Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labor and Leninist Militant Reformism
A very brief examination of the characteristic features of the international labour movement from its inception to the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century shows that nowhere is there any trace of the phenomenon of two organizations to be seen. The division between different spheres of struggle and the separate and distinct organization of these spheres is not the preoccupation of the working class. The struggle against capital exploitation and the political injustice of the day is everywhere intertwined with the struggle against states and the movement to change the dominant social objectivity, and the working masses are not captive to the temptation to draw a line between economic and political organization, or party and trade union organization, and such disputes in order to advance these struggles. Marx and the communism of the abolition of wage labour come into being within the process of this vast class and historical struggle. This is the anti-capitalist movement of the international working class, which, in the process of growing and deepening its consciousness and class horizons, passes to Marx’s criticism of capitalism, to the clear horizon of communism, the abolition of wage labour, and to all that constitutes the content of Marx’s revolutionary teachings. The place of these trainings and their importance and validity for the class and internationalist movement of the proletariat must be explored from such a point of view, otherwise it will turn against itself, and this is what the bourgeoisie has done in various forms in the following periods of history, and we will talk about them in the following pages of this article. At this stage of its historical life, the labour movement, in a certain extent of its practice and class approach, put the abolition of wage labour communism instead of the socialist idealism of Blanc, Cabe and Proudhon and developed it into the real content of the struggle with the bourgeoisie. Marx’s teachings are a manifestation of the ability and success of parts of the anti-capitalist movement of the working class in realizing the process of this replacement. The surgical removal of these teachings and Marx himself from the skeleton of the labour movement, giving Marx’s address in the London library and seeking a medal of honour for him who supposedly discovered something called scientific socialism from the depths of his brain or presented a new school to the proletariat and the world, is in fact a complete copying of the same popular religious nonsense about Muhammad ibn Abdullah and his seclusion on Mount Hira and then his contact with the angels of revelation and the revelation of the verses of the Quran to him.
The communism of the abolition of wage labour was the radical response of a part of the international anti-capitalist labour movement in the second half of the nineteenth century to the needs of the growth, maturity and class development of this movement, and Marx played the role of a thinking man and a skilful spokesman for this tendency. The same movement that was formed in the factories of the Mediterranean coast against the exploitation arising from wage labour, stood the test of the Champi uprising there and issued a manifesto of demands corresponding to the struggle against wage labour. A movement that from there took the road to Lyon, Paris, and other cities in France, stopping production and work for long months in the textile factories of this land, organized the Winstanley Uprising, the Luddite movement, and then Chartism in England, recorded a multitude of strikes, uprisings, and various forms of aggression against working conditions and exploitation in Germany and other European countries, achieved the widest possible fieldwork in the revolutions of 1789 and February and June 1848, and divided French society into two. A movement that everywhere combined the struggle for improved livelihoods and political rights with that against sovereignty and change in the existing situation, but in search of a horizon of liberation from the dominant objectivity of the day, it turned to a dreamy and bourgeois socialist idealism. Yes, it is precisely this great class and international movement that is now, at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, in a certain extent of its social offensive practice, undertaking a fundamental shake-up in its horizon, expectations, solutions and strategies. Marx stands here and in the beating heart of this great historical shake-up.
In the course of this approach or this great historical shake-up, the foundation of the economic and political struggle of the working class is not to be disintegrated and split!!! The war of the working masses against the states is not to be separated from the process of the continuous struggle against capitalist exploitation and injustice. The internal connection between the ongoing struggles of this class, with the moment-by-moment preparation of the ground for the final settlement of accounts with the capitalist system and the creation of a new society, is not to be disrupted!! On the contrary, the real content of this house-breaking and its great approach is that all the above determinations find their right, conscious, class, materialist, practical, revolutionary and anti-wage labour path. The charter of this resurrection was that the labour movement, which previously had no real horizon of the abolition of wage labour before it, would now make the real communist change of wage slavery relations the current practical content of its class struggle. These achievements, teachings, solutions and strategies were absolutely not intended to issue a bourgeois genealogy for the labour movement!!! And they called into question the anti-capitalist nature of this movement!!! Marx’s teachings nowhere asked the broad masses of workers to hang themselves on the noose of right-wing syndicalist reformism for their world and to join the party of bourgeois intellectuals for their afterlife. Any such interpretation of any clause of these teachings, achievements and manifestos is merely a deeply bourgeois and reactionary distortion of their real class and social diversity. Marx, as a person involved in the process of daily interactions and interactions of the anti-capitalist struggles of the working class and at a certain point in the process of expansion, awareness and growth of these struggles, subjects the most fundamental issues afflicting the world labour movement to a profound materialist and revolutionary revision. First of all, he opens the vast library of criticism of bourgeois political economy to the working masses. Until then, it was the analysis of the likes of Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi and Proudhon that determined the angle of view for workers to look at the relationship between the purchase and sale of labour power, and the activists of the labour movement looked at capital and their relationship with capitalist relations from beyond the perspective of bourgeois economists. In all these analyses and scrutiny, the reality of the relationship between labour and capital was disappearing from the workers’ view. The exchange of labour power with capital was interpreted as a form of bribery, and in the meantime, the relationship between the production of surplus value and the true source of the existence of capital in the capitalist system was completely distorted, distorted, and obscured.
