Throughout the Iranian capitalist hell, the voice of protest of the vast working masses, all sections of the working class from industrialists to teachers, nurses to university students, oil workers, and steelworkers is loud with broken echoes, around low and limited demands. To achieve their demands, they resort to the most compromising methods, implicating the government, law, rights, institutions of order and capital power, generation after generation, decade after decade, rolling from pit to pit, falling from the defile to the wilderness. They achieve nothing, they become more and more oppressed and worn out every day. The only thing they do not is a critical anti-capitalist review of this record full of failures and disappointments. No worker asks himself: Where is the root of the problem? Why all these failures?! Why must generation after generation repeat failed experiences over and over again. Why must they only rush from one error to another and circle around in the darkness of the fields? No worker, no section of the working class, raises this vital and fateful question and demands a clear and unambiguous answer from millions of its followers!! The question and answer, whether the workers want it or not, whether they show understanding or not, has long been the key to their life and death.
The roots of failures are intertwined in one point. Millions, and globally billions of workers have locked the foundation of their lives, perspectives, thoughts, criticism, solutions, and struggles in the poisonous belief of always remaining workers, selling labour, and earning a living with wages! The pumping point of the degradations and failures is here. The belief that is the production of capital. The relationship of buying and selling labour has created it and introduced it into human consciousness. In the process of reproduction, self-expansion, and globalization of capitalism, it has strengthened its poisonous organic influence. In this immense swamp of beliefs, remaining a worker, being a wage slave is a forced fate!! Being a seller of labour is an unchangeable fact of existence, an eternal destiny!! Capital has made this idea Sharia and locked it in the consciousness of workers. In this religion and religion, the basis of wage earning is a certain and sacred thing. Every demand, perspective, struggle, uprising, revolution, under any right or left flag is hung on it. Whatever is to be done is permitted and accepted by swearing allegiance to this religion!! Expectation, “right”, an expectation that negates belief in this Sharia, is not allowed to be a reality!! Wage earning is the principle, and the amount of wage must be discussed in the court of the capitalist gods!! He appealed to the Capital Assembly!! He appealed to the Social Security Organization!!
Wage-earning is not unjust, the problem is the low or high wages, their equality or inequality, late or timely payment of wages, correct or incorrect classification of wage-earners”!! The law of wage-earning, like all heavenly laws, has its principles and rulings. According to these principles, imagining a connection between wage-earning and hunger, poverty, homelessness, lack of medicine, gender apartheid, other forms of apartheid, the killing of basic human rights, the bombing of political and social freedoms, environmental pollution, genocide, and waging war is a great sin!! Establishing any form of connection between wage-earning and the separation of man from his work, his being deprived of intervention in the fate of work, production, and his life is a siren of the earth’s explosion!! The law of wage-earning is against these analyses, orientations, and against any kind of bad view of capital, especially the struggle against capitalism. Instead of these thoughts, approaches, blasphemous struggles, the version of democracy, civil movements, “woman, life, freedom”, “anti-imperialism”, reformism, green, yellow, orange revolutions are emerging. The lesson of role-playing as a means of settling scores between bourgeois oppositions and ruling rivals and changing the governance model of capital gives and plenty of other trainings, solutions that it has enough of in its institutes, seminaries and academies.
The belief in the dogma of wage labour—as emphasized—is an intellectual product of capitalism. The social existence, livelihood, needs, “rights,” and freedom of the worker and their class not only lack harmony with this belief but stand in direct opposition to it. This antagonism, simmering within the class existence of the working masses, is made visible through their struggles. They protest what wage labour inflicts upon them. Yet this confrontation, like all social phenomena, is not doomed to blind fate. It may take the path of radical flourishing against wage slavery, or it may hang on the gallows of dissolution within capital’s vaporization process, sinking into the swamp of legalistic, civil, and democratic struggles. Which will prevail? Which approach will be adopted, and which abandoned or weakened? How will the rise and fall, ascent or stagnation, triumph or decline unfold? The answer lies in the balance of forces between the two fundamental classes on the battlefield of struggle. One thing is clear: If workers, as a class and a movement—uniting all sectors and levels of consciousness—fail to adopt an anti-capitalist trajectory and organize themselves council-style against wage slavery, the ruling bourgeoisie and its opposition will inevitably mine every facet, level, and arena of their protest and resistance with capitalist traps. They will do this through the workers themselves, under various banners and labels—left, right, or otherwise. Herein lies the tragedy. This is what has transpired historically since the late 19th century.
