Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labour and Leninist Militant Reformism
For years, capitalists and intellectual representatives of capital have been dancing. They have spread a dance floor in every corner of the globe. Everywhere, the working masses are singing that the era of revolution has ended, the angel of reform has been freed from the clutches of the demon of violence and oppression, the sullen people who spoke of revolution have joined history, and the peace-loving humanity of the era is ready to shake the hands of Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and the like. Let us not forget that the above discussion is not just an old tale of the long-standing dreams of the capitalist class, but also the result of the daily observations of intellectuals and politicians of this class of the course of world events over the past few decades. Our focus is not on the first aspect of the problem, but precisely on its second aspect. The relationship of capital is a furnace of distortions. The bourgeois consciousness is the consciousness evaporated from the cycle of production of surplus value and the social relation of capital, a kind of consciousness that perceives all the social phenomena before it upside down and judges them in reverse. Let us see what the realities are and how the conscious brain or the pupil of the conscious eye of the working class perceives them and how they see them. Naturally, there is much room for discussion in this passage, but I am looking for a conversation as short as possible and for this reason I prefer to dwell on some specific and decisive points.
Revolutions, even the most superficial ones, are nevertheless events that bear on their face the effects of the inherent contradiction between the productive forces of each era and the dominant social relations and interactions. By effects here is meant the social, class, economic, political, cultural, civil, legal, ethnic or even ideological consequences of the contradictory and contradictory existence of a given society in a historical period. “All the conflicts of history, in our opinion, have their roots in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of interaction. Moreover, for a conflict to occur in a country, it is not necessary for this contradiction to have reached its ultimate limit in that particular country. Competition with more advanced industrial countries, which results from the expansion of international relations, is sufficient to create a similar contradiction in a less developed industrial country… “(Marx, The German Ideology).
The contradiction of the productive forces with the dominant social relations has an explicit meaning. This contradiction encompasses all aspects of the existence of the class that carries it, and this means that the social movement of this class is, firstly, a movement in all spheres of social life, and secondly, a movement whose every step of development and expression of its real class life depends on the antagonism to the basis of the ruling relations and the deepening of this antagonism in all these spheres. Thirdly, the victory of this movement is subject to a certain level of organic and comprehensive maturity in all spheres of the contradiction and confrontation with the existing dominant objectivity. Let us examine the issue by referring to the situation of the working class and the struggle of the masses of this class against the capitalist system. The relationship of buying and selling labour power is the womb, the centre of development and outbreak of the contradiction between labour and capital. Capital is a social relationship, and this contradiction is growing, developing, and intensifying throughout the fabric of this relationship. Capital takes the dominant part of the work of the working masses out of their hands in the form of extra work and creates the source of its unrestrained and cancerous growth, in this regard, the level of livelihood, social welfare, the necessary preconditions for the free physical and mental growth of the workers, the process of formation and development of these needs, the fields and conditions for their realization, takes everyone under its crushing blows. These clashes directly and inevitably lead to the wave of struggle of the working class in the field of economic, welfare and social facilities and lead to development and rebellion. Capital needs politics, civility, law, order and contract to develop the work process, conditions for development and establishment of its power bases. The capitalist system imposes all these and makes all these octopuses’ tools to contain the anti-capitalist struggles of the working masses. This makes the war over law and contract, social order, content and how these are ever open and turbulent areas of working-class life. Capital, in the presence of owners, thinkers, politicians, planners, managers and protectors, creates the relationship of buying and selling labour of the capitalist class, puts this class on the throne of the dominant economic and political power, capital reconstructs and reproduces the machine of police, security and military repression as an integral part of its body, and turns this machine into a tool to destroy the daily struggles of the workers. The forced reaction of the working class against this trend is also the struggle against the capitalist state, which forms a circle of hot circles of class struggle of wage slaves in various forms in all existing societies. Capital establishes its pervasive dominance in all areas of thought, civilization, law, culture, morality, ideology, literature, art, tradition, religion, customs and traditions, issues related to gender, colour, race, ethnicity and all aspects of human existence, in all these fields it attacks the threshold of rights, possibilities of physical and intellectual development, freedoms and all dimensions of human social existence. A phenomenon that makes the reaction, struggle and war of the class of sellers of labour power inevitable in all these areas. In a word, the inherent contradiction within the capital relationship is forced and necessarily becomes the basis of a continuous clash between two hostile classes in all areas of social life. A clash, war, and struggle in which the real and final victory of the working class is contingent on the elimination of the relationship of buying and selling labour, the establishment of a society free from state, classes, and exploitation, and the end of any kind of separation of humans from work, the product of work, and the determination of their own social destiny.
