Part three, Nasser Paydar
Thus far, we have briefly discussed the objective characteristics and features of the organization of labour, production, and socialist civilization. These discussions have sought to move beyond the level of ideological generalizations common among past and present Leftist currents, examining socialism instead as a concrete new economic, civil, political, and social order. Yet, despite their clear distinctions from conventional Leftist discourses, these discussions serve merely as a necessary introduction to presenting socialism as the working class’s immediate, viable solution in the struggle against the capitalist system. Even if the vanguard of the labour movement grasps the intricacies or objective specifics of a socialist economy, civilization, and social order, a vast distance remains to be covered before socialism becomes the actual substance of their ongoing class struggle.
For the proletariat, the council-based organization of labour, production, and communist life is neither an idealistic notion nor a utopian prospect; on the contrary, it is the subject of its ongoing class struggle against capital. Accordingly, the primary task of communist activists within the labour movement is to strive creatively, consciously, and through a council-based approach to organize a movement that not only holds the prospect of socialism and the abolition of wage labour before it but also embodies this very goal within its own substance, fabric, and ongoing struggle against capitalism. It is precisely here that the role of genuine activists advocating for the abolition of wage labour or Marxian communism becomes most prominent and significant. Tragically, the history of the twentieth-century labour movement is a history of shying away from proposing a living, actual communist solution; it is a history of latching onto other movements, serving as foot soldiers for “people’s movements,” embracing nationalist anti-imperialism and bourgeois communism, and inevitably fleeing from the process of council-based organization aimed at anti-capitalism and the abolition of wage labour. Over the past century, the helmsmen and navigators of this movement whether conscious or unconscious, worker or non-worker, emerging from the heart of working-class life or the ranks of the propertied intelligentsia, and under whatever banner or name have steered the working masses of various nations and the global working class in every conceivable direction, tethering them to a multitude of visions and strategies. Yet, amidst all this, the one path they failed to place before the class, and the only arena they failed to open up, was the genuine path of organizing against wage slavery and the true battlefield of the anti-capitalist struggle. As far as the eye could see, they built parties for it, formed unions, opened paths for “anti-imperialist” struggle, paved the way for participation in a united front, and taught theories and methods for carrying out a democratic revolution; they ignited revolutions using the power of its struggle, seized political power in its name, ruled over it under its banner, and using that very name inflicted upon it all the calamities of capitalism. Amidst the dust raised by this flurry of movement-building, strategizing, horizon-setting, and tactical manoeuvring, the labour movement lost the true path of the struggle against wage labour. It lost sight of the socialist vision of abolishing wage labour; it dissolved into right-wing syndicalist reformism and was crucified upon the party-centric, pseudo-left reformism. It mistook state capitalism for socialism and interpreted the anti-capitalist class struggle merely as lining up behind the party and submitting to the dictates of party leaders.
The outcome of this process is the situation we witness today a situation from which liberation is the prerequisite for any effort to achieve even a measure of freedom from the crushing weight of calamities, the filth, and the bloodshed inherent in the system of wage slavery. There is no other way. The working class is compelled to find a path out of the dead-ends and false trails of this century. It must replace right-wing trade union reformism and top-down party-building with a socialist, council-based movement that opposes wage labour. Communism is not merely a collection of doctrinaire phrases; it is not a badge of identity or a mere creed. It is a movement to transform the existing order a movement in which every single moment constitutes a battle against capital. Under no circumstances can the working-class masses abandon this struggle; to do so would mean accepting defeat, declaring a readiness to pay the price of that defeat to the bourgeoisie, and enduring all the wretchedness that stems from the existence of capitalism. The international labour movement spent the twentieth century in a state of defeat. Throughout the century, it fought battling more fiercely than ever before and carrying out revolutions. It toppled regimes and replaced them with others, yet nowhere did it make the abolition of wage labour through socialism the horizon of its struggle; nowhere did it organize itself on a council-based, anti-wage-labour footing; nor did it forge its immediate demands into the interconnected links of an anti-capitalist war or the united ramparts of a campaign against wage slavery. It has not sought to overthrow regimes with a consciousness opposed to wage labour or through a conscious class struggle against capital. Its track record is replete with struggle, yet not informed by Marxian understanding but by the mindset of Leninist “people’s communism”; not oriented toward abolishing wage slavery but toward state capitalism; not engaged in a process of anti-capitalist, council-based organization but mired in the depths of trade-union reformism and the fetid swamp of bourgeois-communist party politics; not driven by urgent anti-capitalist demands but by syndicalist claims that tacitly accept the permanence of capitalism; not flying the banner of overthrowing the wage-labour system but waving the standard of a bourgeois, supra-class opposition to the regime; not operating on a front of organized class power against the bourgeoisie but lost in the murky labyrinth of laws, civil norms, and the order of wage slavery. These are the defining features of this movement’s long history—a history that has resulted in the stalled and immobilized state of the global working masses in the face of capital.
