Let’s turn to the last decades of the 18th century in France. A society that was the most populous country in Europe at the time, and a force known as the ” Third social class” made up a significant portion of its population. The class whose highest layer (the financial aristocracy) became a partner in power with the royal families and the church lords in the 1789 Revolution, but its main and largest part, consisting of factory owners, mine and industrial owners, merchants, owners of transportation networks, capitalist farmers, lawyers, renowned intellectuals, political elites, in a word, the French “bourgeoisie”, had a different situation. While this section was increasing its capital, its share of power, and its position in the ruling social order every day, it suffered from the lack of a decisive role in the structure of political rule. It was the dominant economic class, but it did not possess the basic levers of government and the state machine. It saw the monarchy, the church, and the clergy as guardians of the previous economic relations as obstacles to the unruly development of capitalism. It fought against them and for comprehensive domination over legislative, legal, civil, cultural, educational, and social institutions. As the capitalist class, it was the target of enough anger, hatred, and campaigning from the working and subordinate masses, but it tried with all its might to make the labour movement the infantry or conveyor belt of its struggle machine for the conquest of state power. The more the spoke of “human rights”!! and the more passionately he shouted the slogan “liberty – equality – fraternity”!! Each of these words had a certain economic, political, cultural, ideological, and social weight in its own class-specific encyclopaedia, and he used and repeated them with sufficient wisdom, overwhelming magic, and steadfast pursuit. What the spoke of under the name of “right” was the monopoly of all rights, property, power, sovereignty to himself and the denial of all rights to all other classes and social forces. They spoke of “freedom” and what them wanted was their absolute freedom from the shackles of feudal kings and the clerical aristocracy, unlimited freedom to dominate the fate of the work and production of the working masses or other inferiors. He chanted the slogan of equality, and by this concept he meant immediate equality with the tower-keepers of the declining social relations as a stepping stone to a single-handed domination of the destiny of the work and life of all men. He beat the loud drum of brotherhood, and by playing this instrument he expected the slavish allegiance of all humanity without any rights in return for every decision and exercise of his power. Whatever it said, wanted, willed and fought for were matters that capital desired and it had to fulfil. Its own government, or the political, police, intelligence, military, cultural, legal, civil machinery of capital, declared itself the government of the entire society and forced the workers and toilers to accept this claim with the force of brainwashing!! The law that protected the working masses from any right to interfere in determining the fate of production and life, the law of appropriation of the largest part of the products of the workers’ labour by the capitalist class, was the elixir of life, the prescription for the order of subsistence and the security of human life, and with the magical weapon of transforming the nature of capital, it made the working masses believers and obedient to these insinuations.
What he called “right, liberty, equality, fraternity” was for the workers an absolute injustice, an explosive tyranny, a storm of exploitation, a plague of inequality, an inherently irreconcilable enmity. Yet, thanks to all this, he made these same concepts, slogans, words, ideas, thoughts, decrees, and beliefs the infinite power of fetishism, enchantment, and architecture of the essential thought of capital, the current consciousness of the working class and other inferiors. The third class or bourgeoisie, with such an approach and praxis, took the path of its elevation to the dominant political class. An approach and role that in the process of its implementation achieved everything together. The machine of violence made the ruling political classes the support of its power to suppress the labour movement. Riding the wave of anger and dissatisfaction of the vast working mass, it dealt the most crushing blow to the body of the rule of the royal families, the clerical aristocracy. The thoughts, beliefs, social values, legal criteria, culture, ideology, the reactionary narrative of its own capitalist and worker-killing “right”, “freedom”, “equality”, “choice”, “authority”, “altruism and brotherhood” devoured the minds and consciousness of the workers, and made its other dreams come true. The French bourgeoisie advanced in this manner and with these victories until the February Revolution of 1848. Between February and June, it faced the raging waves of movement caused by the severity of hunger and poverty of the working class. In the June Revolution, it witnessed the complete division of Paris, a bloody and fiery confrontation between itself and the working class. In this confrontation, it not only suppressed the proletariat more and more violently, more ferociously, more brutally, and more bloodily, but thanks to this suppression, it also conquered the last strongholds of resistance of the defenders of the previous relations and established itself as the political ruling class. Time passed, what had happened in France, previously in England, and years later in other European countries and America, happened decades later on five continents of the world. The system of wage slavery dissolved the entire planet; the bourgeoisie became the dominant economic and political class of the entire world. An event whose most obvious, most earthly, most obvious interpretation is the unconditional end of any kind of harmony, solidarity of the working class with any part of the capitalist class, including any internal opposition of this class, any political, legal, or civil approach of any part of the bourgeoisie in any area of life or social protest and activism. But this did not happen, the workers of several European countries took steps in the field of anti-capitalist campaign for a few mornings, until the glorious uprising of the Commune. But the flashes remained hasty, dim, and a lamp caught in the wind. The workers everywhere, in France itself, in Europe, all over the world, in the October Revolution, in raising the banner of “victory over the bourgeoisie”!! and establishing “socialism”!!, “right”, “freedom”, “equality”, “choice”, all social concepts, legal values followed the same inherently distorted, reactionary