In order for the working class to achieve the necessary conditions for victory over the wage slavery system, it must achieve a certain level of growth and maturity in all the above fields. Without obtaining these conditions, the labour movement will not only not be able to dismantle the relationship of buying and selling labour power, but it will also not even find the ability to break the capitalist state machine in its real class sense and anti-wage labour. The development process of capitalism, the continuous growth of technology, scientific achievements, machines and work tools, expertise and technologies are all continuous components of the growth of productive forces. All of these, in the process of their formation and development, help to intensify the internal contradictions of the relationship of surplus value production and to provide the material foundations of the impasse and degeneration of capitalism, the main point is that the mentioned factors at each level of their growth and expansion only reflect the continuation of the development and self-expansion of the capitalist production method. These factors within this process and in the course of their development, even during the explosive stages of this expansion and development, by themselves, do not give any signs of the dying state of the wage slavery system, they do not become the basis and reason for the destruction of this system, and they do not knock on the threshold of replacing capitalism with another type of production relations, another society, and other human living conditions. Meanwhile, the force whose every step of growth, awareness, organization, struggle, alignment and development of its power bases is a step in the process of weakening, retreating, bankruptcy, deadlock and capitalism’s march towards death and destruction is only and exclusively the anti-capitalist movement and has the horizon of abolishing wage labour of the masses of the working class. Let us add here that even the mere growth, organization, alignment and exercise of power of the labour movement with any content and approach is not capable of playing such a role. The union struggle, or even the forms of rebellion and uprising and subversive uprisings of the working masses, as long as they do not revolve around the opposition to the survival of capitalism and the orientation of ending wage labour, are not only a mechanism for burying the system of wage slavery, which usually plays the opposite role. The reflection on this point brings before us the crude reality of the fundamental differences in the process of the occurrence of social revolutions in different periods of history, and in particular the decisive and glaring differences between the process of formation, development and occurrence of bourgeois revolutions in one period and workers’ revolutions against wage labour in the next. These differences must be recognized because their correct understanding is a necessary condition for the conscious struggle of the working class against capitalism. This task requires a separate detailed discussion, but a brief reference to some aspects of it is necessary for our present discussion. The development of the productive forces in the system of serfdom or feudal relations implied the simultaneous realization of diverse, complex and in every respect complementary processes. Here capitalism developed as a new mode of production within the dominant system. The relationship of buying and selling labour power accelerated the process of dispossession of small producers without interruption and sometimes explosively, spurred on the feudal economy and the old commodity production, tore open the chest of the dominant medieval relations, and all this, combined, clothed the process of birth, development and evolution of a new society under the domination of the old order in the garb of reality. The development of capital, the division of labour, replaced the old forms of division of labour with the new mode of production, gave birth to and grew the new capitalist class. It replaced feudal land ownership, guild ownership or feudal craft organizations with capitalist private property. Here and there and in changes, it turned the entire old society and the previous system into a field of class struggle. A broad and widespread field in which the rising and developing classes, each rising from its own social existence and in proportion to the level of consciousness, knowledge and progress of its class consciousness, fought against the foundation of the old order and against its political, legal, ideological and other social branches. The bourgeois revolutions were the offspring of this process, and it is with the occurrence of these revolutions and their victory that the system of serfdom and feudal relations give way to the capitalist mode of production and the new bourgeois society. Let us dissect the issue a little further and consider its different angles.