Under any circumstances and at any level of confrontation with the bourgeoisie, the working class requires a clear socialist perspective accompanied by a concrete and lucid program—to advance its anti-capitalist struggle. In this transition, the primary question facing workers is: with what new reality is the existing economic, social, and political order to be replaced? What does the process of these changes and substitutions entail in both the short and long term? The twentieth-century answer to this question was to urgently form trade unions and demand improved living conditions within the framework of the wage-labour system, while ultimately rallying behind a party, bringing it to power, and waiting for the world to be set right! The response of the anti-wage-labour approach stands in stark contrast to this. This approach argues that, in opposition to bourgeois economic plans, the organization of labour, and the prevailing political and civil order, a concrete and transparent socialist alternative must be proposed an alternative that lays out, with precise statistical and factual detail, the method for abolishing wage labour and establishing the comprehensive, council-based, socialist control of the working masses over their labour, production, the fruits of their work, and their own way of life. The task of communists and the standard-bearers of the anti-capitalist struggle is not merely to engage in rhetoric about capitalist exploitation or to offer hollow praise for the miracles and virtues of communism. Just as propaganda regarding the workers’ immediate economic and political demands cannot substitute any force claiming to be communist for the active socialist movement of the class itself, the socialist perspective is not merely an ideal that communists and activists of the movement to abolish wage labour present to workers. On the contrary, it is a strategy and a solution that addresses the real necessity for successfully advancing their ongoing and inevitable daily struggle. One class is in conflict and at war with another a war unfolding along the lines of the existing society’s irresolvable objective contradictions, representing the compelled, forced reaction of the downtrodden, exploited class against the ruling, exploiting class. This is a real war, and communism constitutes both the ongoing practice of this war and its ultimate perspective. It is a complete distortion to view communism as a phenomenon external to the working class a product of the insights and genius of upper-class thinkers while regarding reformism and syndicalism as organic to the lives and movements of workers! Let communism as a construct of upper-class intellectuals remain their own creation! We are discussing a communism that is the movement to transform the status quo. This movement is born of the working class’s social existence and its unavoidable conflict with capital a movement that must grow, gain consciousness, organize, gather strength, exercise power, and dismantle capitalism. The entire discussion centres on how to accomplish these tasks and traverse this path. This movement requires its own distinct horizon, consciousness, and mode of organization, as well as its own specific forms of fortification and mechanisms of struggle; it demands a stance against the regime that aligns with its true nature. Syndicalist reformism and party-centric “people’s communism” strive to disarm this movement on all these fronts, dragging it into a wasteland of compromise and despair derailing it from the authentic path of anti-capitalist struggle.
