The capitalist mode of production already existed under feudal, semi-theocratic, and absolute monarchical regimes. Its economic characteristic is associated labour, in which the operations required to manufacture a product are entrusted to different workers who carry them out in succession, and are therefore no longer feasible for a single individual to perform.

As a result of new inventions and discoveries, this technical development has as its economic consequence the victory of manufacture over the artisan’s workshop, which produces less and at a higher cost; and as its legal consequence the fact that the worker ceases to be the master of the product of his labour and can therefore no longer bring it to market. It is the holder of the complex tools which permit the employment of associated labour who becomes the owner of the product; he pays out a money remuneration to those who have cooperated in its production.

Thus the capitalist and the wage-earner emerge where until then only one figure existed: the artisan. But the laws of the old society prevent this social differentiation from becoming general: reactionary rules stand in the way of the transformation of techniques and of the organisation of the various trades; the development of industry, which threatens the dominance of the landowners, is held back; commodities cannot circulate freely either within the various nations or outside them.

The bourgeois revolution is born from this contrast: it is a social war unleashed and led by the capitalists to free themselves from their dependence on the old ruling classes; to free the forces of production from the old restrictions, and the masses of artisans and small proprietors from both servitude and restrictions alike: for them to become wage-earners, they must, in fact, be set free to bring their labour power to market.

This is the first phase of the bourgeois epoch. The watchword of capitalism at this stage is the unlimited freedom of all economic activities, the repeal of all laws, and the removal of all obstacles that political power placed in the way of the right to produce, purchase, circulate, and sell for money all commodities, labour power included.

The early decades of the great capitalist expansion constitute the liberal phase of the regime. Businesses multiply and grow to enormous proportions; the armies of labour gradually swell in numbers; and the commodities produced reach colossal levels.

In Capital, Marx provided an analysis of this classic type of economy, free from all state interference, as well as of the laws of its development. He explained the crises of overproduction to which the frenzied pursuit of profit leads, and the sudden upheavals they periodically provoke: falling prices, business closures and bankruptcies, plunging entire groups of workers into the deepest poverty.

As a social class, does capitalism have the capacity to react to these incurable economic contradictions inherent to it, throughout the course of its history with its varied local aspects, in which advances and setbacks alternate? The answer provided by classical Marxist critique is that the bourgeois class will never possess a sound theory or scientific knowledge of historical becoming. By virtue of its nature and raison d’être, it will be no more able to discipline the irresistible forces which, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, it has itself unleashed.

This response must not, however, be understood in a scholastic fashion, that is, in the sense that capitalism would be devoid of any possibility to foresee, or even merely to delay, the catastrophes to which its vital imperatives lead it. During its second historical stage, it has no doubt fulfilled without restraint its mission, which was to maximise the power of its monstrous productive apparatus, and it will never cease to produce ever more; but it can strive to dispose of the growing mass of products that would otherwise stifle it, and it does so by extending its market to the very limits of the known world. It is thus that it enters its third phase, that of imperialism.

In this third phase, new economic phenomena emerge, each with its own impact, all of which ultimately offer certain solutions to the periodic partial crises of the bourgeois economy. Marx had certainly foreseen this stage, since the development of capitalist production and the conquest of distant markets are parallel historical phenomena, appearing at the same time as the system itself, the discovery of major trade routes having been one of the main factors in the triumph of capitalism. But it is in Lenin’s classic study Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that we find an analysis of the characteristics of this third phase, conducted, moreover, using Marx’s method.

Already evident during the preparation for the First World War, they have only become more pronounced since. The capitalist system has undergone a major overhaul of the rules that guided it during its liberal phase. The flood of goods onto the world market has been accompanied by an imposing attempt to control the price fluctuations that disrupted the economy, sometimes to the point of even provoking the collapse of colossal enterprises. Abandoning the economic individualism and absolute autonomy of the classical era, bourgeois enterprises formed syndicates; production cartels, ‘trusts’, sprang up. Firms producing the same commodity entered into strict agreements in order to monopolise distribution and set prices at will. Then, as most products in a given industry also serve as raw materials for the industry situated further up the processing chain, vertical cartels were formed, for example, to control the production of certain machines and to set the prices of all subsequent products, from the basic extractive industry through to the last rung of the processing industry, by way of semi-finished articles. At the same time, banks developed and became concentrated. Backed by the most powerful industrial groups in each country, they set about controlling and dominating less important producers, forming everywhere true financial oligarchies, ever more restricted and closed. As Lenin pointed out in his Imperialism, this finance capitalism takes on an increasingly parasitic character.

