Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labour and Leninist Militant Reformism
Marx’s statement that “… theory, if it becomes popular, becomes material violence, and in order to become popular, it must be radical…” has long been a point of reference for all those loyal to his teachings and all those claiming to play a communist role in the international labour movement. The aforementioned statement, especially in the current world conditions, raises questions in the minds, and it is very important that it does. The religious and professional acceptance of an idea or theory, regardless of who the ideator or theorist is, and assuming that even the brightest light of human liberation radiates from within that view, is in any case evidence of petrification, sectarianism, and an escape from the conditions of free thought and the struggle for human liberation. The simplest ambiguity or question about what we quoted from Marx is that if theory, by its mere radicalness, has the necessary capacity to be embraced by the masses and transformed into material violence, then why have all of Marx’s own words, which undoubtedly embody the most radical teachings of class struggle, remained on earth for more than a century and a half, and despite the daily intensification of the pressure of exploitation and the brutality of capitalism, the workers of the world have not shown much interest in putting them into practice?! This is a very important question and requires an important answer or answers. A distinctive feature of the spectrum of militant reformism is that it draws a line on the fundamental questions related to the class struggle of the working masses and, instead of exploring and explaining to the workers, only dresses the real examples of Marx’s teachings in these areas in the garb of holiness and divine decrees!!
Marx said: “Of course, the weapon of criticism cannot replace criticism with weapons. Material power must be overthrown by material force. But theory also turns into material force as soon as it becomes popular. A theory will become popular when it becomes a vehicle for the struggle of the masses, and in order to become a vehicle for the protest and struggle of the masses, it must be radical. Being radical means taking root, and the root for man is nothing but man himself.”
The important question in question is the one we have raised. Why, despite the fact that the workers of the world have been fighting continuously for these 150 years, despite the fact that they have been under the pressure of exploitation and barbarism of capital, despite the fact that they have been rebelling, rising up, and in some cases revolutionizing against the existing conditions, have their struggles, risings, and revolutions not taken root, have not taken root, have not turned into radical material violence to overthrow the foundation of capital and build an anti-wage-labour socialism, and finally, have not made Marx’s critique of capitalism the circulation of its material power? The next question in this regard will be: what is the nature of revolutionary materialism, the critical dissection of the political economy of capitalism, the theory of proletarian revolution, and the entire radical teachings of Marx’s class struggle? Isn’t it true that these ideas and teachings have either not been adopted at all by the working masses of the world, or if they have, instead of being a beacon for the abolition and elimination of wage labour, they have become a mechanism for replacing one type of capitalist planning of labour and production with another?!! Why should we continue to insist on the validity, efficiency and practicality of Marx’s analyses or guidelines and talk about their importance? If the knowledge, consciousness and understanding of Marxism were not involved, what would have happened that has not happened in the past century and a half with their design, publication and dissemination? Where is the problem? Is the problem only that the pressure of the rabid dictatorship of capital has blocked the way for the working masses to communicate with these ideas and the workers have not become familiar with these lessons and knowledge, have they not been interested in such acquaintance? Have they not been able to understand the issues? Have they found these teachings outside the scope of their needs and their class struggle and have given them to the encounter?!! The list of questions is long, but we will close it and limit ourselves to saying that in any case, what will happen to the statement that radical theory has the capacity to become popular and can be transformed into material violence? And why has the fate of what Marx said not been like this?!! To find the answers to these questions, we must first of all return to the process within which Marx proposes the narrative of theory, the radicality of theory, and the mass adoption of radical theory. Let us see what he inferred from these phenomena? Why did he bring them up? On what occasion did he speak of them? What were his subsequent reactions to these statements? And finally, by proposing the aforementioned points, what fundamental historical issues or important social dilemmas did he intend to answer?