The expansion of the relationship of buying and selling labour brought about profound changes in the structure of previous social relations. The bourgeoisie, embodied in the form of capital, brought economic contracts and protocols corresponding to the requirements of the development of wage labour relations into conflict with the foundations and precepts of the declining feudal economy. The rights arising from the social preconditions of the development of accumulation, competition, and circular markets launched a campaign against the legal institutions of the feudal system. It architected and strengthened the civil structure and political order in accordance with the development of the new mode of production. It took education and training out of the sphere of authority of the church lords and feudal nobility, rapidly expanded the scope of sciences and various fields of human knowledge, and linked all these sciences, inventions, discoveries, and their results entirely to the process of capital valorisation. The growth of capitalist productive forces within the depths of old relations brought with it all these fundamental economic, social, political, cultural, civil, and legal transformations and changes, and it was precisely in the context of the occurrence of all these developments and the response to their needs that the capitalist class became the dominant economic and political class. From top to bottom and in all its fibres and fibres, capitalist society went through various phases of its development and growth in the depths of feudal society. In the conditions when feudalism still held political power, the bourgeoisie ruled over all factories, workshops and centres of capital advance, gradually made the landowners’ lands the sphere of their capital accumulation, exercised its supremacy over the circular process of capital and took possession of all the economic levers of society one after another. During this period, the bourgeoisie was the absolute ruler dominating the fate of the masses selling labour power and ruled over the existence and non-existence of workers. The entire social hierarchy and bureaucracy of the wage-slavery society arose right in the heart of the old society and under the umbrella of the power and rule of the feudal aristocracy. It is here, in the heart of the feudal system, that the great palace of religion and the legendary building of the glory of the church begin to crumble and the pressure of their terror and terror on human life is more or less reduced. In all these stages and in every step of the process of expanding capitalist relations, the bourgeoisie, as an exploiting and brutal class, engages in the brutal exploitation of the working masses and uses all the possibilities, levers and mechanisms of the old system to intensify this exploitation and disenfranchisement. Let us summarize this section. As far as the growth of the productive forces of capitalism and the process of the decline and fall of feudalism are concerned, we everywhere witness the realization of all the periods of development and completion of the skeleton of the new system in the heart of the old relations that are dying out. It is at the height of this process that the bourgeoisie seizes political power, and what is much more important and fundamental is that when it ascends to the highest throne of power, it does not suffer from any deficit or deficiency for the capitalist planning of work and production. This class had ideally achieved everything that was necessary for comprehensive domination of the economic, political, civil, intellectual, cultural and every other social sphere, right in the context of the declining feudal relations. Parliament, law, social contracts, legal institutions, civil structure, all of them were already constructed in the darkness of feudalism and were available for consumption. It is clear that all of what was mentioned and all the events that took place wore the garb of reality in the process of class struggle and daily war and conflict between the hostile social classes. But and this is very important that the entire fabric of the bourgeois class struggle was also the response of this class to the interests, requirements and actual and rebellious expectations of the development of capital accumulation, paving the way for the ever more comprehensive development of bourgeois society and opening the road to the establishment of the capitalist system on the ruins of the old feudal order. All that we have said screams out loud that the position of the bourgeoisie in feudal society is fundamentally different from the position of the proletariat in capitalist society. At the time of the revolution against the old relations and the seizure of political power, the bourgeoisie had its desired and expected society ready and ready in its hands, factories, workshops, trading houses, markets, financial, industrial, educational, scientific institutions, and all other spheres of work and production, in a word, the entire social capital, were its property. The bourgeoisie had already built and was in the process of completing its state machine, it had organized and established political order, civilization, culture, education, and everything in accordance with the interests of the cyclical cycle of capital. For the bourgeoisie, the revolution seemed to be the end of a war that had been going on for many years in the chains of economy, politics, culture, sovereignty, legislation, thoughts, beliefs, convictions, ethics, traditions, customs, political order, and the overall structure of social life, and its victory was a declaration of the irreversible defeat of the previous system. The working class has a completely different and even contradictory situation within the capitalist system. Not only does it not have the necessary position, tools, and levers to be continuously suppressed and exterminated in the most catastrophic way, but more importantly and decisively, it is subjected to the most horrific inversions, distortions, and engineering of ideas by capital and its entire intellectual, cultural, political, and social hierarchy. Everything is induced in his mind in an upside-down and false manner, the dominant thoughts, which are the thoughts of the ruling class, envelop his social existence, the process of capital’s work is the process of his alienation and self-alienation, thought, culture, education and the induced consciousness of capital are the weapons of mass murder of his class consciousness and independent anti-wage labour. The position of the working class under the domination of the wage slavery system, compared to the position of the bourgeoisie within the system of serfdom and feudal relations, carries with it all these differences, and it is precisely these fundamental differences that occupy a very important position in examining the process of class struggle and the occurrence of the socialist revolution against wage labour by the proletariat. The history of the global left, from the rise of social democracy, the Second and then the Third International to the present day, is the history of bridging this central and vital issue of the international labour movement, and the anti-wage labour approach is the only approach that has made a practical focus on this axis the centre of the struggle against left and right reformism, the necessary key to the labour movement’s escape from the captivity of reformism, and the circle of efforts to rally the working masses of the world against wage labour.