At this stage, the bourgeois no longer embodies the classic image of the captain of industry who calls forth new forces through the use of modern technology and the intelligent and skilful organisation of associated labour. He is no longer god the father in his factory, as the feudal lord was in his fiefdom, that is to say, that romantic creator in whom the workers must recognise even more a leader than a boss, since it is he who effects the fusion between their labour and the mechanism whose secrets he holds.

The manager of a modern factory is himself a wage-earner, albeit one who shares more or less in the profits, a gilded serf, but a serf all the same. The modern bourgeois, by contrast, is not a production technician, but a wheeler-dealer who receives dividends from the shares he holds without perhaps ever having set foot in a factory; a member of the small financial oligarchy, exporting no longer commodities but capital and securities, bundles of paper that ensure his control over the world.

Still subject to the dynamism of competition between firms, the ruling class uses its monopolistic regulations to curb this competition when it feels it is on the brink of bankruptcy. The major centres of banking speculation decide on its behalf the fate of various companies, setting prices, selling below the ‘normal’ price where necessary, and causing stock market values to fluctuate wildly.

In short, the bourgeoisie makes enormous efforts to establish regulatory bodies that will slow down the economy, thereby denying at one stroke the unlimited freedom that was the credo of the earliest capitalist economic theories.

To fully understand the latest manifestations of this third phase, one must, like Lenin, link it to the accompanying political developments, establish the relationship between monopoly finance capital and the bourgeois State, and finally show how the tragedy of the great wars and the general tendency towards national and social oppression stem from it.

Parallel to the historical development of the capitalist mode of production, we must also consider that of the forms of the bourgeoisie’s political power.

As Engels established, scientific communism is founded on two great discoveries due to Marx. The first is the law of surplus value, showing that the accumulation of capital rests on the continual extraction from the proletarians of a fraction of their labour power. The second is the theory of historical materialism, which sees in the economic relations of production the cause and explanation not only of political events, but of the entire ideological superstructure characterising the various epochs of history and the various types of society.

In the light of the new method and the new doctrine, the founders of scientific socialism themselves no longer appear as pure ideologues come to reveal new principles to the masses in order to enlighten them and lead them in their wake. They are men of science working on the data of history and the real structure of present society, and who, in this research, have striven to free themselves from all the prejudices of the past in order to found a system of laws explaining historical evolution and enabling one to foresee, in a scientific and not a mystical fashion, the broad outlines of future development.

The centuries-long struggle of the bourgeoisie in the economic field and its efforts to dislodge the feudal and theocratic classes from their key position in the government of the State, this tremendous clash of interests, which ultimately culminated in armed revolution and brought the bourgeoisie to power, was mirrored in a parallel struggle of ideas and theories.

The doctrine of the old ruling classes rested on the principles of revelation and authority, because that was a convenient base upon which to build the law and the social custom permitting the oligarchy of warriors, nobles, and priests to control the masses. In the most remote times, truth was held to be enclosed in immutable Tables, believed to have been dictated by powers beyond human reason, which laid down the norms of collective life. In more recent times, it was sought in the letter of the texts of venerated ancient scholars and masters, from whom an answer was expected to all the new questions of knowledge and action.

Modern philosophy’s critique of this principle of authority was a weapon of the nascent revolutionary bourgeoisie, which, in every field, boldly set about casting doubt on all traditional conceptions. It pitted reason against authority, undermining religious dogma in order to better undermine the feudal state, that is, the monarchy of divine right founded on the class solidarity of the landed nobility and the Church.

It thus forged a new ideology, which it consecrated as universal and definitive truth, and whose triumph it celebrated over the lies of religious and absolutist obscurantism. In the light of Marxist critique, however, this ideology appears simply as a new construction responding to new class relations and to the needs of the class newly come to power.

