Nasser Paydar August 2004
The crushing pressure of capitalist exploitation, rapacity, and hostility toward humanity has brought the entire social life of modern humanity to the brink of a massive explosion. Across the globe, throughout successive generations and recent centuries, the fruits of the ceaseless labour of the vast masses who sell their labour power have been transformed again and again into capital. The world today is stifled under the weight of this immense accumulation of capital. The annual social product actively and tangibly created by the world’s workers through their labour reaches staggering heights; according to official statistics from international capitalist institutions, the average per capita share of this product for the populations of 52 countries exceeds 150,000 Swedish kronor annually.
A simple, down-to-earth interpretation of these figures reveals that the world’s workers right now and under current conditions produce, through their labour, a level of welfare, livelihood, and social amenities equivalent to 600,000 Swedish kronor per year for every four-person household globally. To better visualize the actual significance of this colossal volume of output in human life, consider that in a society like Sweden—which boasts one of the highest levels of social welfare the total annual expenditure for a family of four (covering healthcare, medication and treatment, education, food and clothing, housing, leisure, and all other needs) amounts to approximately 350,000 kronor.
Thus, through their daily labour and production, the workers of the world have long since created and continue to reproduce all the conditions and means necessary for the entire global population to enjoy a prosperous and dignified life, replete with the best possible living standards, education, healthcare, and human well-being. But our current world remains rife with hunger, poverty, survival-driven sex work, and a lack of water, food, housing, healthcare, and education, alongside a host of other social and human calamities.
Since the early 1990s, the level of capital accumulation and direct capital investment has grown by 223 percent globally and by over 600 percent in Latin America; however, during this same historical period, the number of impoverished and hungry people in the Caribbean and Latin America has risen from 183 million to 230 million. The proportion of those suffering from extreme poverty has climbed from 40 percent to 50 percent. Alongside this colossal growth in capital accumulation, two billion people remain deprived of basic public health services, medicines, and medical care, as well as safe drinking water, minimal educational opportunities, and virtually all other essentials. During this very period, the number of hospital beds in Sweden that bastion of capitalist prosperity!!! has been cut in half, while each year, twenty schools (covering grades one through nine) and their hundreds of classrooms have been shut down permanently.
The relentless spread of hunger and poverty, the boundless reach of prostitution, the dismantling of schools and hospitals, the ever-mounting number of street children worldwide, the unchecked proliferation of forced child labour, the daily increase in the ranks of the global unemployed—and a multitude of similar phenomena by no means capture the full extent of capitalism’s barbaric assault on contemporary human life. Throughout this same historical period, the capitalist system and its rampaging enforcers have inflicted the most heinous, savage, and inhumane wars upon the vast masses of workers across various continents. The working classes in places such as Palestine, Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have been utterly devastated by the manifold calamities of these conflicts. Beyond the wars themselves, the annual military expenditure of capitalist states during this period has exceeded $900 billion a figure equivalent to the combined income of more than 51 percent of the world’s population.
What is to be done in such a world, and under the domination of a system so hostile to humanity a system steeped in crime and savagery? This question confronts every worker in every corner of the globe. It is a vital and deeply serious question concerning the very existence and survival of the current generation and, even more importantly, the rising generation of workers worldwide. It is a question facing all honourable humanity and addressed to every free-spirited person on Earth.
Must workers in Asia, Latin America, and Africa workers representing the vast majority of the global workforce bear the crushing burden of capitalist-induced poverty, hunger, humiliation, homelessness, oppression, and misery, all under the guise of “living”? Is such a thing truly possible?!!
Must European and American workers simply wait to suffer the same fate that has already befallen their fellow workers on other continents? Does not all evidence indicate that, as long as capitalism persists, a similar fate is inevitable for workers everywhere?
Should we continue to pin our hopes on the existing democracy and “free elections” or on establishing such a democracy in lands currently ruled by dictatorships? Have the deadly surges in unemployment, prostitution, and the steady decline in living standards along with the destruction of schools, hospitals, and healthcare, and the relentless loss of life not occurred, and do they not continue to unfold, precisely under the reign of this very democracy and these freedoms? Can any problem facing workers truly be solved by merely swapping one set of officials for other individuals whose entire mission, from start to finish, is to inflict capitalist barbarism and savagery upon the working masses of the world?!!
Should we expend the full weight of our protests, struggles, and widespread social uprisings merely to replace one government with another? On what scale, and over the lifetimes of how many generations of the global working class, are we to repeat this process? How long must we allow the entire power of our struggle and our capacity for class warfare to be held hostage to the internal settling of scores within the bourgeoisie?
Must we continue to seek a path to liberation from the deadly gender, ethnic, and racial discriminations inherent in the capitalist system by appealing to legality, order, civility, and the miraculous realm of capitalist jurisprudence?!!! When the sex trade, child slave labour, and the prostitution of women rank among the most lucrative sectors for capital accumulation, does championing “permissible reforms” to the wage-slavery system as a remedy for these crimes, acts of barbarism, and discriminations amount to anything other than self-deception, the duping of the public, and a futile exercise in futility?!!
Should we continue to cling to labour unions and existing pro-capitalist organizations that merely masquerade as labour groups, expecting healing from these decrepit, deceptive, and impotent temples? Is it not the case that the signatures of the leaders of all these unions appear everywhere alongside those of capitalists and capitalist governments, affixed to the pact that guarantees our ruin for the sake of the ever-expanding growth of capital profits?
Should we pin our hopes on pseudo-leftist, pro-democracy political sects with the deceptive trappings of their pro-worker rhetoric and take comfort in their slogans of “Down with…” and “Long live…”? Is the history of our global class movement not already repleting with the bitter lessons learned when workers hitched their fortunes to such sects?
