Reviews and Views
Volume Two
Nasser Paydar
I begin today’s discussion with Marx’s famous statement: “No historical social system collapses before all the necessary productive forces have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace the old relations of production before the material conditions of their existence within the framework of the old society have reached maturity.” And the fundamental question is: what are the superior relations of production that flourish within capitalist society and what are the material conditions for this flourishing? This point occupies an important place in our present discussion. Under the rule of capitalism, there is no such thing as a communist mode of production and relations. The land and time of this society witness the unbridled development of wage slavery. It is absolutely true that the development of capitalism creates the material foundations of communism, but this absolutely true statement of Marx, like all his other statements, has been subjected to the most anti-communist distortions. From within it, communism has emerged as the result of combining the sublime development of capitalism with the centralized power of the party at the top of society. The true manifestation, the cornerstone, the index of existence, and the symbol of the growth of communism within the framework of existing society is not the cancerous and more cancerous growth of capitalism, but the anti-capitalist movement for the abolition of wage labour by the working class. Marx’s discussion of the emergence of the material conditions of a superior society within the core of the old society must be understood in this way when it relates to communism. In his first thesis on Feuerbach, he stated that reality must be seen as tangible human activity, as praxis and active man. The anti-capitalist movement and the abolition of wage labour, the “practical-critical” revolutionary movement, is a change in the entire existing existence, a radical and revolutionary change in the entire capitalism with the orientation of creating the practical, living and present necessities for the establishment of communism.
Here we witness some differences from the previous period. Capitalism grew out of serfdom and feudal relations. The development of capitalism was accompanied by the gradual dissolution of feudalism. The bourgeoisie entered history riding the wave of the development of the new mode of production and made the needs of the expansion and domination of capitalism the charter of its historical existence. The more and more the relationship of buying and selling labour power developed, the stronger the bourgeoisie became and the more it had to say. The process of the development and domination of the capitalist system was also the process of the rise, dominance, and power of the capitalist class. The bourgeoisie adopted its demands, expectations, outlook, politics, rights, civilization, model of government, planning of the economic order, thoughts, culture, ideology, and everything else from the context of the needs of a certain mode of production that existed and was expanding. In the struggle against the monarchy, the church, and the institutions of the old order, it prescribed the necessities of this mode of production, and demanded suffrage, parliament, democracy, freedom of speech, free trade, customs tariffs, diplomacy, and the like, as mechanisms to pave the way for the development and domination of this mode of production. “The growth of new superior relations within the framework of the old society” was such as far as capitalism and the bourgeoisie were concerned. This is not the case with the growth and empowerment of communism and the proletariat under the rule of capitalism. There is no such thing as a socialist mode of production growing here. A new form of production does not develop until the proletariat makes its power its weapon of war. If the growth of capitalism goes to the edge of the galaxy, it is the growth of capitalism. The interpretation of the problem by the Second International and Leninism is deeply unrealistic and a distortion of Marx’s words. Here, within the framework of capitalism, what should and can boast as communism, as the manifestation of communism, is the movement for the abolition of wage labour by the proletariat. Despite all the iron chains that are locked on its hands and feet, the working class has the power and capacity to play a role in the depths of this capitalist hell as a conscious, organized, anti-capitalist class power with a clear horizon of abolishing wage labour. If the bourgeoisie owned the factories under feudalism, the proletariat, under wage slavery, has the power to close the factories. If the first-class rules over all financial and industrial centres, the working class has sufficient capacity to stop the lifeblood of capital and block the channels of capital reproduction. If the bourgeoisie makes its capital the platform of its power, the proletariat holds the key to the existence of capital and the inevitable destruction of capitalism. If the bourgeoisie creates a new civil and political structure of society on the basis of the development of a new mode of production, the working class is capable of organizing its own anti-wage labour council nationwide. If the bourgeoisie expands the scope of law and parliament, the proletariat has the capacity to open up the exercise of power against the entirety of the political, civil and governmental order of capital, the ability to completely disrupt this order. The movement to abolish wage labour is moving in this direction and has its own knowledge, analysis, strategy, orientation, mechanism, solutions and remedies for this. We must examine these issues.
