Nasser Paydar July 2010, Part one
Centuries ago, history’s astute midwife delivered our first generation from the womb of the commodity economy. We entered the world as individuals whose labour power was a commodity indeed, their sole possession and as sellers of that labour power: wage slaves alienated from both the work they performed and the products they created, stripped of any right to determine the destiny of their labour, its fruits, or their own lives. It was by these very characteristics that we were distinguished from our forebears; we became workers. To survive, we sold our labour power to capital and generated capital; through our emergence, capital previously existing in mercantile, usurious, and similar forms was transformed into the capital of the capitalist era. A new historical relationship took shape: the buying and selling of labour power, the relationship between labour and capital. In this dynamic, we laboured and produced, yet the product of our toil became capital that was the absolute property of the capitalist. It was a relationship that gave rise to and subsequently fostered the growth and development of our class of wage slaves on one side and the capitalist class on the other, ultimately establishing them as the two principal classes of contemporary society and the modern world. This relationship was the origin and source of the inevitable conflict between our class and the capitalist class. The sale of our labour power became a life-or-death compulsion a prerequisite for our very survival. We had no choice but to toil for the capitalists for twelve, fourteen, sixteen, or sometimes even more hours a day. Our only share of this gruelling, destructive, and deadly workday was the price of our labour power our wages. We produced these wages in a mere fraction of that long workday, while all the remaining hours of our labour went toward the capital and profits of the capitalists. If we slaved away for sixteen hours, only a few of those hours covered our total wages; the entire value produced during the rest of the time became the capital of those capitalist vultures. The direct outcome of this horrific, dehumanizing relationship was our poverty, misery, hunger, and wretched displacement. We possessed nothing but our labour power, and the meagre price fetched by this commodity was insufficient to meet even our most basic needs. Yet poverty, misery, destitution, and displacement constituted only one part of our wretched existence. The product of our labour capital became the source of the capitalists’ power, prestige, and grandeur, paving the way for their ascent to the realm of political rule. The exact opposite was true for our class. Severed from our labour and its product and completely stripped of any say in determining the destiny of our work and lives, we were reduced to a downtrodden, humiliated, captive, subjugated, and vanquished class a class shackled on all sides by the coercive might of capital. The prevailing social order came crashing down upon us, obliterating every vestige of freedom, agency, and participation, as well as our fundamental human rights; we were stripped of everything. The fruit of our labour transformed into capital into the capital, power, property, and dominion of the capitalist class becoming the true god of the existing world. The bourgeois state, political order, laws, rights, culture, education, and ideology came to dominate and rule over our very existence. We became the abject, humiliated slaves of the very labour we produced.
Capital treated us this way. But amidst this, we did not lose one thing. Capital was produced by us we were the creators of all capital and consequently, the power to withhold the creation of capital, to dry up the very source of capital’s life and dominion, to shatter the order of capitalist production, economy, politics, and the state, and to destroy capitalism in its entirety this power remained in our hands. From the very beginning, we began to exercise and apply this power, albeit in a rudimentary and limited fashion. To raise the price of our labour power, to devote more of our workday to our own subsistence and basic needs, and to compel the owners of capital to accede to these modest demands, we brought the machinery of capital and profit production to a halt. We unsheathed the strike the cessation of capital production for the capitalists as a potent weapon; it was the most natural, tangible, simple, yet effective response to the pressures of exploitation, the crimes, and the encroachments of the exploiters, and we fired it straight into the heart of capital. We initiated this action at a time when, in the vast majority of the world’s nations, the relationship of buying and selling labour power had not yet emerged from the womb of history; and even in those societies where it had emerged, it was still in its infancy. By going on strike, we did not merely exercise power or enter the arena of struggle; we also revealed a crucial secret of our own social existence. We demonstrated our awareness of the reality of our exploitation. We declared that