The first correct answer to the question “What is to be done?” is that none of the aforementioned actions should be taken. It is a mistake to repeat an experiment that has already failed; repeating an error especially when it happens time and again is nothing more than a farce, a tragedy replayed as comedy, becoming ever more farcical with each iteration.
Are all avenues closed? Answering “yes” to this question is the perennial response of our worst class enemies. The answer to this question is a categorical “no.” The only paths that are truly and permanently closed and which are deeply misleading, corrosive, and draining are the aforementioned illusory dead ends. These are merely channels for humanity’s aimless wandering through the foul, blood-soaked, and malevolent terrain of wage slavery, dragging us from one capitalist bloodbath to the next. These paths are closed; the bourgeoisie itself has sealed them shut forever. Yet, the highway to humanity’s liberation from the quagmire of all this wretchedness remains wide open more open than in any other historical era, and more primed and ready for the mobilization, offensive, and marshalling of the most immense forces: forces comprising the entirety of the world’s workers and all of humanity that is exploited and oppressed.
The answer given by the world’s class-conscious workers to the question above is unequivocal. Mobilizing, strengthening, and organizing the movement of the working masses to abolish wage labour both within individual societies and across the globe is the only way to combat every aspect of these injustices and deprivations; simultaneously, it is the true path toward humanity’s ultimate liberation from the very foundations of this anti-human system. The answer is that the anti-capitalist movement aimed at abolishing wage labour must be organized with ever-increasing strength and vigour everywhere: in all centres of work and production, across all spheres of human social life, and throughout the entire world.
All the world’s capitalist states, all bourgeois opposition factions whether within or outside the structure of capitalist political power all defenders of the wage-slavery system, all pro-capitalist labour unions, a vast number of trade union activists within the global labour movement, and all party-based sects operating under the false banners of “labour” and “communism” all of them, in practice and through their own lived activities, deny and reject the capacity of the world’s working masses to organize this movement. States meet every trace of this movement and any mention or discussion of it with gunfire. Bourgeois thinkers, ideologues, and intellectual and cultural representatives target every stir of this movement with the massive arsenals of superstition and the bourgeois engineering of intellectual distortion. Leaders of global labour unions acting “more Catholic than the Pope” and even more vigorously than bourgeois states mobilize forces to stifle the movement’s nascent stirrings. Syndicalist activists within the labour movement tell workers that any talk of a movement to abolish wage labour is mere utopian fantasy or idle superstition. Sectarians entrenched in parties cry out in defence of their factions from every direction, actively seeking to stoke a hostile front against the working masses’ movement to abolish wage labour.
But, the movement against capitalism and for the abolition of wage labour is a genuine movement more real and legitimate than any other, more familiar and tangible to workers, more future-oriented, more grounded in reality, and possessing the broadest material foundations for its emergence, formation, and development within the very lives, work, and social existence of the vast masses of the world’s labour-power sellers. It is the only movement that eschews all forms of mystification, utopian speculation, and abstract theorizing; those who claim or imagine otherwise are either knowing enemies or misguided friends. Let us examine the nature of this movement: What does it stand for? What is the horizon of its struggle? What forms does its self-expression and the actual exercise of its power take? What are the fundamental obstacles in its path? How does it organize? How does it gather strength? And where and under what conditions does it achieve victory?
The movement to abolish wage labour is a movement of the world’s working masses against the exploitation, oppression, and disenfranchisement inherent in capitalism across all spheres of social life. This movement identifies the existence of the capitalist system as the root cause of all current forms of misery. This is the most honest, scientific, transparent, and indisputable truth in the world. Human hunger stems from unemployment or meagre wages; thus, human hunger is a function of the dictates of capital’s profitability. People across the globe lack housing, shelter, drinking water, electricity, and the necessities of life because unemployment or the low price at which they sell their labour power renders them unable to afford these essentials; such deprivation, misery, and indignity constitute a crime committed by capital against humanity. Every day, vast numbers of the world’s population die in the most horrific and shocking manner victims of unsanitary conditions and a lack of doctors, medicines, and medical care simply because the resources required for their health and survival are instead converted into greater profits for capital. The continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are teeming with street children and young child labourers, as their working-class parents, crushed by the weight of capitalist exploitation, lack the means to care for and support them. A vast number of women worldwide engage in sex work to support themselves and their children because capital seeks to utilize this massive population solely as sex workers. Patriarchy, gender and ethnic discrimination, and vile “honour”-based prejudices are becoming increasingly catastrophic by the moment, as the survival of all these sinister phenomena is entirely compatible with the reproduction of capital’s mode of production, civilization, and legal structure.
This analysis offered by the movement to abolish wage labour identifies the root of human woes within the objective reality of the existing world; it is the most accurate and the only honest perspective on this specific issue. Those who spin elaborate, nonsensical tales to uproot the causes of so much human misery from the soil of capitalism and transplant them elsewhere are charlatans. It is an absolute falsehood to claim that patriarchy, gender and ethnic discrimination, child labour, or any other such crime are merely unwanted legacies inherited by capitalism from previous systems!
The Movement for Abolition of Paid Work says that at this very moment, all the necessities of life and welfare and social facilities are available in sufficient quantity for all people. Right now, poverty, poverty, lack of health, lack of education and all existing human deprivations can be consigned to the archives of history. This is the truest word. In the few lines above, we have shown its truth from the statistics and figures of the centres of the capitalist system. In the capitalist system, the entire work product of billions of workers in the world is turned into capital, capital and again capital instead of being dedicated to comfort and welfare and health and education and entertainment and human growth. Capitalism, in search of profit and profit and profit, allocates a huge and dominant part of its work or products to products that not only have nothing to do with the needs of life, well-being, health and intellectual development of mankind, which is exactly the absolute wind up and destroyer of all of them. If the world is full of poverty, if schools are dismantled, if hospitals are closed, if people do not have drinking water, it has nothing to do with the lack of work and production in the world. Everything is available.