In the middle of the 19th century, the German social space was largely dominated by the onslaught of two seemingly contradictory and even hostile, but fundamentally fused and interconnected, intellectual approaches. Hegelian idealism linked thoughts, ideas, beliefs and all different states of consciousness to the absolute idea and the spirit of history. Here and at the heart of this system of knowledge, everything came from consciousness, it was the thoughts of people that made their lives, and every kind of change in social and historical conditions found its true origins in the circuit of the evolution of ideas and the elevation of beliefs. Whatever was real was declared rational, whatever had happened in history was instilled with a spark of evolution and the manifestation of absolute perfection. The state stood at the pinnacle of this process and was considered the manifestation of general desires and expectations. In a word, the destiny of history and the absolute idea determined the fate of everything, and the role of human work, struggle, and uprising was limited to navigating, influencing, and manipulating matters in the maze of corridors leading to the promised land and the destined social order.
The Young Hegelians were apparently criticizing this system, but the basis of their criticism also extracted all their mortar, materials, and compositions from the depths of concepts, philosophy, and thoughts. Both approaches had a single social origin, and the war between them was a war over narratives, concepts, ideas, and beliefs. The former considered the laws, ethics, agreements, contracts, and dominant relationships between humans to be products of consciousness and, in this regard, the true bonds of human society. The latter rebelled against these concepts and, one by one, considered these bonds to be superstition, metaphysics, illusion, and very disastrous formulations of religious beliefs. What was considered by the former to be the lifeblood of the stability, growth, and exaltation of human social life was considered by the latter to be only a mechanism of captivity, degradation, humiliation, disenfranchisement, and humiliation. The first approach defended the status quo, and the other approach, under the name of criticizing this status quo, did nothing but draw a sword on concepts, religion, and philosophical and intellectual stereotypes. The second group cried out that the root of all the suffering in human life lies in the incorrectness of their conceptions of themselves, God, and their world. People must be pulled out of the abyss of these illusions and distortions, they must rebel against the rule of concepts, and they must help people replace concepts with correct ideas that embody freedom and human dignity. The manifestos and declarations issued by both approaches, whether to preserve the status quo or under the banner of efforts to overthrow this status quo, ultimately became a single version. A version that organized all the forces of the struggle in the trenches of consciousness, belief, and idea or criticism of these concepts. It removed the dominant social system, the economic foundation, and the ruling class relations from the reach of any protest, struggle, and change. It was beliefs that fought each other. The “old and young Hegelians” themselves were involved in such a war. A war that obscured the real war going on within society, denied it, made it seem insignificant, ignored it, and presented itself as its alternative. A war whose direct result was only the continuous pumping of smoke and fumes, poisons, and massive smog into the living space of humans, and the drowning and suffocation of the inescapable ongoing class struggle in the swamp of these blackness’s and smogs. Marx says in this passage:
The “old Hegelians” understood everything when it was reduced to a logical Hegelian category. The “young Hegelians” criticized everything by attributing it to religious concepts or declaring it to be a theological matter. The “young Hegelians” agree with the “old Hegelians” in their belief in the sovereignty of religion, concepts, and a universal principle in the existing world. The difference is that one side attacks this sovereignty as a usurpation, while the other side praises it as a right.” (The German Ideology)
Marx of the first half of the 1840s began his path to Marx’s Proletariat, Manifesto and Communism, the abolition of wage labour, from here, from a revolt against this situation. A revolt that was not a dispute of ideas and was not in the realm of a struggle of concepts, ideas, thoughts and beliefs. The real manifesto of his uprising is that the framework of this war must be put in place so that behind it the real ongoing war, the earthly war, the war of one class against another for the radical change of existing objectivity, is revealed. Marx explored his path forward with the perspective that: “Criticism has not plucked the imaginary flowers of chains because man has endured these chains without fantasy or consolation, but rather because it has done so to break the chains and pluck living flowers. Criticism of religion removes illusion from man so that perhaps he may think, act, and organize his reality as a disillusioned man with recovered wisdom, so that perhaps he may revolve around himself like the true sun. Religion is an imaginary sun that man revolves around until he revolves around himself…” (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) If we are not people of portrayal and cult of personality