In the political field, the bourgeoisie launched a revolutionary assault on the feudal State and used the power it had won to break all the fetters on the development of the forces of production, of which it was itself the expression. The struggle culminated in a civil war, a class war between the white guards of the Ancien Régime and the revolutionary bourgeois militias. In the classic example of the Revolution of 1789, the Third Estate, which at first was simply demanding its share in the public institutions hitherto monopolised by the aristocracy and the clergy, quickly went on to deprive these reactionary classes of all political influence. A new minority of manufacturing bosses and great merchants took the place of the old privileged minorities. This is an essential aspect of the revolution which the thinkers and parties of the new regime did not openly acknowledge, for the good reason that, whilst acting in the direction dictated by the interests of the new class, they did not themselves understand it.

Drawing on the strength of the Fourth Estate – i.e., of the propertyless and the workers – in physical struggle, this bourgeois revolutionary movement claimed to be ideologically inspired by principles that served the general interest. These were presented as absolute and universal values that were to govern the entire future of humanity; it was not understood that they were merely transitory forms corresponding to a determinate turning point in social relations. The old superstitions and the old myths were mocked; yet, in the name of scientific doubt, of freedom of criticism and reason, a new myth was proclaimed: that of universal values and concepts. Thus, in their revolutionary declarations, the victorious bourgeois spoke of the rights of man and of the citizen in general, and proclaimed the advent of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for all men.

In any case, during this great historical upheaval, the Fourth Estate, that is, the great mass of workers sacrificed for the welfare of the privileged, whether aristocrats or bourgeois, could neither lay hold of the critical weapons that would have enabled them to grasp the true significance of the revolution underway, nor hesitate to support the bourgeoisie in its heroic assault on the past.

In this phase, the bourgeoisie saw no contradiction between the philosophical demands for freedom of thought and action for all men and the use of dictatorship and terror to prevent an internal counter-revolution or foreign intervention from restoring the old regime. The atheist and encyclopaedist sans-culotte claimed to be waging a crusade for the goddess Liberty, yet he found nothing incompatible in simultaneously depriving the class enemy of the liberty of defending its old privileges, through the systematic use of the guillotine. Similarly, whilst believing in the promise of freedom for all, the nascent proletariat helped the bourgeoisie, now come to power, to ruthlessly suppress the counter-revolutionaries.

Following the armed struggle for power, the first phase of bourgeois political domination therefore consists in the exercise of a class dictatorship to root out all vestiges of the old society and suppress every attempt at restoration. This has taken multiple aspects according to the countries considered, presenting an alternation of reactionary counter-offensives and revolutionary waves, the latter ultimately prevailing.

In the most economically developed countries, this was generally followed by a second, long-lasting phase during which the horrors and excesses of the revolution were gradually consigned to the shadows. Exercising henceforth unchallenged its political control over society, the new ruling class succeeded in finding the forms of domination best suited to give credence to a harmony between its management of the world and its metaphysics of liberty, justice, and equality.

In purely legal terms, there are no longer any separate castes. All citizens are, theoretically, in the same relation with the State. They have an equal right to be represented within it by those of their choice and who represent their views and interests. This is the golden age of the parliamentary system and of bourgeois democracy; it is proclaimed that legal and political equality is a fundamental achievement which has paved the way for the continuous improvement of social relations and which excludes new revolutionary clashes and the repetition of the tragedies of the Terror.

For several generations now, proletarian critique has radically exposed this colossal lie. Its analysis of the real economic relations has demonstrated that political and legal freedom is nothing more than the freedom to sell one’s own labour power, which is in reality an implacable necessity, the majority of people having no other means of escaping starvation.

In politics, the State is not the expression of the will of a popular majority, but the committee for the defence of the interests of the ruling bourgeoisie, for whose benefit the parliamentary mechanism operates exclusively.

In philosophy, the reign of reason is nothing but a deception. Man cannot freely use his brain when the freedom and the possibility to satisfy the physiological and material requirements that condition the entire dynamic of the individual are lacking to him; the limit thus imposed on his reason is far more severe than that of the old religious prohibitions or of the severities of an absolutist police!

According to the romantic interpretation of bourgeois literature from this second phase, in every village there was a light: the schoolmaster; and an extinguisher: the priest. The lie of this democratic educationism and culturism lies in the fact that one cannot expect man to form a free and conscious opinion before he has been able to satisfy his needs and defend his interests. Scientifically, logically, it is exactly the opposite that must happen: first eat, and only then, perhaps, form opinions.