we perceive the relationship between labour and capital the very relationship through which we are exploited. We showed that we comprehend the nature of this relationship and recognize it as the true source of our poverty, hunger, destitution, and degradation. As the campaign unfolded and the wheels of capital production were brought to a halt, we articulated all of this—simply and unadorned, free from elaborate philosophizing or abstract theorizing within the lived reality of the people of this era. We laid out the banquet of our burgeoning consciousness and nascent awareness that modest spread of our own findings, beliefs, certainties, and self-generated class knowledge upon the stage of history. Through our protests and struggles, we proclaimed these realities aloud, demonstrating that even centuries ago at the most rudimentary level of class consciousness we understood a great deal. We were fully aware that we were being exploited; that capital was the product of our labour and production; that the owners of capital failed to compensate us for the true value of our work; that the relationship between us and the capitalists was defined not by consensus or reconciliation, but by conflict and struggle; and that our power lay in the labour we performed and the battle we waged to determine the destiny of that labour and production. Yes, we declared quite explicitly that we were conscious of all this. By struggling against capital, we entered the history of human societal evolution the history of class struggle and the class-based campaigns of the capitalist era and an awareness of the realities we have enumerated was an inseparable part of this enduring conflict. In the second half of the 14th century, within the textile manufactories of the Mediterranean coast, we wrote the opening chapters of this confrontation. We rose up against the workshop owners and vehemently protested our intense exploitation. The coercive forces of the feudal rulers rallied to the defence of the capitalist manufactory owners and crushed our rebellion. Yet, we did not yield. Needless to say, we could not afford to yield; had we done so, the plague of starvation would have destroyed us. We continued our struggle. In 1378, we raised the banner of a widespread uprising at the southernmost tip of the European continent. Amidst the bleak feudal world and the serfdom of the era, we demanded wage increases, political rights, and the establishment of working-class political power. Yes, even in that profound darkness and with the level of awareness and class consciousness we possessed we spoke of political rights and working-class power. We penned no philosophical treatises to articulate these demands, nor did we resort to any specific school of thought, religion, or ideological doctrine. We simply voiced the sentiments of our hearts. We proclaimed our social existence and gave voice to the turbulent contradictions inherent within that existence. We had no need for philosophizing, the construction of schools of thought, or learned saviours. Everything was clear: we were the targets of the most brutal and savage forms of exploitation. The fruits of our labour became the capital of our capitalist oppressors, fuelling their power. We opposed these inhumane relations and saw political rights and workers’ power as the solution to escape this situation. This was our prevailing consciousness and understanding at the time. We raised the demand for political rights and power concepts that had emerged centuries earlier with a very simple and rudimentary aim: to find a way to control the destiny of our own labour and production, and to wrest the fruits of our work from the clutches of the capitalist workshop owners. We felt no need for complex theories, philosophies, or elaborate syllogisms to articulate these demands. The wretched conditions of our work, lives, and exploitation echoed these needs within our minds, sounding a constant alarm. We had no control over what we produced; the products of our labour slipped from our grasp and deprived of agency over our own work we were held captive by poverty, misery, displacement, and humiliation. We sought political rights and power to challenge this state of affairs, and we advanced these demands with precisely that scope and objective in mind. It goes without saying, of course, that we did not all think alike; our levels of awareness, understanding, and insight varied, with some among us being more astute and enlightened than others. Others, possessing less prudence and judgment, learned from their companions and comrades-in-arms. We were not the originators of class struggle in history; this struggle had existed long before us between the exploited and the exploiters, between serf and the system of serfdom, between peasant and feudal lord, between slave and slave owner. We stood upon the legacy of a long history of conflict waged by exploited and downtrodden classes against exploiting classes and systems of exploitation. The experiences of these monumental historical struggles shaped our memory, our thought, and our consciousness.