The relationship between humans was considered to be the relationship between commodities and things. The material basis of commodity fetishism, the worker’s loss of his entire human existence in the process of selling labour power, the reality of the all-encompassing dominance of dead labour over living labour, the role of the material mode of production in determining the existence and non-existence of the political, legal, civil, and cultural structure of class society, capital as a social relation and the terrible captivity of humans in the chains of capital’s power, the internal relationship of the state and the material mode of production, and many other issues related to capitalist society and the position of the working class in this system were all instilled into the minds of the workers with complete inversion. The workers, as the objective conditions of their lives, fought against the exploitation, oppression, and suffering resulting from the existence of the relationship of buying and selling labour power. They had long ago organized and empowered a huge anti-capitalist movement with tooth and nail, but in this struggle and in the campaign to change the existing objectivity, they were also subject to the deepest illusions, distortions, and misleading horizons. Marx’s teachings familiarized the working class with the materialist and revolutionary anatomy of the relationship of surplus value production and the entire structure of civil society, and the state and political order based on this mode of production. At the same time, Marx’s dissection depicted from within itself the horizon of a way out of this system and how real a society free from the existence of wage labour, the state, and classes, a society that guarantees “human freedom from every constraint, even the constraint of labour,” and “a society in which the free development of all depends on the free development of each individual,” in the breastplate of the conscious and growing rise of the international labour movement.
Marx’s teachings in the turbulent phase of the labour movement raise the capacity of this movement to acquire the greatest power, the deepest type of vision for challenging the basis of capitalism, the most effective solutions to the struggle, the most powerful forms of organization, the highest level of class insight, and the adoption of the most effective solutions against wage labour. Nowhere in these teachings has there been and can there be seen with any naked eye any trace of any reason for separating the economic struggle from the political, for separating the current movement of the working masses from the basis of a serious and active struggle against capital, or for separating the everyday movement from the real track of the abolition of wage labour.
These teachings have everywhere made it clear that the trade unions will be able to continue their existence only on condition that they become compatible in their practical fabric with the communism of the abolition of wage labour. The fight against sectarianism and party-building beyond the labour movement has been an integral part of these teachings. The true model of labour organization consistent with the nature of Marx’s radical, materialist, and revolutionary teachings is the First International, which is the centre of the organic and internal intersection of the proletariat’s struggle in all spheres of social life against capital exploitation, against every manifestation of every type of capitalist oppression, crime, and injustice, on an internationalist scale, with a profoundly anti-wage labour approach and for the elimination of the entire wage labour system. The term party in Marx’s literature has never been and never will be a license for the separation of the working-class organization into separate economic and political formations or trade union and socialist organizations and the type of these fundamentally bourgeois divisions. Party in Marx’s words is a name for every approach, and his use of this name not only does not imply any type of organization distinct from the working masses of communists, but on the contrary is clear evidence of his belief and effort to reject all forms of this separation. Pay close attention to a few of his statements in the “Communist Manifesto” which later, like all his other statements, was titled “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” in the hierarchy of social-bourgeois distortion.