Not only the theoretical critique of the revolutionaries, but also the facts of the most recent history, are consigning these hypocrisies of democratic ideology to the ghosts of the past. Not only has the panacea of the bourgeois representative system never put an end to the clashes between classes with opposing interests within the various countries, but the development of new economic forms of monopoly capitalism and the struggles for colonial supremacy have plunged peoples into profound crises and into massacres far bloodier than the bourgeois revolution. Not only did capitalism require armed struggle to carve out its path through history, but it employs and secretes violence at every stage of its development.

As industrial potential increased and the armies of labour grew in number, the proletariat’s critical consciousness became more precise and its organisations grew stronger. This is why as well as its economic liberalism, the bourgeoisie was forced to abandon its apparent tolerance of political ideas and organisations, and to govern authoritarianly: herein lies the general significance of the present epoch.

This new direction in the bourgeois management of the world reflects the undeniable fact that the progress of science and technology has gradually stripped all human activities of the autonomy they could still preserve in less modern, and therefore less complex, societies; in every field, more or less isolated initiatives have given way to a network of interdependent relationships that constantly tightens and gradually extends across the entire globe. Private initiative, which accomplished prodigies through the daring of the early navigators and the fierce temerity of the colonisers of distant regions, is now giving way to the coordination of activities that is verified as much in the management of public services, in scientific research or in any other field as in the production and distribution of commodities. In a society equipped with air travel, radio communications, cinema, television – all inventions with exclusively social applications – any autonomous initiative whatsoever is unthinkable.

For decades now, the ruling class’s approach to governance has therefore also been evolving, and at an ever-increasing pace, towards a tighter control and a unitary leadership of society, resulting in the growing centralisation of the State.

This political form is a superstructure of monopolism and imperialism. Lenin had foreseen this as early as 1916 when he wrote that the political forms of the last capitalist phase can only be those of tyranny and oppression. This phase, which in the modern world generally tends to replace classical liberalism, is none other than fascism.

It would be a huge scientific and historical error to confuse this new form, which is both a consequence and a condition of the survival of capitalist oppression and which is imposed by modern times, with a reaction that threatens to re-establish an ancien régime despotism ⁽¹⁾: in most parts of the world, the bourgeoisie neutralised the feudal forces and annihilated them over a century ago!

Anyone who is in any way influenced by such an interpretation, and who in any way acts on the concerns it gives rise to, stands outside the communist camp and communist politics.

The new form in which capitalism will administer the world until the proletarian revolution has overthrown it is emerging through a process that the trite and scholastic methods of petty-bourgeois criticism are powerless to decipher.

Marxists have never taken into account the objections raised against the institution of proletarian power in tsarist and semi-feudal Russia, on the pretext that it should first have taken place in an industrial and advanced country: they were well aware that class battles succeed one another on the scale and under the influence of global forces, erupting wherever historical circumstances – such as war, defeat, the excessive survival of decrepit regimes, the good organisation of the proletarian party etc. – favour them.

There is even less ground for surprise if fascism succeeds liberalism in the most varied forms and through the most varied transitions amongst different peoples, for this is a far less radical transformation than revolution, changing only the form of domination and not the ruling class.

From an economic perspective, fascism can therefore be defined as an attempt by capitalism to control and brake itself, that is, to cushion, through a central disciplining, the most alarming effects of the economic contradictions that are leading the system to ruin.

From a social perspective, it is an attempt by the bourgeoisie, absolutely individualist at its inception, to give itself a collective class consciousness and to pit its own political and military organisations against the threatening class forces constituted within the proletariat.

Politically, fascism is the stage at which the ruling class denounces the futility of liberal tolerance, claims one-party rule, and liquidates the old hierarchies of capital’s servants, too far gangrened by the practice of the democratic fiction.

Ideologically, finally, it neither renounces nor can it renounce invoking mythical universal values; although it has dialectically negated them, it makes its own the liberal postulates of class collaboration, speaks of the nation rather than of class, proclaims the legal equality of all individuals, and continues to pass off its State apparatus as an emanation of the whole social collectivity. All this proves not only that it is not a revolution, but that it does not even constitute a universal and sure resource of the bourgeois counter-revolution.

