What occurred in nineteenth century Europe, during the decades from the forties to the seventies, was the loud outcry of this truth that capitalism historically, on a global scale, lost its capacity for development, flourishing, and real improvement of human life. The wage slavery system from that time onward, apart from destruction, slaughter, erecting an iron barrier in the path of free growth of human life, has had no other role. This point with wording on this general and abstract level, not only clarifies nothing but also drags along a world of ambiguities, questions, perhaps even excommunications and crushing indictments. It must be dissected and explained. That task requires lengthy, unveiled debates. The present writing has no such claim, it limits itself to outlining the most involved, most decisive realities of the trajectory of material development in this passage.
The criterion of judgment above in no way means that capitalism during the last century has not created and brought forth the greatest, most dazzling economic, scientific, technical, informational evolutions. On the contrary, part of the most glorious, most important industrial revolutions of history occurred in this very period. Revolutions that transformed the face of the entire planet, even beyond it, into the most astonishing changes. The legendary growth of the digital industry in various fields, the emergence and worldwide expansion of the internet, the captivating technologies of information, the miraculous wizardry of artificial intelligence are examples of it. Emphasis on the beginning of destruction, humanity burning, setting fire to nature, annihilation generating capitalism, its turning into a barrier to every degree of liberation and improvement of human life from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, does not deny the enchanting, widespread transformations above. The fundamental argument is that none of these occurrences not only contains no contradiction with the inherent, misanthropic degeneration of capitalism in this era but is its shining, undeniable confirmation.
Let us clarify several points. First, when we speak of capitalism as a form of production or an inescapable economic, political, civic, social, cultural formation in the process of material evolution of history, its meaning is not that all industrial discoveries, technical inventions, scientific achievements of the era of establishment and survival of this system were entirely the historical gift of capital and had to be realized only in this period under the domination of these relations. Such an inference is rotten, reactionary, misanthropic to the bone, springing from the depths of the being of capital. Root level critique of such ultra-reactionary conclusion is part of the living enlightenment and praxis of the working class in the battlefield of anti-wage slavery struggle.
Capitalism as the final phase of the evolution of commodity production was only to that extent a vessel for flourishing, development, and historical growth of new productive forces as it smoothed the path for greater human mastery over nature, making certain scientific, industrial, technical, informational advances into guiding lights for broadening and deepening this domination. With the end of this mission and from then onward, each moment of its survival became a murderous, poisonous plague, an obstacle before free human growth, a founder of bombardment of rights, freedoms, consciousness, knowledge, human morality, a grim barrier against the progressive role and life of workers of the world.
Why is it so? The answer is not very complicated. Contrary to the fossilized notion produced in the workshops of capitalist thought, it is not the physical essence or hardware body of economic, political, social formations that even in their golden period of historical progressivism raise the flag of development, fashion the key to productive flourishing, ignite the torch of knowledge, awareness, discovery, invention, make the world prosperous and humanity happy. History is made by human beings with their own labor, with their homogeneous, interconnected material and intellectual production. The economic and social structures are the organic, coercive embodiment of the requirements of this labor, production, its organization and fruition.
All the scientific expansion, technical evolution, industrial invention, astonishing discoveries, the fields and manifestations of material progress of history we see arise from the primary source, from human labor, his material, intellectual production. The dominant political, economic, legal, civic, social relations are themselves part of the process of creation of this very labor and production. In this direction and as an inseparable component of this reality, capitalism too was created by humans with their labor and production, which humans?
If we overlook the time span called “primitive accumulation,” the entirety of what is known as capital in all its determinations—money, commodity, machinery, raw materials, circulation equipment, extending to the towering mountain ranges of industrial, banking, financial, commercial, fixed and circulating capitals dominating the breathing space of earth’s inhabitants, to the infinite world of political, legal, military, state, magical, civic, cultural, police power, or any other determination of capital we know—each and all are the product of labor and exploitation of successive generations of the mass of workers of the world.