“The Communists are not a special party opposed to the workers’ parties. They have no interests separate from the interests of the proletariat as a whole. They do not introduce special principles to include the proletarian movement within its framework. The difference between the Communists and other proletarian parties is only that, on the one hand, in the struggles of the proletariat of different nations, they take into account and defend the common interests of all the proletariat, regardless of their national interests, and, on the other hand, in the various stages through which the struggle of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie passes, they are always representatives of the interests and benefits of the whole movement. In this connection, the Communists are practically the most determined section of the workers’ parties of all countries and are always the driving force of the movement forward. But theoretically, the advantage of the Communists over the rest of the proletariat lies in their understanding of the general conditions, course and results of the proletarian movement.” (The Communist Manifesto)
In the above relatively detailed statements, very important and decisive points have been seriously emphasized. These statements are so urgent, explicit, vivid and of fundamental relevance that it is as if Marx and his companions had seen through the looking glass and the various factions of the present-day bourgeois social-democratic party, the heirs of social democracy and the camp and left nationalism, lined up in their hostile camp, and had determined to make the task of the anti-wage labour movement of the proletariat clear once and for all with this crowd of bourgeois communism, to the core. Let us see what very important points he really points out?
“The communists are not a special party in contrast to other workers’ parties” This point is a clear statement of the fact that, contrary to the widespread distortions of the camp party leaders and their modern successors, the open party, which is critical of them, the word party in these days absolutely did not mean a political organization composed of a handful of elements claiming communism. The reason for this is very clear, in this period the working class basically did not have any party of the type of the 20th century parties that could be compared with other parties!! The explicit denial of the communists as a party in contrast to other workers’ parties in this period and in Marx’s speech reveals with the greatest clarity and clarity that what is meant is not any specific organizational framework called a party but simply different approaches within the working class. He says that there are different approaches in the labour movement and the communist or anti-wage labour approach is one of these approaches. It is quite obvious that each approach strives to achieve the necessary conditions for superiority, development and establishment of its policies and tries to organize itself in this regard, but Marx immediately after the first sentence puts forward the following decisive phrase in a very calculated and measured manner. He adds that:
“Communists have no interests separate from the interests of the entire working class and do not bring forward any special principles.” In this way, he condemns and rejects any kind of vehicle for any kind of separation from the current working-class movement under the cover of communism and communist organization. He says that communists do not put forward any special principles and do not invent any special ideological school. They have no interests separate from the interests of the entire working class. They are the most conscious part of the proletariat, and this greater consciousness of theirs only acquires real meaning or objective, social and class significance in the depths of the current movement of the world working class and, in the ups, and downs of this class’s campaign against capitalism. Otherwise, it is only a vehicle and pretext for schooling and separating their own professional and sectarian interests from the working class and the current anti-capitalist movement of the working masses. Here, this is a very fundamental question before all the masters of the “communist parties”! The twentieth century and the hard-hearted heirs of Hezbollah are currently in their midst. What other meaning does the application of the term “scientific socialism” to Marx’s teachings with the sinister aim of completely separating this socialism from the practice of the class struggle of the proletariat have other than presenting these teachings as “special principles” and transforming communism into a school in opposition to other schools of thought, and finally, other than the comprehensive separation of the interests of party members from the interests of the entire working class?! Marx’s teachings are certainly among the most urgent and important of all sciences, and the most effective and profound anatomy of the problems of political economy and class struggle. But any kind of separation of them from the practice of the anti-wage labour struggle of the working class and any form of their classification as abstract scientific categories or a kind of ideological and ideological socialism, including their embedding in the scaffolding of something called the school of “scientific socialism,” is simply a sword that descends from the arsenal of the bourgeoisie’s class and ideological aggression on these teachings and, through it, on the anti-wage labour movement of the proletariat. According to what we heard from Marx above, the communists are not a party in opposition to other workers’ parties, or, to put it more accurately and precisely, they are not an approach in opposition to other approaches within the workers’ movement, and accordingly, they will not be preparing for the establishment of a distinct organization from the general organization of the working class. The important question here is, who are these people really, and what will their communist status be in its objective manifestation? The answer is not complicated or mysterious. Marx himself, continuing the same discussion, states the task of this question and its answer very clearly: “On the one hand, in the struggles of the proletariat of various nations, they take into account and defend the common interests of all the proletariat, regardless of their national interests, and on the other hand, in the various stages that the struggle of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie goes through, they are always representatives of the interests and benefits of the entire movement.” Everything is clear. Communists are absolutely not allowed to distinguish themselves from the workers and their current movement under this name and under the pretext of being communists and to organize themselves within a sect and organization other than the organization of the class struggle of the working masses. They must fight very resolutely and irreconcilably within this movement against any approach that seeks to sacrifice the interests of the working class for the interests of a particular section of this class or, worse, for the interests and motives of perpetuating the system of wage slavery. They must, as the beating heart of the organism of the life of the struggle and the current anti-capitalist class practice of the working masses, make any type of reformist syndication and unionization, which is the embodiment of the complete and total sale of the labour movement and the interests of the largest section of the working class, the target of their most crushing waves of protest, criticism and struggle.
