Manifesto of the Group “Communist Prometheus”

I. Preface The “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was the first historical programmatic document of the revolutionary party of the world proletariat. Precisely because of its programmatic character, the theses that constituted its core, its essence, did not pertain directly to the historical moment of its publication, but instead, they described the conditions and set the objectives for a long-term historical horizon within which the communist movement was supposed to unfold. The Communist Prometheus did not emerge in a vacuum: our activity is grounded in the continuity and further development of the programmatic core of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”. Marx and Engels declared: «the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property». The development of capitalism created the necessary objective conditions for the realisation of this theses: «modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few». In “The German Ideology”, the founders of scientific communism pointed out that «to this modern private property corresponds the modern State». From this it follows that the abolition of private property requires the abolition of the state. Who, then, must undertake this task? In the preface to the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto, Engels – emphasising that this had always been his and Marx’s shared view – gives an unequivocal answer: «the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself». And while Marx and Engels themselves lived in a period when the fundamental social facts and tasks of the labour movement identified in the Manifesto were, at best, still in their infancy, we are living in an era in which, for the first time, all these propositions can be regarded without reservation as the programme of a world communist party.

II. The Nature of Our Era Completing the formation of the world market, capitalism has fulfilled its historical function. The era of bourgeois revolutions and the formation of national markets, national bourgeoisie, and nation states has come to an end. Contemporary bourgeois society has entered its highest, imperialist phase, characterised by reactionary politics on all fronts. Having passed beyond the ascendant and progressive stage of its development, capitalism has turned towards an inevitable and terrifying decline – a trajectory already clearly recognised by revolutionary Marxists of the times of Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. In our modern era, capitalism has created not only gigantic productive forces, which constitute the objective precondition for its supersession, but also colossal destructive forces capable of annihilating humanity itself. The task of the working class, led by its vanguard – the world communist party – today consists in abolishing capitalism, preventing it from dragging the whole of humanity into the abyss. Communism or barbarism – that is the alternative. Despite the fact that all the forces of the old world fail to recognise this reality, the spectre of communism is stirring within the depths of capitalist society. Regardless of the weakness of modern communists – conscious exponents of an unconscious process – a communist revolution is maturing, one that must abolish the division of society into classes and the private property that underlies it. This task cannot be accomplished without the broad masses of the working class acquiring communist consciousness, and this «can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew» (“The German Ideology”).

III. The Party The dominant ideas of any class society are the ideas of the ruling class. In modern society, the bourgeoisie is the ruling class, and therefore bourgeois ideologies prevail even among wage workers everywhere. «In order to supersede the idea of private property, the idea of communism is enough. In order to supersede private property as it actually exists, real communist activity is necessary», as Marx asserted in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Thus, a genuine critique of bourgeois ideas is possible only within the framework of a real practical movement, in the process of a communist revolution. This practical movement must be led by a world communist party. Such a party does not exist today. We do not regard ourselves as this party, nor even as its sole nucleus. We view our activity as part of the practical movement towards communism, as a struggle for the creation of this party, and our manifesto as only one of the necessary steps along this path. In 1999, in our newspaper Komsa, we declared: «We are ready to cooperate with all those who, not in words but in deeds, are fighting for the liberation of the proletariat from the power of the bourgeoisie; with all those who stand on the positions of classical revolutionary Marxism, regardless of the organisation to which they belong. Our position remains unchanged: today the proletariat does not have its own party, and we are confronted with the urgent necessity of creating one. This is the immediate practical task of our organisation». This task remains relevant today. The above does not contradict the fact that there have been and continue to be groups of revolutionaries – often small in number, sometimes literally reduced to a handful of people – who preserve their commitment to uncompromising revolutionary Marxism, ensuring its scientific integrity and continuity over time. In this sense, we trace our lineage back to Marx and Engels, to the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, to the first two congresses of the Communist International, to the Italian Communist Left, and to the Russian ‘post-Soviet’ communist groups that opposed their ideas to pseudo-Marxism – the ideology of the USSR’s false socialism, which collapsed and sank into oblivion. The absence of a world communist party can be explained only by the absence of the necessary conditions. «These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then, but against the very “production of life” till then, the “total activity” on which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves» (“The German Ideology”). In the same work, the founders of scientific communism write: «The various shaping of material life is, of course, in every case dependent on the needs which are already developed, and the production, as well as the satisfaction, of these needs is an historical process». Within the class of wage labourers, the need to carry out a communist revolution must mature and develop and our task is to assist this process. The environment in which communist consciousness matures is not confined to economic relations between the capitalist and the proletarian – that is, to relations within the process of production and appropriation of surplus value. This process encompasses the totality of relations within the capitalist social economic formation. The development of communist consciousness occurs «not so much because of the “economic origins”» of wage workers, «but rather in the course of class struggle», which is always a political struggle. With this thesis, in 1999, we drew a clear line between ourselves and the proponents of workerist and economistic tendencies. Thus, there exists a class «which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages», and this inevitably places it in the sharpest contradiction with the ruling bourgeois class; today, this class «forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness». Yet all this represents only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a communist revolution. The development of wage labourers from average individuals into conscious exponents of an unconscious process «takes place naturally», «it is not subordinated to the general plan of freely combined individuals», this development occurs «very slowly», and «the various stages and interests are never completely overcome». Communists can only impart to this process a more organised and planned character.

