commanders of the ZODI and REDI collected their cuts on the extracted gold.

When transnational capital demands “legal security” and “order” to enter – as is happening with the current US-coordinated military deployment – ​​these institutions proceed to rescind old agreements and sign new alliances, demonstrating that their only permanent goal is to maintain the flow of capital accumulation at the cost of irreversible environmental devastation and the exploitation of the working class in southern Venezuela.

Neither Legal Mining Nor Illegal Mining: The False Dilemma of Reformism

Petty-bourgeois currents and environmental NGOs seek to ensnare the working class in a false dilemma: choosing between illegal mining (controlled by gang leaders) and supposedly legal, technologically advanced mining under corporate control, within a supposed scheme of “sovereign management of natural resources.” From the perspective of political economy critique, this distinction is an opportunistic trap.

Whether gold mining is controlled by criminal groups, companies legally authorized by the IMF, organized artisanal miners, or a combination of all these actors, and even “without foreign interference,” the law of value dictates the same outcome. Absolutely no improvement can be expected in the poverty wages or the brutal living conditions of the more than 200,000 people who depend directly on this activity in the Venezuelan Amazon. Under the logic of monetary profit, the working class will always be treated as disposable variable capital, exposed to disease, accidents, and employer violence.

Likewise, “legal” industrial mining is a relentless destroyer of ecosystems, even when undertaken by State-owned enterprises without transnational involvement. The massive use of cyanide and mercury, the deforestation of forest reserves, and the irreversible contamination of the Orinoco River basin do not stop simply because a company is listed on the New York or Beijing stock exchanges. Extractive industries, by their very nature, devour the landscape and socioculturally displace Indigenous communities in their pursuit of accumulating surplus value.

The Revolutionary Alternative

The program of the International Communist Party is categorical on this point: the aggressions against the environment and the human carnage in mining areas will not be solved with “green” regulations, democratic oversight or corporate social responsibility codes.

Under capitalism, gold functions as the universal equivalent of commodities, a lifeless substance for which human lives and entire bioregions are destroyed solely to sustain the capitalist financial system. Only the destruction of the bourgeois State and the advent of a universal communist society will eradicate these extractive activities that plunder nature and add no real value to the emancipation and development of humanity. By abolishing commodity production, the market, and money, socialist society will plan its relationship with the natural environment according to the vital needs of the species, forever burying the barbarity of the Orinoco Mining Arc and the wage-labor subjugation of its workers.

On June 14, members of our trade-union fraction traveled to the city of Chicago, where the “Labor Notes” conference was being held, and where a parallel event entitled: “For a Fighting Labor Movement: A Militant Critique of Labor Notes.” was being organized.

Our comrades participated in organizing this event through the trade-union coordination Class Struggle Action Network (CSAN), of which they are members alongside workers and trade-union militants who are not members of our party. This is consistent with our approach to trade-union organizations, which must be open to all workers regardless of their political positions.

The event represented the inaugural action of a coordination between CSAN and other organizations supporting class-based trade unionism: Teamsters Mobilize, the Committee to Organize the Unorganized (IBEW), Transit Workers for a Fighting Union, the Committee for One Fighting Transit Union, and the Machinist Reform Action Committee, which had come into contact with CSAN through previous actions in defense of workers. Class Struggle Baristas United and the Blue Ridge IWW also joined the event after it had been publicly announced.

For our complete critique of the Labor Notes conference itself, see the article “Labor Notes Conference 2026: The Divide Between the Labor Left and the Class Union of the Future” in issue 69 of TICP.

Many workers belonging to the other sponsoring organizations and participating in the initiative were members of non-communist workers political parties, our doctrine does not regard this as an obstacle to complain about, but rather as the terrain on which the party’s intervention in the working class actually takes place: The trade-union movement is the crucial field of political battle in which the communist party confronts the other workers parties that put themselves forward to lead the labor movement.

This battle takes place primarily on the terrain of practical trade-union struggle. We therefore know that the communist trade-union orientation will also establish itself among the ranks of workers belonging to opposing parties, insofar as it proves to be the orientation consistent with the necessities of the development of the class struggle. As the clash between the classes and the crisis of capitalism intensify, and as the revolutionary crisis approaches, practical trade-union problems increasingly take on a political character. The theoretical problems of today will be the practical problems of tomorrow. Within the trade-union movement, communists do not conceal their opinions, but they do not wage a political battle of a theoretical and programmatic order—for example, over the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois State through revolution—when this question remains remote from the current practical problems of the trade-union struggle. The task of the party’s trade-union fraction is to show workers and trade-union militants, including those belonging to other parties, the validity of the communist trade-union orientation for confronting today’s problems and its connection with the ultimate political questions of the workers’ movement.

On this basis, we succeeded in mobilizing a good number of militant and combative trade-union activists to adopt points of unity consistent with our trade-union program, not because they had abandoned the opportunism of their parties, but because the immediate economic terrain on which the coordination was built is one on which it is possible to arrive at correct positions even among workers who, for the time being, remain politically attached to other banners.

These points are as follows:
     - Workers within existing unions must organize on the basis of the class struggle in opposition to the misleading leadership of officials tied to the employers.
     - The working class and the employing class have no interests in common.
     - Unions must break with the political parties of the capitalist class.
     - The struggle of the working class is an international struggle against a global capitalist system based on the exploitation of wage labor, and it requires international solidarity among workers of all nations in order to achieve its objectives.
     - Building the strike power of the working class remains an indispensable and central pillar for advancing the independent interests of the working class, defending wages and living standards, and imposing greater political demands against the employing class and its State.
     - Unions must break with their timid subordination to the legal and regulatory apparatus of the capitalist State, namely the National Labor Relations Act and Taft-Hartley, which impose recognition of employers’ rights, suppress solidarity strikes, and have historically been used to purge unions of their most militant leaders.

Overall, we consider the event a success. Speakers from each of the organizations were given the opportunity to respond to a series of questions prepared in advance, as well as to questions posed by an audience of approximately 150 people attending both in person and online. Among those attending in person were many who had been drawn to the event precisely through Labor Notes, thanks to our comrades distributing leaflets at the conference.

It was an excellent opportunity for our militants to present our positions to workers and to “take the pulse of the American working class,” as one of our comrades put it.

We do not view this coordination as the “seed” from which the class unions of the future will necessarily emerge. To think this would mean falling back into precisely the voluntaristic illusion against which our current has struggled for a century: the notion that organizational forms can be assigned historical significance through their own will, before the material conditions arise that alone can give them their weight.

Rather than representing an organic outburst of the working class rising up against attacks on its living and working conditions—which alone can provide the necessary foundation for the rebirth of class action—the coordinating body is merely a small group of class-based union activists who still wield very little influence within the labor movement.

This is necessary work in the field of trade-union struggle and orientation, allowing us to arrive stronger and better prepared when the objective conditions produced by capitalism push ever larger sections of the working class into struggle.

It is work that constitutes an absolutely necessary training ground and field of instruction for the party.

On July 3, the State responded and "won" (as company management emphasized), clearing, with the help of its police force, the two-week-long picket line, defended by the Sudd Cobas union. The picket line had begun on June 20, after the Acca company in Seano (Prato) announced it was closing down, putting 100 jobs at risk. Fifteen workers and three union representatives were literally forcibly dragged to the police station for identification and subsequently released.

Acca is a major logistics hub for fast fashion in the Prato district, distributing throughout Europe on behalf of 80 small and medium-sized workshops and brands. It is currently under judicial administration for tax and customs fraud, resulting in assets worth €71 million being seized.

But the 100 jobs to be cut arise exclusively from the company's need to relocate operations to warehouses where workers can continue to be kept in slave-like conditions, away from a militant and unionized workforce.

This latest worker mobilization is the culmination of years of struggle, and victories, in the textile district: represented by their union, Sudd Cobas, they have never stopped fighting for better living conditions, against exploitation, low wages, 12-hour workdays, 7 days a week, irregular contracts, and gangmastering.

But these have also been years of intimidation, retaliation, and physical violence from employers and their gangmasters. On June 23, a 45-year-old worker on a picket line was hit by a van.

Faced with all this, today the State intervenes with force, against the last and most exploited, so that goods produced with blood and exploitation continue to circulate, for the profit of the capitalists, demonstrating once again that it is not an impartial apparatus above classes, but a machine for the defense of profit, property and the exploitation of the working class.

The fact that Italian and immigrant workers are fighting side by side in Prato, and that the company in question (like others in the sector) is owned by a Chinese, not an Italian, capitalist, demonstrates that, beyond the right-wing demagogy about "remigration" and the left-wing one about "integration", for the bourgeoisie of all stripes, nationality and ethnicity matter little, only the defense of their interests.

For the international ruling class, the equally international working class, both local and foreign, must stay in its place. They are allowed to demonstrate, but only in a harmless manner that does not jeopardize the laws of capitalism and profit. This is the democratic and constitutional deception that is being fully demonstrated today.

It's a script that's been repeated over and over again. We shouldn't have expected the current government's "fascist drift", which only serves the bourgeois left and the regime's unions to restore their virginity, but has always tolerated and endorsed policies of exploitation.