and if we do not deprive Marx of his own Marx’s with the seal and seal of holiness, prophecy, and the descent of revelation. We recognize that these statements have not yet attained the maturity, depth, and articulation of the Marx’s praxis of later years. This difference exists, but at the same time it must be admitted that the aforementioned statements are a world away from what Feuerbach or the other group of so-called Young Hegelians said about the critique of religion and are not fundamentally of their kind. He speaks of the critique of religion and sees it as the premise of all critiques, which on the surface is a document of similarity between him and the group above, but behind this appearance of similarity, a world of radical difference is rising. He states that the critique of religion must include a critique of the world of which religion is the halo of holiness, then he describes the current situation in German society, and the focus of his explanation from beginning to end is the low and backward level of the class struggle here, compared to other places, and in particular French society. Marx advances this argument to show that the Young Hegelians’ controversy about the sovereignty of concepts and the reference of human liberation to the critique of these concepts is nothing more than a bunch of illusionary imperialist rhetoric. If even a link in the iron chain of bondage on the hands and feet of the masses trapped in exploitation, oppression, and wage slavery is to be loosened, there is only one way, and that is to deepen, develop, and storm the class struggle. “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights,” although the real and direct target of its attack is the Hegelian system, everywhere maintains its distance from the speculative, philosophical, and interpretative criticism of the Feuerbachian type. This distance is not at the level that Marx later achieved, but within its existing orbit, it is evidence of the necessary mining of the boundaries with the above critical approach.
By dissecting the backward situation of Germany and emphasizing the extremely low and inferior position of the class struggle within society, Marx reaches the conclusion that, firstly, the existing conditions of the country are far from what is the real precondition for a radical social revolution, and secondly, no kind of transformation will cure any pain of the working and subordinate masses of society unless it achieves the state of a radical revolution and fundamental change. Regarding the first, he says: “But Germany has not passed through the intermediate stages of political freedom at the same time as modern nations. Germany has not even reached in practice those stages that it has passed through theoretically. So how can it, with a risky leap, pass through not only its own obstacles, but also the obstacles of modern nations, obstacles that in reality should seem like a desirable liberation from its real obstacles. A radical revolution can only be a revolution with radical demands, for in Germany the preconditions and grounds for the development of such a revolution do not exist.”
In the second case, or the necessity and urgency of a radical social revolution, he also emphasizes that: “The only possible freedom for Germany is freedom based on that theoretical perspective that considers man as the highest being for man. Here, freedom from the Middle Ages is possible only by freeing oneself from the incomplete victories over the Middle Ages; no form of slavery is broken unless all forms of slavery are broken. Perfectionist Germany cannot make a revolution unless it achieves a complete revolution” (ibid.).
Marx’s attention to the German question absolutely does not mean that he has placed only the response to the events of the day in Germany or, fundamentally, a specific society called Germany at the centre of his investigation and exploration. On the contrary, he explores the only real solution for man, to break the iron chains of captivity. The starting point and core of his effort is that the war of concepts against concepts, the war of irreligiousness against religion, and the war of ideas against ideas must be replaced by the true war of humans against the real foundation of exploitation, slavery, alienation, and subordination. This is where all his research comes to a close, and it is in this direction that the most fundamental, most historical, and most identifiable explanatory link in his social and class approach becomes apparent. He himself asks, “So where does the real possibility of German liberation lie?” and in response says:
“In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society that is not of civil society. A class that is the dissolution of all social classes, a force that has a universal character because of its common suffering and that demands no special rights, because the injustice that is done to it is not a particular injustice but a general injustice. This class is no longer a historical position that demands a human position, nor is it in one-sided opposition to the German political regime, but in opposition to the entire basis of this system. A section that cannot free itself unless it frees itself from all the other sections and therefore frees the whole of society. In a word, a class that expresses the complete destruction of man and can therefore only revive itself by completely reviving humanity. This class is the embodiment of the decline of society as a specific class, namely the proletariat.”
