Concrete plan of the socialist horizon
Socialism, economics and politics
Nasser Paydar, February 2013
“The spider performs actions that resemble those of a weaver, and the bee, by building its wax chambers, perhaps puts human architects to shame. But the advantage of the worst architect over the best bee is that the architect builds the chamber in his head before he builds it in wax.” (Marx, Capital)
Capital is a social relation and a mode of production. In this mode of production, labour power is a commodity, the product of capital’s labour, and the worker’s relationship to labour and the product of his labour is a relationship to an alien being. An alien being to the worker, who is the foundation of the existence of capitalist society, the dominant and ruling force of the existing world, and the starting and ending point of all economic, political, civil, and social processes in the contemporary world. The working class, which consists of the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants, while being the creator of all global capital, is, by the law of capital, excluded from any kind of intervention in the fate of its labour and the product of its labour, and in the same way from any effective and free intervention in determining the fate of its own life. A man whose labour power is a commodity is, in fact, a commodity himself. In order to survive, he must trade his labour power, that is, place himself or his human existence at the disposal of capital. But the story is more pathetic than this. He is forced to surrender his human existence to capital, that is, to the product of his labour, which is now the absolute ruler of his destiny, and at the same time, in each round of buying and selling his labour power, he reproduces the principle of his alienation from the product of labour, the basis of his wage slavery to capital, and the basis of capital’s rule over the fate of his work, life, and lifeworld. The result of this process is the continuous deepening of the separation of humans from the product of labour, production, and social life. The more the worker devotes himself to work, the more gigantic, terrifying, and evil the world of things that they create for him becomes, and in turn he becomes more and more deeply detached from his human existence and from interfering in his work, the products of his work, and his own life. In the capitalist system, the phenomenon of work is an external existence to the worker, that is, in the process of doing work, the worker does not affirm his human existence but rather denies it more and more deeply. He has no decision-making role in determining the type of work, the product of work, the place or relevance of the result of work in his life, the usefulness or harmfulness or necessity or non-necessity of the product of work he performs, the time of work, the process of realizing work, the planning and social organization supervising the performance of work, the type of consumption of the products or product of work, and in short, in all matters related to the work process or the goal and result of this process. The work process is planned by the capitalists and their state. The requirements of capital reproduction, as the basic pillars of the existence or relevance of human existence, exercise their comprehensive dominance over everything human and over all aspects of his individual and social life. What is produced or not? How much is produced? Which activities are considered work, and which are not? The type of individual or social needs of humans, the relationship of humans with the environment and the type of human intervention in nature, the form, type and amount of consumption, the content of human education and thought, people’s interactions with each other, culture, ethics and social behaviour, the type of employment of individuals, the possibility or impossibility of selling labour power, the fate of the products of human labour, each person’s share of labour and social production, all become a function of the requirements of value addition and reproduction of capital. What falls into the last phase of nothingness in the meantime is the human existence of man. This existence is completely and completely dissolved in the requirements of the self-expansion of capital. A human being who, in all aspects of his intellectual and physical life, is a surplus of the requirements of capital’s profitability, a human being whose every moment of life, from his way of thinking, education, and outlook on the world, or the principle of survival or non-existence, to his eating, clothing, manner of residence, morality, and social interactions, is all determined by the laws of the movement of capital, is inevitably a surplus of capital and a being transformed and degraded in the process of capital’s reproduction.
The capitalist system, with its theme and characteristics, is fundamentally anti-human and anti-social, and is the cause of all forms of exploitation, injustice, crime, misdeeds, corruption, prostitution, all inequalities, all types of oppression, poverty and misery, and hunger and misery of contemporary humanity. Each of these components, individually and collectively, has an internal and organic relationship with the principle of labour power being a commodity, the separation of the worker from labour, and the result of labour being capital. When the fate of human production and labour is determined based on the requirements of profitability or the accumulation and self-expansion of capital, having or not having a job also becomes a function of the needs of capital. When the social product of labour must undergo its process of organization on the basis of competition between different parts of capital and the extraction of the desired rate of profit or the highest share of surplus value for this or that capital, the type of production and labour and the definition of labour are removed from the sphere of human control and transferred to embodied dead labour, that is, to capital. When the type of production and labour must correspond to the need for organization and profit-making of capital, the determination of the form of human subsistence, welfare, physical and intellectual needs is also referred to capital. The result of this process is the emergence of a hell of terror and crime, under whose rule billions of people live in absolute poverty, while a significant part of the labour of successive generations of workers is spent on advertising goods, and to ensure maximum accuracy and elegance of the most beautiful sales advertisements, the production of the most complex technologies becomes the agenda of capital. At the same time that millions of children die due to the lack of the simplest vaccines. Trillions of dollars of the product of their class labour are spent on the production of weapons. When the inhabitants of several continents live the most deadly type of life under the pressure of poverty, misery, lack of hygiene, and deprivation of everything, the result of their day and night work and the hundreds of millions of their chained masses in the form of bullets, mortars, napalm, and microbial and chemical bombs becomes the means of killing hundreds of millions of other people. Capital commits all these crimes and every other kind of crime and barbarity and is ready to put humanity to the sword in response to the imperatives of its own value-added and reproduction.