In short, it is the working class that created capitalism grown from the womb of history and the phase of “primitive accumulation,” nurtured it, directed it to the highest stages of development. Workers for a period were compelled to do so. The economic coercion of livelihood, existence, and survival required it. The vast dispossessed mass who in the seven skies of being possessed nothing for trade except their labor power, and the selling of this power as a commodity, for a “cheap price,” at a value which even in its golden condition did not suffice for its reproduction, was the absolute, coercive condition for continuation of their life. This immense, vast population, this newborn social class, within the mined enclosure of the day, had to deliver in return for every rial of necessary labor (labor required for reproduction of its labor power) a mountain of surplus labor, unpaid labor, to the capitalist beasts, producing capital for the capitalist class. Historically, there was no way to escape the condition. A process that, for example, in Europe of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries had the form of inevitable coercion for the worker masses. What issued from the hands of the cursed sellers of labor power in this era was launching storms of force, protest, strike, riot, uprising, revolution for reducing as far as possible the pressure of capitalist exploitation, the savagery, crime, and barbarity of capitalists.
The absolutely essential and key point is that this condition in the first decades of the nineteenth century reached its historical endpoint. The wage slaves, creators of capital, who until that time had the role of a force called “in-itself” and were incapable of displaying class power against capitalism as the progressive new force creating the future history of life and liberator of humanity, began the most glorious stage playings, raising the proud banner of the movement of human emancipation. The brilliant events of these years, when placed within the text of revolutionary radical materialism, within the living process of material development of history and class struggle as locomotive or driving chain of this process, acquire a meaning important and clear in every respect.
From that time onward, not only in Western Europe but in every corner of the world—even in colonial societies, in capitalist-developing countries, in lands under old oppressive systems—the working masses, the exploited, and the oppressed were able and obliged to raise the banner of the class struggle against wage slavery. Anti-capitalist labor internationalism thus became, from that date, an urgent and vital agenda for the workers’ movement. History had provided such conditions, and this was the only path to liberation for all the exploited, oppressed, and downtrodden people of the world.
From that point on, anywhere in the world, talk of capitalist development of societies could have no meaning other than the most reactionary, anti-human, and enslaving strategies. That disastrous path, promoted by the social-democratic, liberal, and Leninist bourgeoisie and their various branches and offshoots, filled the place of the class struggle of the working masses, the poor, and the oppressed worldwide! The strategy of capitalist development, in any form, under any name, beneath any banner—from the wholly deceptive “democratic under proletarian leadership” model to the horrific Junker-style or any other—served to erect an iron barrier against every struggle and every emancipatory direction of the modern human era.
Why? The defenders of right- or left-wing capital-centered solutions would naturally call it heresy. But regardless of what they believe, history cried out, louder, clearer, and more powerfully than ever, that from that moment on, only the proletariat, with the glorious banner against wage slavery, could be the architect, engineer, guide, and torchbearer of the economic, political, social, and legal development of the inhabitants of countries in every sphere of social life.
Capitalism, by its very nature, is a profit-producing machine, a system that sacrifices humans on the altar of ever-growing capital, separates the worker from their labor, strips them of any influence over their own work, and is the source of all misery, lawlessness, hunger, humiliation, brainwashing, and bombardment of workers’ consciousness. It had now entered a phase that produced nothing but mass killing, war-mongering, destruction, environmental devastation, and Holocausts. Its existential problem was no longer only that it is anti-human, that it objectifies humans explosively, glorifies capital, and leads to the corruption and downfall of humanity in the swamp of the slavery of its own creations.
Or the source of all miseries that befall the working masses. None of these indicators were new to this mode of production. Capital was born with these essential characteristics and entered history as such. What was now added to all of them, making each of these anti-human dimensions infinite, was that this mode of production and its relations, by their very nature, became an impenetrable iron barrier to any form of human development, any degree of free human flourishing, any kind of historical blossoming of humanity. In every aspect of its existence, it produced destruction, annihilation, slaughter, rivers of blood, the most incendiary wars, and an explosive intensification of the exploitation of the globe’s working population.