Our widespread uprising was suppressed this time as well. We suffered defeat, yet we persisted. Persisting in the struggle became the secret of our existence and the inescapable necessity of our lives. The relationship of buying and selling labour-power expanded relentlessly, spreading from region to region and from country to country. As capitalism grew, so did we; we became a segment of every society’s population and advanced toward becoming the dominant majority within nations. Wherever we were, we worked, we were exploited, and we fought against that exploitation and subjugation. Gradually, we established a presence everywhere, engaging in class struggle and conflict in every locale. In the 15th century, in the French city of Lyon, we brought the wheels of production to a halt for five uninterrupted months. During that same period, we shut down the majority of factories in Paris. Various arms manufacturing centres in London ground to a halt under the wave of our strikes. We prevented most paper mills in England from continuing profitable production. In 1617, in the Middlesex region of England, we escalated our actions to the point of an actual civil war against the ruling political regime. Let there be no mistake: the foundation of our uprising was not merely a hollow political dispute with the government of the day. We were battling capital and the capitalist class. We fought against the domination of capital over the fruits of our own labour, and it was in the course of this struggle that we saw the coercive machinery of the ruling political power poised to crush our movement. From the trenches of this anti-capitalist campaign, we confronted the political regime that defended capitalism, engaged in battle, and waged a full-scale war against it. A little further away in Newcastle, England, the very cradle of the development and dominance of the wage-slavery system we brought production to a halt in every workshop across the city. Capitalists and the army that upholds capital marched against us, yet we stood ready for battle, weapons in hand and resolve unshaken. We armed ourselves and met the fire of capital’s weaponry with the fiery wrath of anti-capitalism. Vast numbers of our comrades were killed or imprisoned, but we did not falter; we stormed the prisons and, through the power of anti-capitalist struggle and the force of anti-capitalist arms, liberated our captive comrades. We carried out similar actions in the English county of Lancashire as well.
A fundamental hallmark characterizing these struggles throughout the years and centuries was our radical, anti-capitalist stance. We lacked formal education; the vast majority of us could neither read nor write and were steeped in ignorance, yet we keenly felt the harsh realities dominating our lives agonizing, ruinous realities that made us tremble day and night, whether asleep or awake. They wore us down, tormented us, and drove us to the brink of madness. We required no philosophical or sociological discourse, nor any mystical, ethical, or academic inquiry to comprehend them. Relentlessly and far more laceratingly than the “demon’s bayonet” or the “arrow of the mighty Rostam” they pierced, seared, tormented, and convulsed every cell of our brains, thoughts, consciousness, nerves, and emotions, as well as our very flesh, veins, blood, and sinews. We endured the most terrible form of exploitation. We worked most of the day and night. The result of our work was the luxurious and glorious palace of the capitalists, their legendary prosperity and luxury, their greatness and grandeur, their capital and the machine of their power and sovereignty. The more we worked, the fatter they got and the more worn we got. The bigger we produced, the more terrifyingly we distanced ourselves from the results of our work and production. The stronger the capitalists became, the more we fell from power. The reality dominates what is and what is not, we had these and to understand these material, tangible and earthly facts surrounding us, we did not need to knock on the door of Kant’s house and hang on Spinoza and learn from Descartes and students in the field of Fichte and sit at the rostrum of enlightened philosophers. We suffered the above facts day and night. More important and fundamental than this, we were fighting against these painful, reducing and erosive harsh realities every moment of our lives. In the war against them, we were imprisoned, tortured, burned and surrendered to the death squad.