On this very basis and grounded in this undeniable, established truth—the movement to abolish wage labour demands, above all else, a definitive guarantee of a specific standard of living and social well-being. This standard must correspond to each individual’s per capita share of total social production and output, and must include free healthcare, education, and medical treatment; free childcare; free housing, water, and electricity; free transportation; and completely free care for the elderly. These guarantees are to extend to every citizen of every country and to all inhabitants of the globe employed or unemployed, women and men, young and old alike.
This is the first point of the manifesto of the movement to abolish wage labour. By proposing such a charter of fundamental rights for all human beings, the movement defines the central axis upon which it concentrates its forces in the class war against capitalism. This is the true battlefront. Determining the fate of the product of labour constitutes the real and fundamental arena of our class’s struggle against the system of wage slavery. The lifeblood of capital lies in our exploitation, in the appropriation of our surplus labour, and in the transformation of the fruits of our labour and production into capital. The centre of gravity of our attack against capital will be here. The members of the masses of our class, together with all the humanity present in every country and in all the world, regardless of where they live, regardless of whether they work or not, hit or die, are children or young and old, healthy or sick, regardless of all these, they should have the best food, housing, clothing, health and treatment, education, entertainment and other welfare facilities, equivalent to their per capita share of the labour and social production in the world. The products of work and production of our class should not and absolutely should not be turned into capital, it should be planned in the direction of providing the necessities of life and the free growth of all human beings.
The entry point to the real front of our war is here. It is at this point that we begin to concentrate our fighting forces. War is the war of determining the fate of the product of work and production, preventing the capitalization of this product and fighting for its planning in response to the real needs of mankind. This is why we are fighting against the entire capitalist system, all the political and civil injustices and injustices of this system, against the government and the political order and its reactionary means of violence, and against all existing objects.
But, at this very juncture the moment these demands and this indictment are put forward—all the aforementioned groups will line up against us and against the movement to abolish wage labour, deploying their full capacity for hostility, demagoguery, and hypocrisy. Governments will immediately declare war and issue orders for combat readiness and repression to all military and police forces and the apparatus of reactionary coercion. Labor union leaders will scramble with lightning speed to collude with the capitalists against our movement. Syndicalist activists within our class movement will raise a clamour from all sides, crying, “Seize the heretics!” and “Hang the subversives!” The isolated denizens of party sects will devote every page and column of their newspapers to denouncing our “ultra-leftism.” Syndicalists will wail, “Workers have no bread; is this really the time to fight against capitalism?!” The die-hard adherents of party and factional sects will stir up an uproar from every direction, demanding to know what will become of the overthrow of the dictatorship and the attainment of democracy. “Can such things even be done,” they will ask, “without first settling accounts with the dictatorship and establishing democracy?”
The movement to abolish wage labour will stand firm against all assaults whether unified or fragmented launched from above; it will do so armed with the most resounding arguments, logic as towering as Everest, and a force equal to the collective might of all humanity. The substance of this resistance is multifaceted, comprising a wide array of actions, strategies, and approaches. First and foremost, a warning to capital, the capitalists, and their state be silent, wait, and listen! We have demanded but a tiny fraction of the vast mountain range of wealth created by our own labour and production and this is merely the beginning. Then, an appeal to all: how long must we perish from the hunger, poverty, and misery wrought by capitalist exploitation? How long must millions of us be sacrificed in the tawdry, nauseating spectacle of swapping one capitalist administration for another? How long must the fighting spirit of our class in the name of “revolution” be squandered and dragged into the cesspool of this or that faction of capital’s decrepit, spent old guard? How long must our chests be riddled with bullets in battles fought over mere pennies and pittance wages? If we are destined to die, why not die with the pride, dignity, and noble honour of the working class? Why not fall on the true battlefield where the fate the very existence or annihilation of the capitalist system is decided? Struggle and conspire against our movement from within and without all you please; blacken the pages of your newspapers to your heart’s content.
But know this: we hold immense power in our hands; we will bring the wheels of labour and production to a halt everywhere. We will go on strike. We will paralyze the entire capitalist system, halt the process of capital reproduction, and block the arteries of profit generation across the board. We will persist in this course of action until we achieve our goals and realize our demands. Thirdly, why do you engage in demagoguery? Why are you so hypocritical? Why do you interpret the fact that “the worker has no bread” to mean that the worker must not struggle against capitalism?!!! The worker lacks bread precisely because the capitalist turns that bread into capital; to reclaim their bread, the worker must fight against capitalism over the fate of the product of their labour. Fourthly, the path to overthrowing the bourgeois state lies here not in the salt flats and arid deserts of “democracy.” It is the movement to abolish wage labour that must overthrow the bourgeois state and establish a council-based organization of labour and a communist civilization; you have got it completely backwards.
The opposing camp will undoubtedly sneer at us. This time, the voices are vastly different. We do not parrot the rhetoric of government officials or the apparatuses of capitalist repression. Entitled veteran syndicalists will shriek that nothing can be achieved without syndicates and “state-independent organizations,” while partisan sectarians will shout that without recourse to their parties or the parties of their “leading figures” our cause is doomed and our very existence hangs by a thread. Our answer to them is crystal clear: we have absolutely no need for the unions or the syndicalist and party-based prescriptions you peddle. For these formulas offer no cure for any ailment. Your “independent organizations” serve only to dissolve our movement into the agendas and profit-driven interests of capital; they pave the way for our class’s funeral procession to the graveyard of capitalism. As for your party sects and factions, they are nothing more than playgrounds for children, sanctuaries for the bankrupt remnants of nationalist movements, arenas for flirting with capitalist democracy, cloisters for those praying for a seat in power structures far removed from the lives and struggles of workers, or simply venues to satisfy the repressed desires of individuals within the capitalist world. Neither mass organizations nor party structures nor any similar cliques can resolve the challenges facing our movement. You are all dreamers, naive and utopian; what we require is an organization of ironclad resolve and steadfastness a powerful force capable of waging a truly monumental struggle. To us, this is far more self-evident than even simple geometric propositions.