As soon as the working class raises its head and organizes for better living conditions, democracy gives way to fascism. There is nothing "unconstitutional" about this, as liberals and democrats, supporters of an "ethical" capitalist economy, claim. But it does legitimize the current inhuman economy, the limitation of the freedom to strike—provided for by Article 40 of the Constitution—and the use of repression to protect sacred property and the free movement of goods.

The bourgeois left is complicit with the right in manipulating the State, which defends capitalism. Its constitutions legitimize and soften it. They will never safeguard the rights of workers, both Italian and foreign.

The only path open to workers is to extend the strikes, in an organized manner, united beyond the company and across multiple sectors, over an ever-expanding territory and with increasingly combative unions, led by the authentic revolutionary communist party, which does not persuade workers to give in with legalistic and electoral pretexts.

It's a social war, a war of the entire working class. The workers' struggle in Prato must be brought together with that of other companies and sectors—the laborers, metalworkers, logistics workers, the unemployed and those with precarious employment, etc.

This can only be achieved by rebuilding a truly united class-based union, against the betrayal of the large confederal unions, which not only hold back the spread of struggles but also help the employers and the State sabotage them.

The path to this goal today is to fight for the unity of action of combative unionism, the grassroots unions, and between these and the conflict-ridden areas within the CGIL: a practical unity that paves the way for organizational unity.

The defense of the entire working class requires solidarity in organizing and fighting with its precarious and irregular sections

Four young men, aged between 18 and 29. They were agricultural workers, immigrant laborers, three Afghans and one Pakistani: Ullah Ismat Qiemi, Amin Fazal Khogjani, Waseem Khan, and Safi Iayjad. They were massacred because they rebelled against their exploiters. An execution—public, in broad daylight, brutal—to set an example to all the laborers who work in the fields by the tens of thousands every day, so that they may endure, not fight, not strike, not unionize, in order to obtain a living wage, residency permits, housing, and healthcare.

This horror occurred on Monday, June 1st, in Amendolara (Cosenza), on the western edge of the Metapontino region, a rich agricultural area on the Ionian coast that extends into the province of Matera in Basilicata, borders the province of Cosenza in Calabria to the west, and the province of Taranto in Puglia to the east. It is primarily devoted to the cultivation of fruit trees, especially citrus fruits.

In the torrent of hypocrisy unleashed by the press and bourgeois parties that we are accustomed to witnessing on occasions like this, however, no one could say that it was an unusual and unforeseeable crime.

Four days earlier, in the province of Vicenza, an Indian farm laborer, seriously injured in a three-meter fall on a farm, was abandoned by his owners on the street instead of being taken to the emergency room.

Twenty days earlier, on May 9th, in Taranto, a few kilometers from Amendolara, a Malian farm laborer—Sako Bakari—was killed by a group of racially motivated youths at 5:00 a.m. while on his way to be exploited in the fields.

Two years ago, in June 2024, in the Agro Pontino area of Lazio, in the province of Latina, an Indian Sikh laborer, Satnam Singh, was abandoned in front of his house by his farm owner after a machine severed his arm. He was forced to go to the emergency room and thus avoid legal problems. Due to the delay in getting him to the emergency room, he died the following day.

On June 2, 2018, in San Calogero, in the province of Vibo Valentia (Calabria), Malian laborer Soumaila Sacko, a USB union activist, was shot dead by a farm owner while he was trying to collect sheet metal in an abandoned private lot to use for the shack where he slept in the nearby tent city of San Ferdinando, in Rosarno. Over the years, the tent city has become home to over two thousand laborers who work seasonally in the Gioia Tauro plain, primarily harvesting citrus fruits.

This bloody chain, only a small portion of which we report, is not the product of a "sick capitalism" or individual criminal enterprises, but the very physiology of the capitalist mode of production applied to the land. Gangmastering is not a "feudal remnant" to be eradicated with more bourgeois legality, but the scientific form by which agrarian capital enriches itself, in Calabria as in Punjab, in India and Pakistan, in China or in Mato Grosso in Brazil, etc.

But the most important fact does not concern the death or any other episode expressing the subjugation of the agricultural proletariat in Italy, but rather its revolt on January 7, 2010, in Rosarno. We wrote: "A punch in the face of the polishers of capitalism and its 'progress,' the strike that broke out in Rosarno is not an episode of a war between races, but between opposing social classes, a typical struggle of seasonal laborers, with the same tumultuous traits of its centuries-old history. On one side, a layer of pure wage-earning proletarians who, like their entire class, have nothing to lose and no homeland; on the other, the landowners, the agrarian capitalists, their State and police, and their armed janissaries, with the fruits that are ripening on the trees" ("Il Partito Comunista" no. 339, January-February 2010).

That revolt terrified not only the local, right-thinking lower middle class, but also the medium and large employers who derive enormous profits from the exploitation of laborers throughout the food supply chain, from the fields to large-scale retail outlets. It certainly worried not only the bourgeoisie but also its democratically-styled political regime, which, with its anti-immigrant laws, beginning with the Bossi-Fini Law (Law 189/2002), placed them in conditions of illegality and constant blackmail to obtain or maintain a residence permit. Since then, those legal provisions have remained in place—in perfect continuity across successive governments—to divide the working class, along with the hatred and prejudice hammered out by the bourgeois media.

This slave-owning legislation is not "right-wing" or "parliamentary racism", but an economic function of the bourgeois ruling class State. The State guarantees the employers a reservoir of blackmailed labor, used as leverage to lower the wages of the entire indigenous proletariat, breaking down its essential class unity.

The Rosarno revolt fueled a process of organizing farm workers within the USB and other grassroots unions, which, however, remains weak.

The CGIL, similar to what happened, for example, in the logistics or textile districts of Prato, has abandoned all organizing efforts for the sake of these workers' struggle. It offers individual assistance services for residence permits, and the only collective action it undertakes is similar to that of religious charities. The CGIL, too, whenever similar misdeeds occur, "denounces" the "gangmaster system" and "organized crime", and, in bloodless demonstrations, calls for intervention by State institutions as the only practical solution. Four young workers burned in the clutches of paid labor didn't even warrant the proclamation of a local strike! With this inaction, the largest regime union has merely cemented the division of this section of workers from the rest of the working class.

As punctual as in every tragedy, the CGIL staged its futile parade on June 6th, led by its general secretary accompanied by the secretary of the Democratic Party. A jumble of legalistic rhetoric and crocodile tears. The regime's union stifles the spontaneous need and instinct for class struggle with sterile interclass moralism and channels it into the dead-end streets of petitions to the very institutions complicit in every horror.

It's worth noting that the massacre occurred the day before the eightieth anniversary of the Republic. That democracy, to which the regime's unions appeal to defend farm workers, rather than organize their struggle, hasn't changed their condition one iota in these decades, for the simple fact that the bourgeois regime is the first to want it to remain so, to protect the sector's profits, from farms to retail.

Instead, the class struggle among the laborers will lead to violent confrontation with the employers, their irregular and criminal gangs, and the bourgeois State. As has always been the case throughout the history of the labor movement.

The workers' struggle in the Prato textile district, organized for years by the grassroots union Sudd Cobas, offers an example of organizing a sector of immigrant workers and clashing with employers. Pickets have repeatedly been violently attacked by gangs of company thugs and even by the employers themselves. The Sudd Cobas responded to the small size of the companies by favoring a territorial organization of the union, rather than a company-wide one—in the mistaken tradition of union opportunism—by promoting strikes involving multiple companies, with workers from different factories participating in the pickets. Throughout years of strikes, pickets, and attacks, local democratic institutions have always stood by and watched, while the State, if it intervened, has done so with the police, to defend the companies by clearing the pickets.

The plight of laborers is similar, but made even more difficult by their widespread dispersion and the greater degree of violence the bourgeois State allows employers to use: the gangmasters who killed the laborers in Amendolara will end up in prison, but they are merely the perpetrators of a widespread system of threats and violence. Capitalism needs to exploit cheap immigrant labor for its own profits, after having plundered and generated ever-increasing poverty in vast swathes of the world.

Nothing will change for the agricultural proletariat unless they themselves organize and fight. To achieve this, a class-based union is absolutely necessary, uniting their struggle with that of the rest of the working class, benefiting and strengthening both, since they are, in reality, a single struggle of the same social class. The true defense of the proletariat coincides with the ability to organize and defend its most exploited segment. Until then, we cannot claim to have a genuine class-based union.

This union struggle will not lead to peaceful coexistence between the classes—in the reformist illusion of a finally and truly functioning democracy—but to their head-on clash in the revolutionary outcome. Democracy—the democracy that causes 1,500 deaths a year at work, that finances wars and genocides, that cuts wages, healthcare, and pensions, and to which the regime's unions appeal—will never change the condition of laborers, or that of the entire wage-earning class. It will be the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat that will sweep away the exploiters, who fuel their social privilege and political domination with the sweat and blood of millions of workers.