The bourgeois view of society and the world separate existing social infrastructures such as the state, political order, civilization, law, and contract from the subject of capital. From the perspective of bourgeois sociologists or thinkers and reformers of this class, the capitalist mode of production is associated with industrial and civil development, the growth of human inventions and knowledge, the expansion of welfare and social facilities!! They consider hunger, homelessness, and the many forms of misery of the modern era as a natural and inevitable phenomenon of life!! They attribute all of this to the lack of industrial and civil development and the insufficient growth of capitalism!! And at best, they consider them to be the result of bad laws! illegal governments! low cultural development of people! and such issues!! These ideas are not specific to official and branded bourgeois thinkers. Reformist critics of capitalism, from right to left, also promote the same views. This spectrum’s view of exploitation, poverty, ruin, and misery of humans is also confined within the same framework of bourgeois thought. They also see the legal transformation of capital ownership from private to state ownership, the centralization of economic planning, democracy, improvement of the distribution system, control of the production and labour processes, and the like as the solution to freeing humanity from its existing miseries. n all these narratives, what is exonerated and sanctified is the capital relation or the capitalist mode of production, and what is apparently criticized is the phenomena that follow from the existence of capital and some of the superstructures of this system. Bourgeois socialism, in all its forms and shades, makes the rotten theme of this type of view the cornerstone of its analysis and criticism of capitalist society, and on this basis, in its last solutions, it does not go beyond replacing market capitalism with state capitalism.
The communist critique of capitalism against wage labour by the working class stands at the opposite point to all forms of bourgeois and social reformist critique of this system. Here, the principle of the capital relation, wage labour, the commodity nature of labour power, and the separation of man from his labour are the targets of radical critique. Marx’s critique and abolition of wage labour consider all forms of exploitation, all kinds of inequalities, deprivations, and misery existing in the world as inevitable consequences of the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It considers the capitalist class as personified capital. It analyses the state as the political and legal embodiment of capital, the organization of planning production and labour of capital, and the instrument of imposing capitalist barbarity on the working and subordinate masses of the world. On this basis, communist critique does not tolerate any kind of manipulation of this system, for example, replacing private ownership of capital with state ownership of social capital, the development of civil institutions and the expansion of democracy in society or the “superstructural triangle of the market, contract, justice,” and any other form of change and transformation of the system that does not involve the complete negation of wage labour and the commodity nature of labour power.
In the view of the working-class anti-wage worker, socialism is a type of working and living conditions or a form of organization of working and social life, thanks to which man, in the process of his growth and development, is freed from the control of any power beyond himself or from any kind of constraint and contract independent of his will. This means that capital or fossilized dead labour, which in the capitalist system is the starting, returning and ending point of human life interactions, is actually abolished from its existence. The answer to this question of what the real meaning of the collapse or complete disappearance of the existence of capital and the capitalist mode of production is, in turn, involves the most radical difference between the communist critique of capitalism and the various forms of reformist critique. A fundamental point is that the opposing class responses to this problem are not simply two fundamentally different understandings of the reality of the organization of work and production or the civil and political structure of socialist society, but also carry with them two opposing interpretations of capitalism, the role and position of the working class, the labour movement, the various issues of the socialist movement and the proletariat’s anti-wage labour under capitalist domination, and most importantly, two essentially different narratives of man. A point to which I will refer a few lines below. The communist and Marxian critique of capitalism considers the socialist transformation of the economy, with any form of government over the working masses, to be fundamentally unattainable phenomena. The theme of this class critique considers the abolition of wage labour to be impossible and a demagogue’s idea without a council’s organization of labour and production composed of all citizens, and without all of these individuals having a completely free, influential, creative, and equal role in the planning of production and social labour. The equal role of individuals in the council organization of work and production does not reduce it to formal, legal, and bureaucratic rights of people in decision-making, planning, or administration of affairs. On the contrary, it evaluates the equal ability, capacity, and creative power of all in the matter of social intervention as a necessary condition for achieving an equal position for humans in the administration of society’s affairs and the organization of work, and on this basis, it considers the elimination of capital and capitalist relations to be dependent on the realization of all these related economic, social, cultural, civil, and societal components. In order for the relationship of capital to be destroyed and for humans to dominate the fate of work, production, and the products of their labour, the basis of the governance of individual citizens of a society must be eliminated, any kind of separation of citizens from their work and from the planning of work, production, and social distribution, or any kind of administrative and bureaucratic domination of the social order over individual humans.
The socialist revolution in every corner of the world must become the real embodiment of these components, and the socialist movement of the working class must establish the conditions that will enable such a revolution to be victorious. The revolution of the working class to dismantle the capitalist system is a revolution with extensive soviet and conscious involvement of the working masses, but not every workers’ revolution will be a victorious revolution simply by smashing the bourgeois state machine. The necessary condition for the revolution to be victorious is that the working class, in the entirety of its political practice and the position of its social struggle (level of political awareness and knowledge, degree of class formation and organization, ability to manage social affairs and social planning, etc.), acquires the necessary readiness and preparation for the establishment of a society separated from wage labour. The working class of a society may advance several times, or even several times, in the continuation of the class struggle against the capitalist system, to the stage of uprising and smashing the bourgeois state machine. In each of these cases, it may fail or succeed. It is not easy to answer the question of at what level of council organization and socialist maturity of the working class of a society or the international working class the revolution can pass the initial stages of its victory. But one thing cannot be doubted: that without a powerful council and socialist movement of the workers, without a proletariat aware of the horizon of socialist life, there is no chance even for the real breaking of the political order and rule of capital and the foundation of the growing socialist council organization of labour. By calling for a “party” above the workers and claiming communism and leading the proletariat and subordinating the discontented masses of workers to this call, the existing state machine of capital can be temporarily shattered, a new type of state machine can be established, but the political power produced by the revolution will never be a council institution of power and anti-wage labour and socialist planning of labour and production.