Workers’ demands, protests, and revolutions—as long as they remain shackled to the cult of wage labour—will, even in their most militant and mass-driven forms, not only fail to create liberation but will tighten the noose of capital around their throats. When the very foundation of wage slavery is framed as a “right”!!, a “destiny”!!, or “natural”!!, expecting capitalists to concede to demands for livelihood, legal protections, welfare, or “egalitarian”!! reforms is nothing but a tragic farce, exposing a complete failure to understand capitalism’s most basic nature. Because:
- The existence of capitalism is rooted in production for profit, the excessive production of profit and capital, and the limitless sacrifice of human beings at the altar of ever-greater profit and accumulation. In the logic, criteria, norms, and rituals of this system, what holds no value is humanity—everything is profit and capital. Profit is the goal; human beings are the absolute sacrifice. Examine even the tiniest, most obscure corner of history, capitalism’s record, or its role—this truth remains unshaken.
What do we see in the table above? The volume of surplus value produced by China’s working masses in 2023 is 148 times the surplus value recorded in 1960—63 years prior!! For South Korea’s working class, this figure is 68 times, India 24 times, Indonesia 22 times, and Brazil over 10 times. In countries like Japan, the U.S., France, Germany, and the UK—which, due to their prolonged and vast historical capitalist development, were already saturated with capital by 1960—the working class in 2023 still generated 7 times, 6 times, 5 times, and 4 times more surplus value, respectively, compared to that year!!!
What do these figures say? The answer is crystal clear and crushing. China’s population has increased by less than threefold over these 63 years, yet the volume of values, surplus value, capital, and wealth that workers produce and surrender to capitalist beasts and the predatory capitalist state has grown by a staggering 148-fold!!!
What do these figures reveal? The answer is stark and damning. In 1960, out of the total annual labor of China’s working class, 116billion representedsurpluslabor—strippedfromworkers’accesstolivelihood, welfare,health,education,andlifeitself.Today,over 116billion representedsurpluslabor—strippedfromworkers’accesstolivelihood,welfare,health,education,andlifeitself.Today,over
1.717 trillion of their labour is converted into capital. This same pattern of exploitation dominates the global wage slavery system, entrenched in every country’s working masses.
If in 1960, out of the total annual work of the Chinese working class, $116 billion was surplus labor and was out of reach of their livelihood, welfare, health, healthcare, treatment, education, and life, now over $1.717 trillion is capital. This same trend prevails throughout the world, in every country, between the working class and the system of wage slavery. In the United States, in the first period, $3,510 billion of the labor of the working class became the capital of the capitalist class, and in the second period, $21,776 billion became the additional capital of the capitalists. The figures discussed in the two periods above were: South Korea 26,1764, Indonesia 53,179, India 133,3199, Brazil 188,1955, Germany 909,3622, France 521,2657.
The data scream with siren-like urgency: No matter how much workers labor, no matter what they produce, the galaxies of wealth they create are ripped from their grasp—stolen from their livelihoods, welfare, healthcare, education, health, autonomy, and agency—and transformed into capital. Capital that, at the speed of light, grows vaster and demands ever more colossal, tsunami-like surges of profit and surplus value. Workers are forced to toil with escalating ferocity, only to be torn further from their own creations, their labours’ fruits morphing into capital. This capital, born of their sweat, turns on them with demonic force, compelling them to work harder still, to grind themselves into dust, to destroy themselves—all to feed the insatiable hunger for profit and the mountainous accretion of capital.