Throughout these years and centuries, we viewed our entire struggle as one against the capitalist. We identified the capitalist owners of workplaces and production centres as the architects and root cause of all our misery. We fought against capital and the owners of capital. We sought political rights as a means to wage a more effective war against capitalists against the intense exploitation, poverty, hunger, displacement, and deadly disenfranchisement imposed by the owners of capital. Our battle against regimes was waged from the trenches of anti-capitalism; while we fought for freedom, political rights, and social demands, we viewed our true war as the campaign against the severe exploitation of capitalist systems and the injustices and crimes committed by the owners of capital. To wage this struggle, to push back the capitalists, and to compel them to yield to our demands, we were compelled to speak with one voice and to unite; yet, we sought this unity not in isolation from the process of the struggle or the fight against capitalists, nor for the sake of having an organization, nor based on a belief in the sanctity of the organization, party, or union. Rather, we pursued it solely as the necessary apparatus for advancing the war against capitalist exploitation and against the hunger, poverty, and wretchedness that capitalists inflicted upon us. We did not subscribe to the separation of economics and politics, or of economic and political struggle; consequently, the notion of maintaining one organization for economic struggle and another for political struggle was meaningless to us.
What mattered to us was not organizations, unions, parties, or such “idols” of worship, but rather the movement, the comradeship, the unity of voice, and the united struggle against capitalist exploiters. For years, we fought in this manner and contended with the capitalists; yet, let us not forget that we were not the sole force shaping history. We workers were not the only architects of history—especially not amidst the oppressive gloom of archaic serfdom and feudal relations. Other forces, too, exerted immense pressure on the trajectory of its formation and evolution.
Capitalism advanced with breakneck speed. The wheel of capital accumulation turned upon the blood, flesh, and bones of us rebellious wage slaves spawning colossal capital. Capitalism flourished while we withered. Capital flooded the world with scientific knowledge, yet it transformed science itself into an instrument of ignorance, backwardness, deception, and brainwashing fuelling the explosive intensification of our exploitation and accelerating our physical and mental erosion. It filled the world with industry and technology but turned that entire industrial apparatus and its unbridled development into a tool for our even more savage and agonizing slaughter. It mechanized the workshops, but with the introduction of every machine, it multiplied our daily toil, our hours of surplus labour, and the number of individuals within our class and households forced into labour. Before the mechanization of factories, a single person’s daily labour could sustain several family members; yet industry, machinery, technology, and capitalist knowledge chained the very survival of our young children to their own long, compulsory days of labour. It shut down the *maktab-khènes* (traditional schools) so that the frail, strengthless arms of schoolchildren could serve as the levers turning the spinning wheels that generated profit and capital; it harnessed vast numbers of women and nursing mothers to carts replacing beasts of burden to transform their near-free labour into an inexhaustible fountain of colossal capital accumulation. In a remarkably short span of time, within England’s most industrialized districts the very hub of capitalism’s legendary expansion the plague of capitalist barbarism mowed down our young children and consigned them to the grave far more ruthlessly than the infectious plagues of the Middle Ages. These were children whose mothers, crushed by the coercive economic force of capital and driven by the hunger and poverty born of intense capitalist exploitation, were compelled to endure gruelling workdays, leaving them unable to care for their little ones.
Such was the fate of our class, caught in the ruthless grip of capital; but we fought against this situation with all our might, employing our collective ingenuity and unity. Across France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Britain, and Germany and throughout the continents of Europe and the Americas we gave life to a dynamic, flourishing, and hopeful movement against capitalist exploitation and the crimes of ruling regimes that served the interests of capital owners. We began establishing clandestine, semi-clandestine, and open organizations, striving to unite and structure our anti-capitalist struggle. Bolstered by this strength, we advanced bolder demands and expectations, calling for more fundamental and decisive transformations. In Germany, we launched a sweeping movement for equality and the abolition of private property. We made the powerful, magnificent, and life-affirming call for the abolition of classes for an end to political rule imposed from above, for the equitable distribution of all income, and for the equal participation of citizens in labour and production resonate throughout our workplaces and communities. We ignited the epic and glorious “Thuringia” movement in the German city of Mühlhausen, boldly proclaiming the vision of a revolutionary government known as the “Eternal Council” across the horizon of our people’s lives. We raised the cry that all wealth must be socialized and that everyone must participate in the processes of labour and production; we demanded the dismantling of every form of domination and authority imposed upon the masses.