Marx’s account of the place of the communists in the labour movement, the role they should play, and the relationship they should have with the entire working-class movement is exactly the opposite and opposite interpretation of the current party leaders’ interpretation of these issues. A few isolated strangers, with every current action and reaction of the labour movement in the ivory tower, are gathering together with rotten wishes and dreams of sharing in the political power of capital or carrying the legacy of extinct popular and anti-imperialist nationalist movements and the right to determine national destiny within a sect outside the world, society, and the “mafia”. They line up committee after committee, and to complete the number of members of the committees, each one writes his name in a few places, obtains a few positions, and awards himself a few medals, from the depths of the heavens they issue announcement after announcement to the earth and the cursed earthly hell of capital, saying what??? Why are you sitting here building a union for your world and bringing us to power for your hereafter and calling the power to the marrow of our future capitalist bones the power of your class? This sinister anti-Marxist, anti-communist and anti-worker narrative of building a communist party for the workers is not only pure demagoguery against the anti-capitalist movement of the working masses but also an attempt to tear apart the entire scroll of dignity, credibility and greatness of Marx’s teachings and Marx himself. The scroll of this party-building must be torn up forever by the powerful hand of the movement for the abolition of wage labour by the working masses. The Communist Manifesto, continuing the above points, once again clarifies that “the theoretical views of the communists are in no way based on ideas and principles discovered or invented by a world reformer. They are only a general expression of the real relations of the current class struggle and of the historical movement that is taking place before our eyes. The abolition of property relations that have existed up to now is not something that is unique to communism; all property relations have been constantly undergoing constant changes, constant and historical shifts. . .. The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property in general, but the abolition of bourgeois property.”
All the above points, while revealing some components of communism, the abolition of wage labour for the workers, also undermine the foundation of any attempt to build a party above the working masses and any form of theory-building for the labour movement. The heated debate that is currently going on between the communist parties of the twentieth century and their current heirs, that a phenomenon called “scientific socialism” is a set of beliefs and discoveries of intellectuals of the wealthy classes, is what is being criticized here. If the theories of the communists are not based on the ideas and principles discovered by social reformers, then referring communism, the abolition of wage labour, to the product of the discoveries and investigations of intellectuals of the wealthy classes is also completely wrong. If communism is an expression of the general relations of the current class struggle and the historical movement that is taking place before our eyes, then its true enlightenment must be sought in the depths of this movement and in the moments, moments, and twists of its confrontation with the system of wage slavery. If communism is the conscious movement of the proletarian masses for a fundamental change in the entire existing objectivity, then the communist formation of the proletariat must be pursued only in the turbulent phase of its ever-ongoing class struggle against wage labour. Finally, if communism is the real process of the working class’s struggle for the abolition of wage labour, then the democratic party-building, the anti-regime legacy of the Populist anti-imperialist movement and the right to national self-determination, or bourgeois socialism in general, under the name of communism and the proletariat must be thrown away forever and buried in the old cemeteries of history. Many advocates of bourgeois social party-building invoke the issue of the priority of the conquest of political power in the strategy of the proletariat’s class struggle and the deferral of the socialist transformation of the economy to this issue. We will make it clear in the following discussions that this is precisely the same theory that corresponds to the party-building of sections of the bourgeoisie to replace market capitalism with state capitalism. Here, for the time being, we will only limit ourselves to the fact that, first, the current party narrative is not only no basis for the conquest of political power by the working class, but quite the opposite, it opens a grave impasse in the way of any attempt by the working masses to put an end to the existence of the state over them. Second, and as far as the present part of the discussion is concerned, Marx’s reference to the priority of the conquest of political power by the proletariat cannot be linked in any way to the current category of party-building. It is not clear, and none of the defenders of the phenomenon of the two-organizational party and mass organization have ever proven anywhere why a nationwide anti-wage labour organization of the proletariat is not capable of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and seizing political power. But, for example, are the party sects of a few dozen people, alien to any movement of the workers, a suitable and successful means of achieving this goal, or even a necessary condition for the working class to achieve political power? This is a topic to which we will definitely return.