The basis of the rhetoric of the left forces outside the communist orbit of the abolition of wage labour from the beginning to the present day, from the last years of the 19th century to the entire 20th century and now, has been so: the proletariat must seize political power by leading its own political party, begin the transition from capitalism to communism, and finally overthrow capitalism and establish communism. These theories have been supplemented by other detailed discussions and theories. That the working masses do not know how to fight against wage labour. They are a bunch of trade unions. They only have the union struggle and the struggle for the improvement of livelihood issues as their agenda. They know nothing about opposing capitalism and have no desire to organize such a struggle. They do not seek to overthrow the political regime. They are unable to discover socialist consciousness, and considering all these very, very reasonable arguments!!! The mission of the intellectuals of the upper classes and the humble discoverer of communist consciousness is to establish the party of the proletariat and call the labour movement to obey the obedient and unquestioning orders of the party. The working masses must cling to this party for their liberation and commit themselves to the struggle they deserve, namely the syndicalist struggle!!! Syndicalist struggles, in the midst of special circumstances and in the midst of critical situations, will become anti-regime, the party will command jihad and overthrow, seize political power and in the days, years and periods to come will become what we all witnessed and were in the twentieth century. The left’s response outside the orbit of anti-wage labour struggle to the complex problems of the labour movement and the tortuous path of the class struggle of the working masses under the domination of capitalist relations and to put an end to the existence of these relations has been these very same rules, these very same decrees, decrees and fatwas. In this regard, the left has also transformed Marx’s teachings on class struggle into a solid, petrified and anti-worker, anti-Marx’s and anti-communist Sharia, a Sharia in which Marx is only the sent prophet, the seal and the infallible, Lenin and the Lenin’s are the infallible descendants of the Imams, free from any error, the party is the embodiment of all divine holiness, the party leaders are the intermediaries of the unseen and the seen, and every word and statement of every leader is the revelation of the revelation. For the broad spectrum of parties and disparate forces of this left, the world of failures, setbacks, bottlenecks, and dilemmas of the labour movement of the world is not worthy of discussion or need for dissection and examination. What is vital, sacred, and objectively and religiously obligatory is only defending rotten party sects, safeguarding the sanctity of unionization, and expressing loyalty to completely distorted, distorted, and distorting ideological stereotypes.
The direct product of this type of theorizing, Sharia, solution-making and practicalization are the events that took place throughout the century mentioned, and most of all in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Albania, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba in particular and most of all in Latin American countries, Asia, some African countries and other places in general. The labour movement everywhere left the orbit of the anti-wage labour struggle, everywhere it was hung by the expectations and horizons of sections of the bourgeoisie, it was swept away by the vortex of nationalist “anti-imperialism”, it was taken hostage by the democratization of this and that approach within the capitalist class, it became the obedient infantry of the army of part of the bourgeoisie for the establishment of state capitalism. Left and right reformism within or on the margins of the labour movement, by hanging on to currents of the global capitalist class, responded to the above problem in this way and continues to respond with ease and ease of imagination. Now, following all the above points, let us turn to the question of what could have been the real anti-capitalist strategy and solution for the working class to successfully carry out the process of class struggle and pave the way for a victorious class and social revolution, and what is it in the current conditions?
Despite all the fundamental obstacles and despite all the iron chains that are locked around its hands and feet from all sides, the working class must, in any case, in the heart of these wage slavery relations and under the domination of these bloodbaths of all kinds of capital, under all these pressures, play a role in the arena of class struggle as a decisive, conscious and organized class power against wage labour and with a clear horizon of abolishing the relationship of buying and selling labour power. There is no other way before the working masses of the world. Any other way is pointless. Perhaps everyone thinks that the discussion of the rise of the working class to a decisive, conscious and organized anti-capitalist power within this present society is not a new thing!! Perhaps all circles of the spectrum of left reformism will say: It is clear that this must happen and the entire effort of the parties, groups and forces of the left throughout the twentieth century has also been aimed at achieving this goal!! This type of view of the story is, without any addition or subtraction, the same as the approach of the bourgeoisie to the class struggle of the working masses and the essence of the bourgeois socialist narrative of the policy, goals, and mission of the labour movement. The fact is that the working masses of the world have been at war with the capitalist system throughout the twentieth century, but their struggles have not only not been organized and advanced on the axis of a real, conscious, class struggle against wage labour, but have gradually strayed more and more blatantly from this axis and have dissolved more and more violently into right-wing and left-wing reformism seeking reconciliation with the basis of wage labour. Why has this happened? This is a question that must be answered, and this answer cannot in any way be summarized in the mere power of capital, dictatorship, repression, and the use of force by capitalist states. Such an answer in turn contains a world of demagoguery, reformism, and chauvinism, because it suggests, first of all, that capitalism is a lasting, invincible system capable of resolving all its inherent contradictions. What these approaches call the preparation and equipping of the anti-capitalist workers’ movement has not been the organization and preparation of the working masses for the struggle against capitalism, but rather the hanging of them on the gallows of syndicalist reformism, on the party of state capitalism beyond themselves, and the transformation of their movement into a ladder of ascent for a section of the bourgeoisie to replace one form of capitalism with another. We will talk about the real process of preparation and formation and ossification of the anti-wage labour movement of the workers, but before that we must raise the question: Is such a thing possible? The negative answer to this question is the answer of the bourgeoisie. The same answer that spread before the workers throughout the 20th century and caused the struggle of this class against capital to its current fate. The proletariat can definitely become such a power in this capitalist society, it has the necessary capacity for this, and the whole discussion is about how this can happen and the ways to achieve it. Workers produce capital and the key to the life of this system is in their capable hands. All the oppositions of the bourgeoisie during the rule of capitalism and the entire capitalist class of the world during the dominance of feudal relations have come to power with the power of the working class. All of them have used the levers that determine the influence of this class, to climb to the lofty peak of sovereignty. Why can’t he himself form an independent line against wage labour of all his masses and turn this line into a strong and invincible army against capital? With this account, the basic question will be how and by what means and by which mechanisms can the working class achieve such a position, power and social and class weight within the capitalist system that the bourgeoisie had achieved under the domination of the feudal system. This is the most crucial question facing the global labour movement and the answer to it is the abolition of wage labour approach.