IV. Method The theoretical basis of a world communist party is Marxism. David Ryazanov, in his history of the Communist League, wrote: «Marx and Engels finally discovered a synthesis between ‘politics’ and socialism and, at the same time, an answer to the question of how to unite the labour movement and socialism, which until then had followed different paths. It became clear that socialism, or communism, is the highest form of the labour movement, […], that communism can be realised only by the labour movement; and that the only class which can and must, by virtue of its position, undertake the realisation of communism is the proletariat. From this there naturally followed a task: to bring into the class struggle of the proletariat an awareness of its aims, and to organise the proletariat into a distinct political party. Not withdrawal from the tasks of the present, not a retreat into sectarian isolation, but intervention in all manifestations of social life, attentive study of reality, and active participation in all spheres of social life!» This was written in a time when the bourgeoisie had not yet resolved all the historical tasks confronting it – the era of bourgeois revolutions, the highest point of which was the October Revolution in Russia.

V. The Historical Fate of Capitalism The entire written history of human society that has come down to us is the history of class struggle. More than five hundred years elapsed between the first major slave revolts and the fall of the slave-owning mode of production. The historical period that began with the first large-scale anti-feudal peasant uprisings and ended with the worldwide establishment of capitalism likewise spanned more than five centuries. The first major uprisings of the proto-proletariat (guild apprentices, urban plebeians, manufacture workers) occurred during the transition from the Middle Ages to early modernity. In 1378, an uprising of the ciompi – untrained day labourers in the cloth factories – took place in Florence. The English bourgeois revolution gave rise to movements that were proletarian in character, such as the Levellers and the Diggers. The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was accompanied by movements that can already be described as workers’ uprisings against capitalist conditions of labour: the Luddite movement (England, early 19th century) and the Lyon weavers’ uprising (France, 1831 and 1834). Thus, the practical movement towards communism unfolds across time and space, passing through various stages, solving various accompanying tasks, overcoming various obstacles. We do not know how much time will pass before the abolition of private property, but we know for sure that theories predicting an “automatic” collapse of capitalism or positing fixed “objective” limits to its existence are unscientific. Such are the theories of the collapse of capitalism by a critical fall in the rate of profit or by the exhaustion of a non-capitalist environment. At the same time, the further development of capitalism not only increasingly hinders the development of the productive forces, but ever more frequently destroys them in catastrophic crises of overproduction, intensifying the struggle for markets and the redivision of the world among imperialist states. In the crucible of these crises and wars, capitalism renews itself, like the mythical phoenix, opening new cycles of capital accumulation. The proletariat has no path to liberation other than through the destruction of the capitalist mode of production.

VI. The Spread of Marxism The development and dissemination of Marxism likewise unfolded across space and time. Originating in continental Europe, it spread to Great Britain; through European migration it reached North America; through students educated at European universities and members of aristocratic families who travelled abroad, the most advanced intellectuals in Russia became acquainted with the works of Karl Marx. Later, the ideas of scientific communism would also find their way into Asia. Lenin linked the spread of Marxism to three major periods in world history: «(1) from the revolution of 1848 to the Paris Commune (1871); (2) from the Paris Commune to the Russian revolution (1905); (3) since the Russian revolution […]. » The first period lasted twenty-three years, the second thirty-four years, while the third – beginning with the First Russian Revolution – had not yet been completed at the time Lenin wrote his article.