We had come this far and accomplished these tasks; but our movement remained quite weak, and we lacked a presence in the vastest regions of the globe. In the countries and locales where we operated, we constituted but a small fraction of the total population; our solutions generally lacked solid grounding in material and social realities. While we loudly proclaimed noble human ideals, the prevailing historical, economic, and social conditions along with the actual level of maturity, competence, and class capacity we possessed were insufficient to secure the victories needed to attain those goals or realize those expectations. We are speaking of an era when the process of initial capital investment acted much like the rush of air into the sealed sarcophagus of antiquated relations. Regions across the globe were becoming spheres of capital accumulation one after another. The capitalist class strove to conceal the astronomical scale of its exploitation, savagery, and inherent inhumanity behind the deceptive veil of a “historic civilizing mission.” Riding the rapid wave of capital accumulation, the bourgeoisie capital itself masquerading in the borrowed guise of “humanity” was compelled to challenge the old economic and social order. It viewed the Church, the monarchy, the feudal aristocracy, religious education systems, absolute despotism, and the various institutions and laws safeguarding the old regime as obstacles to the expansion of accumulation and the dominance of the new mode of production; consequently, it engaged in conflict with them, seeking to reform or prune them away. It pursued the establishment of a homogeneous alternative suited to the new mode of production. At the same time, the capitalist class presented these changes and the institutions, arrangements, and contracts required for the expansion of capital accumulation as the ideal model of livelihood, prosperity, and social existence for all humanity. It called upon everyone and, above all, us workers to fight by its side. Everywhere, the bourgeoisie clamoured for freedom, democracy, human rights, equal suffrage, free elections, parliaments, the right to form parties and unions, equality before the law, the security of life and society, social order, secularism, civil society, and the like proclaiming these very things to be the guarantors of a free, prosperous, happy, and secure life for humanity.
Every step in the expansion of capital accumulation was a step toward tightening the yoke of slavery and servitude, intensifying exploitation, deepening humiliation, reinforcing distorted perceptions, and further stupefying us; yet, the crushing, corrosive, and lethal blows of this phase of capitalist development were far more devastating and shattering than any of its previous assaults. The slogans the bourgeoisie trumpeted “freedom,” “justice,” “rights,” and “equality” in its struggle against the old order made us, who were the targets of the most savage deprivations of liberty and inequality and who suffered under the lash of the most ruthless oppression and disenfranchisement, eager to listen. We were enraptured by the sound of these words and embraced them; therein lay the greatest tragedy of the era. We passionately yearned for every shred of freedom, right, equality, the end of oppression, and social self-assertion, yet what the capitalist class championed under these banners and concepts was the exact opposite of what we truly needed. The “freedom” prescribed by the capitalists was, in fact, their absolute liberty to exploit us with ever-more devastating consequences. They sought and glorified freedom for the unfettered competition of their capital; for securing an ever-greater share of the total surplus value derived from the exploitation of the masses of our class; for shattering all constraints and boundaries on capital accumulation; for trading and organizing their capital worldwide without let or hindrance; for exercising undisputed dominion over the destiny of our labour and production; for crushing every protest we raised against exploitation, its intensification, and our lack of rights; for defending armed to the teeth the commodification of labour power and the institution of wage slavery; for slaughtering and drowning our class’s anti-capitalist movement in a bloodbath; for subjecting us to ever-more extensive, profound, and agonizing brainwashing; for distorting, paralyzing, and burying our capacity for critical consciousness beneath the edifice of the capitalist order; and for securing all their own reactionary and anti-human interests.