If the bourgeoisie owned the factories under feudalism, the proletariat, under the domination of the wage slavery system, has the power to close the factories. If the first class ruled 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 was the leader of the human sciences and knowledge of the feudal era and made all the achievements of knowledge a mechanism for increasing capital and enhancing the value of capital, the proletariat is the only force providing resources for the development of science and the only standard-bearer for applying the achievements of all human knowledge for the welfare, freedom and physical and intellectual excellence of humans. If the bourgeoisie made its capital the platform of its power, the proletariat holds the key to the existence of capital and the inevitable destruction of capital as the highest lever for exercising power. If the bourgeoisie creates a new civil and political formation of a new 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 on a nationwide basis. If the bourgeoisie were to expand the sphere of law and order and parliament, the proletariat would have the capacity to open up the exercise of power against the entirety of the political, civil and governmental order of capital and to impose its social, subsistence, political and civil demands on the existing system as effectively and extensively as possible. If the bourgeoisie were to advance beyond national borders and were forced to compete, conflict and internal war in the global arena, the proletariat could rely on the alignment and exercise of internationalist power of its class at every step of its advance.
The list of these “ifs” can be made very long. The important point is that the broad distinctions between the bourgeoisie under the rule of feudalism and the working class under the rule of wage slavery absolutely do not give the permission to the latter class to sign the petition to withdraw from the struggle to be promoted to a decisive class power against wage labour within the capitalist society. Submitting such a letter of resignation is simply a twisted version of the approaches of the bourgeoisie and reformism within the labour movement for the working class. On the contrary, the mentioned distinctions only shout out a fact more and more nakedly and forcefully. The clear and explicit fact that:
In exchange for what was the basis of power and alliance of the bourgeoisie’s invasion in the feudal system, for the proletariat under the domination of the capitalist system, there is only one organized council movement, anti-wage labour, with the prospect of abolishing wage labour among the masses of its class. Only this movement is the chapter of the working class’s speech to declare its existence as a decisive and history-making class power in the depths of capitalist hell. The hostile and historical alternative of the proletariat to the power of property, the power of capital, the power of cultural and scientific power, the power of political presence, the power of civic influence, the power of the market, the power of domination over the spheres of work and production and all other forms of power of the capitalist class is this one and only organized nationwide anti-wage labour movement. This movement is an alternative to the existence of capitalism in all aspects of its existence. It makes each of the demands of the working masses, at every level and of every type and in every period, a platform for a possible and feasible attack by the workers against the production relations of surplus value, it takes advantage of the living and present ability of the working class for this attack and makes the process of the attack a mechanism for increasing the power of the workers’ anti-capitalist struggle for the next step. It makes organization the field of exercising the class power of the working masses against capital. Every level of struggle for every demand and every level of organization is made possible by the vast field of workers’ class consciousness regarding the objectivity of capital exploitation and the fabric of the process of surplus value production and the process of production and self-expansion of capital. The explanation of the relationship between capital and surplus value production in the context of the ongoing anti-capitalist struggle makes it a hall for explaining the legal and civil structure and the legality and order of capital.