1. The first period The first period was a time when socialism was making its transition from utopia to science. Beginning as one of the «very numerous groups or trends of socialism», Marxism advanced by overcoming the «incomprehension of the materialist basis of historical movement, inability to single out the role and significance of each class in capitalist society, concealment of the bourgeois nature of democratic reforms under diverse, quasi-socialist phrases about the “people”, “justice”, “right”, and so on». This period encompassed the European bourgeois revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. By its end, «independent proletarian parties came into being: the First International (1864–72) and the German Social-Democratic Party». The Paris Commune and the First Russian Revolution (1905–1907) became the pinnacles of the era of bourgeois revolutions and, at the same time, the prologue to the proletarian revolutions. In the Paris Commune, the proletariat, as Marx wrote, discovered the long-sought historical political form through which the class of wage labourers could achieve its economic emancipation. The Paris Commune became the prototype of the dictatorship of the proletariat – a semi-state form whose task was not merely to seize power, but to destroy the old bourgeois state machine. In the First Russian Revolution, the proletariat was led by the Marxist party, while the Soviets, created by the wage-earning class itself, represented a further development and continuation of the same historical political form embodied by the Paris Commune. This form would later be realised in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and in the revolutions of 1918–1919 in Germany and Hungary.

2. The second period The second period differs from the first «by its “peaceful” character, by the absence of revolutions. The West had finished with bourgeois revolutions. The East had not yet risen to them». «Socialist parties, basically proletarian» emerging in Western Europe «learned to use bourgeois parliamentarism and to found their own daily press, their educational institutions, their trade unions and their co-operative societies. Marx’s doctrine […] began to spread». It was precisely at this stage of prolonged “peaceful” capitalist development that «liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism». Revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein «cravenly preached “social peace” […], renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the “sympathising” intelligentsia». Yet these same years, which in Western Europe were a time of ‘peaceful’ and gradual development of capitalism, were in the East a period of rapid capitalist growth. This contradictory and uneven development of capitalism was preparing «a new source of great world storms opened up in Asia». «It is in this era», wrote Lenin, «of storms and their “repercussions” in Europe that we are now living». Thus, Marx’s scientific foresight was confirmed. On 27 September 1877, he wrote that «this time the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of counter-revolution». It goes without saying that he was referring to the bourgeois-democratic revolution. «After Asia», Lenin wrote, «Europe has also begun to stir, although not in the Asiatic way. […] The frenzied arming and the policy of imperialism are turning modern Europe into a “social peace” which is more like a gunpowder barrel». Capitalism entered its highest stage – the stage of imperialism.

3. The third period The world-historical significance of the third period in the spread of Marxism lies primarily in the fact that it made the proletariat the leading force in bourgeois revolutions – and, most importantly, it marked the beginning of proletarian communist revolutions themselves. The central event of world-historical significance in this period was the October Revolution in Russia. The combination of two crises – the internal crisis of the bourgeois Provisional Government and the external crisis represented by the protracted first imperialist war – meant that the proletarian revolution had to solve two tasks simultaneously: to complete the bourgeois revolution within the country and to open the road to world revolution. The highest point in the realisation of the second task was the creation of the Communist International, the headquarters of the world revolution. The October Revolution thus had a dual character: by destroying the remnants of feudalism, it resolved tasks that the bourgeoisie was no longer able – and no longer willing – to carry out, and at the same time it sought to open the path towards a world communist revolution. October’s “storming of the heavens” in Russia was followed by revolutions in Germany, Hungary and Finland, and by the beginning of the formation of communist parties in many countries of the world. This unprecedented revolutionary wave was subsequently swept away by a counter-revolution of colossal force. During the 1920s and 1930s, Stalinism in Russia, social democracy, and then Nazism in Germany and fascism in various European countries drowned the first world communist revolution in blood. The failure to grasp this dual character of October was a component of the erroneous view held by the Mensheviks who, based on a one-sided view according to which Russia’s economy at the time suffered not from the dominant influence of imperialist capitalist relations, but from the insufficient development of the productive forces, held that the Russian working class – although destined to play an unprecedented role in organising economic and political life, especially in the “defence,” and even further development, of capitalism – should not take full state power or attempt to build socialism, since such an attempt would be premature. To the proletariat they assigned the role of pushing the Russian bourgeoisie, which they regarded as the only class capable of leading the solution to the country’s immediate economic and political issues. As Yuliy Martov wrote in 1917, after the Bolsheviks had already seized power: «[To attempt] to implant socialism in an economically and culturally backwards country is a senseless utopia». This vision lacks two essential components of a truly scientific revolutionary strategy. First, it fails to take into account the empirical fact that by the time the revolutionary epoch began in Russia, the bourgeoisie of the leading capitalist countries