We know and are fully aware that we need power to impose our demands upon the bourgeoisie. Without mobilizing this power on the greatest possible scale, we cannot realize our aspirations or force them upon our class enemy. Our power lies in our unity and our organization. However, our organization and unity must take the form of an organized anti-capitalist movement aimed at abolishing the wage-labour system for our class. We must organize yet simply creating trade-based or factory-specific organizations even assuming they are independent of the state will not enable us to achieve any of our demands anywhere. Various segments of our class cannot bring their true, effective, and potent class power to bear against capital merely by resorting to scattered struggles and isolated strikes here and there. Workers in the textile, timber, and agricultural sectors along with those in many other workplaces and production sites across Iranian society pose no effective threat to the bourgeoisie so long as they remain confined within the narrow, insular limits of workplace-specific struggles. Millions of unemployed workers given the weak, fragmented, and disorganized state of our class movement can be weaponized against the struggles of their fellow workers. Factors such as widespread global unemployment; the gruelling, destructive competition among sellers of labour power in the current grim climate; the total lack of job security for any segment of the working masses; capital’s efficient mobilization to rapidly replace striking workers with unemployed strike-breakers; and the significant reallocation of capital from less profitable sectors to more lucrative ones all these elements have tipped the balance of power in the arena of scattered workshop and factory strikes to the detriment of our movement. Moreover, let us not forget that the balance of power between us and capital in this type of strike regardless of its significance, scale, or impact has historically, and throughout the past, always been woefully unfavourable to us.
To impose our demands upon the enemy, we must bring the greatest and most effective fighting force of our class into the arena; to achieve this, all sectors of our class must unite and organize within a nationwide, anti-capitalist, and anti-wage-labour organization. We must establish an organization that interlinks the fighting forces of oil workers, steelworkers, utility workers (electricity and water), workers across the entire education sector and school system, healthcare workers including the entire nursing and auxiliary nursing workforce as well as workers in agriculture, fisheries, infrastructure, ports, automotive and home appliance manufacturing, food production, the vast ranks of the unemployed, and workers in the timber, textile, and pharmaceutical industries indeed, workers from every single sector of production and labour. This is the only form of organization capable of bringing the unified and decisive power of our class in any society and across the globe into the broad arena of the class struggle against capital.
From within such nationwide anti-capitalist organizations, the vast masses of our class will be able like a powerful bomb to simultaneously bring the entire structure of life and the process of social capital reproduction in any given country to a standstill. By establishing such organizations and uniting nationwide within them, we will declare war on the bourgeoisie. We will demand the immediate realization of our charter of fundamental rights. To compel the bourgeoisie to yield and accept our demands, we will shut off the oil valves. Simultaneously, we will halt the production of steel, automobiles, construction materials, and everything else. We will close the schools. We will plunge factories into total darkness. We will bring everything to a halt; and alongside all these actions, we will present to the bourgeoisie our concrete, living, and tangible class alternative replacing capitalism with a council-based organization of labour and a communist civilization as the goal of our struggle and the envisioned future of our class conflict. Commensurate with our strength and the immense capacity of our campaign, we will force the bourgeoisie to submit and accept our demands.
Our organization will be a council-based structure a hub for the creative, effective, and direct participation of every individual within the masses of our class in determining how the struggle is advanced, defining demands, selecting strategies, and shaping the movement’s course. Here, there is no place for paternalistic veterans claiming proprietary rights, nor for artificial, self-anointed figures. As a nationwide, anti-capitalist council organization dedicated to abolishing wage labour for the masses of our class, it is free from the shrines and idols typical of sects or trade unions. Here, workers engaged in the ongoing struggle against capital deliberate together on all aspects of that struggle in a manner that is united, comradely, and humane. We need such an organization. Only this form of organization can bring the immense and decisive power of our class into the fray against the bourgeoisie. Only this mode of organizing within this specific front of class struggle empowers us to compel the monstrous, terrifying, and arbitrary force of capital to yield to our class’s demands and expectations.
As we voice these ideas and speak of this battlefront and this form of organization, the outcry from our movement’s opponents will grow far more vehement and resounding. They will unanimously dismiss it all as empty talk! Syndicalists will ask:
Are all workers communists, such that they would be willing to unite in a movement to abolish wage labour? The overwhelming majority of workers have only specific trade-based demands; they are prepared to struggle solely to improve their livelihoods and well-being within the existing system, with no interest in anything beyond that! Sects those pilgrims to the shrines of various groups and parties will ask: Has the bourgeois state died, allowing the worker masses the opportunity to form such an organization?! Is it even possible to speak of organizing workers against capitalism without overthrowing the state and establishing and guaranteeing the permanence of broad democracy?! Furthermore, leaving all that aside, what becomes of the issue of working-class party formation? This initiative runs counter to the principle of party organization and is, for that very reason, strongly condemned. Some will raise a clamour, arguing that the workers’ movement is merely spontaneous and trade-unionist in nature; that worker, in the scope and breadth of their struggles, have no concept of opposing or abolishing wage labour so what are these fantasies you are spinning?!