The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or the all-embracing organization of the working-class councils, at its lowest level or in its most primitive state of victory, is at any rate an organization corresponding to the widespread organized presence of the workers and their readiness, preparation, and firm determination to plan socialist work and production and to put an end to all forms and survivals of wage labour. This formula, however, does not in itself explain all the aspects or specifics of how the class forces of the proletariat are arranged at the moment of victory over the bourgeoisie in different societies and under different conditions. The revolution may end in the fall of the capital state machine at a level of class balance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie at which the working class is in a weak or even very weak position in terms of the development of the class movement and the political and practical preparation for the socialist transformation of the economy. The October Revolution, with all its importance, was of this type. The reverse is also always possible. The victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie can be accompanied by a high or very high level of development of the socialist movement and the organizational and practical preparation of the workers for broad, direct, effective and creative participation in the soviet planning of the economy and the administration of social affairs. Between these two cases, naturally, various other situations are conceivable, corresponding to different levels and components of the growth, maturity and organization of the socialist movement. Leaving aside all these possibilities, the level of productivity of social labour or the degree of industrial and civil development of different societies at the time of a workers’ revolution can also be different. Both the working class of Germany, Sweden, France and England can, in a phase of advancing and preparing their anti-capitalist movement, pull the bourgeoisie from the throne of power, and the proletariat of Iran, Venezuela, Chile and Brazil are capable of doing this. The workers’ revolution is an ongoing and actual proletarian affair in all these societies, but its victory in each of these countries will most likely not be accompanied by the same level of industrial and civil development. The revolution can triumph in a given society and can witness its victory in several countries or in a part of the world simultaneously. It may encounter unified, destructive, and brutal resistance from the domestic and world bourgeoisie, and perhaps the severity of the economic crisis of capital and the political disintegration and despair of the bourgeoisie will eliminate the possibility of such resistance. All of these situations are possible for the moment of the proletariat’s victory over the bourgeoisie and the occurrence of a workers’ revolution, and the establishment or non-establishment of the council and socialist organization of labour and production will be affected by all of these components and circumstances. The lower the degree of workers’ council organization, the lower the workers’ communist consciousness and insight, the less familiar the working class is with the horizon of socialist life and civilization, and the weaker the workers’ readiness for direct and creative intervention in the establishment and development of the soviet organization of socialist labour and production planning, the more complex and intricate the workers’ revolution will be.
In the discussion of the socialist revolution of the working class and its struggle to overthrow capitalism, formulations such as “the proletariat first seizes political power and then establishes socialism” do not provide any clear answer to any of the issues of this revolution. Political power can be seized either by a party or a left-wing political group, relying on the widespread dissatisfaction of the working masses and their movement, or by the councils that have emerged as a platform for the advancement and expression of the socialist and anti-wage labour movement of the working class in the long process of class struggle and have organized the working masses. Both of these can implement programs under the name of communism and the abolition of capitalist relations. But in the first case, at best, a handful of idealistic people with a multitude of ideas, slogans, and utopias seize political power over the heads of the workers. Nothing important will happen, only the name, logo, model, and colour of the state machine of capital will change. In the realm of economy, work, production, and human livelihood, state ownership of capital will probably replace the private ownership of individual capitalists. In the second form, on the contrary, the working masses have a very good chance of establishing socialist socialism, establishing the council organization of labour, and putting an end to all forms of exploitation and class oppression. The socialist revolution depends on having a powerful movement against wage labour and councils. A movement whose locomotive moves on the rails of a living communist critique of the totality of production and the capitalist system. A movement that always and everywhere holds in its hands its living class alternative to the existing capitalist objectivity. A council movement whose demands and expectations of the day indicate a relentless and planned attack on wage labour in all spheres of the economy, politics, and civilization. A movement that is the basis for equipping, preparing, training, and organizing the largest section of the working-class masses for a soviet socialism against wage labour and the abolition of wage labour on the morrow of the revolution. No socialist revolution anywhere in the world will succeed by gathering a number of isolated idealists in a small or even large party circle and attempting to win the support of the working masses to their party. Communism is neither an ideology nor an ideal for the distant future of history, but the ongoing anti-capitalist movement of the working class for the abolition of wage labour. If we agree with this definition, if the anti-wage labour approach of the working class within the labour movement is to advance the working masses towards socialist revolution, there is no other way but to make socialism, the horizon of communist life and the prospect of socialist transformation of the present objectivity the subject of work and the course of struggle of their ongoing movement. With reformism, trade union struggles, party building, “Wishes don’t wash dishes” and communism will not become a reality, asking the workers to join the party and seize political power, no equation can truly be shifted. No strong, conscious, and council movement will emerge. In the event of a revolution and the fall of the existing bourgeois state, no path will be opened to the establishment of a socialist workers’ soviet labour organization, and no door will open to the elimination of capitalism and the abolition of wage labour.
