Intro, What is Revolution?

The most common response we have received to our critique of reformism as a viable strategy for the achievement of communism (other than an attempted refutation of Communism itself) is the defeatist belief that capitalism will, for better or worse, sustain itself indefinitely. That a mix of reform and suppression will eternally stabilize the system and prevent the proletariat from organizing themselves and revolting, or at least that it will do so for long enough that some existential threat brought upon the earth by capitalism kills everyone (namely climate change). Therefore, that in such an eternal system perhaps it is better to try and improve the system than to meaninglessly prepare for a future one that will never come.

This is an understandable belief, but it is also a false one. Every attempt at socialist revolution has to this point failed, yet we must remember that for centuries the right of kings held complete dominion over humanity, and even the idea of liberal capitalism was utopian, certainly more utopian than communism is by today’s standards. To believe capitalism is some unchanging form of society that will never be overcome is a misunderstanding of the nature of human society and its historical transformation. 

What was it that usurped feudalism and replaced it with capitalism? What usurped the system that came before feudalism, and the system that came before that? Revolution. All of the sudden periods of massive societal change that have led to an entirely new era of human history have been what we call revolutions. It is because we seek to establish a new era of human history that we must inherently advocate for a revolution, the process of bringing about a new form of society. Every revolution has taken a completely different form as the conditions existing at the time that the revolution occurred were vastly different, and the fundamental transformation of the everyday existence of all humanity in its current form (from a class society with private ownership into a classless society with common ownership) can only be called a Communist revolution. From that point, we can only discuss what form the future Communist revolution will take. 

In European late feudalism a wealthy middle class began to appear as overseas traders and bankers organized together into guilds. As a class they wielded considerable wealth, but because of their low birth they were not awarded the social privileges of the aristocracy (the class of lords and kings). In time and through a number of measures, this new class, which we now call the bourgeois, was able to transform its economic power into political power. This was the necessary revolution in which capitalism overthrew feudalism and the bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy as the ruling class.

In modern capitalism there is a small number of this new ruling class in each nation, and there is the rest of the population, which is the working class. The lines of power are drawn at the difference between those with massive amounts of property and those without. All that the working class has is their modest personal property, their instruments of labor (their own bodies and minds), and the chains that keep them in this coercive arrangement. 

This means that in the transition from Capitalism into Communism, the revolutionary class must be the international working class (the proletariat). The working class is not able to carve out a section of the economy for itself as the bourgeois did under feudalism. Instead of gaining economic power and leveraging it into political power, this revolution requires the working class to first gain political power and then leverage it into economic power. 

This political power cannot be won in the systems established by the ruling class. It must be won independently because all forms of current bourgeois politics are just that, bourgeois. The purpose of modern government is to organize the domination of the ruling class over the working class. The first objective the modern revolutionary movement must achieve is the overthrow and destruction of the bourgeois/capitalist system. To even passively accept the legitimacy of bourgeois rule (such as by advocating reforms like public power or asking the capitalist state to stop Project Blue) represents a failure in this critical first step. 

The overthrow of bourgeois governments and systems across the world will of course be difficult and painful; accordingly, this is the part of the process that people most doubt will be possible. But as we will outline, the conditions that ensure it is possible will come about naturally. 

Once the proletariat has fully established and secured its independent, democratic, and international power through mass assemblies and workers councils, only then can the process of the revolutionary transformation of society really occur.  

This transition into an entirely new egalitarian world without exploitation is the core of the revolutionary process that we advocate for. In the rest of this article, we hope to articulate how and why the international proletariat can in fact, take all political power for itself and we will expand upon the exact turn of events that can bring about the victory of the world Communist revolution.

Capitalism Trends Towards Crisis – The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

At the very center of this whole discussion is the undeniable fact that due to its own nature, capitalism trends towards periods of crisis, like in the great depression, the 2008 crash, etc. This trend is the process that ensures capitalism’s downfall is possible. Even the bourgeois politicians of the democratic and republican parties have to pay lip service to this decline in living standards with their talk of lowering prices; though they obviously can’t disclose its ultimate cause or actually solve these issues. This is because their real cause is the system itself. 

