Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labour and Leninist Militant Reformism
When we talk about the dictatorship of rampant capital, the sharp edge of inquiry typically focuses on issues such as police and militaristic suppression of workers’ struggles or other social movements, public repression, the lack of political freedoms and civil rights, the deprivation of the working masses and other strata of the right to organize, struggle, form parties, strike, and the like.
There is no need to discuss each of these phenomena and their effects on the deterioration of living conditions, working conditions, physical and intellectual advancement, and all areas of human social life. Enough has been said or written in all these areas. Although the vast majority of debaters and essayists, while outdoing each other, have singled out the connection between this phenomenon and wage labour to show the dimensions of their anti-dictatorship!!, have distorted this connection, and have resorted to every sophistry for this distortion. In any case, and with the knowledge of all these facts, our intention here is not to discuss the direct consequences of the dictatorship of capital that we mentioned above. The aim is to briefly describe the procedure or procedures of other products of this phenomenon. Naked force is the most powerful weapon of the capitalist system in falsifying facts, mentally freezing and intellectually distorting the working masses, closing the eyes, ears and intellect of the workers with illusions, and finally, the unbridled spread of the cult of personality and heroism in the depths of the life and ongoing struggle of the mass of wage slaves. It is a very brief look at this part of the consequences of the rabid dictatorship that is the focus of this short article, and to address this task, first of all, we must turn to capital.
The relationship of buying and selling labour power is the centre of gravity of the worker’s fall from his human existence. If human existence is meant to be a free, needless, interfering, conscious life, free from the shackles and constraints beyond himself and endowed with all the possibilities of intellectual maturity and the capacity for influence, the very existence of the capital relationship blocks the ways to achieve each of these manifestations and necessities of life. Someone who sells his labour power is practically selling his existence as a free human being. He is no longer deprived of all his freedoms and human rights, he works without having the right to interfere in this work, determining what to do is not his sphere of intervention. What he produces is outside the realm of his control, he has no right to express any opinion about the result of his work, the fate of what he does, or other issues related to the work process, the worker is forbidden from any right to interfere in these matters, that is, in what is his life, his hours of life and his being alive. But this fall, dismissal and deprivation are absolutely not limited here, but quite organically crush all areas of his social life under the wheel of its cancerous growth. Capital, in the form of the capitalist class, declares the preconditions and requirements of its maximum profitability to be the interests of all mankind!! Under the name of protecting these general interests!! It establishes the state, creates decision-making institutions, sets up the locks and chains of law, establishes social contracts. It establishes political order. To induce these distortions and inversions, it engages in the engineering of thoughts and architecture of human minds, producing and dominating culture, civilization, thought, and beliefs that contain these distortions.
All of this means that dictatorship is a homogeneous, cognate, internal and inseparable phenomenon of capital or the relation of production of surplus value. The political order and rule of capital, even in cases where it is called the most developed form of democracy, is still the most solid and dominant type of dictatorship. Because here, or even the most decorated and modern form of democracy, we are faced with a kind of social order or organization of work and architecture of human life, in which the absolute fall of man from any kind of exercise of free will and his complete separation from any form of free intervention in the fate of his work and social life is implied as freedom, the perfection of autonomy, the utopia of the exercise of free will and active human influence!! Unlike previous social systems, capital does not necessarily exercise its dictatorship in the form of an aggressive militaristic force of force but rather dresses this dictatorship in the form of custom and normality to the extent of becoming a coherent and organic thread of the entire organism of human social life.
It adorns it with the armour of law, stamps this law with the seal of the order of collective life, injects this order into the blood, minds and thoughts of people with a syringe of ignorance and distortion. It calls the violation of this law not a violation of the political order that protects profit, but an attack on the social security of citizens, capital sets about establishing a parliament and describes the parliament not as an institution of its own power but as the centre of the exercise of the free and autonomous will of all mankind!!! It establishes a legal system in order to crush workers everywhere against the severity of their exploitation, but it interprets this same system as the supreme symbol of eliminating all kinds of oppression and proof of the achievement of human beings in a supreme form of legal equality in the social sphere!!! Capital blocks all channels of the struggle of the working masses against the exploitation and ruling barbarity, prevents the roaring flood of these struggles from taking an anti-wage labour orientation and, by resorting to all possible weapons, directs them towards the wilderness of compromise. It calls this wilderness civil society!! And the erosive floundering of wage slaves in the midst of its sediments is called a “rational” alternative to class war!! The capitalist system considers the deepest inequalities as the very essence of equality, the most catastrophic wars as pure peace, the killing of workers as the resurrection of security, the bloodbath of protests as the preservation of peace, the most barbaric method of exploitation as social development, the blocking of the paths of creativity as paving the way for human excellence and maturity, the compulsion to sell labour power as the freedom and freedom of the worker, the price of labour as the price of labour, and the chains of wage slavery as the promised paradise of liberation!!