The above points merely indicated some of Marx’s theoretical guidelines and formulations regarding the labour movement, the relationship between economics and politics, the connection between the current struggle and the horizon of the abolition of wage labour, and finally the real context and appropriate form of organizing this movement. However, it remains to be seen what he actually did and how he followed up these words in concrete practice. The first precursors of Marx’s active contact with the labour movement date back to the early 1840s. During these years, more than a few hundred thousand German workers lived in French society and alongside the working class of this country. Marx lived among this mass of immigrant workers and had a curious, aware, active, and influential presence in their daily work, life, and struggle. According to Marx himself in his economic and philosophical manuscripts, the events of these days had a very serious impact on his thought process. His acquaintance with the vast mass of immigrant workers was very close, and for a time he lived in the same house and place with Alfred Maurer, a radical and prominent member of one of the labour organizations. During these years, he began publishing the Franco-German Yearbook in collaboration with “Arnold Ruge ” another prominent activist in the labour movement, but this collaboration did not last long. It is very interesting that the root of their separation was their different views on the labour movement. In 1843, French society witnessed the great strike of the workers of Silesia. During this strike, the workers fought to impose their economic demands on the bourgeoisie. They rebelled against the stubborn resistance of the factory owners and smashed all the machinery and tools in the workshop. The workers’ revolt was severely suppressed by the state’s security forces. Ruge evaluated this revolt and all other uprisings of its kind as ineffective and explained that economic struggles devoid of the anti-regime burden of the working masses were incapable of playing any significant role. Marx, on the contrary, considered Ruge’s political and anti-regime approach devoid of the class burden of anti-capitalism an insufficient and sterile effort for the working class and, in comparing the political struggles of the English workers and the widespread economic strike of the working masses of Silesia, attributed the greatest class privilege and prestige to the latter.
In 1846, Marx and Engels founded the Workers’ Educational Society in Brussels and, following this effort, joined the Communist League after a necessary process of dialogue and stipulation. It was after this date that the first congress of the League was held in London. Engels attended this congress and, referring to the agreement between him and Marx with others, the overthrow of the capitalist state, the establishment of the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the capitalist system and its replacement with a classless society and private property were approved as the basic goals of the League. Shortly afterwards, the statutes of this organization were also drafted by Marx based on the members’ suggestions, and it was at this time that the League’s previous slogan with the populist theme “All men are brothers” was replaced by the slogan “Workers of the world, unite”. Another decision of the Communist League was to entrust the task of compiling and editing the “Communist Manifesto” to Marx. This work was welcomed by Marx, and it was precisely this manifesto that became the basis of the activities and approaches of the League today. A very decisive point here is that the Communist League was a broad workers’ organization and had organized a large number of working masses within itself in important German cities such as Frankfurt, Hanover, Munich, Hamburg, Kassel, Düsseldorf, Cologne and other places. In the Communist League, no separation of economic and political struggles or of the struggle for the demands of the day from the general struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist system is visible. In none of the documents of this organization is there any mention of the separation of the organization of different forms of workers’ struggle.
The last and most well-known area of Marx’s practical effort in the depths of the European labour movement is his decisive and very active and influential presence in the establishment of the First Workers’ International. It does not seem necessary to discuss the aims, lines of work, policies and demographic structure of the International. All activists of the international labour movement are more or less aware of these issues, although each tendency and approach has naturally extracted its own interpretations and interpretations from them. The International was the true embodiment of the unity and solidarity, organization and sympathy of the proletariat as a class against the system of wage slavery. Here all the different approaches within the labour movement were present together, but they all reported the basis of their solidarity, agreement and unity very clearly to the workers of the world as follows:
“… The emancipation of the working class must be carried out by the working class itself. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class is not a struggle for exclusive privileges and rights, but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all forms of class domination. The economic subordination of the workers to the monopolists of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, is the foundation of all forms of slavery, social poverty, spiritual degeneration and political dependence. The economic emancipation of the working class is that great goal to which every political movement, as a means, must be subordinate. All efforts directed to this great goal have so far failed due to the lack of solidarity between the various sections of the workers in each country and the lack of threads of fraternal unity between the working classes of different countries. The emancipation of labour is not a local or national question, but a social question that embraces all countries in which modern society has emerged, and its solution depends on the practical and theoretical unity of the workers of all advanced countries.”