The party upholds the tradition of the three great International Associations of the working class, the Second being fully Marxist and the Third being resolutely revolutionary communist. Fulfilling a need long felt by our movement and anticipated as a principle, ours, having reached historical maturity, no longer defines itself as an international of parties but as a international party. This party, transcending the national divisions inherited from the history of the bourgeois world and class struggle, seeks to be united not only in its goals and now undisputed program, but also in its disciplined centralism and close understanding and cohesion among militants of every language and country. Proselytes, while integrating into local party activities, no longer join a national section but directly into the ont international party.

This is our pride and joy, and, on a still "experimental" scale, already a result, and an effective operational force. For the quarrelsome and selfish bourgeoisies, no longer even ecumenical or enlightened, it is unhoped for and unattainable, and will remain so until their shared ignominious demise.

In today's party, this working community manifests itself in a thousand threads: from informal daily communications among comrades to periodic international meetings. As our forces continue to grow, it has proven appropriate to convene general meetings of our group representatives every two months: alternately, a meeting to share information on our activities, review results, and review progress, and a meeting in which, in addition to this feedback on the groups' work, reports resulting from studies are presented, both on foundational topics of the movement's doctrine and history, and to draw more general conclusions on the methods and results of our interventions externally, in the press, in trade unions, and in proselytism.

As usual, in the first part of this last general meeting we exchanged detailed reports on the work of our groups in the following areas:

- Activities of the local branches and local situation. Studies, collaboration with the international press, and support for the website and publications in the local language; translations of texts from our extensive Left Archive; proselytism and relationships with new comrades and those approaching the party; research, presence, and involvement in the local trade union movement; participation and propaganda at demonstrations attended by the proletariat; periodic conferences open to readers on current issues; financial situation.

- Report from the editorial staff of the periodicals in the various languages and plan for upcoming releases.

We have agreed to merge our two biannual journals, "Comunismo" and "Communism", as there is no reason to report the results of our studies on Marxist theory and the history of communism in different and non-contemporaneous ways. Starting with the next issue, currently under preparation, it will appear in English and Italian, and, as soon as possible, in other languages. This next issue will include, in addition to the series already started, some of the papers presented at this general meeting.

Editing our journals involves the following steps: a) Tracking the entire development of our theoretical and historical studies, starting with the meticulous cataloging and preservation of reports from general meetings; b) Tracing and highlighting their continuity across the decades-long panorama of the party's work; c) Scheduling their publication; d) Preparing them for publication, making any necessary adjustments; e) Overseeing the titling, layout, and typographical consistency. For the layout, printing, and distribution of our periodicals, an international collaboration has been established, resulting in a fruitful exchange of relevant operational knowledge.

- Seven comrades in different countries are currently working on the website, working according to a common plan and exchanging the necessary technical expertise. Contributions from the periphery, including commentary on current events, translations of texts, and new research, are brought together in a unified, recognizable structure that is highly useful for the party's overall work and propaganda. A dynamic, combative communist website, the "collective organizer", requires daily monitoring and maintenance, involving all comrades, who report any imperfections or malfunctions, and a dedicated editorial team to centralize the work.

- The comrades were informed of the statistics on the trend over time and the origin of readers' accesses.

- An account was given of the program of publishing monographs on classics of Marxism and the Left, both in printed volumes and recorded as audio-texts.

- We heard about the situation of the party's central treasury, which summarizes in detail the income and expenditure of the sections.

- A detailed report on union activity in the United States and Italy had been prepared by comrades engaged in this challenging field. In particular, it reported our insistence on encouraging the defensive reorganization of the working class, unifying the first class forces mobilized to fight against the opportunism of the "union left".

- Four comrades are responsible for managing propaganda on social media. Excerpts from our periodicals and website are published there: 170 posts have been made in one year, most in Italian and English, followed by Spanish, Turkish, Tagalog, Portuguese, Russian, Indian, and Romanian. Recordings of public conference presentations have been added.

- Updates have been provided on the consistency and nature of correspondence received at the central mailbox and on the sending of the periodic newsletter.

- The designated speaker has provided information on the content of an upcoming public lecture in English on the topic of false Chinese communism: this can already be read on the party website.

- Finally, we considered the general lines of ongoing studies, including two on different moments in the history of the party and trade unions in the USA and one on revolutionary proto-parties in pre-modern societies and in countries with different cultural backgrounds.

This is the list of presentations we heard on the second day of the meeting:

- Considerations on the ongoing general strike in Bolivia (an excerpt of the report appears in the last issue of the newspaper);

- Two reports addressed the history of Iran: the first continued from previous meetings to retrace the tormented history of this great country; the second framed the current war against Iran as a frantic attempt to preserve the survival of decaying global capitalism (from this study we drew the material for the public conference, which is reported in our other press);

- Continuation of the study on the Military Question: from the civil war in Russia to the invasion of Poland;

- New chapter in the research Race, Class and the Agrarian Question in the United States;

- For the Course of Capitalism we considered the growth of the US public debt and the threat of a dollar crisis;

- The Marxist relationship between production techniques and production relations has been re-presented as the foundation of economic studies, following the lead of “Property and Capital” in 1948, in order to arrive at the program of post-proprietor and post-corporate communism;

- Continuation of the history of the Red International Trade Union which reached 1928 with the 6th Congress of the IC and the 4th of the ISR;

- History of the Communist Party of China which now describes the events that led to the defeat of 1927 within the Party and the International;

- Finally, a statement was issued on the ongoing clashes between armies and militias in Mali.

The papers on Race, Class, and the Agrarian Question in the United States is being published in full in the forthcoming issue of "Communism".

As for the remaining ones, given the necessarily lengthy time required for final drafting and publication, we provide here a first summary for the use of comrades and readers.

In the report, we presented a series of data on the public debt of various countries between 2014 and 2025. As demonstrated by a graph, the 2020 pandemic caused the debt-to-GDP ratio to soar everywhere.

We have commented on its trend in the USA, at levels never reached before.

The increase was caused by two simultaneous factors: on the one hand, the enormous expansion of public spending to support businesses, healthcare systems, and households; on the other, the collapse in GDP due to the paralysis of the global economy. In the following years, many countries recovered part of the increase in debt thanks to economic recovery and inflation, which helped increase nominal GDP, reducing the relative burden of debt.

Germany remains a "virtuous" country: between 2014 and 2019, it reduced its debt from 74.5% to 58.7% of GDP. Even after the pandemic, it remains close to 60%, well below other countries. Japan continues to be the most indebted country, consistently above 230% of GDP throughout the period. China went from a ratio of 39.3% in 2014 to almost 90% in 2025. France showed a steady deterioration over the decade: from 96.2% in 2014 to 115.6% in 2025. Italy remained among the most indebted countries: throughout the period, the debt-to-GDP ratio fluctuated around 134%, peaking at 154.4% in 2020. After the pandemic, the figure gradually declined, but in 2025 it returned to 137.1%.

The United States saw its debt increase by about 20% in 2025 compared to 2024. According to Trading Economics, in March 2026, nominal US debt reached an all-time high of $39.1 trillion.

In 1944, the United States, in New Hampshire, at Bretton Woods, at a time when they produced a large portion of the world's goods, much of which had been destroyed by the Second World War, with their absolute supremacy managed to establish the dollar as the world's reserve currency. This was the dawn of a period that French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, in the 1960s, called an "exorbitant privilege": borrowing without too many constraints and paying for goods and debts with paper they printed themselves.

This advantage rested on widespread confidence in the financial stability of the United States: almost everyone trusted that Washington would honor its debts, keep the dollar stable, and preserve Treasury securities as the safest haven, without ever using this power against its creditors. For decades, this stability held, certainly not due to the moral merits of American capitalists, but rather out of pure convenience, as the mechanism benefited too many international players to be questioned.

Since August 1971, when the Bretton Woods agreements were breached, ending the dollar's convertibility into gold, the world economy entered a new phase. The dollar ceased to be tied to a material base like gold and began to base its dominance solely on the economic, political, and military strength of the United States. In the years that followed, the international capitalist system thus found itself directly or indirectly supporting America's trade deficits and Washington's growing public debt, further fueled by the maintenance of a gigantic military apparatus.

A significant shift occurred in 1974, when the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a strategic agreement that would shape the global economic order for decades. In exchange for American military protection and arms supplies, the major Gulf oil producers agreed to sell their crude oil exclusively in dollars and to reinvest a significant portion of their profits in US government bonds. Thus was born the so-called "petrodollar" system, which guaranteed the United States constant demand for both its own currency and US Treasuries, allowing it to finance its debt at relatively low costs.

Today, however, this mechanism is showing increasingly evident signs of wear and tear, due to various factors.

One of these is the transformation of the United States from an importer to a leading exporter of oil. Thanks to the growth of shale extraction, it has become one of the world's leading oil and gas producers, significantly reducing its historical energy dependence on the Middle East. This has altered the traditional privileged relationship with the Gulf monarchies.

Although Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are still among the largest foreign holders of US government bonds, this situation is gradually leading them to reduce their dollar reserves, both due to reduced domestic financing needs and a desire to diversify their investments.