The converse holds true for the anti-wage-labour orientation. This approach enters the arena armed with a clear socialist alternative, communist consciousness-raising efforts, specific strategies and policies, a distinct form of organization, demands, and an agenda for the overthrow of the wage-labour system. Socialism is the product of a revolution by the broad masses of workers a revolution led by a class-conscious vanguard fighting against capitalism. While a trade-unionist movement or one tethered to a party of elites might yield various outcomes, the one thing it will not produce is the socialism that abolishes wage labour. A genuine socialist movement is one comprising the worker masses themselves a movement that, through its own internal evolution, has transformed into a conscious, awakened force that is hostile to capital and prepared for the council-based administration of society and the abolition of wage labour. To bridge this gap and attain this position, the movement distinguishes itself from every other approach within society or even within the working class by adopting the following characteristics:
1. It adopts a Marx’s dissection of the objective reality of contemporary capitalism as its guiding consciousness. To achieve this, it is not enough for its activists simply to read Capital and commit Marx’s revolutionary materialism to memory. Proletarian class consciousness is not merely the ideological literacy or doctrinal learning of a handful of elite elements or the vanguard of its struggles; rather, it is the very essence of its class existence. It is the socialist capacity of the broadest possible masses of workers to resolve all the ongoing issues of their class struggle. To attain this consciousness, the proletariat must adopt the Marx’s anatomy of existing capitalist reality and the path to radically transforming that objective reality as the guiding light of its struggle. Instead of taking orders from a handful of “leaders,” it must mobilize against the bourgeoisie in a massive, collective presence, armed with this consciousness. With this understanding and awareness, it must make the very existence of capitalism the central issue of the conflict; it must lay bare the entire process of labour, production, and its own products before the bourgeoisie, making the determination of their fate the focal point of the daily battle. Proletarian consciousness manifests not in the minds of its vanguard, but in its daily struggle against capital; it is this struggle that must sever the head of reformism from its body and replace it with a Marx’s, socialist, and anti-wage-labour consciousness. The workers’ council movement is the true arena and vehicle for attaining this consciousness. It is here that workers struggle, dissect the objective reality of capitalism, transform the results of this analysis into their own consciousness, learn from one another, and use what they have learned to guide their struggle.
2. It must seek the root cause of all disenfranchisement and misery in the existence of capital. To perceive the true roots of hunger, poverty, displacement, the lack of sanitation, medicine, and water, sexual, ethnic, and racial oppression, patriarchy, prostitution, addiction, a culture of deceit, theft, and mafia-like conduct, the violation of children’s rights, child labour and the phenomenon of street children, environmental pollution, global and regional wars, dictatorship, political repression and the absence of political freedoms, imprisonment, torture, and executions or indeed any form of deprivation, oppression, or human tragedy—one must look directly at capital and the octopus of capitalism. With this perspective, one must examine, pursue, and organize the struggle against all these human calamities.
One of the catastrophic blows dealt by reformism to the global labour movement has been to obscure the roots of these phenomena and to absolve capitalism of its role as their instigator, cause, and guardian; in doing so, it has fragmented the working class, tethering each segment to some form of bourgeois pseudo-opposition and reformism. The long chain of organizations and institutions claiming to defend women’s or children’s rights, opposing war, advocating for peace, championing refugee rights, fighting poverty, or aiding the hungry and the like are all organizations that have emerged based on such distortions of reality. The issue is not the intentions of the founders and initiators of these institutions or even the nature of some of their activities; the vast majority of those active in such organizations are workers themselves, and the work they perform provides effective and vital assistance to the working masses. The fundamental problem is that, rather than serving as a bastion in the working class’s all-out struggle against capital while advancing their cause, they pursue a path of reforming capitalism and resolving human hardships within the framework of the system’s continued existence. They fail to trace the roots of poverty, hunger, disease, misogyny, hostility toward children, dictatorship, war, and environmental degradation back to the nature of capital itself, nor do they view the fight against these ills as part of the struggle against capital. They do not recognize the working class’s anti-capitalist movement as the true driving force of this struggle; instead, driven by these misconceptions and inverted perspectives, they cling to reformist solutions, establish cross-class organizations, and become a reserve force for such institutions. Ultimately, in doing so, they abandon the effective, fundamental struggle to eradicate these deprivations and calamities, squandering the immense potential of the labour movement on reformist dead ends. The movement for the abolition of wage labour views the struggle across all these arenas as an integral part of its anti-capitalist fight. To advance these causes, it does not resort to creating cross-class organizations or latching onto the reformism of bourgeois opposition groups. Adopting this perspective, the movement blocks any erosion of its fighting capacity and class power, clears the fog of illusion from the minds and struggles of the masses, disarms both right-wing and left-wing reformism, and transforms every sphere of workers’ social lives into a battlefield against wage labour. It turns the struggle against gender oppression and against the denial of women’s rights and child labour as well as the fight against dictatorship, repression, the absence of freedoms, imprisonment, torture, and execution, and the struggle against war (or for peace and environmental protection), into interconnected bastions of its anti-capitalist class struggle.
