Blog

Editorial

From the editorial board: A new stage

The publication of the first issue of “Communist Prometheus” is a natural result of nearly thirty years of work done by our group. In conditions of extreme weakness on the part of the contemporary workers’ movement and fragmentation of Marxist forces, we are not trying to start all over. On the contrary, we draw upon accumulated political and theoretical experience. Our praxis has passed through several stages, each one required a refinement of strategy and the consistent application of the Marxist method to changing historical conditions.

History

The Bolsheviks’ last battle

We turn to one of the most tragic, yet politically crucial pages in the history of the world working-class movement: the heroic and consistent struggle of the Group of Democratic Centralism (the “Decists”). While in the late 1920s most party oppositionists harbored fatal illusions regarding the nature of the Soviet state, it was the Decists (T. Sapronov, V. Smirnov, and others) who first drew a rigorous Marxist conclusion: the counter-revolution was complete; the VKP(b) and the state machine had transformed into instruments of capitalist exploitation hostile to the proletariat, which meant that what was needed was not intra-party reform, but a new revolution and the creation of a new, genuinely workers’ party. The special value of this historical material lies in its ruthless dissection of the ideology of Leon Trotsky and his supporters. Using historical documents, we demonstrate how Trotsky’s refusal to recognize the bourgeois nature of the Stalinist regime led him to a disastrous centrism – fruitless hopes for a “left course” by the bureaucracy and the substitution of real class analysis with abstract reflections on the “international situation”.

Programme

About the “Manifesto”

The work on our “Manifesto” marked an important step in the group’s political self-definition and, as we had expected, provoked a lively response among comrades. We have always been convinced that Marxism is not a rigid dogma, but a guide to action, requiring the constant verification of theory through living practice and open, uncompromising discussion among comrades. It is precisely for this reason that we are launching a new column, “Correspondence with a Comrade”, in which we will publish our replies to readers’ questions, criticisms, and comments. In the first instalment of this column, we address the most important theoretical questions raised in the responses to the “Manifesto”: the dialectic of the destruction of the bourgeois state and the withering away of the proletarian semi-state; the falsity of the metaphysical opposition between economic and political struggle; the historical assessment of Stalinism as a consummated bourgeois counter-revolution and of Trotskyism as a tendency that failed to overcome centrism; as well as the material roots of the contemporary proletariat’s passivity in the imperialist metropolises. This polemic is not an academic exercise, but our necessary contribution to the work of preparing the ideological and political foundations of the future world communist party.

Appeal

APPEAL TO THE WORKERS OF RUSSIA

Our group’s history did not start yesterday. Most of our past publications and declarations are not widely known today. That is why we decided to start publishing in our magazine some materials from our archives. One of them is this call to action, published in 1999 in our paper “Komsa”.

International politics

International review: April 2026

Whilst the news speaks of imminent stabilisation, the system is undergoing a profound structural crisis: the markets are saturated with unbacked debt, new technologies are stripping some traditional industries of their former profits while generating new super-profits for others, and states are, as expected, being drawn into wars over resources. It is not enough to diagnose contemporary capitalism; we must understand why the labour movement is currently so weak and fragmented and, above all, where communists must begin their practical work today in order to organise people for the coming social upheavals, rather than confining themselves to passively awaiting spontaneous revolts.

Editorial

From the Editors: The Tool of Labour and the Cybernetic Trowel

The editorial board openly acknowledges its conscious use of generative AI to create magazine illustrations, drawing on a Marxist understanding of technology. Devoid of purpose and genuine imagination, the machine serves merely as an obedient “cybernetic trowel” – a high-tech extension of the human hand and mind. By strictly directing the algorithms, we use them not to imitate machine “creativity”, but to revive the monumental visual language of the revolutionary proletarian avant-garde of 1917–1921. Although modern neural networks have been developed by corporations for profit through the predatory monopolisation of humanity’s “general intellect”, we turn this contradiction against capital itself. By refusing to sell the magazine, we create no surplus value and produce only use-value – communist propaganda. In this way, we carry out a tactical “reverse expropriation”, compelling the infrastructure of the class enemy to serve the interests of the proletariat and transforming capitalist technologies into intellectual weapons of class struggle.