The new bourgeois mythology will no longer be founded on Liberty and Equality, but on the Nation, the Fatherland, the Race, and on an almost deified State.

Against theoretical and philosophical embarrassments, the recourse will remain to invoke the eternal values of the spirit, by virtue of which the bourgeois philistine has always sought to evade the realistic and scientific denunciation of his ideology; this may be ‘the spirit innate in man’, or a spirit emanating from the divine, the latter having always shown itself to be complaisant towards the hypocrisy of oppressors and parasites of every kind.

In any case, all capitalist countries will have to pass through this phase: economically, with monopolism and State capitalism; socially, with the open attack by the white guards on the class organisations of the revolutionary proletariat; politically, with the more or less rapid abolition of the farce of multi-party parliamentarism; ideologically, finally, by invoking supposedly universal ideas and entrusting this or that individual with ‘supreme missions’. Capitalism knows full well that there is no other choice: either to scatter the revolutionary class and prevent its offensive; or to disappear in the final catastrophe.

A first historical manifestation of this third phase took place in Italy, not because of any particularities in that country’s capitalist development, but because of a concurrence of international conditions that influenced domestic events: a victory that amounted to a defeat in the 1915–18 war; an economic crisis due to the high population density and a lack of outlets for commodities and for labour power; a surge of the exploited classes, who sought to pursue an independent and extremist policy; relative instability within the state apparatus, etc.

The second manifestation, which took place in Germany, was on an entirely different scale. There, drawing on a productive apparatus whose power had not been diminished by military defeat, capitalism attempted to skip stages in order to break the stranglehold in which its rivals had trapped it, and which exacerbated internal social struggle. Nowhere else did the dilemma posed by Lenin to the International in 1919 present itself so starkly: the global organisation of the economy by capitalism, or by the workers – ruthless dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or dictatorship of the proletariat.

In his Imperialism, Lenin showed that it was reactionary to imagine that capitalism could economically return to the early forms of liberal capitalism. Today, it must be added that it is equally reactionary, politically, to hope for a return to liberalism and democracy and to believe that they can prevail over the dictatorial method of fascism, which, at a certain stage in its development, the bourgeoisie requires to crush the autonomous class organisations of the proletariat. The revolutionary perspective is the exact opposite: the totalitarian phase will rapidly exhaust its counter-revolutionary resources and come to an end with the revolutionary irruption of the working class. Far from shedding tears over the irrevocable disappearance of mendacious bourgeois freedoms, the working class must direct its strength towards destroying the freedom to own, to oppress, and to exploit. From the heroic days of the anti-feudal revolution, through the pacifist phase of liberalism, to its current final struggle to defend the institutions, privileges, and exploitation of the bosses, the capitalist world has never flown any other banner.

The fascists lost the last war, but fascism won it. The major capitalist states having saved their integrity and historical continuity from that appalling crisis, the bourgeois world was able to make a colossal effort to bring the forces threatening it under control. By employing democratic deception on a colossal scale, it has nonetheless set up a system that enables it to exercise ever tighter control over economic processes, and to immobilise and strip of any independence whatsoever any social or political movement capable of disrupting the established order. Despite their victory over Napoleon, the Legitimists had inherited the social and legal organisation resulting from the Revolution: in the same way, and even if they deny it in vain declarations of principle, the victors over the fascists and Nazis will be forced (sooner or later, more or less explicitly) to recognise through their very acts that they have inherited from the vanquished the totalitarian and authoritarian methods, the only ones possible for administering a world terribly convulsed by the Second Imperialist War.

This fundamental truth stems far more from capitalism’s day-to-day efforts to organise its economic, social, and political control of the world than from arduous and apparently paradoxical critical analyses.

Once individualist, national, liberal, and isolationist, the bourgeoisie today holds its world congresses; just as the Holy Alliance attempted to halt the bourgeois revolution through an international of absolutism, so the contemporary capitalist world is attempting to form its own, which can only be centralist and totalitarian.

Will it succeed in its crucial historical task, which is by no means to prevent the resurrection of fascism, but to contain and crush the revolutionary force of the proletarian International?