This thread is long; the purpose of these fragmentary references is only one thing. That the capitalist system is a falsification of the truths of human life in every fibre of its existence, that its survival at every moment involves the deepening of these inversions and their imposition on the lives of the inhabitants of the world. This system revolves on the heels of these distortions and with the mechanism of subjugation and coercion of wage slaves to accept all these fabrications. Capitalism is by this very virtue, even in the most democratic form of planning the political order and in the “freest” form of civil organization, still the most organic type of dictatorship and the richest treasury of superstitions and illusions. To touch the eight-headed dragon of dictatorship in this system, one should not only examine the state machine of capital, but also thoughts, beliefs, ethics, social values, legal standards, principles of judgment, types of views, habits, traditions, collective life contracts, everything and everything that prevails in society and that individuals are forced to live with, all and all, the evaporation of the capital relationship, the iron lock of the dictatorship of capital on the hands and feet of the working masses and the lofty mountain of illusions of rubble on the heads and faces of wage slaves.
So far, we have spoken of the dictatorship of capital in general, all of which are general determinations of capital in every part of the world and common indicators of capitalist societies throughout the world. It was emphasized earlier that the main subject of discussion here is not to address this general and essential feature of the capitalist mode of production. We have listed these as an introduction to the next point. To say that the capitalist system is, at its core, a system of idolatry, meritocracy, heroism, and the cult of personality. The idolatry of capital is clearly different from previous systems, just as its dictatorship is radically different from the dictatorship of feudalism and serfdom, just as the wilderness of its illusions and the precipice of its superstitions are different from the dark world of ignorance and the pit of superstitions of previous ages. The personality of capital is a direct creation of the relationship of surplus value production. Statesman, intellectual representative, lawyer, philosopher, sociologist, economic, military, police, political expert or any agent, advisor and consultant of capital and in a word the capitalist class, all of them are personified capital. The bourgeoisie class is not limited to the number of owners of industries and businesses, or in general the owners of the means of production and exchange. Every individual, with any position, place and specialization in the capitalist work organization, who, through his/her thought, policy or role, participates and influences the exploitation of labour, the intensification of this exploitation, the persistence and survival of the capital relationship, the imposition of the wage slavery system on the working class, the planning of the productive, political, legal, civil, cultural and social order of capital and its dictation and application on the working and living conditions of the working masses, is an individual of the capitalist class. A significant and perhaps huge part of the capitalists are not the nominal owners of capital, but the statesmen, political, intellectual, academic elites, owners of decisive police, security and military jobs, or managers, consultants and experts in planning the order of capital in various spheres. Capital does not only place its direct legal owner on the platform of honour and power, but also raises a very numerous and huge herd of scholars and politicians who are its saviours as the worthy and chosen ones to the highest throne of authority and “dignity”! and make them rule over the fate of the working masses. The root of the personality of capital lies here. The election scenario in the most advanced democracies is the slavish submission of the working masses to the political representatives and statesmen of capital. The representatives and statesmen to whom the wage slavery system assigns the status of elites, within the framework of its internal division of labour and based on the role they play in planning work, production, reproduction, and survival of capital, give these elites the opportunity to dominate, force the workers to accept the role of their representation, and finally, as is the custom of capital’s fabrication and inversion, it calls this same compulsion free and democratic elections and calls it the supreme symbol of “democracy.”