had become an entirely counter-revolutionary force – incapable of playing a leading role in the bourgeois revolution and ready to betray the interests of its best ally in the struggle against feudalism, the peasantry. From this fact, the only correct conclusion for the tactics of the proletariat was to be drawn: it was necessary to win the peasantry – subject to a double oppression of feudalism and capitalism – as an ally, to appeal to the rational side of its duality, rather than its prejudice, its future – not its past (it was precisely this idea that Engels expressed in “The Peasant Question in France and Germany”). Marx and Engels, unlike the Mensheviks, were able to incorporate this crucial point into the strategy of the proletariat. In “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany”, Engels – drawing on extensive empirical material – analysed the German Revolution of 1848–1849 and developed theses that he and Marx had already advanced during the revolution itself: the leitmotif of the analysis is the inability of the German liberal bourgeoisie to play a leading role in the bourgeois revolution. A hypothetically favourable alignment of forces for the proletariat was repeatedly expressed by Marx and Engels in compact formulas: «[only with the support of the peasantry] the proletarian revolution will obtain that chorus without which its solo song becomes the swan song in all peasant countries,’ or: ‘The whole thing in Germany will depend on the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasant War. Then the affair will be splendid». However, in the mid-19th century, conditions combined in a manner unfavourable to the proletariat, and, according to the classics, it was precisely the fact that the peasant masses were drawn behind the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie rather than the revolutionary proletariat that constituted the principal reason why the revolutions of the Spring of Nations in 1848–1849 were neither radical nor carried through to completion even in a bourgeois sense – let alone capable of opening a perspective for the realisation of an internationalist communist strategy. But such conditions arose half a century later in Russia, and not to take advantage of them would have amounted to nothing less than a betrayal of the proletariat by a party claiming to represent its historical interests. Secondly, the Mensheviks lacked an understanding of the necessity of viewing the struggle of any national section of the proletariat as subordinate to the interests of the world class as a whole. The Bolsheviks bequeathed to subsequent generations of revolutionary fighters an invaluable historical experience: for the first time, the proletariat created a functioning organisational centre of the world revolution; for the first time, it united – in practice, rather than in declarations or moral exhortations – different contingents of the class across the globe and for the first time, it constituted the working class as an active subject of international relations. But all this might not have happened if the Russian workers had followed the Mensheviks and voluntarily renounced the seizure of power. However, the defeat of the first world communist revolution cannot refute the correctness of Marxism, just as it cannot refute the logic of historical social development. The end of the third period can be tentatively considered to be 1925, when, following the results of the 14th Conference of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the transition from the course of world communist revolution to the course of building socialism in a single country was confirmed. The last flashes of this period were the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. The Second Imperialist World War that followed was accompanied only by isolated, independent actions of the proletariat, limited in strength and significance, in which those who had taken part in the revolutionary wave of 1917–1923 and in the subsequent struggle against the bourgeois counter-revolution played a central role. The counter-revolutionary wave and the subsequent decades of bourgeois rule gave rise not only to the monsters of capitalist reaction, but also to many more or less influential ideologies of false socialism – Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism and Guevarism, Juche, Chavism, etc. All of them were born in their time as bourgeois ideologies of ‘catch-up development,’ designed to accompany the centralisation and acceleration of capitalist development in the respective backward countries, and have now taken their rightful place on the edge of the graveyard of bourgeois ideologies, from which the most diverse factions of the bourgeoisie draw their ‘ideas.’ Another component of these ideologies, bringing them closer, for example, to Russian populism, were elements of utopian socialism, designed to involve the broad masses in the construction of capitalism, which was actually taking place, and to hide it behind phrases about the mythical ‘building of socialism.’ At the same time, fragments of the revolutionary “storming of the heavens” in the second half of the 1910s and early 1920s remained – proletarian movements that attempted to defend Marxism in conditions of widespread repression. But they failed to retreat in an organised manner, preserve rare cadres, provide a scientific analysis of the social battles taking place and those to come, and create a core that could become the successor to the world party of the proletariat. Ultimately, they reached an impasse. The most famous of these movements is Trotskyism, which currently does not even have a unified theory and has degenerated to the level of petty-bourgeois ideologies that do not go beyond certain national demands or interclass alliances. Although we do not question Lev Trotsky’s subjective revolutionary spirit and his contributions to the proletariat, scientific honesty requires us to acknowledge that the seeds of modern Trotskyism were sown by Trotsky’s own theoretical and political errors. However, there were also proletarian currents, mainly in Italy, which managed at least to preserve the thread of Marxism and prepare the ground for future generations of revolutionaries. Their most important achievement was a largely accurate analysis of the socio-economic nature of states such as Stalin’s USSR – bourgeois states growing out of a capitalist economic base.