History

From Engel’s Manchester to Global Manchester

For decades, bourgeois ideologues have sought to convince us that Marxism is hopelessly outdated, that the traditional working class has disappeared, and that the brutal exploitation of the past has given way to a humane “post-industrial society” of equal opportunity. We dismantle this myth through rigorous political-economic analysis. We show that capital has not changed its predatory nature in the slightest – it has merely expanded the hellish conditions of nineteenth-century Manchester, described by the young Friedrich Engels, to a planetary scale. Confronted with the inexorable fall in the rate of profit in the 1970s, capitalism unleashed the mechanisms of a global counter-offensive: it shifted material production to the countries of “new” capitalism, condemning billions to hyper-exploitation, while fragmenting and subordinating the working class of the imperialist metropolises through the gig economy, digital Taylorism, debt bondage, and the illusions of fictitious capital. In this article, we dissect the anatomy of the modern fragmented proletariat and demonstrate that, despite spatial and occupational fragmentation, a miner from the Congo, a courier tracked by GPS, and a burnt-out IT specialist remain links in the same chain of surplus-value extraction. To break this global machine for the production of poverty and alienation, the fragmented class of wage labourers must overcome the imposed atomisation and recognise its common class interests. Only a world Marxist party can direct the spontaneous protest of the proletariat into the channel of communist revolution.

International politics

Iran as the Nexus of the Imperialist Crisis

This text presents a Marxist analysis of Iran’s role in the contemporary imperialist crisis and the country’s internal class dynamics. Whilst liberal ideologues speak of a struggle between “reformists” and “conservatives”, we argue that all factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie are united in suppressing the workers’ movement, using it merely as a mass base in their internecine struggles over assets. Against the backdrop of the unfolding US–Israeli intervention, we categorically reject both support for foreign invasion and calls for “national unity” around the Islamic regime. The proletariat’s only possible response would be the tactic of revolutionary defeatism: the Iranian proletariat must break free from bourgeois influence, create its own vanguard party, and use the war to smash the bourgeois state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat through revived workers’ councils.

Critique

Digression: (On Productive Labour)

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”. This brings with it augmentation of national wealth, quite apart from the personal enjoyment which — as a competent witness, Professor Roscher, [tells] us (see ... ) — the manuscript of the compendium brings to its originator himself.

Programme

Introduction and the “Draft Programme” of the Internationalist Communist Party 1944

The “Communist Prometheus” group does not consider itself a “world communist party or even its sole embryo” and views its activity “as part of the practical movement towards communism, as a struggle for the creation of this party”. Based on this premise, we consider it fundamental to exchange experiences and conduct discussions with other internationalist communist organisations. “The Draft Programme of the Internationalist Communist Party” and the accompanying introduction, specifically written by the comrades of Battaglia Comunista, constitute the first in a series of publications of documents, articles, and materials from other communist organisations. We consider the in-depth study of these texts an integral part of the theoretical heritage of Marxism and a crucial element in the formation of the class consciousness of the world proletariat.

History

Searching for a Way

This historical-political essay traces the group’s long trajectory of formation and ideological evolution – from its emergence in the late 1990s to its transition to new forms of activity in the present day. It describes the organisation’s first steps on the “scorched earth” of post-Soviet Russia, the spontaneous maximalism of the early years of the newspaper Komsa_, and attempts to reconstruct communist principles of party work from the ground up. Under present conditions of extreme passivity on the part of the working class, the pursuit of quantitative indicators is ruinous: the foremost task of communists today is not the mechanical compilation of the bourgeois press or pretending to be a mass movement, but the uncompromising selection and rigorous theoretical training of a narrow stratum of revolutionary cadres, along with the development of Marxist theory in its application to contemporary conditions.