The cult of personality is a coercive phenomenon of the capitalist mode of production and is organic in every respect with the dictatorship of capital. When human beings are deprived of any kind of free and independent intervention in their work, in the fate of their work and in determining the current and future state of their social life, they are naturally and necessarily captives of the dictatorship and the dictatorship of the dictators. Capital, in every breath and in every moment of its production or reproduction cycle, creates and reconstructs the dictatorship, the personality orientation, the culture and ethics and education of the dictator and the existence of the dictators on the largest scale, for the obvious reason that the separation of man from the process of work and the fate of his life constantly deepens and deepens. The continuous development and deepening of the separation of workers from the work they do and from determining the task of this work is necessarily and forcibly the unbridled production of the basis of dictatorship and the existence of the dictatorial elite, the production of the thoughts, culture, ethics and ideology of the dictator. When the labour of the worker directly becomes capital and the result of this labour in the form of capital dominates all aspects of the collective life of humans, whether they produce or not, why they work and produce, determining the amount of this labour and production, whether they are hungry or full, whether they die or survive, where they live and how they live, and everything about them; when law, rights, politics, government, culture, morality, tradition, social habits and values, and everything else, like an octopus above the heads of the working masses, become active in determining the type of behaviour, thought, and will of the working masses; when everything revolves around the production of surplus value, the steel chains of dictatorship on the hands and feet of the workers and the umbrella of power and rule of the capitalist dictators above them become ever more iron-clad and established.
Capital and the rabid dictatorship
So far, we have talked about capital in general, about the capitalist system at the international level, independent of the existing distinctions between capitalist societies or independent of the type of production order planning and the politics and civilization of capital in this or that country. Let’s talk about the conditions of the domination of the rabid capitalist dictatorship. But before that we have to explain one more thing. What has been called bourgeois democracy inverted and distorted, and traces of it still remain in some places, was and is nothing but the result of the struggle of the world’s workers against the wage slavery system and the retreat of the capitalist class in front of the conquests of the labour movement. The literature of the left of the world and the dominant forces that called themselves communists or “Marxists” and most of all the Bolsheviks have usually repeated the same point. This point seems to be the desire of the bourgeoisie to align its political power with the mechanisms of democracy and only when it is not possible, it applies the most brutal forms of dictatorship. It is not known to what extent the planning or retelling of this word was accompanied by meditation. The fact is that this statement is more than anything a mixture of contradiction and illusion. Let’s open the issue a little. The claim of “the desirability of democracy for the bourgeoisie” can be translated in two ways. The first translation is that the bourgeoisie really wants to be accountable to the expectations of livelihood, welfare and social rights of people!! Everyone should live well, healthy and prosperous, and in this regard, there is no need to use force, coercion and dictatorship.!! It seems that the bourgeoisie really wants this, and where it does not do so, it is not possible for it!! The second translation would be that the bourgeoisie’s only desire is to achieve this knots level of surplus value and to achieve all the conditions for the valorisation and self-expansion of capital, and at the same time not be forced to exercise a rabid dictatorship!! Honestly, both of these meanings are extremely meaningless and, to be more precise, full of contradictions and illusions. The first translation or interpretation questions the real theme of the capitalist mode of production, which is the exhausting and destructive exploitation of the worker and his complete loss of involvement in his work and the fate of his work and life, and the second translation, intentionally or ignorantly, weaves together a bunch of contradictions to forge an unrealizable good intention for the bourgeoisie. This conclusion that the democratic planning of the political and social order of capital is the heart’s desire of the bourgeoisie!! is not something that anyone has seen and experienced anywhere. On the contrary, wherever the eye is able to dig into history, we see only the opposite. If we go back to the distant past, to the days when, in principle, the golden history of bourgeois democracy!! should be archeologically documented in its relics, to the years of the revolutions of 1789 to 1848 and later in a society like France, what we see is still the opposite of the above statement. If the French bourgeoisie did not see for a second the working masses around it and the barrels of their weapons pressed against its chest, it would resort to the most brutal attacks against the working class and in this transition would form a fraternal alliance with every institution and power that preserves the old system. What is true is that the necessity of capital’s existence is the exploitation of the working masses that is ever more corrosive, crushing and destructive. The establishment of a productive and political order that entails this exploitation or the unbridled intensity of exploitation also requires the most brutal dictatorships, but in some cases and places, capital finds itself forced to retreat, seeing the danger of an attack by the workers’ movement and spurred on by the fear of losing control of the situation. It deeply feels that it must yield to some demands for livelihood, welfare, and social rights of the working masses or a section of the working class. It sees itself in need of satisfying a layer of workers from all sides. It considers it practically impossible to establish the necessary order in the cycle of valorisation and reproduction of social capital without controlling the labour movement by parliamentary, syndicalist, and civil institutions. Even in the immense whirlpool of such compulsion, urgency, and sense of danger, the bourgeoisie still does not necessarily yield to the strategy of retreat. Let us not forget that this retreat for the capitalist class and its state must be a “breadwinner, not a lifesaver,” it must be a guarantee of capital’s attainment of the highest level of profit, a removal of the greatest threats to the capitalist system, and a guarantee of the most certain conditions for the survival of these relations. The meaning of all these musts is that capital and the capitalist class must be certain that if, in order to agree on the minimum subsistence, welfare, and civil rights of the working masses in a certain part of the world, a few riyals of its surplus labour are deducted in favour of increasing the necessary labour of the workers, in return, with the surplus value that it receives from the total unpaid labour of the world working class, it will regain many times what it has lost and will regain the weight of its surplus labour as golden as possible. Only in this case will capital be content with retreat, and it is this retreat that is called democracy, civil society, and the like.