These are merely the protests, outcries, and criticisms voiced by factions claiming to belong to the labour movement criticisms directed at the movement for the abolition of wage labour. The actions of the bourgeois state and the capitalist class’s machinery of coercion and repression require no elaboration. But the response to all these arguments, criticisms, and outcries is equally clear. To the syndicalists and proponents of trade union struggles, we say: Yes, the vast mass of workers fights for their livelihood, for a better life, for food, water, housing, and social security yet capitalism adamantly withholds all of this from them. Driven by the pursuit of ever-greater profits and the inexorable laws of capital accumulation, the capitalist system not only rejects the demands of the working masses but forcibly strips them of any gains they may have previously secured anywhere in the world. Consequently, to achieve even these basic, minimal demands, the working masses have no alternative but to mobilize with ever-increasing strength against the entirety of the capitalist system. To syndicalists in all their various guises and configurations we say: no worker is a die-hard fan of being capital’s wage-slave, nor are they eager to sacrifice their own or their spouses and children’s bread, housing, education, healthcare, well-being, leisure, and recreation merely to swell capital’s profits. When any worker sees capital transforming the entire product of their toil, suffering, and labour into further capital and profit, they are ready to battle capitalism; they feel no shame, hesitation, or reluctance in rightfully and genuinely defining their movement as anti-capitalist. We tell the syndicalist spectrum that communism is not a mere collection of doctrinal beliefs or tenets acceptance or rejection of which determines whether a worker is a communist, a non-communist, or an anti-communist; on the contrary, it is the working class’s movement against exploitation, oppression, and the very foundations of capitalism. Many workers are communists without ever needing to explicitly declare or affirm it. Furthermore, it is not necessary for all workers to be communists in order to organize alongside their class brethren in the struggle against capitalism and the wage-labour system. A worker may believe in God, saints, and prophets, yet these superstitions offer no remedy for their plight; in their ongoing conflict with capital, such beliefs invariably side with the capitalist whereas the worker, as a seller of labour power, has no other way to secure a dignified, humane life than to seize the capitalist and the capitalist system by the throat. For all these reasons, please do not engage in demagoguery; it is you and those like you who instil and force upon the working masses the idea of not opposing wage labour and not opposing capitalism.
In response to the sectarians, we would say that if the repressive power the army, the police, and the machinery of capitalist coercion were to determine the very existence of the workers’ movement, then workers in a society like Iran or indeed anywhere else in the world would never have engaged in any struggle, battle, or conflict. The crucial point is that capitalist dictatorship, pressure, repression, and savagery have not deterred workers from pursuing their struggle and their goals. Everywhere, the working masses have fought amidst the thunder and lightning of the most brutal dictatorships; yet alas, alas, and alas again they have failed to concentrate their class forces on the real and primary front: the struggle against capitalism and for the abolition of wage labour. While they have constantly been at war with the capitalist system, the pressure of the bankrupt “petty-bourgeois socialist” solutions advocated by your ilk syndicalists, social democrats, “people’s socialists,” and all your political and class kin has prevented them from focusing their strength on the fundamental and decisive axis of the conflict. Fear of the police, torture, imprisonment, executions by firing squad, and bloodbaths certainly pose major obstacles to the organization of the workers’ movement against wage labour; nevertheless, the struggle to achieve such organization must and can be waged even under the shadow of this very capitalist savagery and slaughter. You might ask: “What, then, becomes of the question of party formation?” Here, too, our answer is explicit and clear: for us, neither party formation nor any other type of organization serves as a starting point, a sacred principle, or a holy shrine of salvation. For us, what is sacred is the human being the liberation of humanity from the evils of exploitation, class divisions, and capitalism (the source and architect of all current human misery); the liberation of the individual from every form of constraint, including the constraint of labour; and the ultimate freedom of humanity from the shackles of anything other than itself. What we hold sacred is the struggle to achieve this goal. Our movement the movement to abolish wage labour is the vehicle for the world’s workers to realize this vision. It is this movement that must become organized, form a party, or take whatever other shape or name is required. If wage labour is to be eliminated, only this movement possesses the capacity to eradicate it. Our party cannot simply be a “miracle-less shrine” looming over us; such a conception is, in every respect, the bourgeois version of a party. The true guarantee, the foundation, the vehicle, and the genuine pathway for our struggle against capitalism, our confrontation with the bourgeois state, and our fight to abolish wage labour or to establish socialism is solely and exclusively our own nationwide organization dedicated to opposing capitalism and abolishing wage labour.
We know with absolute clarity that within the nationwide anti-capitalist organization of the working masses, not everyone views the goals of the struggle, the class-based alternative to the fight, the specific interpretation of socialism, and various other issues through the same lens. On this basis, we firmly believe that the genuine activists of the movement to abolish wage labour the true communists, the Marx and worker-communists must establish relationships among themselves that are as solid, close, conscious, and thoughtful as possible within this nationwide anti-wage-labour organization we emphasize: within this organization, at the very heart of its council-based relations, and without any form of separation or detachment from it. Proletarian party-building will consist of the close, profound ties characterized by the utmost unity, solidarity, and cooperation among these most advanced communist activists deep within the nationwide, deeply council-based, anti-capitalist, and anti-wage-labour organization of the working masses. Proletarian party-building will manifest as the most dynamic, comprehensive, determined, united, and deeply integrated activity of these activists within that nationwide anti-wage-labour organization, all directed toward the abolition of wage labour. The workers’ party will serve as the circulatory system of this nationwide, council-based, anti-capitalist movement, as well as its unified and organized structure. Therefore, you would do well to stop brandishing the club of “anti-party” condemnation against us; we hold a difference regarding your version of the party that is as profound as the difference between us and any bourgeois conception of party organization.