It explains and redefines political and social rights and freedoms on the basis of anti-wage labour principles and criteria and makes the struggle to impose them on the capitalist system a field of continuous and organic fields of the proletariat’s class war against the basis of wage slavery. It reveals the root of all suffering, deprivation, inferiority, and poverty of all types of human beings in capital. It anatomizes their economic and social foundations in the depth of the relationship of production of surplus value. The organic articulation of the attack on each of these with the anti-wage labour struggle places the working class before the eyes of the working masses. The anti-capitalist movement shouts from behind all the platforms that the struggle against sexual discrimination and women’s rightlessness, the struggle against child labour, for peace, against war, against environmental pollution, and every struggle for freedom and human rights is real, radical, and achievable only on the condition that each of them is a bastion of the battle against capital and against the relationship of buying and selling labour.
The anti-wage labour council movement of the masses of the working class is the real germ of the backbone of proletarian communism and the cornerstone of the new socialist society of the abolition of wage labour, which arises, grows, flourishes and flourishes in the heart of capitalist society. The proletariat either erects this edifice and skilfully structures it and protects it from the dangers of all types of capital, or, conversely, it is unable to do so. In the first case, it brings its social revolution to victory, establishes the soviet organization of socialist planning of labour and production and the abolition of wage labour throughout the country and with the participation of all the members of the masses of its class; in the second case, it is defeated and loses the field of class struggle. History has not issued any definitive, immutable heavenly decree for either of these two cases. What is very fundamental in this regard is that there is no other way to victory. The creation of a post-life party and the struggle of workers, along with unionization, are thoroughly bourgeois and reformist alternatives to the anti-wage council movement of the working masses, and their prospects and end point, even in the event of complete victory, are nothing other than the establishment of state capitalism.
The social revolution of the proletariat is the revolution of the organized, conscious working class in the all-round council movement for the abolition of wage labour. A movement consisting of the working masses who have fought step by step against capital, has step by step made capital the target of struggle in all aspects of its existence, in the production of surplus value, in the structure of the political order, in the existence of the capitalist state, in civilization, rights and culture of capital, in racial discrimination and the massacre of women’s rights, in the slaughter of political freedoms, in the bloodbath of the livelihood of the working masses, in infanticide and environmentalism, in the organic articulation of all these together. The result of this confrontation and class struggle against wage labour has become its own consciousness. The social revolution of the proletariat is a powerful alignment of the broad masses of workers who, within their all-out Council movement, make the war and struggle against capital in all the aforementioned areas a stone in the architecture of their power structure under the domination of the wage slavery system, and on the high roof of such a structure of organized, class-conscious power, they permanently dismantle the work of the bourgeoisie and guarantee the survival of socialism, the abolition of wage labour.
The spectrum of right and left reformism has historically denied the possibility of organizing and growing the anti-capitalist council movement of the working masses, made syndicalism and party formation the alternative to organizing this movement, and on the ruins of these negations and alternatives, has woven together a version of the conquest of political power by parties beyond the labour movement. Syndicalism and syndicalist movements, or at best, spontaneous, horizonless, illusory, class-less, anti-wage-labour uprisings, have made them the ladder of these parties’ ascent to the political power of capital. This type of revolution, which even in the event of victory has resulted in nothing but the displacement of the state machine of capital and the replacement of one type of planning of the productive and political order of capital by another, is a clear example of Marx’s words:
“The contradiction between the productive forces and the form of exchange, which, as we have seen, has repeatedly occurred in history, although without endangering its basis, has necessarily taken the form of a revolution in each case, and at the same time has assumed various secondary forms, such as general clashes, clashes of different classes, conflicts of consciousness, wars of ideas, political struggles, etc. From a limited point of view, one can isolate one of these secondary forms and consider it as the basis of these revolutions. This is all the easier, because the people who started the revolutions, in proportion to their level of culture and the stage of historical development, had illusions about their activities…” (The German Ideology)
There is a very essential and fundamental difference between these types of political uprisings and events, even in conditions where the working class has the greatest and widest presence, and what is referred to as the anti-capitalist and socialist revolution of the proletariat. The occurrence of these types of events and revolutions, the first stamp on their foreheads, is the very weak and subordinate position of the proletariat’s movement for the abolition of wage labour and the leadership and dominance of oppositions from the bourgeoisie over the labour movement. These revolutions, as far as the working class is concerned, are doomed to failure, and the root of their failure or the limits and limits of their resistance to failure lie precisely in the very situation of the same phenomenon that we have discussed above. To the extent that the working masses have remained far from their soviet organization, to the extent that they have not made a conscious class and anti-wage labour and Marx’s dissection of the living and present objectivity of capitalism their conscious being, to the extent that they have not imposed their anti-capitalist