Let us turn to the rabid dictatorship and its consequences. Capital in the largest part of the world does not fulfil the last condition in any way and for this reason is not prepared to accept any step of retreat in the face of the workers’ movement, even if it feels the deadliest dangers. In the countries of this part of the world, the bourgeoisie, when it feels the last moments of life under the wheels of the train of power of the uprising of the working masses and sees death in all its majesty, will certainly hear the “voice of revolution”, say, and prepare to retreat and begin “democratization”, but one thing is clear. That it does not have the capacity for this and for this very reason it either starts this process in reality, in which case it will at least go to the point of collapse of the political power of its day, or it does not start it and only uses the noise and fuss of such a thing as a means of buying time for the renewal of the necessary forces and the general massacre of the workers’ movement. Why capital in this part of the capitalist world is unable to accept retreat but, in another part, at least for a period of history, it has had the capacity to do so, is a subject that we have discussed in detail elsewhere. Here we will only very briefly recall that capitalist production from the ground up lacks the capacity to respond to the minimum welfare and subsistence, social rights and political freedoms of wage slaves. Here, even in conditions where millions of times the necessities of the welfare and supreme livelihood of all the inhabitants of the earth are produced, it is not the needs of life and welfare of humans but capital and again capital that is produced. The basis of the galactic growth of capital is based on depreciation, erosion and deepening of the poverty of the working masses and the opposite is not going to happen. Capitalism has the division of labour, the process of organization, the process of forming the rate of profit and its own contradictory crisis-causing nature. What arises from the core of capitalist production and all its consequences is the process of developing unemployment, poverty, hunger, dictatorship, war-making, barbarism and the explosive separation of the working class from work, the fate of the fruits of work and the destiny of its own life. If capital in one part of the world, taking into account all the components that we have explained, retreats for a few moments from the massacre of the bread, medicine, education and lives of the working masses, it must ignite the fire of massacre of these facilities in other parts of the world on a much larger scale. In a word, the foundation of capital’s existence is based on an unbridled and rabid dictatorship, and every moment and every step of retreat from the actions of this dictatorship can only be counted and analysed as an exception to this general rule.
The present discussion began with reference to the inherent function of capital in depriving working people of free involvement in work and social production and the destiny of their lives. The more intense the pressure of capital exploitation, the more crushing and deadly the exploitation of workers, the more severely and fatally capital makes them captives of the fire of poverty, hunger, misery and humiliation, the more acute and crushing the spurs of the dictatorship of capital descend on the dust of the working class, the more powerful and rebellious capital crushes every breath of protest of the working masses, the more the phenomenon of the role of personality or meritocracy imposes its terrible dangers on the life and struggle of wage slaves. The rabid dictatorship of capital expands the degree of separation of the worker from his work and the dimensions of the cult of personality and idolization of the capitalist system to the last possible limits and brings it to the verge of explosion. Here, the problem of the labour seller is not only that he is exploited, but this problem is also not limited to the extremely catastrophic intensity of his exploitation. The scope of his misery goes beyond enduring hunger, poverty, deprivation, and deprivation of education, health, and treatment. His deprivation of any kind of social rights, such as the right to organize, express and fight, or political freedoms, does not reflect all his pain and suffering. Here, the wage slave endures all these pains and hardships at once and on the greatest scale, but he is also grappling with another, more terrible tragedy. By virtue of being a worker and because of enduring all the pressures and sufferings that we have listed, he is deprived of the social growth and maturity necessary to play his minimum human role in society and in the arena of class struggle. If in the first countries, workers consider themselves to have this “right”!! to transfer the state power of capital and the way to impose the planning of the political or economic order of capitalism on themselves and their class from one bourgeois coalition to another, here even thinking about this false and completely fabricated feeling of “interference”!! is forbidden fruit and is punishable by death. In the first societies, when the worker sells his labour power, he sees the cost of doctors, medicine, treatment, education, daycare, and housing rent as a natural part of his job, considering the high and low price of selling this power. In the hell of the second type of capitalism, even the grounds for workers’ notions of having the right to this view or facilities are constantly bombarded. Here, the worker opens his eyes to the world, from the ground and the air, from the house and the cottage, the alley, the neighbourhood, the city and the entire social environment, he is the target of a continuous barrage of humiliation, reproach, insult, being considered nothing and being nothing. His senses only transfer the blame, scolding, stoning, being disgusted and rejected to the brain and make an archive there. A situation that is not specific to a part of the workers of these countries, but the entire masses of workers who sell labour power and successive generations of the labour army are under its pressure. The mad dictatorship adopts the philosophy of its existence and application from the necessity of imposing the most ferocious and catastrophic level of intensity of exploitation of the working class and is applied precisely to stifle the thought, consciousness, knowledge, expectation, ideal and imagination of the right to a human livelihood or the lowest level of welfare, freedom and social rights of a human being in the germ and turn to ashes.