We will elaborate on all these responses one by one, yet we are well aware that the opposition will not remain silent. They and this time, specifically the internal opposition or those claiming to represent the movement of our class will declare in unison, with anger and a tone steeped in mockery: “Let us assume all these arguments are correct very well, let them be correct! But is it actually feasible or possible, under current conditions in an era devoid of any signs of a revolutionary upsurge or an imminent uprising to overthrow the regime to organize an anti-capitalist workers’ council movement or to establish a nationwide council-based organization of the working masses aimed at abolishing wage labour?” They will ask: “How and through what connections or resources do you intend to establish a nationwide workers’ organization one that is council-based, anti-capitalist, and dedicated to abolishing wage labour for a working class that does not yet possess even a few proper, effective trade unions?” Among the arguments, objections, and protests raised by this internal opposition or these claimants, this final question is the most realistic and fundamental one. We must be fair and take this question very seriously. But the response from the movement for the abolition of wage labour is equally serious. Activists of this movement would reply that pointing this out is merely stating the obvious. This task is undoubtedly difficult, for it involves laying the true cornerstone of the movement to abolish wage labour the solid foundation for transforming the existing objective reality. This is not a matter of begging the capitalist system for legal recognition. Securing the right to strike is not a matter of latching onto the realm of “civil society” under capitalism, nor is it a legalistic struggle. It is not about begging for years for a stale bargaining “forum” with the capitalist system, nor about burning bridges and sacrificing one’s own dignity. It is not merely a gathering of a few people in a friendly circle or the declaration of a political party. This is the true front of the workers’ class war against capitalism. Every step toward success in this endeavour demands struggle, and yet more struggle. As prudent, resourceful, and self-sacrificing activists deeply attuned to the suffering, seasoned by hardship, and fiercely committed to the working-class cause we must tirelessly seek out other activists and militant, socially conscious elements of the labour movement. We must do this everywhere: from workshop to workshop, factory to factory, farm to farm, school to school, hospital to hospital, home to home, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and city to city day and night, at all times. We must cultivate a precise, profound, broad, and comprehensive understanding of working and living conditions, and a clear grasp of capitalist reality including the exploitation, disenfranchisement, and oppression of the masses of our class within this barbaric system. Amidst these social relations, we must whisper and whisper again about the manifesto of the workers’ fundamental anti-capitalist and anti-wage-labour demands, sharing these ideas in intimate conversations of two, three, or four people, in small circles, and in larger gatherings. Gradually, these whispers must be raised to a shout. Such relationships must breathe life into the foundations and living cells of the anti-capitalist class movement within centres of labour and production. These living cells and tissues of our movement’s organism can and must play the most active role in the daily struggles of the working masses. These cells and activists are capable of using the class’s ongoing struggles as a platform for their own growth, maturation, consolidation, and accumulation of strength; simultaneously, they must strive to adopt all effective tactics and strategies to ensure the victory of these struggles over the enemy. Through their creative and self-sacrificing participation in the workers’ daily struggles, these cells and circles will endeavour to disseminate the content of the class’s fundamental demands as widely as possible into the workers’ awakening consciousness, transforming them into the workers’ own recognized and legitimate expectations. In this process, these interconnected relationships, circles, and activists will strive to lay the cornerstone of workers’ councils across various centres of labour and production, while simultaneously forging and consolidating the internal cohesion and unity of these councils into an ironclad network of labour communication serving as the foundation for a nationwide organization of workers against the wage-labour system. It is precisely within the depths of these very efforts that workers across the oil, iron smelting, petrochemical, steel, tire manufacturing, agricultural food, construction, utilities (water and electricity), home appliance, textile, transport and communications, education, healthcare, and media sectors will join hands even before the establishment and structuring of their own nationwide, anti-capitalist council organizations. The oil worker will not abandon their class comrades in the textile industry; water and electricity workers will rush to the aid of woodworkers the moment a strike is announced. Workers in key areas of labour and production will warn the capitalists and their state that their own strikes will serve as a reliable and omnipresent backing for strikes in other sectors. It is within this network of interactions, mutual solidarity, and shared struggle that every protest, uprising, strike, and confrontation will bring capital to its knees, and the working-class masses of any society will realize they possess the immense power to settle scores with and ultimately destroy their class enemy.
Following these discussions, let us this time ask the opposition (specifically those who claim to be “insiders” of the movement) whether they truly believe these actions are impossible. An affirmative answer to this question is merely the answer of the bourgeoisie. All the forms of action, struggles, uprisings, and conflicts we have mentioned here in terms of their nature, their feasibility, or their impossibility have occurred amply throughout the history of the labour movement, both in Iran and globally. And the bitter irony of history is that all these past events have validated the arguments of the genuine activists of the anti-capitalist and wage-labour-abolitionist movement, while starkly refuting the baseless, petty-bourgeois claims made by all of you. During the lifetime of the First International, the workers of Europe demonstrated one of the most magnificent displays of class solidarity against the European bourgeoisie; the passionate mutual support among workers across various European nations harnessed the united power of the continent’s working masses, compelling the bourgeoisie to retreat and forcing capitalists to accede to workers’ demands. During the historic uprising of the Paris Communards, we witnessed how activists from labour movements elsewhere in Europe even without broad, continent-wide organization and despite the First International’s state of relative passivity stood firmly by their class brethren in France. With the October Revolution, Russian workers shook the world of the global bourgeoisie to its foundations. At specific historical junctures, massive labour movements in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, and other European nations rocked the very pillars of the bourgeois order. Labor movements in Latin America and Asia played a pivotal role in numerous revolutions and the rise and fall of governments. Iran’s working class overthrew the Shah’s bourgeois state; in short, the history of the last two centuries worldwide has been defined everywhere by the presence, protest, and struggle of the working masses. On the international stage, our class has shown no lack of resolve regarding struggle, uprising, revolution, and the overthrow of governments; indeed, it has been actively engaged in these battles everywhere. What it has largely failed to do is concentrate its class forces on the axis of actual warfare against the very foundation of the wage-labour system, or to array its ranks on the battlefront dedicated to the abolition of wage labour. This and this alone have been and remains the Achilles’ heel of our movement and the root cause of all our historical defeats at the hands of the savage capitalist system. It is precisely here that we have suffered the most devastating and lethal blows from the bourgeois enemy; and let it be known to the world that you syndicalists and syndicalist-worshippers, sectarians and idolaters of sectarian fetishes, nationalists masquerading under the banners of labour and communism, “people’s socialists,” social democrats, and, in short, bourgeois socialists have played the greatest and most decisive role in inflicting these defeats upon us and in siding with the bourgeoisie against us. In the destruction of our International and the establishment of the Social Democratic International upon its ruins; in the defeat of the October Revolution and the leading of our class into the wasteland of exploitation, malice, and the savagery of state capitalism; in the defeat of the great movements of our fellow-strugglers across Europe; and in obscuring and darkening the horizon of our class struggle whether in Iran’s 1979 Revolution or in the various revolutions across Asia, Latin America, and Africa throughout the twentieth century you acted everywhere to the benefit of capital and to the detriment of our movement for the abolition of wage labour. We readily acknowledge and strongly admit that, in most instances, the aim was to serve and assist; yet let us not forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. More importantly, when we speak of you and your ilk, we are not speaking of outsiders. Activists within our class movement across the globe have been deeply complicit in all your delusions, deceptions, and deviations. Together, we have imposed the current painful and wretched state of affairs upon the lives, labour, and struggles of the masses of our class.