The crisis of capitalism is first and foremost a crisis of abundance. Not one of overpopulation and lack of resources as it is so often portrayed by the interests of capital and the various reactionary fools that support them.

Imagine you are the owner of a business making cloth. Cloth is produced in large part by handlooms, which are able to produce a certain square footage of fabric each hour. With an investment into a power loom, you are then able to hire a worker to produce three times as much square footage of fabric in the same amount of time. This increase in productivity then allows you to undersell your competitors, and despite selling at a cheaper price; the more efficient production that uses less labor time means that your profit (revenue-cost) is higher. 

Great, but now both you and your competitors will begin to expand their investment and must use these power looms by necessity (as the old method is far less efficient and has been made obsolete). As the majority of your profit comes not from the production of the cloth itself; but from the advantage your company had with this new production over the wider market, you eventually find yourself in a situation where you can no longer extract the same profits once the wider market adapts to meet the efficiency of your company. In response, you need another new technology to outcompete the others again. This cycle continues on and on.

What has been left out is what necessarily happens to the workers during this process. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is always felt the hardest by the most vulnerable class in society, the working class. When the capitalist buys the new machinery, they often must lay off a number of their workers who have been made redundant. What happens to these people who have just lost their livelihood is absolutely irrelevant to the interests of the owner. At the same time, the less the capitalist has to pay their workers the better off the owner is. With the owner in a situation of constant and intense market competition, any compassion or support for a worker makes their company less competitive. If their company gave a generous severance package to their laid-off workers, that is a substantial amount of money that could have gone towards the purchase of new machines instead. It opens up the opportunity for their competitor to not be as kind and make the choice to not pay those they fire, or pay them very little. By any standards of morality and human respect, this is the worse option. By the logic of the capitalist market, this is the efficient option that is often rewarded by further success in economic competition. 

These choices extend to hiring, training, wages, workers’ safety, etc. The more money put into labor, the less the capitalist can put into capital (machines and other investments), which are what allows them to outcompete other businesses. What this ultimately means is that capitalists making entirely necessary choices to remain individually competitive and profitable in the market eventually leads to an economy where nothing is profitable, even with extremely repressive and exploitative treatment of workers. As competition constantly intensifies, a race to the top means the methods to extract more and more profit run into the inherent limitations of both technology and the exploitation of workers, as there is only a certain rate at which technology can advance and only so much the workers can be exploited beyond the point at which they can no longer function. 

While it is a very simplified explanation, this is essentially what is described by the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”. The process where competition drives efficiency, but efficiency is associated with higher costs. At a certain point, a system that requires endless growth and perfect efficiency runs into the limitations of the real world.

Reform Cannot Prevent Crisis or Sustain Capitalism Forever

While this reality is often acknowledged as inherently unavoidable in a pure and stupid form of capitalism; there is a tendency we have noticed within the reformist left that claims such a process can be prevented from occurring by a more insidious and smart capitalism. One which employs welfare to appease the working masses and takes on large debts to be the new source of demand in a saturated capitalism. From this belief (which ultimately says that capitalism will sustain itself for eternity) stems the conclusion that we must therefore dedicate ourselves not to overthrowing the system, but instead making sure we have the right people in control of it so that it may take on a better form.

This belief itself stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons capitalism enters crisis and the mechanisms by which economic policy can address it. As explained in the section on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, profit comes from outcompeting competition. The crisis of capitalism is predominantly caused by a saturation of capital in the market that leads to a loss of profitability as there is eventually no inefficient production to outcompete. It is not just a lack of demand that can be fixed by government stimulus. 

This is not to say that such policies are incapable of delaying such a crisis. Historical precedent as well as general logic prove as much to be true. What is misunderstood however is the changes these policies represent in the real economy (the everyday lives of workers and the operations of capital) and the reasons they cannot satiate the needs of capital forever.

Firstly, such deficit policies (taken when capitalism enters crisis) do serve the needs of capital insofar as they raise general prices through inflation. While this raising of prices does raise the costs of production for business (through material costs), it also raises the price of whatever they produce to a similar amount. Any slight loss that results from this process is then recuperated by the lowering of real wages to the workers that results from inflation (If you get paid the same but everything costs more your real wages are less). This temporarily increases the rate of profit, but also necessarily presents an issue to the system of capital in that the workers will eventually reach a breaking point where they revolt against their gradual impoverishment.