2. Capital is not merely a pile of money, factories, shops, banks, land, trading firms, transportation, or economic enterprises. It is a social relation—one that encompasses the state, coercive laws, hollow “rights,” the entirety of civil society, the military, police, paramilitary forces, the judiciary, brainwashing institutions and thought-police apparatuses, terrifying intelligence agencies, parliaments, and the vast chain of power institutions that shape culture, morality, politics, and distorted social values!! Capital is this entire octopus, with all its blood-soaked claws and repulsive fangs. When we say that capital wants profit, this profit-seeking, infinite self-expansion, more galactic profits are intended for this entire super-monstrous structure, with all its bloody claws. On the one hand, for all these institutions, branches, networks, apparatuses, ramparts, arsenals, the state, organizations, their relentless development, their insatiable nourishment, their consistency requires the explosive intensification of the exploitation of the working masses, and on the other hand, it uses this entire structure as an apparatus of physical and intellectual repression to force the workers to accept its rebellious exploitation and its permanent domination.
Cast a brief light into the shadowy corners of this process. What do you see?? You witness the most horrifying and grotesque scenes imaginable in the universe—a reality so terrifying it could trigger earthquakes. A vision of a world where billions of humans, labelled workers, are branded as wage slaves on their shoulders, carrying banners of faith in the sanctity of wage labor!! Generation after generation, they toil. 80 to 90% of the fruits of their labour are ripped away and transformed into capital. The capital they create—stolen from their lives—demands ever greater mountains of surplus value. It stacks skyscraper-sized surplus value upon itself, then hungers for even more monstrous, terror-inducing profits and surplus value!!!
This is capitalism. Accepting wage labor means this—and now another horrifying question! Do you expect this octopus—a bomb that melts humans and liquefies humanity into capital—to guarantee your food, clothing, water, electricity, healthcare, education, health, environment, or basic necessities??!! Is such an expectation not proof of idiotic delusion and surrendered reason?? It absolutely is. This insults no worker. We ourselves are among the most anguished and grounded of workers. The truth must be spoken; reality must be illuminated and laid bare with precision. Such an expectation is undeniably stupidity. Instead of denial, we must seek and find the path to liberation from this curse. So let us confront the final question: What is to be done?
The answer is the one we have been shouting most loudly for the past three decades, and although no significant group of workers anywhere has given a living, praxis-like, or movement-based response to it, we have insisted on its legitimacy and urgency more loudly than ever. In short, we must tear up, tear up, once and for all, the petition to leave forever as workers, as wage slaves, as sellers of labor power. We must smash the foundation of accepting, considering “wage earning” as destiny, and considering it fate. Let us remove this collar from our consciousness, knowledge, and campaign, and throw it away. Let us see the preparation for a new emergence in the history of human life.
Let us rush towards each other, let us find each other during work, production, education, treatment, commuting, rest, wakefulness, sleep, health, illness, joy, sorrow, the birth of a child, mourning the death of loved ones, let us shake hands, face to face, like chained people, let us make a covenant of liberation. Let us write a 21st century “manifesto” for the class struggle. With this manifesto, let us shout in the ears of the masses of the class, in the ears of humanity that the course of the campaign must change substantially. “Wage-earning” will no longer be the starting point of our campaigns. In every struggle, protest, rebellion, uprising, every confrontation with the capitalists, the government, the capitalist system, in the struggle for livelihood, welfare, housing, medicine, treatment, education, freedom, human rights, in the struggle against gender apartheid, environmental pollution, child labour, hunger, genocide, imprisonment, torture, execution, we will begin with opposition to the basis of capitalist existence. Even at the lowest level of our daily protest, in demanding the wages confiscated from here, we will depart from the absolute injustice of wage labour, from the essential inhumanity of capitalism. At the same time, we warn all the oppositions who are traders in power, heralds of democracy, experts in establishing civil movements, agents of the lock of women’s liberation to capitalist civilization!!, standard-bearers of establishing a healthy environment of the wage slavery system!!, workers who are working to replace the government model, the form of capitalist ownership, all of them to pack up their saviour’s bags, stop trying to recruit us, to turn us into humble and despicable servants to settle accounts with their ruling rivals. Let us declare that we are not a handful of workers in this or that factory, company, trust, school, university, hospital, transport, port, farm, printing, publishing or peddler, unemployed, housewives, we are a single social class, a class of wage slaves against the foundation of wage labour, against the existence of capitalism, we see the root of exploitation, misery, poverty, homelessness, waterlessness, deprivation, all the misfortunes of life in the existence of capital, we recognize the state, law, institutions of order, the forces of coercion as capital incarnated in these personifications. We are at war with all of these, our campaign to eliminate the ruling regime or any other political regime is part of our war for the complete destruction of the system of wage slavery.