Furthermore, military operations in Iran, without any real involvement from their allied Gulf monarchies, have undermined their confidence in being able to rely on American protection.

While until a few years ago, almost all global crude oil was paid for in dollars, today a growing share of transactions are conducted in yuan, rubles, rupees, and, to a lesser extent, euros. China in particular is working to strengthen the yuan's international role by promoting trade agreements in local currencies and building alternative financial infrastructures to the US-dominated system.

Among these is the mBridge project, launched in 2022 under the auspices of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements, a cross-border payment platform for trades in the digital currencies of the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The infrastructure, which enables secure, instant, cost-effective, and universally accessible payments, is independent of the Swift circuit, and therefore the dollar, thus reducing its need as an intermediary in trades.

This context also includes the strengthening of the BRICS, initially composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and now expanded to include new members and strategic partners. These national capitalisms—which, in truth, have little else in common—aim to reduce their dependence on the dollar in international trade.

Global dollar reserves, which in the 1970s accounted for approximately 85% of the total, are therefore slowly shrinking, a gradual process that could accelerate due to the United States' abuse of its financial power as a political tool.

According to a recent report from Deutsche Bank, tensions and conflicts in the Middle East are putting pressure on some of the historical foundations of the petrodollar. Analysts are openly speaking of a potential "perfect storm" for the US-dominated monetary system.

The question, therefore, does not seem to be whether the dollar will lose some of its global centrality, but how quickly this transformation will occur and what the economic, social, political, and military consequences will be for the United States and the entire global system.

For decades, the United States has benefited from the dollar's role in exerting a decisive influence on the global economy. However, this very use of the dollar as a tool of pressure—for example, the freezing of Russian central bank reserves following the conflict in Ukraine—is pushing many countries to seek alternatives.

Today, the largest foreign holders of US government debt are Japan and China. The ongoing transformation of these two countries' securities portfolios appears to be informed by gradual, long-term strategies. The reduction in US debt exposure appears to be driven not by panic or a temporary crisis, but by decisions matured over time.

China, for example, held approximately $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities in 2013; today, it has fallen below $760 billion, a significant reduction, but one that has occurred over a decade. Japan, while still the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, is also gradually reducing its exposure: in the third quarter of 2024, Japanese investors sold nearly $62 billion in Treasuries; China sold over $51 billion in the same period.

But when two of the world's largest creditors simultaneously move in the same direction, the phenomenon inevitably takes on a deeper meaning. There are certainly financial technical reasons behind this. In the case of Japan, the central bank's change in monetary policy has made domestic investments in yen more attractive, reducing interest in dollar-denominated bonds and the risk associated with currency fluctuations.

But the reasons aren't just financial. More and more investors are watching with concern the trajectory of US public debt and the interest payments, which have reached enormous levels. It's estimated that the federal government will have spent approximately $1.22 trillion on these debts in 2025, or $100 billion a month. This raises doubts about the long-term sustainability of the American financial system.

In this context, China has accelerated its financial diversification. It has progressively increased its gold reserves, considered a commodity less vulnerable to international sanctions, and at the same time has favored bilateral trade agreements in local currencies.

The fact that even Japan, a historic ally of the United States, is increasingly prioritizing national economic interests over the stability of the American financial system is due to serious internal problems: extremely high public debt, stagnant growth, and a weakened currency.

For decades, the US Treasury market has represented the bulk of global finance. This is changing today: while in 2008, foreign investors held 49% of US debt, they now hold 30%.

This decline was described as follows on May 10 in "Il Sole 24 Ore", the newspaper of the Italian employers' association, Confindustria: "American banks have quintupled the Treasuries on their balance sheets: in 2022—according to data from the New York Fed—they held $106 billion, and now (as of April 22) they hold $518 billion. But their efforts aren't enough to keep yields low, considering the speed at which US public debt is growing. This is also because in recent weeks, with the major market upheavals triggered by the war in Iran, some of the recent big buyers have become sellers: according to Bloomberg calculations based on Fed data released on Friday, for example, Japan sold Treasuries last week to support the yen. So yields struggle to fall".

To attract new investors, the United States must offer higher yields on its bonds. But higher interest rates also mean higher public debt costs. Consequently, the deficit grows further and the need to issue new debt increases, fueling what's known as a "debt spiral".

The consequences aren't limited to finance. Rising Treasury yields impact mortgages and corporate credit, which shift costs onto the working class, student loans, and the cost of living for American workers. At the same time, they reduce the deferred wages provided by public services.

Losing dominance of the global financial and monetary markets and ballooning public debt could trigger the collapse of senile US capitalism, driven by industrial, commercial, and banking decline. It will be forced to use its military might to counter or influence the growth of competing imperialisms. For the US proletariat, already battered by years of economic crisis, a future of further sacrifices lies ahead, including the supreme one of being deployed to war against its class brothers in other uniforms.

The same thing is true across the oceans: gold, bilateral agreements on local currencies, autonomous payment systems, the internationalization of the yuan: all these phenomena do not represent the birth of a stable and more just order, as multipolar propagandists fantasize, but merely the attempt by new capitalist powers to carve out or increase an autonomous space for themselves in the global imperialist struggle.

Here lies the fundamental deception of any nationalist reading of the phenomenon. Neither China nor the BRICS embody a liberation of humanity from the domination of capital. They simply represent other national capitals advancing against the old American hegemonic center.

The historical truth is that global capitalism has entered a phase of increasingly violent fragmentation. The era of triumphant globalization is giving way to a new inter-imperialist competition in which each State seeks to protect its national capital against the others.

The general collapse of capitalism will drag down government debt with it, turning financial assets into worthless paper. And it will present the international working class with the choice: war, through which the victors will wipe out all accounts, then begin a new cycle of accumulation, or communist revolution, which will wipe out not only all credit, but the very regime of Capital.

On 3 July, workers’ anger erupted in Turin. Rents are rising due to the unfreezing of the old residual leases and in anticipation of the next wave of ‘southerners’, attracted by the rumour that Fiat would hire as many as thirty thousand of them.

Marx and Engels addressed the issue of housing in their works, concluding that capitalism cannot solve any problem, not even that of housing. There are no solutions under the current regime. Those proposed to the working class by the bourgeoisie and opportunism only aim to delay the true historical solution, which begins with the violent overthrow of the existing State power through the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship.

The first, essential question is that of power. Only then will real and irreversible economic and social reforms be implemented.

The Time for Reforms Is Over

The bourgeois and petty-bourgeois whores accuse revolutionary Marxism of wanting to solve everything in one fell swoop. Revolution is a process that begins long before the seizure of power and concludes with the disappearance of classes and the State. In this process, two periods can be distinguished: the one preceding and the one following the victorious insurrection. In the first, all energy is directed towards overthrowing the political power of the enemy class. In the second, all class forces, using the irreplaceable machinery of the dictatorship of the proletariat State, proceed to gradually dismantle the economic and social forms of the capitalist regime.

Armed insurrection serves to break the capitalist State, not to modify the economic structure. It is an anarchist and immediatist claim that the proletarian and ‘popular’ insurrection immediately and instantly destroys the economic and social structures along with political power. It will be the communist regime that undertakes this work of modification. While the political power of capitalism can be destroyed in a matter of days, economic reform is a gigantic task spanning several decades, given the international character of socialism, to which all local needs must be subordinated.

Reforms come after revolution, not revolution after reforms. Herein lies the unmistakable and unbridgeable divide between revolutionary communism and the shapeless host of petty-bourgeois demagogues.

Bernstein, Turati, and their comrades did not dream of denying the revolution in words, but they excluded it in the actions of the proletarian party and the masses when they placed the conquest of power at the end of the ladder of partial conquests and reforms. The modern Bernsteins add nothing, whatever the lucubrations with which they cover their counter-revolutionary actions.

The merit of the legal action (not legalistic, gentlemen historians of the PCI!) of the class party in Germany in the last quarter of the last century was that it took advantage of the relatively peaceful period of capitalist development to build gigantic class union organisations and spread the programme of revolutionary communism both within and beyond national borders: Every small and transient success was one more element in the certainty that everything would collapse if the capitalist State was not overthrown once and for all, with the violence of arms. When the marching order was reversed, the objective also changed. The result is tragically well known: the largest party of the 2nd International, the most powerful trade unions in the world, joined the first imperialist war, the revolution was defeated in Germany, then the Russian October and the proletarian communes in Europe and Asia were destroyed.

The social traitors shamelessly proclaimed that socialism had been compromised by ‘Bolshevik violence’ which had ‘forced’ the course of events by transferring to the democratic West methods and means of struggle incompatible with the peaceful and ‘orderly’ development of modern civilisation. The 1914-18 war had amply demonstrated that the economic crises of capitalism were irresolvable locally and, by directly affecting the great masses of workers, posed the historical alternative: perpetuation of the capitalist regime or revolution. Reformism exhausted itself in this contradiction. Its impotence spilled over into fascism, which, presenting itself as a ‘popular’ regime, deluded itself into reviving those hopes in a desperate attempt to unify the conflicting fractions of the bourgeoisie. The era of reformism is dead. The era of communist revolution has begun.