demands on the capitalist class and the capitalist state, to the extent that they have not pursued their fight for political freedoms and human rights from an anti-wage labour perspective and from within the trenches of the struggle against the capital base, to the extent that they have not made the horizon of the abolition of wage labour the conscious and practical perspective of their movement, to the extent that they have not made successful and effective anti-capitalist strategies the weapon of their war against capital, and in a word, to the extent that they have not created the iron skeleton of an organized soviet movement to abolish wage labour among the masses of their class, yes, to that extent they are more vulnerable and are not able to impose the expectations, positions, and situation of their class movement on the course of daily events. The social revolution of the working class is a revolution that relies on such a framework, on a strong and organized all-round soviet movement against wage labour, a council movement with the conscious and broad involvement of the working masses, it is a specific moment in the process of growth, expansion, consolidation, expression of existence, competition, campaign and gaining power of such a movement. A revolution that is born in this way and has the process of growth, rise and role of such a movement behind it is a revolution that will be able to close the scroll of capitalist life, has the necessary capacity to end the history of the life of wage labour. It will have the ability to establish the council organization of socialist labour and production, eliminate capital as a social relationship, end the separation of humans from labour and the labour process and the social product of labour and production and the fate of its social life. The victory of the working class in the war against capital depends on the formation, cohesion, growth, consolidation and gaining power of such a movement. The process of development, growth, and empowerment of this movement is a process of class warfare of the working masses against capital in all areas of social life in the depths of capitalist hell.
Following what we have said, let us return to the starting point of the discussion. No workers’ revolution with the characteristics and indicators that we have given here has taken place anywhere in the world and in any period of the history of capitalism and the workers’ movement. Spontaneous and spontaneous struggles of the workers can flow on the real basis of conscious struggle against wage labour and go through the maze of maturity, retreat, advance, defeat, reconstruction, revival and all the circles of their existence on the basis mentioned and truly win. These struggles can also suffer a completely different and contradictory fate or fates. We have witnessed various forms of an event that has been in the making for a hundred years. Falling into the dark and misleading abyss of reformism, syndicalism, democracy, social democracy, liberalism and many other perversions that have blocked the path of any kind of growth, structure, cohesion and dynamism against wage labour in the workers’ movement. “The thoughts of the ruling class are the dominant thoughts of every era,” and these thoughts, horizons, and solutions, in the absence of clear anti-wage labour alternatives, have great power to contain, divert, and misdirect the self-propelling anti-capitalist war and struggle of the working class. The labour movement is constantly and at all moments of its existence engaged in a struggle on the high border between these two incompatible strategies. One thing is obvious. The weight of capitalist solutions is catastrophically heavier and more formidable. Workers have lived, live, and extract the fibre and fabric of their minds and brains from these very solutions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and cultures. The system of wage slavery has its own ready-made solutions and strategies for everything, even for the form, path, and content of the confrontation between the working masses and capital. The problem of the labour movement is by no means limited to these limits. The internal conflicts and disputes of the capitalist class always and in all regions of the world drown every protest and struggle of the working masses like a flood. All the oppositions of this class, each with their worlds of superstition and trickery, taking advantage of the multitude of political, cultural and intellectual possibilities, inject their most anti-worker expectations into the artery of the existence of the working class movement, surround this movement from all sides with their alternative ideas, remove the entire power of workers’ protest and struggle from its real field in order to create a mechanism for settling their accounts with their competitors within their class, to reduce the danger of this movement from capital and to make its ability to fight against wage labour a guarantee of the survival of capital. The various oppositions within the bourgeoisie are skilled swimmers of the terrible, muddy and toxic floods that capital itself, in its continuous process of reproducing everywhere, in all corners of existence, sets off the system of wage slavery and drowns the working masses in itself. They are capable of catching the most fish from within these poisonous floods, and they very easily prey on any effort by the working masses and any level of mobilization of their fighting power. Alongside the official and authorized oppositions within or on the margins of the political power of capital, throughout the world, a multitude of forces opposing governments have lined up under the colourful banners of the left or right, each of which has very thick veils of communism and socialism on its horizons, expectations, and bourgeois existence. All of them proclaim themselves to be parties, organizations, groups, and in any case, very straightforward and unadulterated communist formations of the working class. All of them consider their strategies to be the sole strategy of the proletariat, their analyses to be the analyses of wage slaves, their goals to be the only clear and pure goals of the working class, and their policies and solutions to be the most refined and unadulterated policies and solutions of the class struggle of the working masses. All of them consider themselves to be the guardians, trustees, and custodians of the workers without any ifs or buts, and all of them, with all their capacity and strength, inject their thoughts, solutions, and solutions into the workers’ movement through all possible channels.