The presentation of these points does not in any way imply diminishing the struggle to fulfil the livelihood, welfare, political and social demands of the working masses. On the contrary, it is in line with the proposal of making them more important and radical. Workers always and at any time, in proportion to their class strength, level of awareness, degree of organization and fighting forces, struggle against various forms of economic and political injustice. They experience various forms of struggle. Strikes, protests, street demonstrations, mass uprisings, general arming and any other type of struggle are on their agenda. The workers’ movement in all these areas, from strikes to uprisings and in the presentation of all economic, political or social demands, may be a fully reformist movement, in the sense that it does not open a horizon beyond capitalism before itself and hangs the realization of its demands on the framework of the relationship of buying and selling labour power. A painful situation that we have witnessed enough historically and today more than ever. This movement, on the contrary, can have a truly socialist direction and the abolition of wage labour, in such a way that it makes all the areas of its daily struggle into continuous bulwarks of assault on the very fabric of capital existence. In the field of livelihood and welfare demands, in the struggle for political freedoms or against women’s rights and inhuman sexual discrimination, in protest against environmental pollution, in the campaign to abolish child labour, in the struggle against the criminal warmongering of the world bourgeoisie and in every other area of human social life, the radical and anti-capitalist advance, in all these areas the living socialist alternative and the concrete manifesto of council planning and anti-wage labour should be hammered into the heads of the capitalist class by the present economic and social objectivity and by acquiring the readiness and provision of the power to realize socialism and the abolition of wage labour, homogenizing the content of the daily struggle. The role, content of activity and existential philosophy of the communist tendency within the working class are also defined by these works. Activists of this approach strive to increase the offensive power and explosiveness of the labour movement through direct and creative presence in all forms of uprisings and protests of the working masses, Marxist explanation of the exploitation, oppression, injustice, predatoriness, and inhumanity of capitalism, direct propaganda of the socialist alternative, exposure and rejection of any bourgeois reformist alternative, proposal of the most radical economic or political demands, continuous improvement of the level of class consciousness and knowledge of workers, and such other types of work. All of these, in conjunction with each other, determine the basic lines of the practice of the communist tendency of the working class. If an approach is to be truly and seriously abolish wage labour and communism, it must demonstrate these orientations and carry out these tasks. This approach must make the clear socialist alternative to the existing society the banner of the daily struggle of the working class. Socialism does not emerge from within party-building and syndicalization. Socialism can only be upheld by the working masses who have truly and with a class-conscious mind fought against exploitation, injustice, oppression, and the injustices resulting from the existence of capitalism, and in the course of this struggle have become a conscious, soviet-organized interventionist power familiar with economic, political, and social planning based on the abolition of wage labour. The socialist approach within the working class must make active participation in the organization of such a movement the axis of its struggle and social practice. The radical socialist and anti-wage labour critique must make the present objectivity the daily stream of protest, struggle, demands, organization, and orientation of the workers. Marx says:
“The criticism that deals with this content is the criticism that occurs during the struggle, and in the struggle the question is not whether the opponent is a noble, strong and interesting opponent, but whether the blow will be struck at the opponent. The question is that the Germans must not be allowed a momentary air of self-deception and surrender. The pressure must be made even more intense by adding consciousness of the pressure to it, and the disgrace must be made even more shameful by publishing it in writing. Every sphere of German society must be described as a shameful part of Germany. The frozen relations must be made to dance by playing a pleasant instrument. The masses must be terrified of themselves, so that they become bold and reckless. In this way, man satisfies the inevitable needs of the German people, and the needs of the people are the last arguments for satisfying these needs.” (German ideology)
By flattering this or that scene of the workers’ reformist movement, by propagating reformism among the working masses, by calling on the workers to revolution, by hanging the workers on the party and by repeating the word socialism in the ears of a number of workers, no socialist movement will definitely sprout anywhere, and revolutions that are accompanied by these components will never end with the establishment of the organization of labour and communist civilization. This narrative that the whole discussion is about the conquest of political power and that with the realization of this, all other matters will fall into place has no similarity with the Marxian understanding of the workers’ revolution and the anti-wage labour. In reality, the matter is different. The political power of capital must definitely be shattered; this is among the most obvious prerequisites for the establishment of the socialist soviet society of the working masses. But the fundamental question is how? By which movement? With what form of organization, what horizon and what concrete plan of economic and social planning should this be done. If the discussion on establishing socialism is about abolishing wage labour by the working class, the demand for overthrow must also be of a socialist nature, anti-capitalist, homogeneous, and integrated with the conscious anti-capitalist soviet movement of the working masses. The tunnel of the socialist revolution cannot be dug with a supra-class, democratic, popular, and liberal anti-regime!! The overthrow of the bourgeois state must become a definite link in the chain of advance and offensive of the anti-wage labour soviet movement of the workers. The revolutionaries, that is, the broad masses of the proletariat, must experience socialism as a movement and take pride in it. They must shoot their clear charter for the socialist planning of labour and production into the brain of the ruling social system, step by step, in this movement. Political power must be seized by the proletariat as a class organized in anti-capitalist all-round councils, not by a handful of individuals or parties that have made themselves an alternative to the state machine of capital under the name of communism and the proletariat. The socialist revolution is a concrete stage in the process of advancement of the socialist movement of the working