4. The fourth (current) period Contemporary conditions differ substantially from those observed by the classics of Marxism, who traced the following logic of social development: rapid capitalist expansion was accompanied by a sharp intensification of class antagonisms, the situation of the proletarian masses became increasingly unbearable, and this generated the growth of spontaneous class struggle. Marxists then had only to merge the labour movement and socialism. Today, rapid capitalist development – accompanied by the expansion of industrial production, the disintegration of the peasantry, and large-scale migration to the cities – can be observed primarily in Southeast Asia and Africa – but even there, this process has either already ended or is slowing down. There is certainly no reason to expect a spontaneous class struggle among wage workers in the developed imperialist metropolises in the foreseeable future. The present conditions in all developed imperialist states closely resemble those that had already taken shape in the most advanced capitalist countries - England and the United States – in the second half of the nineteenth century. As early as 1907, Lenin provided an incisive characterisation of these conditions. The proletariat shows «almost no political independence. In these countries – where bourgeois-democratic historical tasks were almost entirely non-existent – the political arena was completely held by a triumphant and self-satisfied bourgeoisie, unequalled anywhere in the world in the art of deceiving, corrupting and bribing the workers». Compared with the capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the contemporary working class exhibits a far more complex internal stratification; in advanced capitalist countries, it is accompanied by the growth of parasitism and the labour aristocracy, the spread of a property-owning strata of wage workers and families with multiple sources of income; relatively high labour productivity means that far fewer workers are concentrated within individual industrial enterprises than in earlier periods; there is a convergence of incomes between wage workers and the intermediate strata, and a more developed transport system and housing stock have blurred – though not abolished – the spatial separation between “working-class” and bourgeois residential areas; the production, dissemination and consumption of the dominant ideology (social networks, streaming platforms, the Internet in general) have taken on more developed forms; imperialism has given rise to an extensive ‘social’ state. This is precisely why there is no mass labour movement and why the revolutionary minority is extremely weak in the centres of imperialist development (centres whose working class bears the historical task of playing a decisive role in the communist revolution), making the prospect of a victorious communist revolution impossible in the short and medium term. At the same time, primitive accumulation of capital (i.e., the separation of the direct producer from the means of production) has largely been completed worldwide in the last sphere where it could still take place: agriculture. In the second half of the twentieth century, the decomposition of the peasantry was largely completed. It no longer exists as a pre-capitalist class on a scale of any global significance. The agrarian revolution was complete. Agricultural production has become one of the sectors of the capitalist economy. The era of bourgeois revolutions has ended, and with it, national liberation wars and anti-colonial movements have receded into the past. All this has deprived the communists of the opportunity to supplement the proletarian uprising with another edition of the peasant war or a national liberation movement. The modern class of wage workers will have to carry out the world communist revolution under new and unprecedented historical conditions. At the same time, for the first time in history, it will be compelled to realise an unmediated and uncompromised communist programme – a programme centred on the abolition of private property. The implementation of this programme will open the way from the highest and final form of commodity production – capitalism – to communistically organised, i.e. directly social labour, which excludes the possibility of transforming the product of social labour into a commodity. The abolition of private property implies the destruction of commodity production as such. Here it is worth noting two important conclusions that follow from the scientific analysis of capitalism developed by Marxism: 1) measures aimed at mitigating individual negative manifestations – through nationalisation, state regulation and the elimination of market “failures”, the expansion of the “welfare state”, etc. – do not lead to this goal; 