The endogeneity of communism in the labour movement
The starting point of the approach to the abolition of wage labour is a conscious insistence on the innate nature of communism in the labour movement. Communism is not an invention or discovery of anyone. It is not a doctrine or a tradition that was founded and copied by an individual, a group, a party, or a group. The material, social, and class manifestation of anti-capitalism is within the working class. Bourgeois communism and the various branches of Leninism, if not in words, then in practice and in every clause of their praxis, stubbornly deny this reality. This denial is the source and starting point of the separation of Leninism and bourgeois communism in general from the communism of Marx and the working class. If the proletariat is to become an independent class power and the vanguard force of communism against the bourgeoisie, it must have this anti-capitalism and communism, however embryonic, in its social and class existence. Leninist parties consider this opposition to be the basis of their strategy and orientations in the field of class struggle. Their message to the working masses is that communism is not your innate approach to life, struggle, and social existence. Communism is a creation of our ideology, religion and knowledge, but it is the guarantee of your liberation!! That is why you must line up behind it, that is, behind us and our party. Communism is not in you but before us. The approach of abolishing wage labour thinks the opposite. Opposition to capital is an internal tendency in the labour movement. This same opposition is the growing germ, proletarian communism. A germ that can grow, branch out, mature and become a powerful communist movement of the masses of the working class, the opposite is also true. It remains deprived of any degree of growth and flourishing, ossification and gaining power. Under the pressure of the inversions, metamorphoses, alternative creations, distortions and engineering of the inherent thoughts of capital, under the physical and intellectual oppression of the bourgeoisie and under the attack of right and left reformism, the labour movement remains weak, is subdued and isolated, is transformed and retreats. The important point is that the source of Marx’s communism lies deep in the conditions of work, exploitation, life, and struggle of the working masses. Communism is the inherent anti-capitalism of the labour movement, and this inherent anti-capitalism is what, if it grows, resists, promotes knowledge, awareness, and organizes an anti-capitalist council, will become real communism beyond capitalism, a communist society. I would like to emphasize here that some people, even some Leninist circles, including a number of Iranian Leninists, have pretended or are pretending to accept the intrinsic nature of communism in the labour movement!! The debate is not about claims. The entire orientation and everything these people or circles have done has been the opposite of their claim. The approach of abolishing wage labour is the living manifestation of communism within the working class, and on this basis, it has its own words in relation to all issues related to the labour movement.
Dissecting capitalism and an alternative image of wage slavery
The approach to abolishing wage labour explains capitalism with the relationship of buying and selling labour power, the relationship of the worker’s separation from work and the product of work, separation from the process of determining the fate of work and life, the relationship of the objectification of man and the personalization of the commodity. On this basis and with this analysis of capitalism, this approach defines a socialist or communist society, even on the very first day of its existence, with the index of the planning of the council of labour and social production with the conscious, penetrating, equal, free, creative and effective intervention of individual human beings. It sees socialism in the abolition of wage labour, the abolition of the law of value, the abolition of the separation of the worker from work and the product of labour and the fate of his life, in the abolition of classes, the state and every force above the heads of humans. The approach to abolishing wage labour devotes all its energy to organizing, developing, structuring and leading a movement that should and can be the driving force for the establishment of such a society. Right-wing union reformism and Lenin’s party-building are the obstacles to the rise and dominance of this movement. By unionization, the hollow anti-class regime, and bringing the party to power, by raising the banner of the political power of the proletariat on the roof of the party’s Central Committee, one can only replace one form of capitalist planning with another.