masses. Meanwhile, what initially and immediately distinguishes this phase of the process of progress from its previous stages is the readiness and determination of the working masses to smash the state machine and replace it with a socialist soviet organization. But the workers can only seize political power as a class when they have acquired and practiced in their current movement the political and social capacity and maturity necessary for the socialist transformation of the economy, the abolition of wage labour, the dismantling of the foundations and civil structure of the old society, the establishment of a socialist council labour organization, the relentless deepening of the revolution, and the path to communist society. This practice requires the workers’ struggles to be placed on the basis of a broad soviet movement with a socialist approach. The councils, which are the vessel of the proletariat’s attack on wage labour, call upon the members of the working class to directly intervene in this attack, unite the communist tendency of this class with the broad masses of workers in a direct struggle against capitalist exploitation and injustice. They are the vessel for the workers to express their existence in order to propose a living and concrete alternative to socialism against capitalism and to transform this alternative into the theme of the ongoing struggle of the working class. The council and socialist movement of the workers is a powerful growing seedling that can take root in the heart of the old and dying capitalist society and, at a certain moment of its continuity, explode the entire capitalist society and build the socialist organization of labour and civilization of the working class on its ruins. This movement, in every phase and at every level of its development, follows the protest and communist action of the working masses against capital. The process of buying and selling labour power and all its economic, political, civil, legal, and cultural consequences are dissected for all workers with the knife of communist dissection. With this anatomy, the reality of the relationship between labour and capital is revealed more deeply. In Marx’s words, it terrifies the workers with the current state of exploitation, injustice, and oppression they endure. In this regard, the socialist council movement proposes a way out of this terror and horror in the language of earthly humans and as another practically possible type of social life, and it fights for its realization.
If the working class is to launch a revolution to liberate itself and humanity from the evils of capitalism, it must pursue the process of launching this revolution from within such a council and socialist movement. And if the communists are to strive in the forefront of the working class for the victory of this revolution, they must be practical and conscious activists within this soviet movement. They must declare war on the world bourgeoisie and all capitalist states of the world with a concrete and de facto communist alternative to the objectivity of capitalism. A real and routine war between two social classes is over the existence and non-existence of wage labour, a war in which the proletariat, with a land indictment, targets the entire exploitation and brutality of capitalism, and the bourgeoisie finds itself confronted with a class whose desire and expectation is not the reform and reformist manipulation of capitalism, but the total abolition of this system. In this war, no immediate economic, welfare, or social demands of the workers are ignored, but everything is presented with a fundamentally different content than the reformist movement, and the struggle to achieve them takes on a content different from the reformists’ method of work. This battle is the very real battle of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie over socialism and capitalism. A battle within existing society not for the reform of the conditions of exploitation and work, but for the abolition and elimination of all forms of exploitation, classes, the state, and the entire relation of buying and selling labour power. The socialist revolution is a stage in the intensification and development of this battle. The working class must live within this battle and thrive on its foundation. The conquest of political power, if the proletariat is to come to power as a class, must reflect the specific action of the broad mass of workers at a specific moment in the battle between socialism and capital. This is the decisive point from which communists, even the most radical and revolutionary communists, have been evading for the last hundred years. The reversion of the leftist revolutionary clause and its point of escape from official reformism during this long period has been to chant the slogan of revolution, seize political power and relegate socialism to the future of the revolution. This formula is definitely not the formula of the socialist revolution of the proletariat; it is the twisted version of the leftist partisan bourgeoisie to replace one type of capitalist planning of work and production with another. According to this formula, as long as the political power or the capitalist state machine has not been destroyed, there is no talk of a direct and actual struggle against wage labour by the proletariat!! The labour movement must submit to the scaffolding of reformism in its economic and social demands!! To hang himself on the noose of a party that is above his life and struggle, to face the miracles of the guardians of this fake shrine, without any concrete and urgent communist alternative, without any practical creative presence in the socialist critique of capitalism, without continuously presenting specific communist plans to abolish the existing situation, in a word, without having any real socialist movement, to prepare himself only for a military offensive against the capitalist state machine and the party’s rise to power!!
In this twisted version, the working masses are just a handful of soldiers called up by party commanders for military training. They are asked to prepare themselves, smash the existing state machine, and then wait for the artifice and miracle of their leaders in pushing their class towards the promised paradise of socialism!!! Such a narrative of the socialist revolution is a bourgeois and reactionary narrative. The real root of this anti-communist narrative lies in the social democracy’s view of socialism. A view that was given a military and revolutionary guise by Bolshevism and paved the way for the defeat of the October Revolution. It considered state capitalism to be socialism and therefore did not feel the need to have a broad socialist movement of workers and to equip the masses of the working class in an organized soviet movement against wage labour. The necessity of having this movement is tangible for those who have set the goal of their struggle as the actual abolition of wage labour and the dismantling of the capitalist system. Only then will the establishment of socialism require the organization of the workers in anti-capitalist councils. Otherwise, a party and a handful of soldiers under orders and prohibitions are enough to smash the existing state machine, install a new state over the heads of the workers, and fill the world with the clamour of the victory of communism.