2) no “intermediate”‘ economic system, no “third way,” can exist between commodity (i.e. capitalist) production and planned (i.e. communist) production. Because modern society is characterised by a permanent – not accidental – social interconnection resting on an anarchic basis of production, a connection that appears on the surface as the universal circulation of money, any mode of production that preserves this commodity-based, anarchic foundation – and therefore money – falls within the scope of Marx’s theory and is, by definition, capitalist, regardless of the labels assigned to it by old or new ideological mantras: “real socialism,” “monocapitalism,” “totalitarianism,” “state capitalism,” “bureaucratic collectivism,” “neo-Asian mode of production,” “new feudalism,” etc. As Lenin showed in his polemic with Kautsky and Bukharin, a hypothetical capitalism in which only a single collective capitalist remains – embodied in a state or a private corporation that has completely suppressed competition among different fractions – is impossible. At present, none of the bourgeois factions can, even in principle, offer solutions to the fundamental problems facing humanity. Thus, the only truly universal interest of the modern bourgeoisie is the preservation of the existing mode of production. Undoubtedly, the division within the bourgeoisie – the ruling class of capitalist society – is an objective phenomenon. It is fragmented by competition in the struggle for the appropriation of surplus value and therefore cannot be united in any lasting sense. Yet it is united by a common class interest: to preserve the social order within which it can continue to appropriate surplus value. All modern political shells are fully developed and fully adequate to the established mode of production. The differences between “right-wing” and “left-wing” parties, as well as between “democratic” and “dictatorial” regimes, are of a private, cosmetic nature. Parliament (like all other representative institutions) has become a dysfunctional relic even for the bourgeoisie itself, since the struggle between its factions and the adoption of major decisions take place within the executive and monetary apparatuses of the state. For the proletariat, parliament is even less relevant, as it can no longer serve even as a tribune for its class interests. This was not the case in the era of bourgeois revolutions, which fought against the remnants of the medieval order. At that time, communists supported the struggle for bourgeois democracy, since it created conditions for accelerated capitalist development; consequently, it was a necessary and unavoidable stage for the full unfolding of the proletarian struggle on a modern, i.e., capitalist, foundation. The participation of the proletariat in this struggle was the only thing that could give it the most consistent and complete character, as well as significantly hasten its outcome. Our era for the first time sets the proletariat and its world communist party the task of carrying out exclusively its own, specifically communist, objectives. Therefore, the communist party cannot enter into any interclass blocs, electoral coalitions, interparty alliances, coordination committees, etc. But we have always welcomed – will continue to welcome – defectors from the bourgeois class who place themselves on the path of the world communist revolution. They are following the only correct path – the path of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

VII. Capitalism Breeds Wars Commodities are the economic cell-form of capitalist society. From this cell, all its inherent characteristics inevitably grow: competition by all possible means, poverty, and the highest manifestation of the contradictions of capitalism – world imperialist wars. Thus, the very development of the capitalist mode of production constantly creates the conditions for war. Consequently, the only way to end war is to abolish private property. Back in “The German Ideology”, Marx and Engels wrote: «Big industry universalised competition […], established means of communication and the modern world market […]. […] Generally speaking, big industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests, big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it». At present, the capitalist mode of production has indeed spread across the globe, so if Marx and Engels created the Communist League as an international organisation, then in the current conditions of universal competition, Marxists must see themselves as the world proletarian vanguard, otherwise they are doomed to parochialism and narrow-mindedness or, worse still, to becoming an instrument of one of the factions of the bourgeoisie, which always pursues certain nationally limited interests that are inadequate for the modern era.