The bourgeoisie spoke of “right”! And by “right,” they meant the eternal, sacrosanct, and unquestionable legitimacy of the labour-power purchase-and-sale relationship: their right to purchase labour-power; our right to be the sellers of that labour-power; the capitalist’s right to choose whether or not to buy the labour-power of the masses of our class to exploit us or cast us into the wasteland of unemployment; the right of capital owners to possess the state, the army, the police, and the forces of coercion and repression; our right to endure imprisonment, torture, and execution; the capitalists’ right to kill us through the pressure of starvation; the right of capital to exercise undisputed dominion over the fruits of our labour and production; the right of capital to rule unconditionally over our life’s destiny; the right of capital to bar our class from any say in determining what is produced, the nature of consumption, how we live and die, or whether we live or cease to exist; the right of capital to dictate our birthplace, our place of residence, and the entirety of our existence; our right to endure hunger, displacement, homelessness, and barbaric global, ethnic, religious, and racial holocausts and wars; the right of the masters of the capitalist hell to cast us into the quagmire of corruption, addiction, and prostitution; the right of capital to engineer our thoughts and instil a completely inverted version of the truths of society, the world, and history into the consciousness and minds of the masses of our class in short, the “inalienable right” of capital to perpetrate all these acts of barbarism against us, and our “right” to endure all these acts of savagery and atrocity.
The bourgeoisie spoke of “suffrage,” “free elections,” and “democracy,” intending for us the masses of wage-slaves to regard submission to capital’s savage exploitation as a promised paradise!! To view the barbarism of capital as the order of our dream life!! To recognize the capitalist state as the symbol of our own sovereignty over the destiny of our labour, production, and lives!! To allow the capitalist class to proclaim its order an order of capital’s economy, politics, and civilization; of legendary accumulation and profitability; of the unbridled intensification of our exploitation; of our total dispossession of any influence over our own labour and production; of the guardianship of capitalism’s hell of filth, terror, and horror as a covenant of prosperity and a model for our ideal existence. For the capitalist class, suffrage, democracy, and elections served as the burial decree for the power of our class struggle, interring it within the graveyard of the wage-slavery order. By promoting these concepts, the bourgeoisie sought to extinguish our class war against capital and pave the way for perpetuating the antiquated, humanity-consuming machinery of capitalism.
In its war against us, the capitalist class aimed its entire arsenal at us, unleashing on a massive scale distortion, fabrications of a barren wasteland, and brainwashing campaigns; it mobilized all its efforts, social power, and ingenuity to bury our surging movement in a graveyard of deceit and inversion. But the lethal, poisoned arrows in the quiver of capital’s offensive and in its arsenal of stupefaction were not limited to this alone. Before long, the realm of capitalist philosophy, thought, and politics became pregnant with the advent of “saviour” apostles, the formulation of “socialist” doctrines, and the birth of models promising deliverance from the oppression of capitalism! Numerous “sages” of the bourgeoisie or those borrowing capital’s mindset hoisted the white flag of liberation over our lives, preaching about non-exploitative cooperative economies and socialist utopias far removed from the clamour, suffering, bloodshed, and pain of class struggle. They hailed the establishment of these “shrines of salvation” as the way out of the fetid quagmire of wage slavery, clouding our consciousness and minds by sanctifying these cities and mirages.
Yes, such was our lot, fellow chained comrades! And this is what the bourgeoisie did to us. On one hand, through bloody economic coercion and lethal, explosive exploitation, it barred the masses of our class from education, the free development of thought, the deepening of understanding, and the independent maturation of consciousness; on the other, it drove our spontaneous class insight and awareness into an abyss of bewilderment amidst a dark, labyrinthine maze of distortion, the fabrication of false models, empty philosophizing, and deliberate misdirection. But by virtue of our social existence driven by the sheer necessity of life and the struggle to survive we waged war against capital and the capitalists. We marshalled our forces on every battlefield; our war against the capitalists and the intensity of capitalist exploitation knew no pause. It was solely through this struggle that we secured sustenance, clothing, and shelter; that we breathed and remained among the living. Had we abandoned the fight against capital’s savage exploitation even briefly, for but a few days we would have ceased to exist; we would no longer have been counted among the living. We waged this war ceaselessly, yet the bourgeoisie employing the full array of strategies, levers, weapons, apparatuses, distortions, brainwashing techniques, and barren voids mentioned earlier dealt us the most crushing and paralyzing blows. It strung us up on the terrifying gallows of the capitalist order its civilization, laws, ideologies, democracy, and its moral, cultural, and social values. It blocked every avenue that might have allowed us to properly dissect and analyse the realities of our class and our labour. It diverted us from the conscious exploration of our own social and historical alternatives. It mined the paths of our problem-solving, strategic direction, quest for liberation, and goal setting, plunging us into an abyss of aimlessness, uncertainty, and a lack of vision.