Bourgeois Egalitarianism

L’égalité of 1789 enshrined the principle that every citizen is equal before the State and, therefore, that the State is the State of all. No social formation had ever dared to use violence against the working classes, convincing them to believe that the political power of the wealthy classes was their own power. The theocratic, absolutist, feudal State stood opposed to serfs of the glebe and free workers as the State of privilege. The State was tax collector and executioner, demanding taxes from the people, condemned them, punished them. Only the classes that governed it were excluded. Democracy breaks down the orders and estates, and establishes equality: every citizen, whatever social class they belong to, has the same rights and the same duties. The tax collector demands payment from the proletarian just as much as from the bourgeois: if insolvent, they are subject to the same penalties. The deception of equality: the proletarian is defrauded twice, as a producer of surplus value, which is extorted from him by the bourgeois, and as a citizen, whose wages are forcibly reduced by the State in the form of taxes. In practice, the bourgeois pays nothing of its own to keep its State going, because taxes are a portion of surplus value produced solely by the worker. The State punishes the proletarian and his bourgeois master on the same grounds if they do not comply with tax laws.

All ‘rights’ meet this tragic end. The State guarantees their observance, and presents itself as the State of all, but acts as the State of capital and cannot do otherwise.

The Price Cap

On this egalitarian criterion as the basis for price controls, or regime of maximum prices for basic necessities and even rents, imposed by the State, capitalism has invented nothing new. Every regime has seen State intervention in the distribution of the means of subsistence. It is just that the capitalist State uses this tool for the sole purpose of keeping workers’ wages at the lowest possible level and deceiving the masses about its function as the State of the whole people. The false workers’ parties accredit this lie by peddling rent freeze, price controls to the wage-earning class as a workers’ achievement. Let us see how things stand. Definition of wage according to Marx and non-degenerate Marxists: sum of the prices of the means of subsistence with which the worker replenishes his labour-power. Among the means of subsistence are also included housing, clothing, and other products and ‘services’ that capitalism tends to impose on the proletariat at certain times in order to better subjugate it. It is clear that wages fall or rise depending on whether these prices rise or fall. Capitalism tends to compress wages as much as possible below even the value of labour-power, that is, below the sum of the prices of the means of subsistence. On the contrary, the proletariat struggles to defend itself against this pressure and to raise wages above this limit.

When, then, there is a reduction in basic necessities, or in a part of them that has a significant impact on the total sum, precisely such as rent, there is, as backlash, a reduction in real wages. This reduction, usually, occurs first, and normally in an indirect way: as rents fall, the prices of other goods rise. This manoeuvre is achieved through inflation that precedes the government’s rent freeze measure.

The worker does not gain anything from it, not even in the immediate term.

Rent Control: A Delight for the Petty Bourgeoisie

For those who do not live on wages, such as the petty bourgeois (for the big bourgeois, the issue does not exist because, in most cases, they live in luxury hotels or have their own mansions), tenants of both houses and shops, the freeze is a great favour. For them, profits are not reduced due to the increase in rents: they normally react by increasing the price of commodities. They are in a position to increase their income. Workers are not, unless they extend the length of their working day beyond ten hours a day.

But history, particularly that of these last twenty-five years, is extremely significant in this regard. With the war, the regime of the rent freeze was instituted by fascism. It was an easy matter. Construction companies had to build for the war and ended up making piles of money. Even today, there is still a portion, albeit minimal, of rents that have been frozen since then. Once the war ended, the freeze remained in place for rents that had already been frozen, but it was not extended to the houses being built by the rich bourgeois, for whom the war, whether lost or won, had always been a colossal business opportunity. The big cities are ‘rebuilt’, in whose new neighbourhoods the workers looking for jobs and wages to survive do not settle in, but the non-wage earners who continue to trade on the black market, even with ‘gifts’ from the ‘allies’.

Gradually, rents are unfrozen, new houses are built, rents for houses inhabited by workers slowly rise and, due to inflation, the prices of other basic necessities also rise, so that the greater profits extorted advance the Italian economy in the way we all know. At the same time, however, the houses that the war had not destroyed – especially houses in working-class neighbourhoods – were about to be destroyed by capitalism’s thirst for profit. In homage to the ‘new regime’, it is said that they want to demolish ‘old slums’ in order to build modern and comfortable houses on top of them. Where this has happened, the areas have served to erect enormous and expensive buildings for the bourgeoisie. ‘Social’ housing was built, when it was done, for the evicted, which in many cases is no longer structurally sound, but which, in return, charges rents outside the freeze. The bourgeois has lived in well-built houses, outside the ghettos. They remained there with their old contracts, and in many cases they are still there. They did not move in search of work, as workers often had to do, thus losing their frozen contracts.

The national campaign for ‘housing for workers’ ended in a way well known to all: State officials, police officers, privileged workers, and petty bourgeois live there. Workers are a rarity, like museum pieces.

The False Solution of Opportunism

Alongside rent freezes and price caps, the opportunist parties, in unison with the union leaderships, add that of the so-called urban planning reform. The reform should prevent speculation on land and encourage construction.

But capitalism has done huge business mainly because construction companies have benefited from colossal subsidies and contracts. Capitalism has always sought ‘urban expansion’ in order to make profits. It has found conditions for survival through profits, but at what cost! Abandonment of agricultural land, disruption of productive forces, forced proletarianisation in the countryside, increase in the industrial reserve army. Town and country: an insoluble contradiction, in whose crass ignorance the parties that dare to refer to Marxism would claim to untangle centuries-old knots.

‘The housing question’, Engels comments in his essay of the same name, ‘can only be solved when society has been sufficiently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the antithesis between town and country, which has been brought to an extreme point by present-day capitalist society (...) only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible. To want to solve the housing question while at the same time desiring to maintain the modern big cities is an absurdity. The modern big cities, however, will be abolished only by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, and when this is once on the way then there will be quite many other things to do than supplying each worker with a little house for his own possession’.

The Communist Solution

Dismantling elephantine urban complexes, demolishing monstrous hives devoid of light and air, redistributing human masses across the earth’s surface harmoniously integrating them into nature: this is the ultimate goal.

But the philistine cries out for the ‘concrete’, the ‘practical’, the ‘immediate’, offering the proletarian, exhausted by work and nauseated by the demagogy of politicians, the bastardised order: rent control, houses on instalment!

‘(...) [O]ne thing’, Engels continues, ‘is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real “housing shortage”, given rational utilisation of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses. Immediately once the proletariat has conquered political power such a measure dictated in the public interests will be just as easy to carry out as other expropriations and billetings are by the existing State’.

This was Engels’s peremptory response to the scoundrels of his time, less despicable than those of today. The Marxist solution is hard for the bourgeois, the petty bourgeois, and aspiring property owners to swallow. This is why it is ignored by the false communo-socialists of yesterday and today.

There is no housing ‘shortage’. There is no need to build any more for several decades in the large cities. There is only an urgent need to evict banks, useless offices, churches, party headquarters, clubs, institutions of all kinds, luxury homes, headquarters of small unproductive and uneconomical companies, and to thin out many branches of production that are only necessary to keep this shaky society of profit afloat. This is the immediate programme of the communist revolution. Any other ‘concrete proposal’ is demagogy.

The Struggle Against the High Cost of Living

One might say that all this is just, coherent, possible, but that today it is not yet ‘mature’ because political power is still in the hands of capitalism. What can be done to defend the masses of wage-earners from the economic crushing of capital? The answer is not to be found in a formula or in a contingent initiative. The defence of the working class is inseparable from the revolutionary preparation of the proletariat.

Moreover, the ruling castes themselves, the trade unions, the same traitorous parties, are forced to admit that what is given to the workers with one hand is taken away with the other. Every wage increase returns to capitalism in the form of price increases. It is a grudging admission of the resounding failure of reformism, of gradualism.

Linking immediate action to the final struggle, mobilising the masses in a fierce and relentless struggle to put the bosses, the government, and the political parties against the wall: this is what can and must be done.

It is in this process of revolutionary preparation that the struggles themselves lose their precarious and insufficient character, taking on the character of struggles that tend to close the ranks of all proletarian sectors and bind them to the revolutionary leadership of the international communist party.

This process implies the overthrow of the current trade union policy, the abandonment of fragmented struggles, of the alliance between CGIL, CISL, and UIL, of reforms, of the protection of the national economy. In turn, this presupposes proletarian war against the State and the traitorous parties, against all forces, large or small, that hinder the linking march of the class with its party.

Capitalism no longer knows which saint to pray to. It hopes that the proletariat will continue to be deceived by the opportunist parties, so that it can control it at will and, when the time is right, deal it a violent blow that keeps it away from the revolution for another fifty years.

The struggle against the high cost of living is, therefore, a political struggle that workers’ unions can organise: with maximum effectiveness, provided that they are led by the communist programme. Otherwise, without this leadership, the struggle of the masses will only serve to demoralise them due to the absolute lack of results capable of weakening the enemy forces. It is a political struggle, it is a struggle against the State. It is a revolutionary, anti-reformist, anti-democratic struggle.