Let us not digress. The point is that our class has certainly not lacked struggles or revolutions on the stage of world history in recent centuries. The persistent problem has been our subjugation, and the distortion and squandering of our fighting power within the stranglehold of bourgeois solutions. Therefore, by breaking free from these solutions, by mobilizing our genuine fighting forces onto the true battlefront against capital, and by channelling our full offensive capacity into the core struggle against the wage-labour system, we can be highly optimistic about advancing the class struggle and achieving our socialist goals. Above all, we can establish and expand a nationwide, anti-capitalist council-based organization dedicated to the abolition of wage labour.
It goes without saying that at every step of this endeavour, our movement will bear the brunt of severe blows first and foremost from the bourgeois state and the capitalist class, and subsequently from syndicalist, sectarian, and similar approaches. But, by engaging the enemy directly on the true front of the class war, we will on that very same front heal the wounds inflicted by these blows, analyse our setbacks to pave the way for future victories, mitigate our weaknesses, and rectify our shortcomings. In the very heart of this struggle, we deepen our class knowledge and ever more profoundly explore and refine our class alternative to the existing capitalist reality. We transform Marx’s teachings into a material weapon of combat, root out the ugly bourgeois ideas that have infiltrated our minds, and purge capitalist strategies and approaches from our intellectual outlook. We liberate theory and practice ideas and reality from all forms of duality, bifurcation, and separation, honing them instead through transparent revolutionary and communist praxis. Amidst this real struggle to determine our destiny, we engage in debate with kindred class tendencies within our movement; we challenge syndicalism and, should it prove obstinate, banish it from the arena of our struggles. We call upon sectarians to shatter their sectarian idols, and if they refuse, we leave them to their own sectarian pursuits. Here, within this monumental class struggle against capitalism and for the abolition of wage labour, we weave all these elements together, advancing a passionate history of struggle a history of genuine working-class and Marxist combat against capitalism in the life of our own class.
As a first step, our movement organized around the council-based struggle to abolish wage labour will fight for the most immediate and comprehensive realization of a charter of basic rights for the working masses. Our charter will serve as a manifesto for the working class’s war against capitalism across every sphere of social existence a nationwide front as vast as the class struggle against capital itself, with battlements erected at every step and in every corner. Within this all-encompassing front, the battle waged by women against all forms of inequality, gender-based oppression, patriarchy, and social disenfranchisement is by no means separate or distinct from the other battlefronts. The root of all such disenfranchisement lies deep within the accumulated, putrid sediment of capitalism, and every battle is ultimately a battle against capital. If human beings were liberated from the buying and selling of labour power, from the commodification of their own labour, from the predicament of being forced to work for a livelihood, and from the condition that ties life and social well-being to employment, no human problem would remain. Inequalities regarding gender, the valuation of labour power as a commodity, roles within capitalist production, and positioning within the planning of labour, production, and social life all are imposed by capital; the anti-capitalist council movement is a movement against all these inequalities.
Here, we struggle against environmental pollution, child labour, patriarchy and the disenfranchisement of women, political repression and dictatorship, ethnic prejudice and religious superstition, unemployment, and every other crime of capital just as we fight to compel capitalists and the capitalist system to grant the highest possible standards of living and social welfare. Our struggle across all these arenas and battlefronts is a struggle against the wage-labour system, aimed at the ultimate abolition of wage labour itself.
Thus, with the vision of abolishing capitalism, through a step-by-step effort to unite our ranks, and driven by the dynamism, fervour, and selfless dedication of our activists to build phase by phase a nationwide, council-based organization opposed to wage labour, our movement will forge its path through the ups and downs and the arduous twists and turns of the class struggle. Along this journey, we will endure defeats and face setbacks, just as we will achieve victories and make advances. Along this entire protracted front, we will confront and engage in battle step by step and moment by moment with the bourgeois state: with its military arsenals; with its machinery of coercion, repression, and slaughter; with the myriad intrigues, plots, and schemes of its intellectual, political, and cultural representatives; and with the diverse solutions and strategies of the various factions of the bourgeoisie. Our war against the political regime will unfold within this very context; herein lies a crucial distinction between our movement and any reformist movement whether militant or peaceful operating within or outside the sphere of the working class’s social existence. We shall fire upon the bourgeois state from the surging ramparts of anti-capitalism; our movement will never stray into the dead-ends or false paths of a quest for democracy that lies outside the direct orbit of the struggle against capital. From the perspective of our movement, political freedoms and civil rights constitute the ongoing battlefronts of the proletariat’s class struggle against capital. For us, freedom signifies the liberty to determine the destiny of the fruits of labour; it means every citizen’s right to direct, effective, and decisive participation in the planning of labour, production, and social life; it means liberation from the constraints and conditions of wage labour; and it means emancipation from the sinister presence of a state that looms over citizens like a nightmare. These are the meanings of freedom in the lexicon of our anti-capitalist movement; consequently, our struggle for political freedoms is inseparable from the fundamental battle against wage labour. In the culture of our movement, civil rights signify consigning the civility, legality, contractually, and civil order of capital to the archives of history and establishing a new form of civility and legality one founded on the principle that the flourishing and free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of all. Our struggle to secure these rights and freedoms is an integral and inseparable part of our nationwide movement against wage labour and for the abolition of the wage-labour system. On this very basis, our battle against dictatorship and the dictatorial state against political repression and the absence of social rights and freedoms constitutes an inseparable component of our anti-capitalist struggle.