Proletarian communism is not a program consisting of parts of a manifesto, principles, distant goals and immediate demands that some people write, form a party charter and on the basis of it begin to recruit and organize the working mass into the ranks of the army under the command of the party. Anti-capitalism is the innermost core of the working class, which must branch out, fight, increase its power, overthrow the foundation of the existence of capital and establish itself, the communism of the abolition of wage labour, the soviets of labour and social production. If we see communism as a living and growing approach in the social existence of the proletariat and the labour movement – if this is so, as it certainly is – then this approach or movement must raise the banner of communist anti-capitalism in all areas of social life within the existing society, in all areas of confrontation between the two basic classes of capitalist society. It must put forward radical anti-capitalist solutions and strategies, be the real manifestation of communism’s presence in this society, under the domination of this very system of wage slavery. There is nothing more demagoguery and scandalous than to emphasize the existence of communism as an approach within the labour movement, but wherever there is talk of struggle, debate, and protest among the working masses, to be the standard-bearer of the ugliest and most disastrous reformist solutions. In the arena of struggle for urgent demands, in the arena of anti-regime and overthrow of political power, in the narrative of organizing the labour movement, in dissecting capitalism, in understanding society beyond the system of wage slavery, in understanding the existence and non-existence of wage labour or the survival and decline of the law of value, and in all other issues of class struggle, let us speak of reformism. Let us take up the anti-communism of the proletariat and spread reformist tactics, positions, and solutions before the workers. Leninist parties and circles have historically done this, are doing this, and by doing so, they have dealt and will continue to inflict the most crushing blows in favour of the bourgeoisie on the anti-capitalist movement of the working class. The activists of the approach to abolishing wage labour, addressing their fellow masses in the world, say that the root of all poverty, misery, lack of rights, oppression, hunger, displacement, homelessness, the root of every form of deprivation of freedom, imprisonment and torture, war-making, criminal sexual, ethnic and racial discrimination, the root of all self-alienation, brainwashing, the existence of the state, Sharia and physical and intellectual repression systems, all of them, in our era, are in the existence of capital, in the relationship between man and his work. In all these areas, there is no choice but to fight against capital, to become a united, organized and conscious anti-capitalist power. Some Leninist parties also say this in an ideological and Sharia-based way. The difference is not over formulations, but over praxis and the completely opposite approach that they follow in all areas of social life and the process of class struggle.
Approach to abolishing wage labour and fighting to fulfil urgent demands:
The movement for the abolition of wage labour insists on a radical and anti-capitalist formulation of all the urgent and everyday demands of the working class. How far we will be able to realize these demands is another question. There is a huge difference between whether the essence of the demands and expectations of the day is an anti-capitalist movement or not, even though the movement in question has the ability to realize these demands or not. We are not talking about the limits and limits of the ability of the working masses to impose this or that demand of the day on the bourgeoisie. We are talking about the class nature and type of the movement within which and on the platform of its power we are discussing the demands. We are talking about the place, the movement, the front and the barricade in which we fight, how far we advance certainly depends on the strength of our struggle. There is no doubt about this, but the Marxist and anti-capitalist meaning of the limitation of our forces is not to change the class basis of our urgent demands. If we base the work on the abstract ability or inability of the day, then we must also banish the idea of the destruction of capitalism forever. While we do not do so. We do not have the necessary preparation and readiness to destroy capitalism, but we do not take the path of surrendering to the perpetuation of wage slavery either. On the contrary, we beat the drum of preparing and gaining the power of our class to achieve this goal.
Let us consider the struggle for wage increases. The approach of abolishing wage labour and the endogenous communism of the labour movement do not base its campaign in this area on wages commensurate with the basic subsistence and welfare needs of the working masses, on locking the rate of wage increases with something called the inflation rate!! It is an obvious deception to call ourselves the bulwark of the communist anti-capitalism of the proletariat, but in a scene of the struggle between labour and capital, in the struggle for wage increases, to stamp immortality on the relationship of surplus value production, on the capitalization of the product of our labour, on being separate and remaining separate from the fate of our labour and life. We demand the price of reproducing our labour power so that we can continue the galactic increase without any restraint from capital!! In this regard, let us launch the controversy of the poverty line. Let us call this line higher and lower than wages and make the large and small numbers the guarantee of