For centuries the African continent has been plundered and exploited by the capitalist powers. Now they have been joined by China whose presence in Africa, over the course of two decades has grown to such an extent that it has become the main economic partner for many of the countries there.

Chinese capitalism, whose annual rate of growth of GNP has been around 9% since the 1980s, has become a major power which can now lay claim to an influence in international politics that is proportionate to its economic, financial and military size.

The first triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FoCAC) was held in 2000 to ratify the influence China has on the continent. In the Forum held in Beijing on 3 to 4 September 2018, in the presence of over 50 African government leaders and heads of State, President Xi Jinping ‘offered’ 60 thousand million dollars of financial backing, as well as announcing the cancellation of debt for some of the poorest countries or those experiencing difficulties. Of the 60 thousand million, pledged over the next three years, 15 of them will consist of aid and loans at zero interest, 20 of credit lines, 10 for a special development fund, 5 to support Chinese imports from the black continent and another 10 to serve as incentives to Chinese firms to invest in the various African countries. These funds will be in addition to those allocated in previous years, and indeed the growth of Chinese financial commitments in Africa has been exponential: 5 thousand million in 2006, 10 in 2012, 60 in 2015 and another 60 thousand million in 2018.

Rhetoric, Chinese and western

Sino-African relations, which go back a long way, have undergone an evolution over time that is strictly linked to the phases of capitalist development in China. We can thus identify two distinct phases marking the relations between the Chinese People's Republic and Africa.

In the first phase, after China, with the victory of the Communist Party in 1949, had won independence and national unity, the main task for its bourgeoisie was transforming a backward and almost exclusively agricultural country into a modern industrial one, through a difficult accumulation of capital. Over the same period Africa was still largely under colonial rule and the struggles for national independence, an indispensable premise for any plans for economic development, were beginning. In this context, in April 1955, during the First Afro-asiatic Conference held in Bandung, China’s premier, Zhou En-lai met with Egyptian president Nasser, and in May 1956 Egypt would be the first African State to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

A major step forward in foreign policy was Zhou En-lai’s visit to ten African countries, between the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964. The declared aim of the trip was to express support for the national liberation movements and the young “socialist” governments that emerged from decolonization, and to seek allies in the so-called Third World in order to combat China’s diplomatic isolation. Nine of the countries visited would institute formal relations with the Popular Republic. The political approaches were always accompanied by small amounts of economic aid, more symbolic than anything, used to build stadiums, presidential palaces and government buildings, but also infrastructure such as the Tanzania-Zambia railway, or else socially useful investments such as hospitals, provided with Chinese qualified medical personnel, which as well as having an ideological agenda, offered grants to African students who were becoming influential members of the local political classes. By the end of 1978 China had established diplomatic relations with 43 African countries.

The second phase would begin at the end of the seventies and extend to the start of the new millennium. To maintain the spate of impetuous growth of Chinese capitalism from 1978 onwards, Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatism in domestic politics (capitalism is always “pragmatic”) would require Beijing to orient its foreign policy towards more concrete economic and commercial relations. The principal stages were: 1978, when Beijing’s policies of “openness and reform” began”; 1993, when China became an importer of oil; and 1995, when the Council of State decreed that aid, commercial loans and “developmental” aid in Africa should be linked to Chinese commercial interests.

The final stage began in the year 2000 with the creation of FoCAC. With relations between China and Africa having been accelerated, due the Chinese need to find outlets abroad following enormous growth in its productive and financial apparatus, China’s descent into the infernal circle of imperialism was complete. China, in competition with the old European, American and Russian imperial colonial bosses, now required greater submission from the African countries.

By 2013, China had established diplomatic relations with 50 African countries, which is practically all of them. Today Swaziland alone continues to maintain relations with Taiwan. The Chinese People’s Republic has always demanded the recognition of the existence of only one China, with Taiwan an integral part of it, the sole legitimate government of which is in Beijing.

What has also changed are the principles which the Chinese government proclaimed would have to inform its relations with the African States, principles which have been refined over time in a numerous series of reports.

In the first phase the relations of China with Africa were based on the “Five Principles” of peaceful co-existence of 1953 and on the Eight Principles of foreign aid enunciated by Premier Zhou in the course of his visit to Africa in 1964.

The Five Principles proposed reciprocal respect of territorial integrity and sovereignty; non-interference in internal affairs; equality, mutual advantage, and peaceful co-existence.

The “Eight Principles” advocated assistance to foreign countries according to the principle of equality and mutual advantage; respect for the sovereignty of the beneficiary countries, no ties or fixed privileges; the provision of loans at low or zero rates of interest; assistance for beneficiaries to commence their own autonomous and independent economic development; the achievement of rapid outcomes through small investments; the provision of high quality Chinese equipment, goods and materials; help with technical training, with experts in the beneficiary countries and from China accorded the same treatment.

What is more in this first phase attention was drawn to the similarity of the interests of China and the African countries, with a shared history as nations oppressed by colonialism and with a common economic and social “model” (“socialism”) insofar as they were developing countries. In such a way did Beijing aim to differentiate itself from both the West and from Moscow.

After 1978 however, during the wave of economic modernization, Chinese attention shifted from aid programs in Africa to more commercial and profitable links. Beijing opted to develop a policy in Africa that moved towards “mutual advantage” and “win-win cooperation”, in which in exchange for the creation of infrastructures China would be provided with African natural resources. From the enunciation of political principles and ideologies there was a move towards leveraging common interests and reciprocal benefits.

And yet China – as all imperialisms do – also conceals a predatory face behind the mask of cooperation and the advantages that the African countries can hope to derive from strict ties with the Asiatic giant. Even at the FoCAC summit China hid its predatory aims under the phraseology of cooperation and development: “The objective of Sino-African relations is the improvement of people’s living conditions”, declared Xi Jinping.

At the Forum the Chinese president listed eight important areas of cooperation between China and the African countries: promotion of industry, infrastructures, exchange facilities, environmental development, exchange of know-how, health assistance, interpersonal exchanges, peace and security. The Chinese media announced that “the cooperation between China and Africa is between two brothers”.

The Chinese oppose western practice with a policy based on the “Five Nos”: No interference in internal affairs, No imposition of Bejing’s will on African countries, No seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing cooperation with Africa, No attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa, No interference as regards models of development, which are to remain in line with the respective national conditions.

As far as the West is concerned, the growing influence of China on the African continent has provoked criticism and reaction from its hacks and politicians. In the West, where the cult of putrefying democracy and freedom of speech is on show (that is brainy people cashing in) the criticism of Chinese expansionism in Africa ranges across the entire political spectrum, from ‘right’ to ‘left’. Beijing is accused of ‘neocolonialism’, of luring Africans into the debt trap, of only being interested in exploiting the mineral resources. Others, adopting a moralistic tone, reproach the Chinese for having no respect for democracy and ‘human Rights’. And then there are those who reproach their own governments for having no interest in the African continent: the Chinese expansion in Africa had supposedly caught them ‘unprepared’, with Trump’s United States having ‘forgotten’ Africa, and Europe seeing it only as the source of the migratory problem.

All this rhetoric, whether Chinese or anti-Chinese, is merely to disguise the true nature of the struggle happening on the African continent, which sees the new arrival, China, carving out space for itself within the spheres of influence of the other imperialisms, while using the same financial weapons and the same vile and deceitful ideological justifications. It is a real war, and, like all wars, it is only resolved, at least temporarily, with the victory, on a military level, of one of the contenders.

The Chinese in Africa

Since the beginning of the 21st Century, commercial exchange between China and the African continent has increased annually by around 20%. With a volume of trade of around 170 thousand million dollars, for 9 years China has been Africa’s main trading partner, ahead of the United States and France. Alongside this there has been an enormous increase in Chinese investment. The 60 thousand million promised recently is in fact going to be added to that already invested over the last 17 years: between 2000 and 2017 the Chinese government, banks and various funds have put 143 thousand million dollars into Africa.

China started to become interested in the African continent in a more active sense in the early years of the new millennium. This was a period in which the strong growth in its economy required ever greater quantities of raw materials. The clear objective of the first relationships established by the Chinese with the African countries was the supplying of factories in the mother country with oil, copper and other minerals, in short with everything needed to sustain and increase its industrial expansion.

Over the last few years China, having become the factory of the world, has not only discovered the necessity of guaranteeing ever new outlets for the products of its manufacturing sector, but is in search of investment opportunities for its excess capital.

To respond to capital’s requirements, the Chinese directors are trying to implement the great Belt and Road Initiative project (BRI), the so-called New Silk Road, composed of various maritime and terrestrial commercial routes winding their way from China to the West. The full extent of the project is difficult to quantify since it is composed of myriad infrastructural works which traverse the whole of Asia before converging on Europe. But Africa as well is part of it. Much more than the other regions with an interest in it, the African face of the project consists of a complex and stratified system of treaties between China and the various African countries. In any case the focus is on infrastructures: by initiating building and dock yard projects throughout Africa, Beijing is integrating the African continent into the great New Silk Road project.