Our movement is an anti-capitalist soviet movement. A movement whose foundation is based on the ever more active, more penetrating, more creative intervention of the ever-greater number of working masses. From the fusion and integration of the anti-capitalist soviet of individual workers in every work canter, education, treatment, transportation network, neighbourhood, school, hospital, it sprouts, grows, develops as a vessel for its anti-capitalist campaign. The strategy, the solution, the solution, everything is determined by the workers against wage labour and sovietism. A movement based on the awakened praxis of the working masses that does not tolerate the existence of any force above it, its representatives are always dismissible officials and its national congress, secret or public, is the manifestation of the conscious consciousness and free will of all individuals, an anti-capitalist collective. We must make every possible effort, hand in hand, to establish this movement. With this movement, let us fight against capital from trench to trench, above each trench we will read a list of demands, expectations, conditions, and sectional goals as the content of the campaign. Let us make the organized power of the council of our class a weapon to impose them on the enemy, let us demonstrate a real war between two opposing and hostile social classes over the existence and non-existence of capitalism. On the first front, we declare that:
- All food, clothing, housing, water, electricity, gas, household appliances, education, medicine, treatment, transportation, health, recreation, and leisure of humans must be completely removed from the control of monetary and commodity trading of capitalism. Housing with the necessary facilities is the indisputable right of every individual. Every human being, household, and cohabiting individuals will have the obvious right to receive all their livelihood and welfare needs in sufficient quantities, without any restrictions, without paying a single rial, by referring to the existing distribution canters.
- We are against the existence of any kind of government, and we fight for the complete elimination of any power over society. In the first step of the campaign, we fight against any form of government interference in the lives of individuals, from clothing, marriage, entertainment, relationships between men and women, girls and boys to tradition, religion, culture, beliefs, moral values, expression of thought, protest, organization, display of power, or political and social activities of humans. With the organized anti-wage labour council movement and the inexhaustible force of our class campaign, we block the way for any kind of government interference in the lives of the people. How? We will tell you a little later.
- The root, the originator of the reproduction and the cause of the survival of all forms of discrimination and oppression, including the horrific gender apartheid, in the existing world, lies in the depths of capitalism. To eradicate gender apartheid, the system of wage slavery must be destroyed, and for any degree of reduction and challenge, all channels of intensification of the more horrific exploitation of women by capital, all the bloody mechanisms created by capital to impose multiple oppression on them, must be attacked and fought. Domestic work is among the most important of these channels, mechanisms. This form of work must be completely abolished. The path to effective challenge to patriarchy also passes through this. The volume of domestic work of millions of women is part of the annual social work, this huge and galactic part of work, in the form of training the workforce, the prerequisite for the two-shift work of wives, caring for children, the disabled, the sick, the elderly, the housekeepers of the capitalists, packaging goods, cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, in a word, carrying out a significant part of the process of production and vaporization of social capital, is completely taken over by the capitalist class, the capitalist state and the capitalist system as unpaid labour, pure surplus labour of the working class. This huge surplus labour, called domestic work, on the one hand, makes the capitalists’ profits roar, and on the other, it throws millions of women and girls into the swamp of decay, exhaustion, disease, deprivation of education, growth, and social facilities. The framework of this type of work must be permanently disrupted by making all the necessities of life and welfare of people free, developing as many educational, medical, rehabilitation, care canters for the elderly, the disabled, etc. Every form of economic dependence of women on their husbands and children on their parents must be eliminated. If a step is to be taken to challenge gender apartheid, it must start here. The Soviet movement for the abolition of wage labour is fighting in the trenches of the campaign to achieve these goals, against every law, protocol, decree, custom, and tradition that preserves gender discrimination.