The term proletariat has been used by other people before Marx, with different content and interpretations. Some believe that he discovered this class and its historical role from the maze of philosophy and theoretical discussions!! Others have considered Marx’s turning to labour circles in France and his stirring and mixing with workers as the real basis for paying attention to the historical and history-making role of the working class. The latter have considered the words of the first group to be a school theory and their own words to be a materialist explanation of events, but the reality is that both claims are equally fanciful. The series of movements that drove Marx’s movement in these intellectual and social ups and downs was neither a theologically speculative approach nor a path of ignorance towards the labour masses in France or elsewhere. Marx himself was a man from a very large group of people who were burdened by all the miseries and burdens of class society. I will mention below why some people approach the subject from the first perspective and the rest from the second, but before that, a serious question is before both groups. This question is why Marx should be considered a non-worker who either rides the wave of philosophical exploration in search of a being called the proletariat?!! Or does he knock on the doors of coffee houses in working-class neighbourhoods here and there to grab the cloak, turban, and scarf of becoming a worker?! What did he have that other workers did not have, and what did the working masses have that Marx did not have? Wasn’t it that he trampled everywhere to sell his labour power, but the capitalists everywhere and the capitalist governments of all countries had banned the purchase of his labour power, and in one place, where they accidentally intended to accept him, they gave up their intention because of his bad handwriting? Except that the pressure of hunger resulting from belonging to the exploited class did not press on his throat and that of all his family members as much as on other workers. Except that the number of his children who were reaped with the sickle of hunger was less than the victims of other working-class families. In his nakedness and lack of clothing, and in pawning his towels, books, shoes, and plates for a morsel of bread, he was no better off than his fellow workers. He suffered no less than other workers in terms of housebreaking and making his children sleep on the streets. In enduring the dictatorship, brutality, and lack of rights of capital, whose life story is the Masnavi of seventy pages of paper, and finally in the struggle against the foundation of capitalism, which not only the workers of the world but all the false workers of the world accuse him of. In any case, the fact that the “left” has been sewing and sewing the clothes of the “scholar of the upper classes” on his body for 150 years is a mystery that at least this “left” itself has no answer to. An answer that is at the same time very clear to both the class chains and the true continuers of Marx’s path. The left, which is not itself a worker, is alien to the anti-capitalist struggle of this class, is either a member of the elite of the upper classes, or if not, sees itself as a petty glutton for these elites. The left, with all these characteristics, wants and insists on making the labour movement its platform of power. Yes, this left must dress Marx in the clothes of the elite of the upper classes and present him to the workers in this attire. The non-worker left does this to warn all the working masses that Marx is not one of them, that they do not have the capacity to think, learn, become informed, become anti-wage labour, and fight against the capitalist system. The last victory of their ability and capacity is summed up in syndication, trade unionism, and demanding a strong hand from the capitalists. By doing this, the left tells the workers that Marx is one of the intellectuals of the upper classes, and that in order to beg for any amount of intelligence, knowledge, and awareness and to find a way to fight, the workers must definitely rely on the bourgeois intellectuals, on the party and sect of these intellectuals, and on their obvious left-wing party copies. The wisdom of the left’s insistence on Marx belonging to the intellectuals of the upper classes stems only from this.