With the onset of such a period, the role played by this economic and social formation, at any level of economic or political development anywhere in the world, yielded nothing but anti-human catastrophe. Colonialism, aggression, expansionism, wars of economic and territorial division of the world, the transformation of the largest parts of the planet into zones for the exploitation of semi-free or ultra-cheap labor of billions of workers, drowning these billions of cursed, hell-bound humans in tsunamis of hunger, misery, disease, poverty, humiliation, and genocide—all of this was collateralized, institutionalized, and weaponized by the regressive, war-driven core of capitalism as the very foundation of its economic, political, and social development.
All of this signaled that from the embrace of this octopus, henceforth, nothing would emerge except misery, desolation, holocaust, hunger, and homelessness. In this context, the nascent and new class in history was meant to bear the banner of all evolution, revolutions, and transformative change, aligning them with the ultimate liberation of humanity. History, in its material development and in its inherently progressive and emancipatory human trajectory, declared this clearly.
Yet the class that was supposed to take up this banner not only failed to do so but was incapable of even the most painful form of historical stewardship. Instead of the proletariat, other sections of the bourgeoisie sprouted like mushrooms from the swamp of capitalist existence and cemented their dominance over all previous class partners. The social-democratic bourgeoisie, with its regressive cunning and skill, became the vanguard of corruption, a guardian of darkness, and the designer of the most terrifying misdirections for the perpetuation of capitalism. Meanwhile, the Leninist bourgeoisie inflicted the most severe, lethal, and crushing blows on the mind, heart, and existence of the global workers’ movement.
These two approaches were like the two sharp edges of a scissor, cutting through the entirety of the anti-capitalist class struggle of the world’s workers. One beat the drum of parliamentarism, assuming the role of “socialist editing” of the human-exploiting wage-slavery system. The other went even further, selling the entire substance of the world’s working-class struggle and the human liberation movement to the decayed engine of nationalistic, pseudo-anti-imperialist agendas
From a more material, earthly, and lucid perspective, it demanded of workers everywhere to play the role of a subservient, submissive infantry defending the iron fortress of capitalist rule, glorifying state ownership under the false and hollow banner of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”!! And they were to call the fulfillment of such a role “class struggle” and the “human liberation campaign”!!
The darkest events in human life, whose occurrence was not only incompatible with the material, radical, and historical development of human societies, but outrightly opposed it, were presented as progress. But let us not forget: the history of human life is the history of class struggle. In this struggle, inevitably, the force or class that will prevail is the one capable of wielding its campaign power in all its dimensions, facets, and levels—of thinking strategically, problem-solving, seeking solutions, setting strategy, designing tactics, choosing battlefields—and, as far as the proletariat is concerned, of understanding as deeply and Marxistically as possible capitalism in all its peaks and troughs, twists, turns, and practical angles, and applying this knowledge to wage-slavery struggle in the most victorious way possible.
The working class failed to play this role and surrendered all positions in the worst possible way to the bourgeoisie. It did not recognize or utilize its capacity and potential globally—as a class capable of driving the economic, political, and social development of colonies and countries under pre-capitalist relations—and instead handed this task over to the Leninist bourgeoisie or any other mafia of this class!!
Following the directives of the camp of the “banner of unity” with bourgeois factions dissatisfied with profit shares, ownership, and power—even raising “liberal feudal lords”—they proudly proclaimed the “anti-imperialist democratic revolution”!! They clung to the “people versus anti-people” framework!! In short, they played the role of servile, subservient agents of sections of the bourgeoisie in advancing the most anti-worker, reactionary, and anti-human development of capitalism.
This humiliating misdirection resulted in the transformation of the farthest reaches of the world into capitalist territories under the rule of the most predatory, genocidal, and anti-human dictatorships in the history of the wage-slavery system. Workers were led to believe, and they accepted wholeheartedly, that industrial development, technical advancement, material evolution, transformation, revolution, historical change, and all acts of human liberation depended entirely on remaining wage slaves, obeying without question the prescriptions, paradigms, and planning of the capitalist elites, and of each section of the bourgeoisie complicit in labor exploitation under the guise of “wage-labor socialism”!! Or neutral in the struggle between the two rebellious camps of the capitalist world!! What it never considered was that knowledge, techniques, technologies, industry, and everything necessary for the development of countries had historically already come into existence. Capitalism, through the plaguing exploitation of the working class, had already provided these in abundance as the product of its brutal historical exploitation.