- The foundation of all environmental pollution lies in the cycle of production and vaporization of capital. It is capital that has made water, air, forests, seas, plains, swamps, rivers, wildlife, all of nature, the human living environment poisonous, polluted, unusable and deadly, and has made all of the food, clothing and necessities of human life pathogenic and deadly. It has destroyed nature, made the planet uninhabitable and made the prospects for human survival bleak. The way to combat environmental pollution is the absolute closure of all production, waste, pesticides, and all materials and supplies that capital uses with the aim of reducing the cost of discovery, extraction, exploitation, storage of goods, planting, possession, harvesting of crops, organization, and sale of industrial products. The anti-capitalist soviet movement fights on the front line to achieve the above goals. The arsenal and weapon that is irresistible and effective everywhere for this decisive war is the anti-power, anti-state, anti-capital or the stormy and liberating history-making force hidden in the working class. The workers are the creators of all capital, wealth, possibilities, all existing creations on the planet. By this very virtue, they are the creators of the foundation or the real pumping core of all powers. Just as they create capital, reproduce it, make it self-increasing and the source of power, they also have the power to completely block this creation. With their soviet and nationwide organization, they are able to stop the wheel of labour and production from turning wherever they want. They bombard the womb of growth and birth, the vaporization and organization of capital in all aspects of its existence.
The structure of order, government, sovereignty, and everything else will disrupt capital into the abyss. The workers have such a capacity for struggle and a weapon for the campaign. This is a fundamental task of the councils and the anti-capitalist council organization. When the council movement puts forward its demands, it sounds the siren of stopping the artery of surplus value and capital production, the siren of disruption and closure of the capitalist social order. It allows the wage slavery system to choose between accepting the demands and drying up the springs of capital and profit production, a real war in which each side makes every effort to challenge the other, and the working masses organized in the anti-wage labour council movement strive to increase, flourish, branch out, expand, become larger, and become more aware of their capacity for struggle. In the process of this struggle, it absolutely does not wait for the agreement and acceptance of the capitalists or their government. In the canters of production, circulation, and distribution, every organized circle of social capital begins to distribute empty houses, food, household goods, subsistence, welfare, educational, and medical necessities to the vast masses of the population. In schools, universities, and research canters, it destroys the basis of financial, commodity, and monetary exchanges of education, every form of tuition collection, and every other economic exchange.
In all hospitals, pharmacies, every health canter, it raises the banner of free treatment from any form of monetary exchange, free of charge and without any money. In the field of transportation, it collects the demands for money, tickets and cards. It does this to the extent of its daily fighting capacity, in proportion to the current fielding and mobilization capacity of its forces, and at the same time, it strives moment by moment to increase this capacity and power. It is clear that the capitalist class and its government are also falling upon the lives of the rebellious workers in the struggle with all their physical and intellectual repression, bloodbaths, genocide, Holocaust-making and everything in between. A real earthly and class war is engulfing society, similar to what broke out in Paris in June 1848. In 1871, with the glorious historical uprising of the Communards, it dazzled the inhabitants of the world. This is what real class struggle means! “Death to such and such an executioner, long live such and such an executioner, democracy, democracy, human rights, women, life, freedom” and the like. These cardboard scenarios are nothing other than a painful and absurd fall into the abyss of commercialism, competition, partnerships between various ruling gangs, and the opposition of the bourgeoisie over the division of profit shares, power, ownership, and sovereignty. The working-class humanity, which constitutes 80% of the world’s population, whether they want to or not, whether they know or not, whether they want to know or not, is at the greatest, most unprecedented crossroads in history, the crossroads of determining its own historical destiny. One way is to continue on the track so far and to certain ruin and destruction. The other way is to simply turn on the track of the true campaign against wage slavery. We, the anti-capitalist workers and activists of the movement for the abolition of wage labour, have the honor of having started this path decades ago. We have done everything we could, we have made every possible effort to bring our comrades in chains together in this campaign. We will certainly continue this path and, in our own share, as a few workers, fight according to our means and capabilities to establish an organized anti-capitalist Soviet movement of the masses of our class.
Let’s join the chain!
Anti-Capitalist Workers, Activists of the Movement for the Abolition of Wage Labor
February 24, 2025