The most important of the infrastructure projects already accomplished by China in Africa certainly relate to railway networks. In the last ten years China has contributed to the construction of more than 5,700 kilometers of railway track. In East Africa the already existing Chinese infrastructure may be considered part of a broader network of branches which connect the ports to the hinterland. Within the region the Chinese have achieved two important rail links which give a good idea of the huge investments being made. At 800 kilometers long, the new Djibouti Addis Ababa railroad is the longest electrified track in Africa, and goods trains can cover it in less than 10 hours, as opposed to before, when goods transported in trucks could take three days. The cost of the line was 3.4 thousand million dollars and it is the first part of a project that aims to construct 5,000 kilometers of railroad track by the end of 2020 in Ethiopia. The Mombasa-Nairobi railway meanwhile is a high-speed train, which covers the 450 kilometers separating the capital of Kenya from the coast in just four and half hours. Costing 3.2 thousand million dollars, this project has created 50 thousand jobs and contributed to a 2% increase in the country’s national GNP. The development of this railway line is also the premise for connecting up countries without an outlet to the sea, such as Rwanda and Uganda, to the ports on the Indian ocean.

Another fundamental sector into which Chinese investment is being directed in Africa regards the modernization of ports, like Djibouti, Port Said in Egypt and Lagos in Nigeria. In Tanzania thanks to Chinese loans the port of Bagamoyo is under construction, which may well become one of the most important stopovers on the continent due to its capacity to dock mega-ships. The importance of investment in port facilities is provided by the fact that around 90% of African importations and exportations are by sea. In this way, according to analysts, China wants to put in place a kind of encirclement of the African continent with the dozens of ports financed by them.

In addition to investments in the railways and ports, Chinese capital up to now has financed the completion of more than 4,300 kilometers of motorways, 14 airports, 34 electrical power plants and around a 1,000 small hydroelectrical power stations. In general, Chinese capital has been employed principally in three sectors: transport (38 thousand million), energy (30 thousand million) and mining activity (19 thousand million).

China is showing an increasing hunger for raw materials which Africa is capable of satisfying, a land rich in resources ready to plunder. Ensuring access to its raw materials, above all oil, is one of Beijing’s main priorities. But the mining, processing and transportation of African raw materials is in many cases only possible through the building of new infrastructures, and 75% of China’s imports from Africa relate to raw materials. The payment of loans contracted with China are indeed often effectuated through the provision of raw materials. For example, over the last 14 years Angola has contracted debts with China of over 19 thousand million dollars which for the most part is repaid in oil.

Finally, it should be noted that China is delocalizing a lot of its own industrial production. According to some studies there are more than 10,000 companies currently operating in China, 90% of which are privately owned; according to the African Development Bank, the number of Chinese in Africa is around 1,300,000. One of the main countries identified by the Chinese for industrial production is Ethiopia. The Hawassa industrial Park in this country, which has attracted dozens of industries for producing clothing, was realized with Chinese investment. The construction of similar parks is also currently underway in Kenya and Egypt.

There are a number of factors which underlie this strategy. First of all, transferring industrial production to Africa means that the cost of transporting raw materials can be reduced; indeed, since these raw materials are available in situ, the cost of transporting them to the centers of production in Africa, thanks also to the infrastructures constructed by China, is extremely low, thereby increasing profit margins for the companies. To which may be added the fact that the Chinese firms whose production is situated in Africa have at their disposal a vast and expanding internal market in which to sell their products.

But a decisive factor underlying the tendency to delocalize regards rising wages in China. The times are long gone when Chinese capitalism had at its disposal an endless supply of poor wretches prepared to offer their labor for an extremely low wage. Over the last decade Chinese workers have obtained annual wage increases of around 12%. On the other hand, whereas in China the population has tended to fall following the one child policy, the fast expansion of the population in Africa means there is plenty of young labor power available. It has been calculated that in Africa it would be deemed acceptable to offer wages that were 45% of those in China. The African continent is becoming, therefore, an abundant reservoir of labor to exploit, overflowing with millions of young limbs available for capital.

From this point of view, Chinese investment in Africa is contributing to turning the African working class into one that is more robust, employed to work in the constructions financed by Chinese capital and in the factories. But, for the rest, the expansion of Chinese capitalism in Africa has nothing positive to offer African proletarians because it happens within an international context of bitter imperialist conflict which will inevitably lead to ever more disastrous wars and crises.

Land Grabbing

China and the other imperialisms are in competition in Africa also as regards so-called land-grabbing, that is, the progressive acquisition of vast swathes of land by States and big companies in foreign countries and for the most part in the poorer ones. The hacks in the West, loyal servants of their own bourgeoisies, are used to depicting China’s acquisition of land in Africa in hysterical terms, often resorting to hypocritical rhetoric about poor peasants being chased off the land. We will therefore draw attention to two important aspects. First of all: even if the data is not precise, the Focsiv report “I padroni della Terra” estimates that, of the 88 million hectares of fertile land already nabbed by various States and multinational companies, the main “Lords of the Earth” turn out to be those in the United States, in first place with 10 million hectares acquired since the year 2000, and far ahead of China with its 3 million hectares. Secondly: Half of the land that China has acquired abroad is not in Africa but in countries in South-East Asia, such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

The events in the years 2007-2008, with the explosion of the economic/financial crisis and consequent food crisis, are what underlie this ‘land grabbing’, of which Africa is the main victim. Commencing in early 2007 there was a vertiginous increase in the price of food products, which peaked in the Spring of the following year, with the cost of rice and wheat eventually going up by 150%. Thence the interest in investing capital in agriculture, which prompted the rapid growth in buying land abroad: if in 2008 it was a matter of 4 million hectares being purchased, by 2009 it had already risen to 59 million.

Those who suffered the most from the effects of this increase in the price of foodstuffs were above all the people in the poorest countries, where increasing hunger provoked major social disorder and revolts, with Egypt one example. The food crisis thus became a threat to the well-fed ruling classes, and demonstrated the fragility of those States which, with limited resources within their own national borders, depended on being supplied from abroad.

Food has always been a critical factor in the history of the People’s Republic. Millions of deaths would result from the failure of the Great Leap Forward, indeed up until the eighties there was still food rationing and meat was only eaten on special occasions.

China, with around 20% of the world’s population has only around 8-9% of the available arable land. Furthermore, according to official statistics, around 40% of its soil is being rendered progressively less fertile through soil erosion and pollution. The impetuous rate of industrial growth has seriously damaged much of the cultivable land and has compromised water supplies due to pollution of the water table, rivers and lakes.

Things only changed after the reforms in the eighties. From 1978 a notable increase in agricultural production of about 4.8% per annum was registered. The total intake of calories, per person per day, has risen considerably from 2,163 kcal in 1980 to 3,102 in 2014. If in the rural areas the diet continues to be mainly based on the consumption, and auto-consumption, of vegetable and cereal products (rice in the south, grain in the north), the diet of the urban population (enjoying a pro-capita income about three times higher than in the rural areas) is characterized instead by the consumption of a significant amount of animal protein. The increase in the consumption of animal products has been immense, and between 1985 and 2005 the consumption of meat quadrupled, and has continued to increase since then.

What is more, the divide between productive capacity and the need to feed the population, taken together with the abundant availability of capital, has propelled China, from around 2010, to rent or buy up land abroad. To begin with this was in neighboring countries, but soon its attention turned to Africa, which has low priced land of excellent quality available and political regimes that are well disposed towards China. Thus it is now growing rice and other food products on African land.

Vain attempts that will be able to do very little, in the context of a mode of production that is incapable of satisfying the most essential needs.

The Base in Djibouti

The export of Chinese capital into Africa requires military back up. Clearly the Chinese must conceal their military expansion under humanitarian rhetoric, in this instance as well following the Westerners in their lurid hypocrisies, who as good democrats are still the masters of talking peace whilst simultaneously bringing death and destruction.

Therefore, the Chinese also take part, with their soldiers and military vehicles, in the so-called “peacekeeping” operations. According to the data of the European Council on Foreign Relations, China’s military presence in the African continent amounts to about 2,500 soldiers, employed on missions under the United Nations mandate. Of these, 1,051 are based in South Sudan, 666 in Liberia, 402 in Mali, and the rest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African republic, and Sudan. To these can be added the thousands of so-called “contractors”, employees of private companies, mercenaries, to whom are delegated a whole series of military and policing operations which are not managed directly by the State army. Not huge numbers, therefore, but destined to grow as the Chinese penetration of the continent increases. Over recent years Chinese influence in Africa has increasingly required the use of the military to protect its interests on the continent and in order to reinforce its geopolitical position. The Chinese military presence is necessary to safeguard the substantial investments made by the Chinese government and companies and to protect their infrastructures and production hubs.

Soon China will be able to station other soldiers in Africa following the opening in Djibouti of its first permanent military base abroad, which has the capacity to accommodate up to 10,000 soldiers.