Under the umbrella of power and rule of this type of dictatorship of capital, not only the bread, health, treatment, welfare, and the minimum price of labour of the worker are captured by the flames of fire, the basis of his existence as a person with the most basic human “rights”, protesting the massacre of these basic “rights” and possessing the capacity and power of this protest is also completely set on fire. The torch, the flag, the shackles, and the instruments of torture that impose the cheapness of the quasi-free price of labour on wage slaves, already completely destroy even the same arrogance, audacity, and sense of independence and conventional human power of the worker in other parts of the capitalist hell. Capital does not exercise its rabid and predatory dictatorship to only reduce the cost of reproducing the worker’s labour power to the last possible limits, but also does this in order to bombard his consciousness, knowledge, and perception of having a human life. This is the same catastrophe that, more painfully than all other catastrophes, has captured the largest part of the world’s working class in the clutches of its wrath. Below we will explain how reformism in general, including leftist reformism, reaps the very same sown by the bourgeoisie, that is, the achievements of this mad dictatorship of capitalism, for its own benefit and in the real world, again for the benefit of the wage slavery system and uses it against the anti-wage labour movement of the working class, but before that we must look at the real effects of the disaster on the way the working masses are present and lined up in the arena of class struggle objectively and from a closer distance. The mad dictatorship of capital provides all the favourable and necessary grounds for the workers’ movement to remain dependent, subordinate and submit to the tutelage of the bourgeoisie and protects these conditions. The working class, which never, to any extent and at any level of its ability to put forward its words, even meets the slightest expectation of its day, following this or that opportunistic and profit-seeking opposition of the bourgeoisie is the easiest thing it sees before it. There is no easier or more accessible way to see the very crude face of this reality than to take a moment to look at the history of the Iranian labour movement. From the beginning to the present, the Iranian working class has not only been unable to impose its minimum subsistence, welfare and political demands on the bourgeoisie, but has also failed in formulating these demands. In the “Constitutionalism” (1905-1906) all the power of his day was hung on the gallows of constitutionalism, a part of the reactionary bourgeoisie, he poured into the streets with any number of his people from Makran in Baluchistan to Ardabil, but his entire field of action and expression of life was lost in the reactionary demand of the bourgeois scavengers, in the establishment of the “Justice House”!! In the replacement of the guardianship of the Marvi school, the dismissal of Ain al-Dawla or the replacement of Asgar Garichi (He was a person who was a transportation contractor between Tehran and Qom during the Constitutional Revolution) with another Garichi. Between the years 1320 (1941) and the black coup of 18 Mordad 1332 (1953), he hung on the slogans and expectations that were dictated by the reactionary parties of the right and left of the bourgeoisie and above all the Tudeh Party – the headquarters of power and the tribune of state-run capitalism in the camp. The workers entered the fray on the broadest and most passionate level and launched the bloodiest wars, but rather than preparing to impose their most basic demands on the capitalist state, they became the foot soldiers of the bourgeois parties for the “nationalization” of the oil industry, “anti-colonialism”, “anti-imperialist” and, in short, a means of settling scores between various sections of the Iranian and world bourgeoisie. In the movement leading to the Bahman Uprising of 1979, although it was the real vanguard of the beginning of the movement, it still followed the most backward and fiercest part of the bourgeoisie, or the pan-Islamist reactionary, on a very large scale. If it did not do this in one place, for example in Kurdistan, it was only because instead of hanging itself on the back of the predatory Islamic bourgeoisie, it donated all its wealth and power to the bourgeoisie demanding autonomy, with a huge backpack of nationalist illusions. In the street demonstrations and uprisings of 2009, while the fire of hunger, lack of medicine, lack of doctors, lack of water, poverty, addiction and prostitution was burning every fibre of its being, it either remained silent or entered the field and refrained from putting forward its demands or hung the reformist reactionary on the gallows of “Allahu Akbar” and “Yah Hossein Mir Hossein”.