This was how the bourgeoisie treated us; our movement trapped within the vast confines of this limbo and tossed upon the turbulent seas of ongoing class struggle was buffeted by the interplay of two opposing, neutralizing forces: on one side, the sheer necessity of survival and our own anti-capitalist class existence; on the other, the solutions, horizons, apparatuses, and strategies prescribed by the bourgeoisie. In France, during the February Revolution of 1848, when the capitalist class hijacked the helm of our struggle to proclaim its republic of deceit and lies, we failed to advance or implement a clear class alternative; inevitably, we settled for merely inscribing a few of our demands onto the anti-worker framework of that republic. The bourgeoisie was forced to yield, yet its concession and retreat did nothing to resolve the mountain of problems we faced; instead, it paved its own path to the summit of political power, assuming the role of the dominant political class and ruthlessly lashing out at every aspect of our livelihoods. The republic was established through the force of our struggle and the fire of our weapons, yet our class reaped only a catastrophic intensification of hunger, destitution, and misery. We carried the bourgeoisie to the pinnacle of victory, only to suffer defeat ourselves. The only lesson drawn from this failure was a steadfast resolve to continue the fight. We set our sights on the June Revolution of 1848, yet once again, we lacked the effective class organization and preparation needed to dismantle capitalism. This time, compared to a few months prior, we had surged forward leaps and bounds ahead; we had split Paris in two, pitting the Paris of the workers against the Paris of the bourgeoisie. We sounded the alarm of the capitalists’ defeat in the ears of capital’s political and intellectual representatives. We warned the custodians of the shrine of “capitalist democracy” to pack up and hand over power to us, aiming our rifles at their chests to prove we meant business; yet, amidst the prevailing conditions, these warnings, alarms, and posturing lacked sufficient class substance or backing. We were not constituted as an organized class. We had not generated the capacity for working-class societal management within our movement. We lacked a powerful, organized council-based movement characterized by the potent, competent, and conscious intervention of the individual masses of our own class. At the time, we simply lacked these capabilities, preparations, and capacities. Consequently, we suffered defeat, were brought to our knees, and added to our tally of failures. We endured a turbulent, liminal period. Under the pressure of our gun barrels, the bourgeoisie was compelled to persist in the struggle against the old order; it was we who sounded the call to war against the roots of exploitation and the manifestations of oppression inherent in the previous regime; it was we who emboldened and propelled the bourgeoisie toward a deeper, broader, and more fundamental challenge against the monarchy, the church, and the apparatus of the old order yet the bourgeoisie emerged victorious from all these battles, while we were the true losers. Contrary to various theoretical analyses, the root cause of these defeats lay not merely in the insufficient numbers of our class, the underdevelopment of the capitalist mode of production, the system’s historical capacity for further expansion and survival, or factors of that nature. The question of victory and defeat is not solely about seizing power or failing to achieve that position. Our class could have emerged victorious from the ongoing process of class struggle without necessarily pushing in any specific revolution to the point of completely overthrowing the system of wage slavery. We possessed the potential to transform the trajectory of our campaign, step by step laying stone upon stone into a powerful, nationwide, anti-capitalist council movement. This would be a movement in which every single worker acted as a thinking, influential agent for the more effective advancement of the class struggle, while simultaneously learning, growing, and maturing for the future task of managing a socialist society that has transcended wage labour.