Now it is the workers who can and must wrest from the clutches of capitalist coercion and domination the world of technology, knowledge, discoveries, and inventions they themselves created through their labor. Everything must become a weapon in their hands for a new, emancipatory development, ensuring the free growth of humanity and the end of classes, exploitation, the state, and class society. The process of economic, political, cultural, scientific, educational, and social development of societies must be freed from the influence of the wage-slavery system, becoming the immediate and urgent agenda of the movement tasked with human liberation from all external constraints, rescuing humanity from the dark horrors of production for profit, alienation from work, and exclusion from control over the production and creation of life itself.
Capital injected into every cell of workers’ consciousness the deadly poison that only capital and the capitalist know the path to industrial growth, political expansion, social organization, planning, and world transformation!! That all of this is their exclusive, god-given privilege!! The role of the proletariat, according to this illusion, was to accept the eternal nature of wage slavery and to produce ever greater accumulations of capital for the capitalist class.
The Leninist bourgeoisie, of course, did not limit the extent of destruction, brainwashing, and fossilization of the working masses to this alone. It instilled in them the belief that this humiliating servitude to the bourgeoisie, provided it was aligned with the camp and under the banner of “people’s anti-imperialism,” was simultaneously the only real path to the destruction of capitalism!!
In short, the proletariat completely lost, sinking into the black swamp of pseudo-anti-imperialism and democratic revolution in some places, intoxicated by “victory” in selling out class struggle elsewhere—trading its historical class power for a better daily wage, slightly gentler lashes and tortures. It struck the “fourfold prayer” over anti-capitalist class struggle and regarded mere survival for an adequate wage as its only possible historical mission!!
The central issue, or the fundamental reason for this discussion—which the preceding points serve as a preface—is to clarify, as clearly as possible, the nature and character of this catastrophic defeat of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the era under discussion, up to the present. What occurred, and what diverted history absolutely from the path toward the eventual elimination of classes, class society, exploitation, the state, and human freedom from all external constraints, was that the workers’ movement replaced the strategy of anti-wage-class struggle with the acceptance, reform, or “humanization” of capitalism!!
The darkest event in the process of material historical development, which for an indefinite period completely derailed the locomotive of this dynamic process and the class struggle, plunging it into the depths of the valley, was the defeat of the Paris Commune. This can be seen as the threshold for one of the most catastrophic incidents in the history of human life.
After that, the working masses of the world did everything except the one thing that mattered: they did not think about it, nor pursue it through consciousness, problem-solving, struggle, planning, or praxis of life—the anti-capitalist class struggle. The global working class fossilized in permanence, fetishism, and the engineering of capitalist thought; it staged strikes, uprisings, rebellions, and revolutions—but all of these were carried out in accordance with the designs, paradigms, and strategies of this or that section of the bourgeoisie.
As a coercive and inevitable consequence of this degeneration, the more the workers advanced, the more they exhausted and destroyed themselves, collapsing from existence, while simultaneously making capitalism more galactic, more predatory, more holocaust-inducing. Average global rates of exploitation, which were already 100%–200% under capital, were raised in some cases to 1,500% or even several thousand percent. Capital became infinitely fatter, while workers became astonishingly impoverished, and the entire world was turned into an arsenal of political, military, ideological, police, genocidal, and war-making power. Workers themselves became ignoble, condemned to submission before these powers, burning amid the flames stoked by these arsenals.
Capital became more dominant, the world more submissive, invincible, while workers became more humble, degraded, and powerless. They fought, and the sun of their struggle never set for a single moment, yet they did so only in the orbit of accepting the eternal nature of wage slavery, ensuring that their labor would be reproduced at the lowest possible cost, saturating the world with capital while reducing themselves further in relation to capitalism. They became the infantry of the “revolutions” of the era—but in doing so, they merely facilitated the displacement of outdated bourgeois elements and installed more ruthless partners capable of sustaining capitalism in power.