The question is, what does all this reveal and what secret does it reveal? Perhaps the simplest answer is that the real secret of the problem lies in the lack of class knowledge, the dominance of bourgeois beliefs, thoughts, and ideology, and the widespread unfamiliarity of workers with Marx’s understanding of capitalism and class struggle. The obvious explanation is that class consciousness against wage labour is the most key and vital issue of the labour movement. There is no doubt that the working class’s attainment of any degree of knowledge of class praxis, and not of scholastic and academic formulations, is a decisive step towards liberation from the catastrophic pressure of this situation. But let us not forget that we are not yet talking about the problem of workers’ struggle against wage labour or not. For the time being, we have moved the conversation to a much lower level. The focus of the discussion is currently the initial feeling of the worker and the working class of their weight, position, and initial power of influence. Does the working class of today in Europe or North America have a more favourable situation in terms of anti-capitalist consciousness compared to the Iranian worker or any society like Iran?!! Are workers in Sweden, Germany, France, and Canada engaged in an organized, far-sighted, and conscious struggle against wage labour?! It is clear that the answer to these questions is negative, and therefore the specific problem above cannot be attributed solely to the weakness of anti-capitalist insight and the alienation of workers from the Marxian understanding of capital and class struggle. It is in view of these factors that the aforementioned question remains before us. This question of where the real mystery of the situation we have described lies. But the answer is not so difficult. In the hell of poverty, misery and deprivation that capital has imposed on the workers and under the deadly spur of a rabid and bloody dictatorship that guards the quasi-free sale of labour power in this hell of filth, blood and savagery, the path of any kind of worker’s self-expression as a working human being and in the place of an individual from the working class and the way of expressing the existence of this class has been completely blocked. The feeling that the vast mass of wage slaves must and can rely on themselves, on their class and on their movement for their own liberation or even for any amount of effort to improve their working conditions and reduce the intensity of their exploitation, has not found a way for their social existence to grow and mature and has been suppressed moment by moment and step by step. In such a situation and in the absence of such growth and maturity, resorting to this or that reactionary opportunist opposition of the bourgeoisie has been considered the way out and has played the role of a ” Habul Al-Mateen ” (Habul Al-Mateen, the largest circulation and most influential constitutional newspaper).
Capital, with its deadly whip of exploitation and poverty, deprivation of all freedoms, and the practice of a mad dictatorship, not only facilitates the continuation of the most horrific exploitation and injustice on workers, not only does it prevent the labour movement from any degree of anti-capitalist protest and mobilization, but it also provides all the necessary conditions for the isolation and opportunism of any mad bourgeois opposition to this movement. It allows any section of the capitalist class or any reformist approach of any non-working class to wear the talisman of being a saviour, to position itself as the defender and supporter of the worker, to attract as many workers as possible with the illusion, and to make this mountain of illusion a ladder of power and a means of its own ascent to the stage of showing off its authority. The mad dictatorship of capital has historically and in different periods provided these facilities to different sections of the bourgeoisie.