Let us not forget the focus of the discussion, which is about theory, the radicality of theory, and the mass adoption of radical theory. What we have said so far and the twists and turns we are going through are all in line with explaining this issue. We went further to the point of summing up Marx in the article “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights.” The emphasis on the last point was more than anything else so that we could contemplate Marx, his class approach, and all his explorations and views in their true place. Introducing him in various guises as a philosopher, revolutionary, young, old, and the like is more like an investigation into the intellectual maturation process of a human being. We must speak of a Marx who: whoever his child was, whatever family he was born into, whatever his level of education, whatever his level of ability, whatever his path and detours he took, in any case he ended up in a place that belonged to the vast mass of wage slaves and subordinates of the capitalist system. The protest of humanity under the pressure of exploitation and the brutality of class exploitation represents it, fights against wage slavery, makes the dissection of the social relationship of capital the guiding light of this struggle, makes every effort to bring all the workers of the world to the fore around this great class struggle, and aims to replace this system with a world of free people from all constraints. This Marx, in the heart of this life, in the process of class struggle whose freedom is the freedom of all human beings or the freedom of man from the shackles of any type of relations and class society, in the year of writing the mentioned article, he had come so far that he sees the need for radical theory as a necessary and vital condition of this struggle or the liberation movement of this class. He does not discover two separate things but the same and the same essence, basically his work is not of discovery and invention and compilation of research treatises. He is an active and scholarly element of the labour movement and is in the heart of such social and class relationships that he feels the pressure of the need for radical theory on his chest and his class. It is here that he declares following what we said earlier: “Just as philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, the proletariat also finds its intellectual weapon in philosophy, and as soon as the lightning of thought deeply affects the virgin soil of the masses, the liberation of the Germans and their transformation into human beings will be realized.” The brain of this liberation is philosophy, and its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be realized without the dissolution of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot dissolve itself unless philosophy becomes a reality.”
Marx’s meaning of philosophy is clear. Up to this point, he has mined the boundaries of his social and class approach with the Young Hegelians’ speculative imperialist critique of the Hegelian system or the critique of the rule of concepts with the weapon of concepts. He stands on the virgin soil of the cultivation, possession, and harvest of radical revolution and radical changes that guarantee the liberation of humanity and speaks from within this soil and as its powerful and growing sprout. To get here, he has uttered the “four takbirs” (Hadith :The Four Takbirs in Funeral Prayer ) On all philosophies, interpretations, conceptualisms, and critiques of the concept of the sovereign. In such a situation, what he means by philosophy can no longer be a handful of beliefs, concepts, and ideas. He speaks of a philosophy that is supposed to play the role of a head for the proletariat. This head is certainly nothing other than the class consciousness of wage slaves for the replacement of capital by communism, the abolition of wage labour, and nothing else. But posing the problem in this way and at this level still does not clarify everything, it brings with it some ambiguities and poses many questions for individuals. Questions that, for Marx himself, only pave the way for the continuation of the class struggle for the true liberation and destiny of man. One thing screams through the words. That Marx up to this point, up to the final sentence of the “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” with all the work he has done and with all the achievements of this work, is still not the Marx of the Manifesto and the First International and works like Grundrisse and Capital, not even the Marx of German ideology. He still makes separate calculations for theory and the centre of descent of theory, for the lightning bolt of thought and the virgin soil that receives this lightning bolt. The German Ideology disrupts this separation. In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, it was said that “radicality is the prerequisite for the massification of theory. A theory is radical when it touches the root, and the root for man is nothing other than man himself.” Here (the German Ideology) it touches precisely man himself. Man, who through work declares his distinction from the animal. His first historical act is to produce his means of subsistence, then he creates the means of satisfying his needs. In the next step, he simultaneously creates people like himself, and within these same historical functions he sets about establishing social relations. The relationship between man and woman, parents and children, families together, and he constantly develops and complicates these relations. The production of life, whether in the form of the creation of the means of subsistence or reproduction, is for him a two-way relationship that is natural on the one hand and social on the other. A relationship that is a mode of material production and at the same time a specific social cooperation. This mode of cooperation is itself a productive force, and it is the totality of the productive forces available to man that determines the conditions of society. All this means that the history of humanity must always be examined in relation to the history of production and exchange. After explaining these points, Marx adds that man is the product of this process and, with these characteristics, is also a conscious man. It is in the process of reaching these conclusions that he declares very clearly: “But from the very beginning this consciousness is not pure consciousness, “mind” is from the very beginning afflicted with the misfortune of carrying the “burden” of matter.” The essence of Marx’s statement here, while continuing his growing critique of the Hegelian system, is that this continuity moves on a completely new horizon and has taken a profoundly different approach. In the final phrases of “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” the discussion was about the lightning bolt of thought and its blaze in the virgin soil of the masses, the dissolution of the proletariat and the realization of philosophy, the heart of the former and the brain of the latter, and so on. There, despite the very long way Marx had come to distance himself from the Young Hegelians and their critique of praxis and materialist empiricism, the proletariat and philosophy or the lightning bolt of thought still had separate calculations that had to be made one. They were two things that had to be mixed together in order to ignite, but here this is not the case at all. Not only is there no longer any talk of “replacing existing consciousness with a human consciousness”, but it is also very clearly stated: “This desire for a change of consciousness means the desire for a different interpretation of the existing world, i.e., the recognition of this world through an interpretation” (The German Ideology).