an imaginary sectarian radicalism. Working-class communism as a living movement within the labour movement does not do this. On the contrary, it pursues the demand for higher wages in the human campaign of opposition to the basis of wage-earning. As the approach of a class of civil society whose language, identity and genre of protest are not from this society, but against it, it transfers the wage-setting battle to the field of determining the total product of labour and production. Bilan spreads what his class has created in the heart of this field, sets aside the share of the reproduction of the means of production and demands the allocation of the entire remainder to livelihood, welfare, education, health, treatment, care of the elderly and the elderly, and the costs of increased physical and mental health of humans. It declares that it is against any degree of capitalization of this product. Communism, as a living, dynamic and field-based movement in the social existence of the working masses, acts in this way. It places the axis of the struggle on the capitalization and non-capitalization of the products of labour. It tells the entire mass of the chain that it is necessary to take up a stand and fight here, in the area of the existence and non-existence of the surplus value production relationship. In this regard, with this call, it sheds the light of Marxian criticism of political economy on all angles of the wage labour relationship. By doing this, it advances the daily existence of its class by steps and perhaps miles towards a conscious anti-capitalist existence. In the context of this effort, it gives meaning to real class consciousness. Marxian recognition of capital and the result of the radical explanation of the living and present objectivity of this mode of production make the living consciousness of the workers. Communism, within the boiling of the proletariat, draws the wage war or any other war of the workers over the improvement of working conditions, livelihood, public welfare, health, treatment, education, over the best conditions for raising and developing children or caring for the elderly into this field. It shifts the axis of attack against the artery of existence of capital to the axis of opposition to wage labour, and here the necessity of organizing the power of struggle, the urgency of exercising united class power against capitalism, becomes the preoccupation of the minds and the subject of the movement of the working masses. In practice, it shows that the more organized, more conscious, and more universal this power is, the wider and brighter the victories will be. The approach of abolishing wage labour in relation to wages and increasing wages does this, and it will certainly be asked what will be the result of this war or this type of fighting? What will we achieve with these tasks that we will not be able to achieve if we do not do them? The question is valid and its answer is also clear. First: With this lineup, we are practically elevating the struggle for wage increases to a continuous link in the chain of class warfare to destroy capitalism. We pursue the campaign to increase the price of labour power not in a place of dissolved force in the structure of the political and legal order of capital, but as a class protesting and fighting to destroy this system. We talk about increasing wages, but we are making the coordinated and organic basis of wage-earning and the relationship of surplus value production the target of class aggression. Second: Our weapon in this struggle is not law and contract and hanging on to the apparatuses of the capital order, but only the power of force and the anti-capitalist struggle of us and our class. The more we bring our power into the field, the more we will crush the bourgeoisie into submission. Third: We make the wage war or any other war to improve working and living conditions a mechanism for forming an independent class front and the skeleton of this front, a school of knowledge and awareness and a platform for a more powerful arrangement of the power of our class’s struggle against the capitalist class.
The approach to abolishing wage labour and the struggle for political freedoms
Marxian communism, which is rooted in the struggle for political freedoms and social rights of humans, also takes root in the realm of the struggle for human beings’ political freedoms and social rights. It sees the foundation of slavery, deprivation of freedoms, subordination, and the massacre of rights and entitlements in wage labour, in the separation of man from his work. It explains that man, a seller of labour power, is deprived of any real right to intervene in determining the fate of his own life. In a society based on wage labour, capital is the starting point, the point of reference, and the end of things. It rules over everything. Here, freedom, choice, rights, law, democracy, civilization, and morality are the superordinate of the profit-producing cycle and the guardians of the surplus-value production relationship. All of these are inverted, false, misleading, and unreal. The economic, political, and civil structure of capitalism is an obstacle to the realization of any freedom and basic human rights. What the bourgeoisie calls rights is pure injustice, and what it calls freedom is the denial of any kind of human freedom. In the depths of this hell, the path to any degree of freedom passes through the exercise of organized council power against capital. The order of capital must be disrupted in all the different fields of economy, politics, and civilization. Capital must be pushed back in proportion to the existing class power. This must be done with organized council power. This power must be made an alternative to civilization, law, rights, and the order of capital within this hell.