The workers’ revolution is the task of the socialist movement of the masses of the working class. A council movement that from the very beginning and long before the collapse of the state machine of capital, called the capitalists and their state to war by presenting a specific socialist solution to all existing problems. It makes the purchase relation and the method of labour power the object of criticism and struggle in its entire economic, civil, political and social existence. It makes the demands of the day a bulwark against the cycle of capital reproduction and a source of increasing disruption of the surplus value production relation. It practices the exercise of power and, under the knife of the executioners of capital and capitalist states, presents an anti-capitalist alternative to every manifestation of the existence of capital in every economic, political or social realm. In a system whose foundation of existence is based on the production of surplus value, it should direct its current demands to block as much as possible the process of converting labour into profit and make the removal of the highest level of livelihood, welfare, and facilities from the control of monetary and commodity transactions the content of the struggle. In the war against dictatorship and oppression, it should take the foundation of the capitalist political order as the target of protest, and in order to achieve political freedoms and social rights, it should put the basis of the existence of the state and the political and civil order based on the existence of capital under the impetus of the struggle. It should target law, contract, civilization, and the rights arising from the wage labour relationship, and in all these areas, it should introduce its own anti-wage and socialist alternative to what is and what capital imposes. It should declare the determination of daily work to be the inalienable right of the councils. It should explore the roots of sexual inequalities and women’s rightlessness or any other type of social oppression in the depths of the existence of the relationship of buying and selling labour power, and it should take refuge behind demands whose realization would be the elimination of these disasters by pushing back capitalism as much as possible.
Only such a movement can become the field of the proletariat’s fierce struggle against capital, pave the way for the socialist revolution and the spearhead for the establishment of the soviet organization of labour and production and communist civilization. It is here that the workers, united and organically, devise how to fight against capital and make their class struggle the real locomotive of the social revolution and radical historical transformation. If the bourgeoisie of the 17th and 18th centuries or the first half of the 19th century spread out the field of struggle against feudalism and the system of serfdom on the platform of the growth of the new mode of production and wage labour relations, the proletariat can only sound the death knell of the wage slavery system and open the gates of socialism to humanity on the roof of the vast soviet movement. In the aforementioned historical conditions, the bourgeoisie was associated with the growth, maturity and maturity of the new mode of production that had actually and objectively emerged in society. The proletariat in our time must also be associated with a movement that expresses itself within this outdated and dying capitalist system with its concrete communist alternative, with its type of organization, its anti-regime and anti-capitalist demands, and with its strategies for exercising class power. The essential difference is that there the capitalist mode of production, as a stage in the material course of historical evolution, objectively developed within the system of serfdom and previous forms of production, and the bourgeoisie derived its mentality, ideology, demands and expectations from the context of the same material process and the economic, political, civil, cultural and social requirements of the self-expansion of capital. But here the progressive communist tendency of the working class transforms the economic, political and social aspect of its future socialist order by projecting it as a living alternative and transforming this alternative into a current of ongoing struggle and a powerful anti-capitalist council movement of the masses of its class into a great class power. There, the new mode of production and economic organization existed objectively and as a specific phase of the evolution of the commodity economy, and the bourgeoisie, on the platform of the historical necessities of its development, demanded civilization, political order, social rights, a new type of management of society and the conquest of political power. Here, the socialist council movement is the working class that must rise, become more and more aware, become more horizon-oriented, gain strength, and demonstrate its adequacy to end capitalism and establish the socialist council organization of labour and production.
The real victory of the workers’ socialist revolution depends on the working class breaking away from the ideology, horizon and any kind of bourgeois solution in all areas, and especially in relation to how to change the existing social order. The council and communist movement of the proletariat is the basis for the realization of this class break and the arena for the preparation of the proletariat for building a society based on the abolition of the capital relation. The seizure of political power is the task of this council and socialist movement, and it is only within the context of this movement that the proletariat can seize political power as a class. The extent to which the working masses are prepared for direct and effective participation in economic planning and the management of all aspects of social affairs at the moment of the victory of the revolution is a matter that depends more than anything else on the degree of organization and progress of the socialist council movement of this class in the years preceding the revolution. What is beyond doubt is that even the most preliminary phase of establishing a soviet organization of planning work and production cannot be an institution separate from the broad council organization of the working masses. The statement that the proletariat finds itself in power when it sees its leaders in power is merely a confirmation of a misleading anti-communist and bourgeois inversion. The discussion is not about the mere idea of the proletariat; the working masses, under certain conditions, look at society, the world, history, social existence, the struggle, and everything else with the bourgeois eye.
This is a pathetic situation that should not be sanctified and honoured, the discussion is about its fundamental change. The proletariat must remove from the world the basis of any kind of leadership, being a leader, ijtihad, imitation, disciple and follower. The trust of the working masses in their representatives may be based on illusion and lack of communist awareness and insight. This is not trust that it is illusion, imitation and guardianship, it should not be considered a virtue, on the contrary, it should be resolutely criticized and replaced with communist fusion and cohesion. The socialist soviet organization of labour and production of the working class cannot be an institution above them and based on guardianship and proxy of their power. In order to eliminate wage labour relations, the proletariat must establish a new social order that includes its own specific form of social organization of labour. An organization of production and labour based on the abolition of the law of value, all its economic consequences, the abolition of the commodity nature of labour power and the product of labour, the abolition of the relationship of capital, the market, and exchange. This social organization of labour is an economic category, but just as political. Within this new order, policymaking, production planning, or any type of social activity needed by society is as much a matter for individual members of society as production itself or service and welfare activities. Here, the direct and decisive participation of individual citizens in all economic and social planning is an integral part of the daily work of individuals. Within this organization of labour, there is no mention of the government or any institution above the heads of citizens.