VIII. The Nature of Wars in the Current Era Marxism has always viewed the emergence of nations as a consequence of the establishment of capitalism and the elimination of feudalism, i.e. before the beginning of the capitalist era, nations did not exist in the scientific sense of the word. In the Middle Ages, states were composed of numerous semi-autonomous localities and regions, often separated by their own customs barriers and frequently speaking different languages. These units were economically self-contained, and their connection to central state power was relatively weak. Capitalism, which destroyed the medieval communal, guild, and artisanal ties, replaced them with another type of social connection: one established by the market within the framework of a commodity economy. It was this connection that became the social bond constituting the nation. In one of his most important works, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914), Lenin wrote: «Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. […] Therefore, the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The most profound economic factors drive towards this goal, and, therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the national state is typical and normal for the capitalist period. Consequently, if we want to grasp the meaning of self-determination of nations, not by juggling with legal definitions, or “inventing” abstract definitions, but by examining the historico-economic conditions of the national movements, we must inevitably reach the conclusion that the self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state». Due to the uneven development of capitalism, a specific variant of the national question emerged: the colonial question. Its essence lay in the fact that countries whose bourgeoisie had largely completed the elimination of pre-capitalist remnants at home became metropolises and employed their power to preserve these very remnants in dependent territories – the colonies. The communists were then faced with the task of supporting certain bourgeois-democratic movements in backward countries, insofar as their victory accelerated capitalist development and thereby brought closer the next stage of proletarian revolutions on a world scale. However, this applied not to all bourgeois-democratic movements, but only to those of a genuinely national-revolutionary character. Already at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, Lenin emphasised: «There can be no doubt of the fact that any nationalist movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, because the great mass of the population of the backward countries consists of the peasantry, which is the representative of bourgeois capitalist relations. […] if we say ‘bourgeois-democratic’, we lose the distinction between the reformist and revolutionary movement […], simply because the imperialist bourgeoisie has done everything in its power to create a reformist movement among the oppressed peoples too. A certain understanding has emerged between the bourgeoisie of the exploiting countries and that of the colonies, so that very often, even perhaps in most cases, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, although they also support national movements, nevertheless fight against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes with a certain degree of agreement with the imperialist bourgeoisie, that is to say together with it. […] The point about this is that as communists we will only support the bourgeois freedom movements in the colonial countries if these movements are really revolutionary and if their representatives are not opposed to us training and organising the peasantry in a revolutionary way. If that is no good, then the communists there also have a duty to fight against the reformist bourgeoisie…» Here, it is important to emphasise one point: by the term ‘backward’, the Communist International meant countries with a predominantly feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal-peasant economy, and not countries with a fully developed capitalist economy that lagged behind the leading countries only in quantitative terms. Today, there are no such backward countries on any significant scale. Thus, from the standpoint of Marxism, the national question is considered “solved” once feudalism has been completely overcome within a country’s economy and production has become entirely commodity-based. From this moment on, a new historical stage begins: the struggle of the proletariat for the abolition of all nations and state borders, for the unification of people throughout the world within the framework of a new, communist economy. Naturally, this scientific understanding differs from the widespread philistine opinion that the national question is not resolved as long as conflicts between states representing different nations and ethnic groups within a single state persist, but the reality is that, in this sense, the national question cannot, in principle, be resolved within the framework of the global capitalist economy. Such a common-sense approach is not only theoretically sterile, but also practically harmful, as it makes the proletarian who accepts it a blind and passive instrument that will inevitably be exploited by one faction of the bourgeoisie or another. The only protection against this is a clear understanding that nations today are fully formed, and that the wars waged by particular detachments of the world bourgeoisie (whether in small countries in terms of economic size, large countries, or within countries), under the banner of ‘national liberation war’, are either directly and openly imperialist or imperialist in a ‘proxy’ form, when the bourgeoisie of a smaller nation, or of a part of it, acts merely as an intermediary for advancing the objectives of particular imperialist powers or blocs. In “The Communist Manifesto”, Marx and Engels proclaimed that the proletariat had no country. This implied the need for the proletariat to fight first and foremost for its own class interests on a global scale, since national interests had become synonymous with the interests of the ruling classes. With the advent of the imperialist era, nationalism completely lost any progressive content. As Lenin wrote: «If national wars in the 18th and 19th centuries marked the beginning of capitalism, imperialist wars point to its end». It is completely irrelevant which detachment of the bourgeoisie struck first: this particular circumstance does not change the main point: the reactionary nature of such wars. In these conditions, as Lenin wrote, the division into defensive and offensive wars becomes obsolete. Neither side in such a conflict is fighting to break down the archaic and barbaric capitalist system and move on to the next stage of humanity’s social evolution – which means that wars will happen again and again. Humanity can break out of this vicious circle only when the proletariat launches a world revolution: the complete end of this world civil war will put an end to all wars by abolishing their root cause: commodity production. Thus, imperialist war is not an exception but a typical phenomenon of our imperialist era, but typical does not mean the only one, and in the imperialist era there can be “justified”, ”defensive” revolutionary wars: class civil wars, wars against all imperialist powers waged by the proletariat to establish its own dictatorship, as well as wars aimed at spreading the revolution to other countries. Therefore, the position of communists has nothing in common with bourgeois pacifism, and the general slogan of communists, applicable to any war in the current imperialist era, is the classic slogan of the German Spartacists: “The main enemy is at home.” However, this slogan – and the only correct tactic that follows from it, namely revolutionary defeatism, i.e. the mass revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of all countries against their ‘own’ governments in all imperialist wars – can only be realised if there is a mass movement of the working class. Until such a movement exists, every worker can lay his brick in the foundation of the future edifice, that is, understand – and spread this understanding around him – that even in a purely everyday sense, it is irrational for the proletariat to support ‘its own’ bourgeoisie in war, since the ruling class inevitably uses it to increase oppression of the exploited class (restrictions on political freedoms, freedom of speech, assembly, organisations, everyday controls, the shifting of increased costs onto the population, the intensification of labour regimes, and forced mobilisation), and will benefit itself (redistribution of assets, increased corruption and privileges, including under the pretext of classifying previously publicly available information, enrichment from military contracts and foreign aid, further deepening of already extreme social inequality).