Radical theory here is no longer a flash of thought or philosophy that must be ignited in the virgin soil of the masses to ignite it or become a head in place of the workers’ former capital-stricken head. On the contrary, it is no longer fundamentally anything called pure consciousness, because “every consciousness carries the burden of matter from the very beginning” and, as far as it goes back to the proletariat, it carries the burden of being a wage slave, the sale of labour power, the production of surplus value, the burden of wear and tear and destruction under the pressure of capital’s exploitation, the burden of complete collapse from existence under the existential whip of the social relation of capital, the burden of the continuous transformation of living labour into dead labour, the burden of the whips of law and contract, rights and decrees, principles and values created by capital, and of all these, the burden of destruction that is most painful and burdensome, the burden of the distortion, metamorphosis and distortion of all these realities by capital.
This consciousness is the rebellious current of all these pains, sufferings, depreciations, downfalls, but their simultaneous immersion in the dark cesspool of thoughts and beliefs of the relation of surplus value production. A potion that bears the burden of matter, a matter that is the social existence of workers but is deep in the swamp of capitalism. Deeply and in all its aspects it is a prisoner of conflict, contradiction and contradiction. It explodes against the pressure of capital exploitation but seeks its way out of the dark channels dug by wage labour relations. It is a cry against hunger and domination and the fall of human existence but borrows the sinister throat of capital for its echo. The proletariat here is not a class that must wait for the glow of the embers of consciousness and knowledge from distant shores. Everything else is at the heart of life, work, social relations, and his violent struggle and conflict. Everything else is in the heart of life, work, social relations, and his violent struggle. Social existence is in the midst of his struggle and fight, which he must cherish, fertilise, and kindle. He is now “the class which constitutes the majority of the members of society and is the source of communist consciousness, a definite consciousness which can naturally arise among other classes on condition of contemplation of the situation of this class” (The German Ideology). (The German Ideology).