3. It aligns its immediate demands with the overarching struggle against capital, thereby drawing a clear line of demarcation against all forms of reformism. It places no reliance on the law, legality, civil norms, or the rights of capital. Instead, it relies on its own class power, using the exercise of that power as the mechanism to impose its demands upon the bourgeoisie. Its immediate, day-to-day objectives are determined solely by the strength of its ongoing struggle; based on this strength, it demands an ever-increasing share of the fruits of its labour and production to meet subsistence needs, ensure social welfare, and improve working and living conditions thereby maximizing the reduction of capitalist profits. In this vein, it adopts a platform of immediate demands that includes the highest possible price for labour power, alongside the provision of free medical care, medication, healthcare, utilities (water and electricity), education, childcare, elderly care, and similar services.
4. It must sweep away the dominance of party-rule and the top-down creation of trade unions, organizing instead through a council-based, nationwide, and anti-capitalist structure. It must transform its councils into instruments for exercising power against capital and imposing its demands upon the bourgeoisie; into arenas for the active and impactful intervention of the protesting working-class masses; into a foundation for the growth and maturation of socialist consciousness among all members of the class; and into a bastion for the education, preparation, equipping, and readiness of the broadest possible masses of workers for the socialist, council-based administration of society. An anti-capitalist movement cannot exist without councils; if this movement is to establish socialism, it must create all the necessary conditions for abolishing any form of state standing above the workers. The abolition of the state hinges on replacing it with a council-based organization for planning labour and production one composed of the broad masses of workers acting with conscious, free, equal, and creative agency. Nationwide council-based organization that opposes the wage-labour system is the only suitable framework for realizing this goal.
5. Pursue the struggle to overthrow the bourgeois state from the stronghold of the anti-capitalist war. The slogan of seizing political power absent a nationwide council-based organization of the working masses against capital, and without the organized workers’ council movement itself assuming power is by no means a slogan of the working class’s socialist movement. Throughout the past century, the practical, real-world implication of this slogan has been that a party, riding the wave of the working masses’ discontent, rebellion, and explosive rage, has overthrown the incumbent capitalist government only to replace it with a different state apparatus. The capitalist system has remained intact, and the working class has suffered the same fate as in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc or in societies like Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The proletariat must shatter the political power of the bourgeoisie, but it must do so through its own organized, anti-wage-labour council movement not by trailing behind this or that party that stands outside its own struggle and daily life. It goes without saying that the working class welcomes the overthrow of the capitalist state under any circumstances and utilizes that overthrow to strengthen, expand, and consolidate its anti-capitalist movement to the fullest extent possible; what is crucial and must be emphasized is that it does not substitute this anti-wage-labour drive for overthrow with a democratic, supra-class opposition to the regime.
6. It must adopt the blueprint for the socialist transformation of current society not merely as a slogan, an ideal, or a distant historical goal, but as a living, immediate agenda and wield it as a weapon in its war against capital. By adopting this model or concrete blueprint for socialist transformation, the anti-wage-labour movement declares to the capitalist class and its state that it is prepared to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish a socialist, council-based organization for the planning of labour and production. The working class’s council movement integrates this blueprint into the ongoing substance of its education, consciousness, and conscious class existence. The points outlined above represent the most general indicators through which the labour movement acquires the capacity necessary to overthrow the bourgeoisie and abolish capitalism. Each of these indicators requires detailed discussion and analysis a task I have already undertaken, however preliminarily and inadequately, in another book titled “The Movement to Abolish Wage Labor”; for this very reason, I shall limit myself here to these brief remarks.
This book and this discussion come to an end here.