IX. The Tasks of the Communist Struggle The appropriation of Marxist theory and of the experience of previous class struggles of the proletariat is a necessary but insufficient condition for the struggle to create a world communist party. We live in an era in which the conditions for a communist revolution are maturing. The key question is not how rapidly capitalism will be overcome, but how. The necessity of the revolutionary path is not in question. The problem lies in how exactly this process will unfold. The driving force of the communist revolution is the class of wage workers – the only revolutionary class of our era. The task of communists is to generalise and develop the forms assumed by its struggle, directing it towards the abolition of private property. To this end, communists must participate in all manifestations of the contemporary struggle of the proletariat, however partial and limited they may be. The world communist party exists in constant connection with the class of wage workers. Objective conditions determine the depth and breadth of the political vanguard’s activities. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that class struggle develops simultaneously – but unevenly – on several fronts: economic, political and theoretical. The main task of the struggle on the theoretical front consists in linking and generalising the experience of the wage-working class across global time and space. It is necessary to grow together with the working class, not in isolation from it, and certainly not by substituting ourselves for it. The programme of the Internationalist Communist Party, presented in September 1944, sets out theses that remain relevant today: «Our political line will not be influenced by idealistic temptations or theories of spontaneity. This will allow the party’s will to fight to coincide with the will of the masses when they express, in a concentrated form, the urgency of a practical necessity in the sense of a revolutionary assault for the conquest of power. But there will be no serious conquest of power unless the party first gains influence over the masses of the proletariat. To this end, the party defines its tasks as follows: a) the masses cannot be won over when and how one wishes, if objective conditions do not stir them; the tactical acrobatics of parties that would like to influence them and make them spring into action at the touch of a magic wand are useless; b) the fighting spirit of the masses, when ignited in struggle, indicates – as if in a diagram – the process of instability and crisis that pervades the productive apparatus of capitalism, its markets and the whole of its political organisation. At this moment, the party can insert itself into the struggle and be one of its determining elements, drawing the masses into its orbit to unite their energies and direct them towards the achievement of specific objectives; c) the success of such an intervention is possible to the extent that the party has been able to create permanent organisations for propaganda, recruitment and agitation within the masses; to the extent that it has been able to win trust, through constant adherence to the life and struggles of the proletariat and its class demands; finally, to the extent that it has demonstrated that it has not deluded the masses with untimely and insincere agitation, with empty gestures such as strikes for the sake of strikes, or strikes for purposes that are contrary to the spirit and interests of the class». If all representatives of the exploited classes preceding the proletariat had the opportunity to free themselves from their dependent position individually, by entering the ranks of the ruling class, then from the moment when modern history fully became world history the liberation of the exploited class – the class of wage workers – has become possible only «under conditions of real collectivity», «in its association and through it». In other words, the exit from capitalism can only be the result of exclusively collective action by the world proletariat. After capitalism, there will be neither exploited nor exploiters. In his “Theses on Feuerbach”, Marx sets out the fundamental tenets of dialectical materialism and, among other things, draws attention to the fundamental flaw of previous materialism. «The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society». This is followed by a crucial conclusion: «The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice». Only practice united with revolutionary theory can be revolutionary practice. Only such a unity of theory and practice constitutes the communist movement, able to surpass a social condition in which one part of society rises above another.

«Workers of the world, unite! » January 2026.