Fighting against sexual, ethnic and racial discrimination
The approach of abolishing wage labour in the field of struggle against gender discrimination puts forward its own analyses and solutions. Here too, it gets to the root and explores the path of struggle in a radical attack against the existence of capital. It does not cling to the slogans of “freedom of dress”, “equal pay for men and women for equal work”, “women’s control over their own bodies” or the proportionality of gender employment to educational qualifications!! Words that the bourgeoisie has used for years as a tool to separate our class from the real track of the struggle against the fundamental lack of rights for women, and bourgeois communism, much more Catholic than the Pope, has turned them into chocolate and sweets for its circles. Freedom in general, including freedom of dress, is not something we talk about and demand by launching an action in this or that street. Freedom of dress must be imposed on capitalism and its state through free dress and a campaign of resistance and war against any kind of attack on this free dress. By stamping the seal of approval on wage-earning and exploitation, we cannot demand equality for the exploited from the threshold of power of the exploiters and their state. We must make the battleground against the basis of wage labour, against the capitalization of the product of labour, a storm as much as possible, and in the heart of this struggle – as long as wages exist – wages must be equalized. The foundation of the existence of the family, the product of class relations, the foundation of the relations that make parents responsible for raising the labour force needed by the bourgeoisie and put this burden on women, the foundation of domestic work and the economic root of all contracts, traditions or morals corresponding to sexual discrimination and women’s rights, in the depths of capitalism, must be made the target of radical protest. The approach of the abolition of wage labour explains that all this is possible, that we have the power to do all this. If we organize the masses of our class in a soviet and anti-capitalist way, if we consider the exercise of class power against capital as the basis, then to the extent of organizing and exercising this power, we impose the above demands on capital and its state. One of the most crushing blows that reformism, whether of the peaceful type of the Second International or its militant and leftist Leninist form, has dealt the labour movement is the working class’s refusal to organize and exercise its decisive power against the very foundation of capitalist existence.
Reformism, by beating the drum of unionism on one hand and overthrowing full-fledged capitalist hollowness, on the other hand, has practically removed the feeling of the need to organize the council and the national power of the class masses and exercise this power against capital from the existence of the labour movement. If we get reformism out of the way, then we will see this power. We will touch the earthly and material meaning of being the creator of global capital. If the entire political, police, military, civil, legal, intellectual and physical suppression power in the world comes from that capital, and if this capital itself is a direct result of our work and production, then we have the power to destroy this octopus. We can disrupt it and expand our class power according to the amount of disruption we bring to the cycle of capital appreciation and the structure of the capitalist order. All discussions are about recognizing this power and applying it against capital.
Anti-capitalist subversion
The approach to abolishing wage labour does not spread the empty platform of supra-class subversion, its anti-regime is, in all its aspects, anti-capitalist and an integral part of the class struggle of the working masses to destroy capitalism. We are fighting for the continuous reduction of surplus labour, for the continuous improvement of the standard of living, health, medicine and treatment, political freedoms and social rights, eliminating sexual inequalities, eliminating child labour and environmental pollution, in disrupting and closing the cycle of capital and profit production, in tearing up the framework of law and contract, rights and order and civilization of capitalism, here in the trenches and fields of a real anti-capitalist war that we face the bourgeois state. The way the anti-wage labour movement confronts the political regime is the reverse of what has historically been the agenda of Leninist parties and bourgeois communism. They practically summarize the entire class struggle in anti-regime rhetoric. They insinuate to the workers that with the fall of the political power of the day and their party sitting on the throne of power, all problems will be solved!! They are trying to rally the working masses behind them and ride the wave of workers’ anger to bring the party to power. Strategies whose only product is, at best, the substitution of one form of planning of the production cycle and capitalist order for another. A degenerate orientation that has imposed the most catastrophic defeats on the world workers’ movement. The movement for the abolition of wage labour considers the overthrow of the bourgeois state as the agenda of a movement that is organized and councillors in various spheres of social life engaged in a war against capital. A movement that pulls the bourgeoisie from the throne of power and replaces it with itself, which is the true symbol of the organized and conscious power of all members of the working masses and is ready for the councillor planning of work and production.
Fight against environmental pollution
Communism, the abolition of wage labour, sees the root of all environmental pollution in the existence and survival of wage slavery. It is capital that has poisoned, drop by drop, water, food, air, clothing, land, and human lifetime, and has made it a tool for reducing the cost of production and increasing surplus values. For any improvement in the human living environment anywhere in the world, the lifeblood of capital, the relationship of surplus value production, the existence of capitalist planning of labour and production must be attacked. Factories, agriculture, industries, institutions producing industrial goods, food, clothing, household appliances, energy, or any other product, all commercial centres, warehousing, transportation, and distribution of goods that are in any way or form a source of poisoning the necessities of life or polluting the human living environment, must be forced to change, close, and improve the work process with the power of an organized anti-capitalist council. The war against environmental pollution must be made a field of exercising power over what is produced, what is not produced, how much is produced, and no more is produced, and production must be adapted to the real needs of humans.