Does the problem really end there? Absolutely not. The system of wage slavery has spread this feeling of nothingness and inferiority as a culture and a way of looking at the depths of the social existence of the working masses to the point that they themselves look at each other with the same perspective of borrowing and donating capital. A relatively large number of activists within the Iranian labour movement who have turned to partying, organized political struggle, and activity under the name of the left and even communism during the mentioned years have also been unable to take any level of opposition to this situation and swim in the opposite direction of this trend. Each of these activists also viewed the labour movement and their associates in the same way that the bourgeoisie wanted and dictated. Yousef Eftekhari, one of the most prolific and successful of these activists, everywhere viewed workers as a mass of human beings who must obey the orders of their superiors. He saw himself not as a labour activist but as the guardian and saviour of the working masses. He held classes for the workers, tried to cultivate cadres and an influential figure, but all his efforts were, on the one hand, hung on the cult of personality, heroism and saviourism, and on the other hand, he suffered pitifully from the pressure of reformist illusions. While he fought unwaveringly to bring the workers together, his pride everywhere was that by gaining favour, trust and acceptance in the presence of the “Sharif Emami” and “Homayoun’s” inside, or the “Sayan” and “Vicente Lombardo ” in the International Labor Organization, he established a Ministry of Labor for the workers of Iran!! He formulated a labour law!!! And he wrote a prescription for improving livelihoods!! The reality is that the vast majority of workers’ movement activists, especially in recent times, have made turning to political issues their life’s agenda not from the stronghold of their class struggle, but mainly in the great enthusiasm for gaining credibility in parties, groups and circles beyond their class. What has driven them into politics has not been the advancement of class struggle, but rather the general desire to establish themselves as political activists and engage in a class-based anti-regime struggle at the cost of abandoning their effective role within the labour movement. The disastrous attachment of significant sections of the Iranian working class to the anti-worker policies of the camp bourgeoisie, nationalist anti-imperialist, people’s communism, Kurdish nationalism, and the reformist left has been carried out by these same activists. Activists who were in reality not activists organizing the anti-capitalist masses of their class, but party pawns involved in paving the way for the party and the political organization of capital to penetrate their class. These are all problems that the rabid dictatorship of capital, along with other important factors, has played a fundamental role in imposing on the labour movement and the working masses.
Reformism and the reapers of the dictatorship of rabid capital
The dictatorship of the rabid does not only play the role of a working weapon of capital to impose the most severe pressure of exploitation on the working masses. It does not only irrigate the commercial fields of the dispossessed factions of the government. Reformism within the labour movement from right to left is also a cluster of this form of dictatorship. The reformism of our time derives its philosophy of existence and the foundation of its objectivity from the context of the existence of capital. It is not reformist ideas that create reformism. It is the production of capitalism that gives birth to the thought, belief, and type of reformist view of society and the resolution of society’s problems from its heart. Left reformism is among the victims and sometimes the front line of victims of the naked dictatorship of capital, but sometimes for this reason it is also a force that benefits and benefits from this dictatorship. Their victimization is not the same as the victimization of the working masses. Left reformists are usually among the worthy, elite, famous, and wise people of the non-working classes, and their victimization entails a kind of sanctification. The foundation of left reformism in Western Europe and North America rests on the grounding of the anti-wage labour movement.
The bourgeoisie, thanks to its large share of the surplus value resulting from the exploitation of the world working class, has brought the labour movement to this day, and left reformism has also made a hat out of this felt. In our society and similar societies, the situation is somewhat different. Here, the mad dictatorship, while guarding the roaring ocean of profits and crushing every dissenting voice, including every kind of breathing by the left reformists, does not deprive this reformism of its more or less share of its spoils. Despair, helplessness, humiliation, illusion and the feeling of need for a saviour among the workers, all of which are the direct products of the immense pressure of exploitation and the intensity of the mad dictatorship of capital, compel the working masses to claim the miracle of liberation with all their sanctity. Capital blocks the way for any kind of growth, maturity and involvement of the worker, including his conscious class involvement in organizing his struggle against capitalism. The party leaders also seize this opportunity, immediately entering the field and shouting at the cursed, hot, and cursed masses that there is no need to organize against wage labour, we have an alternative. Consider our party as the vessel of your communist organization, hang on to us, put us bourgeois who claim “communism”!! in the place of the bourgeoisie without the claim of communism. We will plan capitalism in a different way and call it socialism. The conventional party of the left forces in general and from long ago until today, while enduring the death whip of the naked and rabid dictatorship of capitalism, has also been more or less a glutton for this dictatorship. The discussion became long. With this in mind, a few more points should be added.