During the twentieth century, many revolutions have taken place in different parts of the capitalist world. None of these revolutions have had the components and indicators of a victorious social revolution of the working class. Even the October Revolution, which was the greatest workers’ revolution in history in terms of the participation and role played by workers, still took place in the absence of these basic indicators. Among all the revolutions and events of human life so far, October was the most powerful and enlightening event. October smashed ideals and slogans on the roof of human life of the era, which were the key to opening the gates of a new world for humanity. October had such a place, but this same revolution, with all its differences from other revolutionary events in history, still lacked the real characteristics of a victorious social revolution of the working class. Here too, the workers’ movement lacked a solid anti-wage labour framework. There was no clear horizon of the abolition of wage labour ahead. The vast masses of the working class had not practiced struggle and power within an organized anti-capitalist council movement. They shone very brightly and displayed their rebellious class and anti-capitalist spontaneity in the architecture of spontaneous anti-capitalist councils. However, instead of becoming a bastion of struggle against capital and a platform for the maturation of their anti-wage labour consciousness, these councils became a ladder for the party to rise to political power. In the pervasive dust of the democratic revolution and the supra-class anti-regime, the struggle for the fall of the Tsar, the paving of the way for the growth of the European type of capitalist mode of production, the prospect of establishing a society whose top and bottom were summarized in state capitalism, and finally, the subordination of the orders of the party commanders to follow these paths, the working masses were unable to expand, deepen, and consolidate the organization of the all-Russian anti-wage labour council of their movement. The process of the working-class campaign was not a platform for continuous attacks on the system of wage slavery, a deeper class understanding of the capital relationship, the promotion of a conscious anti-capitalist existence, the organization of a productive anti-wage labour power. The working masses made a revolution, but the product of the revolution was not the establishment of a socialist labour and production council organization with the participation of the broad masses of the working class and ready to pave the way for the socialist transformation of the economy and the abolition of wage labour, which was a kind of party power beyond the working masses. A state power above the working masses that, despite all the slogans, claims, hopes, idealizations and the creation of beautiful dreams, was on the path to defeating the anti-wage labour movement of the working class and establishing state capitalism.
If this is how the October Revolution went, the task of other revolutions of the twentieth century is very clear. What has happened in some countries of the world during this century, worthy of any name, has had nothing to do with the anti-capitalist revolution of the working class and has not carried any sign of such an event on its forehead. In all these countries, a section of the world bourgeoisie, in competition and struggle with other sections, has set about paving the way for the accumulation of capital and the industrial development of the country, spreading the field of “people’s anti-imperialism”, seizing the opportunity of the international conditions after the October Revolution, raising the banner of communism!! Riding on the wave of the broad struggles of the working masses and the vast masses of the peasants of the day. In this direction and in this way, this section of the bourgeoisie has seized political power in the aforementioned societies, blocked the way for any kind of expression of life to the anti-wage labour movement of the working class and established state capitalism. Those who talk about the end of the era of revolutions and the flourishing of the era of reforms are very deceitful or very stupid people. There are groups who have identified the militant and armed reformism of this or that section of the bourgeoisie under the false banner of bourgeois communism with the anti-capitalist revolution of the working class, and they are insinuating one.
What has failed is not the proletarian revolution against wage slavery, but the alignment of approaches from the world bourgeoisie under the false name of communism, revolution, working class and with real science and technology to establish state capitalism. These types of revolutions have also truly failed, and their sun of life and star of fortune have perhaps set forever. The revolutions that died were all arenas for the rise and acquisition of power by the bourgeoisie, a type of revolutions on the way that have not died and will not die, these revolutions do not carry any false flags, they have a bright perspective, a perspective that is not a new form of capitalism but a society free from the relationship of buying and selling labour power and all the economic, political, civil, cultural and social consequences of the wage labour relationship. The revolutions of the nineteenth century were not supposed to be like their eighteenth century predecessors and in the twists and turns of their occurrence were to herald the death of capitalism, a true statement that was expressed by Marx in the middle of the aforementioned century and occurred in the uprising of the Communards and then the Russian workers, but it did not last and it quickly faded away. Not only the revolutions of the 19th century, but all the revolutions of the 20th century also failed to carry the burden of anti-capitalism. Now the eyes of history are fixed on the revolutions of the 21st century. The revolution of the abolition of wage labour by the working masses, a revolution that will be the only response of the proletariat to the existing conditions of the world and the history of human life.