“Hamon-e Gozar o Koh-o-Vash — heart endures happily —
Until each day bears its nightly burden — each day until night pricks with thorns”
Let us not forget another fundamental point. This catastrophic, destructive event in human life occurred in a period when its impact was not limited to the specific arena of the international working-class struggle against the basis of exploitation, domination, and the survival of wage slavery. It directly affected all ongoing movements of the exploited, oppressed, and downtrodden across the world.
Every peasant, anti-colonial, anti-occupation, anti-gendered, anti-racial, anti-ethnic, and anti-environmental movement was driven into the abyss of the most severe defeats. No degree of victory was realistically possible for any of these movements. This is because any genuine success of the downtrodden, oppressed, and exploited required the decisive, conscious, organized, council-based, anti-capitalist role of the global working class.
When we observe that each of the revolutionary movements of the oppressed throughout the 20th century—in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and most prominently in Palestine—despite their grandeur and heroic efforts, fell one by one, producing “uneven offspring” of the human-killing bourgeois states, their roots lie deep within this catastrophic historical event. This defeat, up to today, has not only failed to provide a perspective for change, remedy, or an end, but has grown, metastasized, and become global, consuming point by point the world itself.
According to statistics from institutes and official state centers of capitalism, the number of starving workers has exceeded four and a half billion, or more than half of the global population. Two world-destroying and humanity-killing international wars, with 130 million victims and the destruction of the work of multiple successive generations, occurred during this period. The terrifying Holocaust of Nazi bourgeoisie in Europe, and the even more catastrophic Holocaust perpetrated by the Zionist bourgeoisie and the U.S., the “democracy camp” in Palestine, are horrifying outcomes of this era.
Everything in this history that claimed the name of anti-imperialist struggle produced disaster, becoming the noose of capital around the necks of the working masses. The pressure of dictatorship, autocracy, deprivation generated by capital, and the annihilation of 80% of the world’s population reached unprecedented heights. In conditions where the storm of democratization, civil movements, “freedom campaigns,” and “rights movements” swept across every corner of the globe, the brutality, slaughter, and aggression of capital to massacre the free-working people of the world became heavier, more severe, and unbearable.
All these consequences, with their infinitely inhuman misfortune, stood like straw before a mountain compared to the true culmination of them all—or to what capital, thanks to this very event, imposed upon the consciousness, understanding, and nature of the working-class struggle. With each passing day, the working masses fell increasingly behind in understanding and recognizing their relationship with capitalism, growing ever more distant from the path of struggle against this octopus.
This rupture has reached such a point that today, no eloquence, no fluency, no pedagogical marvel, no penetrating psychological education can make any worker—claiming to fight for their rights, welfare, livelihood, freedom, or that of their class—perceive the catastrophic fossilization of their condition in solutions created by capital!! No selfless, devoted leader of struggles against gender apartheid, occupation, capitalist holocaust, or environmental destruction can be convinced that achieving their goals requires joining the anti-wage-slavery class struggle of the global working masses. All of these statements have been rejected by the vast majority of the working class, especially by the self-proclaimed saviors, standard-bearers, and heralds of proletarian liberation.
To conclude: the anti-capitalist and wage-slavery-abolishing movement of the working class faces difficulties, rocky terrain, and obstacles at every step of its structure, advance, and growth. Activists of this movement, in order to mobilize the vast chain-linked masses, must “pluck thorns with their eyelashes,” “break thorns with their hands,” “bite stones with their teeth,” and, like divers in the whale’s maw, traverse miles on lame feet without a guide. This is the harsh and exhausting reality they face.
The bourgeoisie has done this not only in its dominant and ruling position but, even more effectively, in the role of savior, as “socialist,” or “Marxist-Leninist,” manipulating the movement in exactly this way. We are not dealing with the workers of Marx’s time. We are confronting a chain-linked mass that is the product of the greatest historical defeat of the anti-wage-slavery movement. Working masses, who hear nothing from their supposed saviors except the voices of pluralism, democratization, and civil uprisings aimed at shaping and grooming capitalism, receive no other signal for consciousness, action, or strategy, nor is their antenna of thought, action, and planning tuned to anything else.
Naser Paydar
27 Mordad 1404 (August 18, 2025)