First, many intellectual representatives of bourgeois reaction, especially under the name of the left, have tried and are trying to completely cut off the situation of the working class in the hell of the naked dictatorship of capital, including the terrible pressure of this form of dictatorship on workers, from the capitalist system, and consider it not as a direct product of the rampant exploitation of capital, but on the contrary, as a result of the insufficient development of capitalism and the legacy of previous forms of production!! In our society, representatives like these and others like them are in this category. What they weave together and write down is among the most unscientific sophistry and the ugliest superstitions. For them, capitalism is a world full of the most modern industries, the most advanced technologies, the most excellent specializations, the gigantic productivity of social labour, the most magnificent research and scientific organizations, the most gigantic financial and industrial monopolies, skyscraper banks, the most elegant and necessary structure of civil order, the paradise of democracy and social rights, the turbulent ocean of prosperity and equality between men and women, and in a word, the land of the fulfilment of human desires, expectations, and ideals!!! In the view of these people, the capitalist mode of production is not a mode of production based on wage labour. They do not explore capitalism with its essential content and index, namely the relationship between the purchase and sale of labour power and the production of surplus value, and they do not see the level of industrial development of different capitalist societies as a function of the preconditions and requirements of reproducing this relationship. They do not understand at all the definitive effects of the inherent contradictions of capital and the global division of labour of capitalism on the distinctions between different sectors of global capital, and they deny hundreds of other fundamental issues in this regard. This group, because they do not accept the basis of capitalism in Iran and similar societies under the pressure of their materialist understanding of history and their positivist and bourgeois ideals, does not see the predatory dictatorship ruling society as the rabid dictatorship of capital. In their view, wherever the growth of industry is not on par with America and Western Europe, wherever the bourgeoisie speaks the language of rabid dictatorship, religion, and fascism instead of the language of “democratic” language, then capitalism is definitely absent!!! And dictatorships are also dictatorships of rulers outside the circle of social relations and society and the stages of historical development of human societies!!! They can weave all these deceptions together, but the rabid dictatorship existing everywhere in the world is the dictatorship of capital. This dictatorship is only applied to preserve the most brutal intensity of exploitation of labour and to link it to any other relations or insufficient development of industry!!! These are the worst kinds of lies and demagoguery.
The second point is that the working class has no other way to free itself from any kind of dictatorship, including its ferocious and predatory form, except to intensify, develop and deepen its anti-wage labour struggle. All the sufferings mentioned in this short article emanate from the heart of capital and emanate to block the path of any kind of anti-capitalist fieldwork and power exercise by the workers. There is only one way to confront this situation, and that is to organize in anti-wage labour councils, where the worker’s subordination is transformed into power, his ignorance into awareness, his isolation and despair into unity and self-expression, his despair into hope, his horizon lessness into the prospect of liberation from wage labour. Where the brutal, bloody dictatorship of capital is repelled and pushed back with the nationwide organized power of the anti-wage labour council. Historically, bourgeois oppositions have used various means and in various guises to sever the internal, organic, and indissoluble connection between the naked dictatorship in a part of the existing world and the basis of capitalist domination and rule in the societies of that part. To convince the working masses that this dictatorship does not emanate from the essence of capital, that the rabid dictatorship is not the forced need of capital to protect the quasi-free price of labour and the hell of rightlessness and bloodshed of the labour movement. The bourgeois oppositions constantly inject these illusions into the minds of workers in order to divert the working class struggle from the real track of the anti-wage labour struggle and the genuine anti-capitalist overthrow, to make the labour movement wander in the wilderness of a supra-class anti-regime devoid of the burden of anti-wage labour, and in this regard, to make the workers’ power of struggle and protest the platform for their confrontation with their rivals and the ladder for their ascension to the throne of capital.
The third point is that left reformism has historically tried to ruin the entire bowl and jar of anti-capitalist and council disorganization of the working-class masses in societies like Iran over the predatory and naked dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The present discussion was entirely devoted to examining the list of devastating and catastrophic consequences of the rabid dictatorship of capital for the labour movement, but the claim of left reformism in the case we have mentioned is completely false. The naked dictatorship of capital is definitely an obstacle to the anti-wage labour mobilization of the working masses, but left reformism also creates an obstacle no less than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie on the path of the soviet and anti-capitalist organization of the working masses. Left reformism, in its social context, is against any real anti-wage labour movement of the working class and, consequently, against any degree of council organization of the working masses against wage slavery. The foundation of the Left Reformist spectrum is based on the unionization and syndicalist struggle of the workers, the party-building above the working masses by the elites and intellectuals of the upper classes, the revolution to replace the state machine of the day of capital with the party machine of Left Reformism, and the establishment of state capitalism under the name of “communism”!! This is a point that I have discussed in detail elsewhere and I do not see the need to repeat it here.