Anti-capitalist Council organization of the working masses
The approach of abolishing wage labour, for the organization of the working class, does not depend on the two-organizational theory of the party and the union. This strategy is based on institutional capital, anti-communism and the system of perpetuating the wage slavery system. For the vast masses of the working class, the Leninists prescribe the creation of a trade union. Workers are told to fight in these organizations to raise their wages and improve their livelihoods. At the same time, they ask the believers in “Leninism” to establish a “Communist Party”. The working masses are called to bury their entire anti-capitalist power in the graveyard of capital interests in exchange for the right to bargain and for the wage rate. They validate being a wage slave and being ruled. Consider yourself a handful of unionists, light-thinkers, liberals and liberals. Don’t see organized anti-wage work in their capacity. Leninist parties tell the working masses that they do not have the authority to do this, and for this reason, they must line up behind the party to get rid of the current situation. They call the party above their head as their own organization and tie any amount of their liberation to fighting under the footsteps of this evil Imam Zadeh and holy place. The social and historical horizon of this strategy is very familiar to the workers of the world. Camp state capitalism or another form of planning the economic, political and legal system of wage slavery is the only old, sick, sick and unborn baby that can be born from this strategy. The approach of abolishing wage labour, the party and union establishment version of Bikh and Ben considers reactionary, anti-worker and anti-communist. The fact that some parties and sects change the name of Syndicate and Union to Shura or General Assembly does not make any difference in the story. The labour movement needs the organization of a national anti-capitalist council with a clear horizon of the abolition of wage labour. Council here is not a noun, an organizational pattern. A radical anti-capitalist movement is organized. It is a movement consisting of all, the majority or the maximum number of workers, which fights against capital in all spheres of social life within the existing society. It takes root everywhere. The Foundation sees the dark days in the relationship of buying and selling labour, in the separation of producers from their work, and is lining up against this relationship to reduce and eliminate them. Anti-capitalist councils are the container for growth, ossification and maturity of anti-capitalism in the boiling point of the working class. Here, the working masses, just as they fight for wage increases, improvement of living standards, general welfare, political freedoms, against child labour, sexual discrimination, displacement, environmental pollution, etc., in the heart of these anti-capitalist struggles, they create their own councils. They form councils and organize their national anti-capitalist council movement. Within these councils, they express their existence as a class, a class power against the system of wage slavery, a class fighting against the existence of capital and against all the lawless and inhumane forms of capitalism. Members of the working class join hands. The most conscious activists of the movement, along with their less conscious associates, discuss and deliberate on all issues related to the current struggle, including the resolution and solution of all security issues related to the class struggle under the most ferocious dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. They weave the results of their deliberations, analyses and solutions into the fabric of collective decision-making to advance the struggle more effectively. No institution, organ, committee or group above the workers makes decisions for them. Everyone participates as creatively, effectively, freely, equally and consciously as possible in rooting out, finding solutions, determining strategies and adopting tactics. They gather the means of any kind of organization-building and party-building separate from themselves. Here, the conscious does not join hands to build organizations for others and start recruiting them. The workers’ council movement, at every level and degree of growth and maturity, is the embodiment of all the living and present organized class power of the proletariat against capital and, accordingly, is a living and developing alternative to capitalism. In describing proletarian communism, Marx said that “we will build a society in which the free development of everything depends on the free development of each individual.” Referring to this statement, Marx adds that the approach to the abolition of wage labour “depends on the flourishing of a movement within which the power to intervene, influence, find solutions, and the growth and awareness of all workers depend on the free, creative, equal, and aware intervention of each worker”.