and capital-created narrative of the bourgeoisie of the first half of the 19th century, they led a path of misguidance, of wandering in the wilderness that ended in disaster. They demanded freedom, equality, choice, authority, the right that the bourgeoisie wanted to get rid of the monarchy and the church on the one hand, and for its complete control over the fate of work, production, and the life of the working class! Freedom, rights, equality, a choice that for the working masses meant pure dictatorship, absolute injustice, terrifying inequality, increasing exploitation, tsunami-like misery, hunger and poverty, plague-like genocide, blazing wars that consumed families, devastated desert nature, a poisoned environment, and a world of other evils. When the bourgeoisie of the first half of the 19th century chanted these slogans and uttered these concepts, they understood very well and knew what they were saying and what they wanted. However, the workers, on the contrary, under the pressure of brainwashing and intellectual suppression by capital, instead of a class struggle against capitalism, locked and sealed all the demands, perspectives, strategies, solutions, and prospects of their movement into the legal, civil, peaceful or militant trimming of the wage slavery system, into making it bearable, changing the government model, and replacing the form of capital ownership. They became a planet of the capitalist power system, departing from always being workers, remaining wage slaves, they shouted “freedom”!!, they did not see the essential contradiction between the freedom of their class and living as wage slaves, they did not make the need to recognize it a command of their thinking and cognitive process. They stitched together the earth and time from the dust of demanding “right”, but they did not recognize wage labour as absolute injustice! They shouted “gender equality” to the ceiling of the galaxy, but they did not consider the absolute domination of the form of production and the relations that created all barbarism, the inherent contradiction between the real equality of people and the domination of this system. “They locked Aristotle’s myth on the door of the international good” With a borrowed head from the Jacobin bourgeoisie, the 18th century plebeians pursued “right”, “freedom”, “equality”, “will” and choice. They called it the labour movement and the anti-capitalist struggle, socialism, communism, labour revolution or some such name.
Even compared to their past, they fell in a blatant way. In the first half of the 19th century, every day deeper than the day before, more alert and aware than the year before, they made the essential contradiction of “freedom, rights, equality”, other slogans, demands, expectations, goals of their class with the inverted narrative of the bourgeoisie more exposed, clearer, more noisy, they strengthened and strengthened their independent class line, anti-capitalism. But as time passed, they dissolved more, more painfully, more fossilized, more unconsciously in the standards, criteria, social values, beliefs, thoughts, ideologies that guard the survival of capitalism. This process continued. It left the entire 20th century behind, put on the clothes of social democracy, became a Leninist redcoat. It raised the banner of the “camp of socialism”! The “staff of people’s anti-imperialist”, the “democratic revolution” became the infantry of all the internal settling of scores and conflicts of the bourgeoisie. It completely forgot the conscious anti-capitalist campaign. It erased the movement to abolish wage labour from its memory. It failed and its history became a dark place of repeated failures. It became worn out, worn out, wretched, fossilized. The rapidity went through the entire process of integration, dissolution in the cycle of capital production and decay in the capitalist social order. With the collapse of the camp, instead of learning the least lesson, it went into further regression. This time, the recruiting ground for the so-called “civil” movements became the 18th century bourgeois democracy. The living and the present stand at this point. It has lost everything, it has turned every corner of the world into the capitalist beast’s capital, and out of its 6 billion people, more than 4.5 billion are below the poverty line, struggling in the swamp of hunger. Capital has raised the capitalist class to the galaxies, and it, billions of billions, old, young, children, women and men, are unable to buy medicine to continue their lives today. The international working class is drowning and buried in such a swamp. But still, everywhere, in all continents, countries, under colourful flags, the infantry of the transfer of government from one party of the capitalist class to another, the change of the democratic or militant model of the capitalist states, the blackness of the army of democracy and the demand for participation of the rival oppositions of the bourgeoisie. Otherwise, at best, it is resorting to strikes, rebellions, to convince the capitalists to pay the lowest price for the reproduction of labour power within the framework of continuous submission to wage slavery and acceptance of the immortality of capitalism. A situation that it has accepted as the fate of life!! But the disaster is not limited to this. It has long been that capitalism has rejected this very condition, full of the humiliation of the working class. It has clearly and bluntly declared that it wants unconditional surrender. If it began its history with the “bronze law of wages”, its daily saying is that it does not see any obligation to accept this “law” either. It is not willing to provide any guarantee for paying the price of reproducing labour power. The harder and more destructively the worker works as long as he/she lives, when he/she dies, someone from among the large number of unemployed wage slaves will take his/her place. This is the word of capital, and it is the workers of the world who must decide. The way, strategy and solution to get out of this situation is completely clear and practical. The economic, political, police, military, cultural, intellectual and physical repression of capitalism must be responded to with an overwhelming counter-power of organized workers, a nationwide conscious council and against wage slavery. With this counter-power, it is possible and inevitable to impose all demands on capitalism and finally the complete destruction of this war-mongering, man-killing octopus. Without this counter-power, no elementary demands can be imposed on it, it is the working masses of the world who are destroyed. They are historically forced to choose between these two paths.
Anti-capitalist workers active in the abolition of wage labour movement
May 2026