From this point on, radical theory for Marx is not a philosophy that is imposed on the proletariat, it is not a bunch of ideas, beliefs, and criticisms that are learned by the workers. It is not made up of abstract conclusions and formulations, but is deeply material, it does not come to the proletariat to be embraced by the masses, but rather it springs from the very life, work, and struggle of this class, and it is within this process that it learns, takes advantage of all the knowledge, all the consciousness, experience, and lessons of the class struggle, and with their help it exalts, ignites, burns, and creates. It does not descend from somewhere to become material violence, but rather it is the existing material violence of the proletariat that becomes aware, becomes anti-wage labour, is applied against wage labour, and sees the preparation for the destruction of capitalism. Its radicality is not rooted in its theoretical framework, but in the exploitation and struggle of the working class against the exploitation of capital. Its root is man, and this man is the proletariat. This theory is no longer a weapon of criticism, it is armed criticism, but not a weapon that is given to the proletariat or thrown over its shoulders, but a weapon that is the proletariat itself, its class power, which is exercised against exploitation, against the relationship of buying and selling labour power, and against the existence of wage slavery. It is radical because it is the real current of the conscious, organized, and far-sighted struggle of a class that wants to dissolve its class hood, and to do this, it must dissolve the existence of classes and the existence of class society. There is no kind of consciousness that replaces another kind of consciousness, no school that disarms another school, no particular “ism” that is written on the door of a shop, party, sect or any other type of business place in place of another ism and causes a certain market to heat up. It is not the product of the brain oozes of the intellectuals of the propertied classes, it is not a creed or a manifesto of ideology, none of these, instead of all these it is only the organized, conscious, far-sighted, united, universal and council war of the vast mass of wage slaves against the foundation of capital, against capital as a social relation, against all aspects of the existence of this relation.
Being radical or not is not a matter that can be referred to theory, it is an ongoing struggle between classes that may be radical or may not be radical at all. Marx’s teachings, based on their theoretical structure, on the content of works such as Grundrisse, Capital, the Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, Theories of Surplus Value, or The Holy Family, are not lightning bolts that will surely fall on the threshing floor of pain, exploitation, and misery of the working masses and turn this threshing floor into a volcano of workers’ revolution. Just as they have not fallen and have not done so to this day. These teachings are a conscious class and revolutionary critique of the proletariat on capital and on the system of wage slavery. But a critique that must be recreated, materialized, become a movement, ignited, and become a weapon to crush, push back, and eliminate capital, moment by moment, at every point in the life of the international workers’ movement in the process of struggle against the present objectivity of capitalism. The aforementioned teachings, by being critical, radical, or revolutionary, do not convey any information about the inevitability of their transformation into a revolutionary war of the proletariat against capitalism, they do not say anything about the inevitability of their mass capture and flaming into the material violence of the working class against capital. On the contrary, with all their criticality and radicality, they can still become one form of consciousness instead of another. It becomes a weapon for interpretation, Marxism-Leninism, and Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and even so distorted and degenerated that every backward idolater makes the name of his idol its scholastic suffix and finally acquires a place and wears a garment that Marx feared with all his being. Upon hearing the term Marxism, he exclaimed that at least he himself is not a Marxist.
Revolutionary thoughts are the thoughts of a revolutionary class. For this class, these thoughts only manifest themselves in the form of the actual mechanisms and current practice of the struggle to change the existing situation and replace it with another objective situation. Otherwise, they are only a network of assumptions that are no longer revolutionary, nor the thoughts of the revolutionary class, nor the mechanism or weapon for changing the objective situation. The revolutionary theory of the proletariat is its revolutionary struggle against capital. It is the movement for the abolition of wage labour of the working class. It is the horizon that this class fights to realize, it is the daily demands that form the bulwarks of its ongoing war against wage labour. It is the power that this class exerts against the bourgeoisie and the state, it is an organization that becomes the weapon of its collective power against capital, it is the consciousness, knowledge, awareness and knowledge that makes this struggle more and more conscious, stronger and more anti-wage labour. In a word, the revolutionary theory of the proletariat is its organized, conscious, united, horizon-oriented and powerful struggle for the abolition of wage labour. Only when this happens and these forms take on real expression do Marx’s teachings become the true teachings of Marx and the conscious existence of the proletariat. Otherwise, they are a collection of knowledge that anyone can read to become a scientist, learn economics, acquire knowledge and replace their existing knowledge, teach Marxism, and write books, articles, and treatises about Marxism. Become a “communist”, make others communist, establish a communist party, seize political power, call this power the same as the power of the working class and impose it on the masses of wage slaves of capital, and become anything else or do anything else. But just do not become an activist in the movement for the abolition of wage labour of the working class and do not join this movement.