The charter of fundamental rights of our class’s anti-capitalist movement serves as an initial manifesto, corresponding to the degree of concentrated combat power we can muster against the bourgeoisie to impose these and all previously stated demands upon the capitalist system. The ultimate goal of our struggle is the definitive and fundamental abolition of wage labour and the establishment of a communist civilization. But, at every stage of this struggle commensurate with the alignment of class forces and our own level of readiness and combat preparation we can compel the bourgeoisie to accede to our demands. Throughout the ebbs and flows of this protracted historical campaign, we might well topple the bourgeois state from power perhaps even multiple times without succeeding in establishing our own system of workers’ councils and communist civilization; we might even fail, for a considerable time, to secure high standards of living, healthcare, housing, utilities, education, childcare, elderly care, and other free social amenities. Nevertheless, across every inch of the battlefront, and in proportion to our combat strength and the forces we mobilize, we will force the bourgeoisie to retreat and accept our demands.
The question of whether our advances and the bourgeoisie’s retreats occur in phases following sporadic, nationwide, or other forms of uprisings and revolts is a matter of reflection, strategy, analysis, and decision-making regarding the scope, capacity, and depth of the struggle waged by the broad masses of our class through anti-capitalist council-based organization aimed at abolishing wage labour. Whenever and under whatever conditions we are able, we will like our comrades in Argentina welcome the expropriation of factories and the planning of their operations and production by our own councils. As soon as we are able, we will bring key sectors of labour and production to a simultaneous halt, thereby inflicting the most extensive setbacks upon the capitalist system. We will sever the lifelines of capital oil, electricity, and the steel industry and in doing so, deepen our class’s pressure on the entirety of capitalist labour and production planning. At any moment and in any situation where we can, we will disrupt the entire process of capitalist production and reproduction; relying on our immense class power, we will accelerate the collapse of the bourgeois state and the overthrow of capitalism as a whole.
Our movement, along this very axis of struggle following the organization of countless massive strikes, repeated uprisings, various ebbs and flows, numerous offensives, and both forced and calculated retreats; in the wake of enduring defeats and recovering from the ravages of conflict; and at a juncture marked by advance, growth, the mustering of forces, a shift in the balance of power, and the capacity for mass mobilization will bring down the machinery of coercion and the entire bourgeois state. We shall triumph over the bourgeoisie; our nationwide anti-capitalist council organization having amassed, over years of struggle, a vast wealth of experience, education, and readiness for the abolition of wage labour will assume the task of planning labour, production, and the order of social life as the council-based organization of labour and socialist civilization. We will set to work with all our might to dismantle the system of wage slavery and to abolish the state, classes, and class society.
The movement to abolish wage labour is an internationalist movement a movement of all the world’s workers against global capital and against the very foundation of the relationship involving the buying and selling of labour power and the production of surplus value worldwide. At every step of our struggle in every moment, phase, and stage we will strive to clasp the hands of our class comrades across the globe and in the remotest corners of the capitalist hellscape with ever-greater warmth and firmness. With every ounce of our thought, speech, writing, action, and intent, we will endeavour to mobilize the strength of our movement bringing it into the fray in support of every strike, uprising, protest, and anti-capitalist struggle waged by workers anywhere in the world. Simultaneously, we will call upon workers in every society and corner of the globe to lend their steadfast support to our strikes, protests, and demands. We will urge all the world’s workers to concentrate the full force of our international class struggle and fire it straight into the heart of the capitalist system.
From its very inception, the internationalist working-class movement has championed demands shared by all workers worldwide. Our charter of fundamental rights is a charter of common demands for workers across the globe and throughout the capitalist world. Securing and guaranteeing a standard of living commensurate with the per capita share of global social production; free housing, water, electricity, and transportation; free healthcare, medication, and medical treatment; free education; free care for the elderly and the disabled; free childcare; the total abolition of child labour; and the elimination of all forms of gender, ethnic, and racial inequality these constitute the fundamental demands of all workers worldwide. Our internationalist movement will strive with all its might to compel the realization of these basic, elementary demands and expectations for all workers for the working masses of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and for the citizens of all societies within the global capitalist order.
Our class-based, internationalist movement views the struggle against all forms of war and warmongering by global capital, the struggle against capital’s barbaric aggressions and incursions into regions such as Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, and Africa, and the struggle against all forms of capitalist crime, savagery, and inhumanity on a global scale as interconnected links in the overarching chain of our own struggle. Wars are an arena of capitalist barbarism directed against the masses of our class and constitute a specific component of capital’s strategies to enforce the permanence of wage slavery upon workers. It is our internationalist movement that, through united and coordinated action disrupting the capitalist order of production and society on a global scale can prevent the thuggish and unrestrained capitalist states from stoking the fires of war. In Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and everywhere else, it is the masses of our class bound by a shared destiny and their lives that are being destroyed, slaughtered, and bombarded by fascist armies and the military arsenals of capital. Confronting this barbarism is the imperative and unquestionable duty of our internationalist movement. It is our international anti-capitalist movement that must hasten to the aid of Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Balkan, and African workers. The existing world, in every fibre of its being, is the arena of our continuous struggle against capital. We shall be the true victors of this monumental class and historical struggle.