Communism, the abolition of wage labour and the narrative of class consciousness
The approach to abolishing wage labour does not make any fuss about how to transmit consciousness to the working masses. It considers this commotion to be the result of the greatest alienation from the class consciousness of the proletariat and the awareness of the working masses. The creation of these commotions is the work of parties, circles, and individuals who consider themselves legislators or promoters of a Sharia. It is these who consider the working masses to be irrational, illiterate beings. They consider them to be devoid of intelligence and the power of discernment. They do not see communist consciousness as the conscious existence of the workers; they do not consider this consciousness to be the circulation and nourishment of the labour movement. They do not recognize the anti-capitalist struggle as a natural and internal matter of the working class. The approach to abolishing wage labour sees class consciousness and communist conscious work as completely different from these. Class consciousness for humans, and necessarily for workers, is not a category outside of their struggle and social existence. It is life that creates consciousness, the opposite is not true. Communist consciousness is not a borrowed head for the torso of the working masses. The real source of this consciousness is the land of the working class’s life and struggle. Marx, on the basis of his understanding of capitalism, did not derive his materialist narrative of the history of the development of human societies or his alternative for a society beyond wage slavery from the completion of the views of previous scholars of economics and philosophy and socialist reformers. He criticized all of these and extracted the essence of this criticism or the alloy of this weapon from the depths of the existing society, the present historical conditions, by referring to the ongoing class struggle within this society, from the heart of the conditions of work and exploitation and life and struggle of the working class. The class consciousness of the proletariat is not Engels’ “scientific socialism”, nor is it something called “Marxism-Leninism”. It is not a bunch of thoughts, beliefs, criticism, negation and assertion, it is not an ideology and, contrary to the imagination of some, it is not just a critique of ideology. The conscious existence of the class is the standard-bearer of the abolition of wage slavery, the standard-bearer of the dissolution of classes and class society, the standard-bearer of the liberation of humanity from every form and power above itself.
The bourgeois consciousness is the evaporation of the cycle of capital production, the charter of the interests, expectations and goals of the exploiting class. The class that exists and does not exist sacrifices humanity to its own inhuman interests and desires. However, the bourgeoisie claims to represent the interests, interests and expectations of all humans, and on this basis, this consciousness is a complete symbol of inversion, distortion and fabrication. The consciousness of the working class is the opposite. The proletariat is a class whose suffering is not a special suffering and injustice imposed on it, nor a special injustice, but a universal injustice and suffering. Its position is not historical but human. The condition for its liberation is the liberation of humanity. On this basis, its consciousness is an expression of the exact reality and is devoid of any falsification or inversion. The consciousness of the proletariat is a conscious movement against capitalism and for the abolition of wage labour. This awareness manifests itself only in the existence of this movement, in the power it exerts against capital, in the analyses, solutions, finding solutions, demands, organizations, criticisms, overthrows, strategies, tactics, rebellions and all that is the fabric of its ongoing campaign against the existence of capital and against all manifestations of capitalist existence. The awareness of the proletariat fills the gap between its spontaneous anti-capitalism and the communism of the abolition of wage labour and is fake outside the existence of this movement. Marx’s teachings also fulfil the role of the awareness of this class when they become a weapon of the working class’s war against the foundation of the wage slavery system. Otherwise, neither Marx’s communism nor will it be a sign of the awareness of the proletariat. The working class does not need the arrival of awareness-raising messengers. The whole point is that the aware, solution-seekers and internal activists of the labour movement should be torchbearers of knowledge, consciousness and awareness against wage slavery in this movement. The labour process and the product of labour and the social production of the masses should be chained together before the broad masses by referring to Marx’s critique of political economy. They should shed light on the internal and organic connection of the political, legal, civil order, state, democracy, law and all existing social infrastructures with the relation of surplus value production and should chain the result of all this to the consciousness, knowledge and awareness of the masses. They should follow all these works in the course of the daily events of the labour movement. They should criticize reformist solutions and replace them with anti-capitalist solutions. They should be the effective force for organizing workers’ councils and lead the working masses towards relying on independent anti-capitalist class power. I will conclude my words. I repeat once again that by creating a party and building a syndicate and forming a union, not only is no help provided to the class struggle of the proletariat, but on the contrary, the most crushing blows are dealt to the body of this struggle. This has been the case historically. Bourgeois communism, including Leninism and Leninist parties, has done this. Communism is a movement deep within the social existence of the working class and at the very core of the labour movement. It is an approach within this movement. The germ of Marxist communism is here, and the all-out Soviet movement against wage slavery with Marxist consciousness and understanding is the only real platform for the growth and spread of this communism.
Nasser Paydar
Speech at the seminar “The Movement for the Abolition of Wage Labor in Iran” Berlin Association for the Study of Iranian Social Movements
Held on April 23, 2017