The backbone of the Charter of the International Workingmen’s Association is the struggle against the basis of capitalism. In this Charter, the economic emancipation of the working class, in other words, the abolition of wage labour relations, is considered the foundation of all the pillars of the work and planning of the labour movement. At the same time, political struggle is considered a continuous and inseparable part of everyday struggles and serves the realization of economic goals and the prospect of the abolition of capitalism. Not only are the different spheres of the working-class struggle demarcated by any kind of class game or any form of division, but all measures corresponding to these divisions are condemned as obstacles to the confrontation of the proletariat against capital. Apart from all these determinations and indicators, the First International was a container for the fusion and accompaniment of all the current tendencies within the labour movement within the sealed four walls of anti-wage labour. This is a point that the broad spectrum of left reformism and the masters of the parties of this spectrum, as well as the right-wing syndicalists, are trying to cover up and distort it in the worst way. They are making the most noise and fuss to use the presence of different labour movements with different approaches within the First International as a vehicle for class compromise for their ugly reformist and opportunist abuse. They say that the gathering of these tendencies in the International Workers’ Association is a license for the validity, principle, necessity and legitimacy of the alliance of reformists and syndicalists on the one hand and the radical anti-wage labour approach on the other hand within a comprehensive mass labour organization!!! What was presented to the attention of the working masses of Europe in the International was not compromised and alliance but the reformist bone marrow typical of the masters of the parties of the left reformist spectrum or their twin syndicalists, which was completely the opposite, the acceptance of the anti-wage labour charter of the proletariat by all movements and the practical obligation of all of these in compliance with the anti-capitalist manifesto of the working class. Any talk of unity of tendencies in the First International is to level the most outrageous accusations against this organization, against Marx, and against all active communists involved in establishing this anti-capitalist labour organization. A wide range of labour movements of the day were present here, Proudhonists, Bakuninists, Blanquists, other imaginary socialists and many other heterogeneous groups and approaches, but the foundation of the work of the International was not the common denominator of their beliefs and solutions, but the struggle against the foundations of capitalism, both in the context of everyday confrontation with the bourgeoisie and within the general and universal orientation of the proletariat to end the existence of the system of wage slavery. That each of these groups and approaches had a certain understanding of the meaning and concept of anti-capitalism is a completely assumed and undeniable issue. But the very fundamental issue is that:
First, the International was not a union of tendencies, but a clear symbol of the unity of the working masses in the ongoing class war against wage labour. The workers who supported Bakunin, Blanqui, Proudhon, and others there did not press each other’s hands under the banner of Proudhonists’, Blanquists’, Bakuninisms’, and the like, but under the name of the proletariat of the world and as a class in opposition and struggle against the system of wage slavery. Secondly, the foundation of the establishment of the International was not ideology, belief, and professional thoughts, but the objective process of the anti-capitalist struggle. What this means is that the English, French, German, Austrian, Dutch, and Polish working masses in the First International did not combine and separate their different and conflicting ideologies in order to extract from them an ideological composition acceptable to all. On the contrary, they gathered together for a united and common struggle in this direction by referring to a radical and universal anti-wage labour manifesto. Another important issue can be emphasized in this context. That the vast majority of European workers organized in the International, contrary to what syndicalists and the masters of the communist parties think of the workers of the world today, all saw themselves, without any ifs or buts, as anti-capitalist and in direct conflict with wage labour relations. Furthermore, they considered themselves internationalists and had formed the International to fight against capitalism. None of these workers, belonging to any intellectual spectrum, was absolutely intent on proving that they, their class, and their class movement were devoid of anti-capitalist enthusiasm. None of these workers would have even imagined that one hundred and sixty years after them, there would be beings in the world who, under the name of communism and the owner and master of the Communist Party, would devote all their efforts to proving the bourgeois nature of the labour movement and the ignorance of the workers’ souls about their opposition to wage labour!!!
As is clear from the general course of our discussion, our intention here is by no means to explore the various aspects of the International’s work program and the various strengths and weaknesses of its constituents. Just as in other parts of this article, the subject of discussion has not been a detailed or even semi-detailed examination of any of the events. In all these cases, we have traced very specific points and have gone to how the labour movement of countries has approached very specific issues. What became very clear and obvious to our eyes in the midst of this exploration was that the labour movement has from the beginning entered the arena of historical and class struggle as an anti-capitalist movement. Everywhere it has combined the struggle for the daily subsistence demands with the struggle for the attainment of political rights. In all fields it has linked its daily struggle to impose its economic and political demands on the bourgeoisie with the horizon of a nationwide struggle to break out of the system of wage slavery. In all these periods, it has undertaken the task of organizing itself against capitalism. In the process of advancing this organization, it has not attempted any separation of the economic struggle from the political one. Finally, nowhere has it placed its struggle to achieve its demands in opposition to the struggle against the foundation of capitalism.