A deep familiarity with this organization of work, or in fact a clear understanding of the socialist alternative to the existing capitalist reality or any other bourgeois alternative, is the task of the workers’ council movement within capitalist society. The design of this model as an urgent and practical solution to the exit from capitalism, helping to harmonize the ongoing struggles of workers with the process of preparation, awareness, and acquisition of the ability to establish socialism, is the most urgent and immediate task of the approach to the abolition of wage labour in any society and any part of the world. The subject of the present book is naturally not the design of a living, breathing, and present socialist solution for the working class in this or that society or throughout the capitalist world, but rather an attempt to explain and illustrate the materialist and Marxian view of the design of the socialist alternative and an attempt to draw the attention of communist activists in the labour movement to the necessity of carrying out this task. This book will certainly contain important shortcomings and deficiencies. I see the preparation of the book, despite the multitude of shortcomings and misconceptions in its discussions, as an effort to emphasize the necessity of drawing up a socialist perspective for the workers’ movement. Before concluding the introduction, one more point should be noted. Almost all Leninist parties and a very wide range of so-called left forces call any discussion about a concrete socialist alternative to the existing society fantasy, utopia, and structuralism. I will explain why they think so below, but before that, we must examine the context of their argument. Their argument is usually that the model of socialism is only real when the proletariat is in power and the planning of the economy and the new structure of society are a living and present issue before it. Otherwise, it becomes a bunch of utopian stereotypes, the design of which is to promote a kind of dogmatism and idealism among the working masses. They add that this is at the same time an academic prescription for the working class and calls into question the basis of planning and socialist transformation of the economy by this class!!
What this spectrum says, despite the outward guise of formulations, is a closed version of the socialist movement of the working class, a clear violation of the Marxian and materialist understanding of history, and a license to dissolve the labour movement in the reformist strategies of bourgeois communism. First of all, it is unclear why if the working masses, instead of the Martian sloganeering of socialism, take socialism, the living socialist alternative to the objectivity of capitalism, as their weapon and horizon, is this utopianism or dogmatism?! The issue is profoundly the opposite. What has been common from time immemorial to the present day as a tradition among the Pro-Russian, Pro-China, and populist leftists, and continues to be common, is the replacement of the practical socialism of the proletariat with a handful of reformist dreams and utopias. Socialism is a movement before it is an economic and social order. The current movement of the working class is against the exploitation and blackmail of capitalism and against the basis of capitalist existence. The important question before the above group is how the working masses can have a truly socialist movement without proposing a concrete socialist alternative to the reality of capitalism, striking at its legitimacy, fighting for its practical application, and preparing themselves for this practice. It was emphasized above that the class struggle is the constant war between the two basic classes of society over the existence and non-existence of the mode of production and the entire dominant social system. The bourgeoisie has a specific economic, political, civil and engineering plan for the continuity of existence and for every moment of the survival of these world relations. Even the different parties and sections of this class, in competition with each other and with the aim of deceiving the working masses, fill the earth and time with their own plans for the productive, political and social order of capital. Why should the working class, the class that is the standard-bearer of establishing a society that is fundamentally opposed to the existing system, not present its plan for the construction of the future society in a tangible form and make it the subject of its daily struggle, thought and education? By denying the urgency of a concrete socialist alternative, the “left” practically draws a line under communism as a real movement and removes such a movement from the agenda of the working class. In this narrative, communism is not an anti-wage labour movement of the working masses, but a utopia for nowhere in history.
When we talk about the objective socialist alternative, it means that the proletariat is very seriously and explicitly declaring to the capitalist class and its governments that it is ready to plan work, production, and social order based on the elimination of capitalism and the abolition of wage labour. It is declaring that it is carrying out its daily struggle around replacing the current situation with this alternative, extracting its current demands from the text of this alternative, and considering its organization as a vessel for exercising united and conscious power to realize the demands based on this alternative. A labour movement without an actual, objective, and concrete socialist alternative is a movement without a horizon, reformist, dissolved in the scaffolding of the wage slavery system, whose only concern will be to try to moderate the exploitation, injustices, and black lives of this system. The working class without awareness, recognition, education, and self-identity with this alternative is a class captive to bourgeois reformist ideas and illusions. The commotion about communism and the slogan that the socialist revolution will turn the world upside down, without a specific plan of the anti-wage architecture of the existing materials of labour and social production, will not familiarize the workers with the real perspective of their daily struggle, and the current workers’ movement will not advance any society to a phase of a conscious movement with a council and socialist horizon. The usual programming style of the left forces is more like writing amulets and piecing together prayers and sermons for religious sermons. Communism in their programming narrative is a bunch of utopian words that faith in is supposed to be the path to salvation for believers.