An organized, council-based movement that champions the manifesto for establishing communist planning entailing the abolition of wage labour and the collective organization of social production by the people themselves and which ensures the conscious, free, effective, and equal participation of the vastest number of workers in planning, decision-making, and the determination of the destiny of labour and production, by making these processes contingent upon the heightened awareness, understanding, and active engagement of every individual worker. Had we traversed the path of organizing and asserting such a movement, we would have conquered the enemy’s strongholds of power at every stage of the class struggle regardless of the scale of the immediate gains for the simple reason that we would have wielded our class power through a radical stance against capital, transforming the victories achieved at each stage of the struggle into bastions for even greater triumphs. When we speak of defeat following defeat, we are acknowledging our inability at that time to discover and pursue this very process a predicament in which, nearly two centuries later, we remain trapped, albeit in an even more dire and catastrophic form.
Yes, this is what capital did to us, and this is what we endured at its hands. In the early second half of the nineteenth century, a voice rose from the depths of our ongoing movement a voice that embodied an active, conscious, radical, and critical dissection of the very essence of the capitalist system that putrid order of blood and terror. It was the voice of the sharp scalpel of the wage-slave dissecting the true mysteries of capital’s existence; the voice of a conscious, thinking worker striving to tear away the dark veils obscuring our vision of the genuine anti-capitalist struggle and to replace the blind alleys we wandered with the true path of class struggle. It was the red anthem of our class’s movement against wage labour, resonating through the lives of the people of that era through the words of Marx. Marx emerged from among us from the heart of our daily struggles and armed with our consciousness, understanding, and thought, plunged into the surging river of the fight. He was one of us; he voiced our deepest sentiments and transformed our fundamental critique of capitalism into the rallying cry of our movement. He sought to hold up a light and expose every dark corner of the wage-slavery system to our view, bringing what capital inflicts upon us into the open and making it the central issue of our class war. Marx spoke of commodities, the law of value, the commodity economy, and the commodification of labour’s products; of the exchange of commodities, the reification of human beings, and the personification of the commodified product of human labour; of the replacement of human relations with the relations between things; and of the commodification of labour power and the emergence of our class in history. He starkly revealed how capital is born from the labour and exploitation of the masses of our class, adding that by selling our labour power, we become alienated from our own work and its fruits, and are stripped of any say in the destiny of our labour, production, and lives. The product of our labour transforms into capital an omnipotent, overpowering deity that rules over human existence shaping our consciousness, understanding, thought, ethics, and culture, while bringing down upon us immense human catastrophes. Marx articulated these arguments, critiques, analyses, dissections, and insights not as an outsider, but as a participant in our ongoing movement as a companion, comrade, ally, and fellow fighter. His ultimate aim was for us to enter the fray with conscious minds and a class-based, anti-capitalist awareness, ensuring that our ongoing struggles across all spheres of social life strike directly at the very heart of capital’s existence; he sought to orient the fight for every demand whether simple or significant around a radical campaign against the very existence of the wage-slavery system. He explained that our movement is the true birthplace of communism. The seed and essential substance of communism the abolition of wage labour lies right here: in the social existence of the working class and the reality of the labour movement. It is precisely here amidst the twists and turns of our campaign against capital and the unfolding events of the working masses’ class struggle that this movement must grow, branch out, take shape, marshal its ranks, wage war, and triumph. Marx articulated all these arguments, analyses, strategic insights, and visions within the arena of our ongoing struggle so that our movement of the day might strike at the root and advance along the axis of a radical war against capitalism; he wrote, spoke, and fought battling alongside us until the very last moments of his life. Hand in hand with us, he raised the red banner of the International and unfurled the manifesto of global working-class unity against capitalism before his fellow workers, bound together by the same chains.