The base in Djibouti, which opened in 2018, is situated in a strategically very important position. Djibouti, a small State on the Horn of Africa with little more than 900,000 inhabitants, faces onto the Bab el-Mandeb strait, situated between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean. Like the straits of Hormuz and Molucca, it holds a fundamental importance for the Chinese economy, situated as it is on the route to the Suez Canal: through which passes the flow of oil destined for China, and through which its exports arrive in Europe and fully reconnects with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

The new military base therefore guarantees security to the maritime section of the Silk Road, and at the same time represents a good point from which to consolidate and extend the Chinese penetration of the Ethiopian market and the Horn of Africa in general. With Djibouti, the PRC’s first military base outside China, Beijing is consolidating its presence in Africa, and, potentially, a new contender has arrived to join the armed imperialist gendarmes on the continent.

The “Djibouti Model” will be reproduced by China in the development of its other bases abroad, such as the one profiled in Walvia Bay, in Namibia.

Finally, another factor indicative of the growing weight China is acquiring in Africa, and which ties it to the African countries, is the exportation of arms. Over the last few years China has surpassed America in the sale of arms in Africa. According to the last report by SIPRI China is the second provider of arms in Africa after Russia. Despite the overall importation of arms into Africa decreasing by 22% in the period 2013-17 as compared to the previous five years, the arms provided by China went up by 55%, reaching 17% of the total.

This expansion of Chinese imperialism in Africa, on the military, industrial and economic levels, is worrying the other imperialists, who are trying to push back by increasing their own military presence in the continent; one whose strategic importance is increasing as every day goes by.

The ever more frequent episodes of bloody encounters between guerilla militias and regular armies, often passed off as caused by ethnic and religious tensions, are instead provoked by this subterranean struggle between the major global imperialisms.

African proletarians, oppressed in many cases not only through the exploitation of their labour-power in the factories, fields and mines but also by wars, famines, and illnesses caused by unsustainable living conditions, will have to rediscover their essential unity and power as a class if they are to douse the fires of war lit by imperialism; they will have to proclaim their own war, a war against the bourgeoisie and its accomplices, whether in the West or the East, but most importantly of all, against their own national bourgeoisies and their own bosses.

The following article figures as a kind of ‘prequel’ to the series ‘The working Class is a class of Emigrants’, a long series of articles whose first part appeared in Il Partito Comunista no.18 in February 1976 with later parts appeared more or less continuously up to issue no. 41. All together, the result is a forensic examination of emigration placed firmly on a class rather than a national basis.

The series was prompted by the lived experience of an Italian comrade, Ezio, who worked as an emigrant worker in Switzerland and who interpreted his experiences in the light of previous party studies on the subject supplemented by wider research, viewed through the lens of the wider international and classist vision of our party.vision, which he shared to the end of his days.

The first part has now been translated into English and appeared in The International Communist Party no.68, and we will aim to publish further parts going forward.

The government recently held a ‘National Emigration Conference’ in Rome, in which the big union Mandarins took their turns at the podium alongside priests and ministers.

Opportunism once again confirmed its total submission to the bourgeois State. Indeed the great ‘national communist’ party [The Italian Communist Party] does not defend the interests of emigrants as proletarians, as potential brothers of the exploited of the entire world, which by its very nature is opposed to the international front of capital, but as ‘Italians abroad’, Italian citizens whom the Italian State is supposed to protect. This is a complete betrayal of the communist approach.

With the ongoing development of the capitalist regime comes further confirmation that the State apparatus, which overshadows the other machinery of bourgeois rule such as parliament, the judiciary and the individual possessors of capital, is increasingly becoming the cumbersome protagonist of all aspects of social life (don't you realise, romantic petty-bourgeois daydreamer pondering over restrictions on freedom, that with the “tax registry” the State can even count the small change in your pocket?). Opportunism - while babbling on about demagogic and reactionary “grassroots participation” under the current regime, which on closer inspection proves to be complementary to rather than an obstacle to State power - always bows down before the “raison d'état”. For it, same as in fascist ideology, the raison d'état is the synthesis, at a higher level, of the various “class rights”. The State belongs to everyone. Marxist revolutionaries do not call on the State to do, say, or protect anything: the “doing” is now up to the working class alone.

In the case of emigrants, the proletarians of Italy, providing the labour-power commodity, belong to the State of the Italian bourgeoisie: the ABC of our doctrine is that the State, having this surplus commodity at its disposal, can also export it, like any other commodity; the bilateral agreements on the recruitment of workers to go abroad are, after all, drawn up on the model of normal trade agreements. Yes, the State protects its goods to be shipped, stowed safely away on international trains.

Not only, therefore, have we established that the false communist who trusts in the paternal influence of the State is a renegade, but also that proletarians abroad can expect nothing but confirmation of their oppression from the solicitude of consulates and welfare associations.

The conditions of insecurity, segregation, and forced and artificial separation from families also turn out to be useful to both the host capital, and to the exporting bourgeoisie, with the latter thus assured of remittances and of the lives of the workers themselves: in southern Italy in 1968, more than a third of credit entries came from emigrants' remittances.

But our renegades, no different from others elsewhere, speak of “the prestige of Italy, of the international authority of our country, of which the communities abroad are among the most important representatives among other peoples”. We know, you are interested in Italy, they say, that it should make a good show itself on the market, in competition with the other labour-exporting countries.

“How can one deny,” the Stalinist resistance fighter and patriot will insinuate, “that there are real national, racial and cultural differences even among workers? A differentiated tactic is needed, one that respects the cultural heritage of emigrants”. He forgets that production, trade and even social life in the most capitalistically developed countries are no longer regulated by the yardstick of “nations”: the latter, with their multiple elements produced by the history of past centuries, formed the material basis on which capitalism in its infancy first built its markets, but its States as well; today, it is the latter that regulate production. The boundaries of the market coincide with the administrative boundaries of the State and not with the limits of ethnic settlements. People are registered according to citizenship and not race. Wars are waged by bourgeois States, no longer by nations, and are fought for State purposes, to divide up zones of influence, such that in every war there are more the nations and peoples divided up and bartered over at the peace table than there are those who manage to settle in their “legitimate” country.

For the proletarian abroad, being an Italian citizen (and the same obviously goes for Spaniards, the Irish and anyone else whom the whims of international capital force to emigrate), the language and “national culture” that he is expected to carry with him is nothing but than a double chain, keeping him apart from his foreign comrades: proletarians have written in their own name, in the registers of the country of their birth, neither land, possessions or interests to defend, neither have they homeland, citizenship nor culture. Citizenship for them, not for the bourgeoisie, is a one-sided relationship: an obligation to work, an obligation to go to war, even an obligation to vote (yes, now - the ultimate mockery - they want emigrants to “vote” too). For the bourgeoisie, homeland means comfortable and well-paid government sinecures, schools where they can laze around and learn how to cheat the workers, armies of lawyers and police officers devoted to defending their sacred private property; for the proletariat, it means only a hail of bullets whenever they dare to raise their heads.

Sacrosanct, and we have made it our own, is the phrase that circulates among workers in Switzerland: “every worker is a foreign worker”, which is absolutely in tune, more than a century later, with our own expression: workers have no homeland, you cannot take away what they do not have.

But if the proletarian is essentially always a stranger, in the land he inhabits, in the society in which he lives, estranged from his own daily and exhausting work, and individually competing even with those who share his condition, how can he hope, as the lowest class in society, to oppose or at least defend himself from bourgeois oppression? Our dialectical materialism has already given its answer: the proletariat is either revolutionary or it is nothing. Where the bourgeoisie sees only nations, Marxism discovers the classes that are the actors of history: the working class can exert its weight and strength not insofar as it permeates and blends into the bastardised interclassist categories, but only insofar as it moves as a class, that is, when its members are organised in structures specific to it committed to its own exclusive objectives. It is a revolutionary and conscious class only when it is led by its party. But inviting workers, as the PCI [Italian Communist Party] does, in order to “participate in the life of local authorities, to democratise consular committees or for the social management of schools abroad” means precisely to downgrade the proletariat.

It is also pointless to call for participation in local trade unions if one fails to note that in Switzerland, as elsewhere, the trade union centre, in addition to being complicit with capital in the marginalisation of foreign workers, has a long tradition of collaboration with employers behind it. Proof of this is the recent renewal of the draconian agreement known as ‘labour peace’, in force in Switzerland since 1937, whereby the Swiss Trade Union Federation undertakes in advance not to organise any strikes, even in this period of employer attacks on wages and employment, and to repress any spontaneous workers' unrest: ‘Art. 2 - the parties undertake to maintain absolute industrial peace and to ensure that it is respected by their members. Any industrial action is excluded (...) This absolute industrial peace also applies at the individual level’. This is not the language of workers' representatives, it is the economy, national capital speaking in the guise of opportunism.

The first step in the revival of the labour movement will be marked – with the unmasking of these traitors – by an objective and inevitable contradiction between the requirements of the labour movement and that of the so-called general “progress”, “peace” and “welfare” brigade. The growth of the movement will then also require the autonomous doctrine of its class party.