This then necessitates social programs, which bolster the lives of the workers without needing a direct increase in pay from the capitalists. Yet in the same way as government investment into businesses impoverishes the workers, investment into workers will in turn impoverish the businesses. Workers having more money does mean more demand for consumer goods, but capital is primarily driven not by consumer goods but by its own reproduction.

Government policy is, much to the dismay of bourgeois economists, more of a lever than an actual driving force. It can create wealth only when there is room for growth within the capitalist system, beyond which point reformist policy can only move wealth from one section of the economy to another.

Yet to say that capitalism cannot sustain itself forever is not to say that it will overthrow itself. For revolution to occur, there is a second prerequisite beyond just crisis.

From Crisis to Communism

The role of the revolutionary minority of workers and the party that it forms is to be the historical memory and advisor of the whole working class. Class conscious workers who understand a revolutionary transformation of society is necessary to end their exploitation (Communists) must study class struggle across time and space and use the lessons learned from these events to build a unified political program. 

Most people will not be ready for revolution until their only choices are to fight back or die. Although there is always a section of the working class that is willing to revolt at any given time, the proportion of the population who becomes willing and able to do so grows in relation to the degradation of their own material conditions. Mass working class militancy is a necessary prerequisite for revolution and it occurs only in times of serious crisis as the contradictions of the capitalist system become too obvious to ignore for the segments of the population who were placated and given some privileges when the system could still afford to do so.

It is in the period of crisis that the majority of the working class will be able and willing to rise to the occasion of overthrowing capitalism. Organized communist militants are not the driving force behind this trend as it is the system itself that pushes more and more workers to this point of desperation. Where communists do influence this process is in shaping how this dissatisfaction and anger ultimately manifest.

For a large scale working class uprising to become a successful Communist revolution a large enough proportion of the entire global working class must be actively working towards achieving Communism. The role of the Communist party is being a space for this revolutionary minority of the class to gather, organize, spread this understanding, and develop the revolutionary program for the whole working class to implement. History shows that a dedicated Communist organization with the correct theoretical understanding can rapidly multiply its membership to the point it can have a real effect on the revolution during the crisis, but for this to occur we must work to build our organizations as much as possible before this next period of crisis fully sets in.

Conclusion

Everywhere where workers and capitalists exist side by side, class consciousness, and therefore revolution, is possible. Rather than the intense suppression of the working class and its revolutionary minority being what makes revolution unlikely, it is a sign of just how desperate the ruling class is to fight this possibility. The more the fire of revolution spreads, the more the capitalists have to try to stamp it out. After all, if they had nothing to fear and revolution was truly impossible, they would not have to dedicate entire industries and organizations to its continued suppression. 

Our current role as revolutionary Communists is to help the working class gain class consciousness and to use this understanding to reach its ultimate revolutionary conclusion. If the Communist programme is sufficiently understood and accepted by militant workers, then that movement of class conscious members of the working class can expand rapidly and will lead to the transformation of our society. 

For decades now, workers have been reduced to passive observers as their lives are made worse, and projections of what the future will look like seem more bleak than ever. The question is whether or not this will be tolerated, whether workers across nations will realize the real power they hold, whether we can unite as one and build a new and better world.

To those who even now say the fight is already lost, then why not try? To those workers who oppose us, why would you comply with your master’s subliminal orders? And to those who read our words and know somewhere deep in your gut that there is truth to them, what are you waiting for? If what you fear is being singled out by the forces of reaction, why wait for them to embolden themselves before you organize? Whether you join the revolution or not, its failure will mean your death.

The success of the World Communist Revolution is the only path away from enslavement, despair, and death. It is the duty of those who recognize the possibility of true human emancipation to join in this monumental struggle from the moment they acknowledge that it exists. For it is also your struggle, its defeat or victory will be your own.

And remember

Socialism or Barbarism, Communism or Extinction – There is no third way!

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further reading

The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

Capitalism’s Economic Foundations (Part I)

The Failures of Reformist Economics

Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy, Paul Mattick