Why have the forces that make up the broad spectrum of the left historically refused to propose socialism as a concrete alternative, or a clear solution to the planning of work and social production, and have denied or are denying its urgency? This is another important question that needs to be addressed, but the answer is simple. The twentieth century left, despite being militant or clinging to communism, Marx and the proletariat, in their political practice, had no other horizon than replacing one form of labour organization and capital order with another, for example, this or that type of state capitalism, and they still do not have any other horizons. The great record of sacrifices, self-sacrifices, epics, and idealism is certainly valuable and irreducible in its place, but the class struggle is another story, and the material dialectic does not identify its calculations with this record or attach itself to it. The top and bottom of the existence of the left in the twentieth century has been and continues to be that it has a party, formulates a manifesto, presents itself as loyal to communism and the cause of the proletariat. It aims to seize political power, to achieve this goal it calls on the working masses to support itself, to persuade the workers to this side by promising to build a better world, if successful it establishes a new state machine, plans the capitalist system according to its own model. It calls this model socialism and calls any movement against it by any worker a war against communism. The horizon of existence, struggle and expectations of the left in the twentieth century has never been greater than this and it is not now. Throughout the past century and since the days of the October Revolution, some strands of this left have attempted to criticize this type of view of the labour movement and class struggle, but these criticisms have generally been democratic and lacking a clear Marxian and anti-wage labour theme. Among the circles claiming to make such a critique, the claims of Iranian left groups, for example, the spectrum known as “worker communism,” are as baseless, right-wing, and anti-communist as the others. All of these currents are deeply immersed in party games and sectarianism over the labour movement, and they consider the party’s guardianship of the proletariat, which has a deeply bourgeois and reactionary theme, to be the foundation of their view, approach, policy, and practice in relation to this movement. Despite the false clamour of believing in the role of workers’ councils, they completely deny the principle of anti-capitalist council organization of the working masses, and in practice, they make the twin forces of the party and the union an alternative to this organization. Even if we disregard other aspects of their capitalist and non-Marxian analyses and horizons and focus on their specific perception of the labour movement, the mechanisms of class struggle, and the narrative of the preparation and construction of the praxis of the working masses for socialist revolution, we realize that the socialism of these movements is nothing other than state capitalism. In this regard and with this fundamental Achilles heel, the project of socialism as a concrete alternative to the current reality of capitalism also becomes meaningless to them, and they call it structuralism and utopianism. From their perspective, the task of the proletariat is not to organize itself as a council, conscious and nationwide, with an objective and specific anti-wage alternative in hand, to determine its demands of the day with reference to this alternative and to fight to impose them on the bourgeoisie, to make its anti-capitalist council power more united, more organized and more conscious, and finally to overthrow the state of capital and establish the socialist organization of labour that abolishes wage labour. They do not consider such a role for the working class outside the circle of word games. In their view, it is the party above the workers that must make the labour movement a means of conquering political power for itself, and if this goal is achieved, everything will go according to the will of the working masses!! There is no need to explain that the dissolved left, in such concepts, does not see the need to dissect the economic foundation of the current society, present a de facto alternative to wage labour, and present it as a conscious platform for the workers’ struggle and revolution. The real reason for the left’s avoidance of proposing a living socialist model in opposition to the capitalist economic, political, and social order must be sought here. Another question remains in this passage. Some will ask that if proposing a concrete and living model of socialism is an absolutely necessary mechanism of the anti-capitalist movement of the working class, then why did Marx and his companions in the First International not strive for this? The answer is simple, and in this regard, two points should be considered. First, the largest part of Marx’s work is precisely the anatomy of capitalism and the critique of the political economy of the bourgeoisie. A critique that is the class consciousness of the proletariat and the theoretical framework of socialism as the de facto alternative of this class to the system of wage slavery. The second point is that in the last years of the first half and the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, a text like the “Communist Manifesto” largely played the role of a socialist alternative to the capitalist system. During the period in question, bourgeois communism had not yet achieved the status of a dominant social system anywhere in the world. The workers’ revolutions of the countries one after another did not give birth to the bourgeois communism of the camp and China. The concept of working-class communism in the light of the Marxist critique of the political economy of capitalism, the materialist and Marxist narrative of history and the general practice of the communist approach of the day seemed sufficient to demarcate what the bourgeoisie in various Proudhonist, anarchist, Owenite, Blanquist forms, imaginary utopias and the like was proposing in the name of socialism. The communist movement of the working masses was not associated with the party of the reactionary left games of the people’s and bourgeois groups, and proletarian communism was not identified with the hell of filth, blood and horror of the Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese camps and similar models.
In the conditions of that day, at least for a significant part of the international working class, communism evoked a free society free from wage labour and exploitation, and classes and the state, and the workers in the practice of class struggle and for example in establishing the First International and the Paris Commune, despite the presence and wide field of reformist tendencies, anyway, they had in mind the establishment of a society with high specifications. The other side of the story is also important, that the power of thought engineering and the domination of capital’s inherent inversions on the horizon of thought, life, expectation, culture and everything of the working masses had not reached the strength and consistency of today. All of these are important and decisive components that distinguish the present era from the middle years of the 19th century, and all of these together call out that projecting a living and objective model of socialism in front of the working masses is a necessary and unavoidable mechanism. Regarding the conditions of these two different historical periods, one more important point should not be forgotten. The fact that Marx and his companions did not do something, did not find the opportunity to do it, or did not think of it at all, does not give any license to elevate the shortcomings of their work to “revelation of the house” and avoid answering the absolutely basic and vital issues of the labour movement.