The Priests of Capital

Intro

“Oh the fucking priests and all they fucking wanted us to believe! It’s absolutely fucking necessary that I tell you this story.”
“Pere Duchesne”, Jacques Hébert, 1790¹

Every year you’re crushed more and more on one end by the increasing amount of work expected of you at your job and on the other by the confiscation of the scraps you get in return. Wanting a better life, you attend a local demonstration and join a group of activists. What you find is a corps of people who make it their job to siphon your frustration and turn it towards their own ends, towards a petition, towards a demonstration, towards a local single issue. Through this process, these groups have you on the frontlines believing that the sacrifice given to them will bring your salvation. Believing that the addressing of your own conditions will come later, you become active in order to be more active, working for them and donating your rent in order to create more work. None of it has ever yielded fruit, because it was never going to.

The infinite expansion of capital continues in the background, unhampered by all of this effort, this apparent opposition which material scrutiny reveals to be only symbolic. As the activity and goals of the organization prove more and more hollow, your job continues to expect more labor, your wages decline, and your prospects for the future are erased in front of you. The only thing the activism now provides is your one sense of community, built on mutual pity, sacrifice, and being the only believers in a lifeless cause.

Behind all of this, unnoticed so far because they’ve been purposefully hidden, are The Priests of Capital, those tasked with the myth making, the vampires that live only by feeding off your anger.

But First, What is Escape?

A question we ask before we get into the priests, not only because the answer is intrinsically important, but also because knowing the answer provides the lens needed to more adequately see through the priests’ lies.

What we fight for is a moneyless, classless, stateless society. Such a world has been possible for quite some time. It is only because we’ve been beaten into delirium by the ruling class that a world without irrational and arbitrary systems made only to enslave us seems impossible. In truth, it’s the world we’ve lived in for the majority of our history as a species. Working only when work is needed, a life lived in accordance with the reality of our mutual interdependence, where the majority of our time is spent doing what we want. Make no mistake, the backwards way of life we lead, that being class society, is the outlier, but that doesn’t mean that it will disappear on its own.

Two great classes find themselves at odds with one another. The ruling class of our epoch, the bourgeois, finds itself as obsolete as the system that created them. Simultaneously, our class, the working class, continues to obey the orders of our lords out of habit and fear for the consequences of disobeying. The day when the workers of the world become conscious of the full situation and organize themselves on the basis not of what exists but what is possible, is the day our species will return to the social serenity we once enjoyed. Only now with the fruits that the previous class societies helped us achieve.

This transformation cannot occur piece by piece. The ruling class has shown us its capacity for inhuman levels of violence never seen before. Nor can it be won for the working class. Every attempt to overthrow the system in place of the class has only led to the establishment of a new slate of rulers. Only the mass action of the class, acting through a class party will allow us to free ourselves.

And Now, The Priests

Some of them say that we should blame our working class comrades at home and abroad for our problems. Some of them may redirect our grievances into calls for endless facelifts of the system, harmless escape valves for righteous class anger. Whatever message makes the most sense to any particular proletarian, the Priests are there to help us come to terms with our wretched existence and make sure we harmlessly thrash around without achieving anything.

The Priests are the ideological manifestation of the reactionary impulse to act only within our assigned roles as docile capital generating machines and upstanding citizens. In every society the ideas of the existing order evolve in various directions. Priests are those who spread these various subspecies, which then compete with each other. What distinguishes the Priest is that their narratives always end up justifying the continuation of class society.

These great liars and even greater fools come in all strains, the most insidious and the only kind worth discussing here in detail is The Priest in Red. The Stalinists, social democrats, and democratic socialists all fit comfortably into this role. The red Priests are those who appear to adopt revolutionary and Communist principles, but in reality only warp stolen rhetoric into yet another kind of capitalist logic.

Social democrats talk of manifesting universal justice and social harmony through electing the right politicians and passing the right laws, while the Stalinists fantasize about all of the government programs they could bring if only their party members were able to become the new representatives of capital. Ultimately, one wants reforms to capitalism through the ballot box and the other wants reforms through rifles, but both agree that the existing form of exploitation must be maintained in one form or another. Neither of these con artists can actually bring about a Communist world through their insidious activity, history has shown as much.²

The more courtly strain of the leftist Priests are the ones who dream of joining the ranks of the ruling class through peaceful and democratic means, the democratic socialists. These fools are afflicted by two misunderstandings. Firstly, that the existing governments of the world are neutral territories where classes can fight for control, and second that international revolution by the working class is impossible.

The first lie parroted from Gramsci to Mamdani is the idea that states established by and for the ruling class can somehow be understood as an independent institution. It should be obvious to anyone with even a basic understanding of history that all governments exist to ensure the smooth and efficient operation of the ruling system and nothing more, and that bourgeois governments are no different in this regard. All modern government action occurs to ensure long term profits for capitalists and the destruction of independent proletarian power. As such, the political maneuvering of these Priests keeps all political activity bound within the confines of legal and electoral struggles, where power is entirely out of working class hands. The end result of this practice being useless fighting over reforms that inherently cannot change the basis of capitalist domination.

These same spineless ideologues often justify their first lie with their second, that electoral reform of capital is needed not because this can somehow conjure up Communist revolution, but because successful revolutionary insurrection is either immoral or impossible. They are sly enough to realize that reform obviously does not bring about socialism, and advocate for this dead end because they were never genuinely committed to the Communist programme and with it the possibility of proletarian emancipation. What should be evident is the fact that capitalism can create the conditions for a successful revolutionary process, as all other forms of class society have so far, which we’ve discussed in a previous article³. Ignoring this, they argue we should engage in electoral busywork for the sole purpose of continually trying to negotiate a better deal in our non-consensual exploitation. The end result is the creation of a slave who believes that freedom is a pipe-dream and so they should settle for negotiating the number of lashings they are administered.

More willing to lie about their radical nature are the Priests that spread a message of Stalinist “revolution” (by which they mean only an armed switching of particular bureaucrats and politicians) to achieve the same ends as the last denomination.

Although they differentiate themselves as more radical and thus naturally appeal to the kind of leftist who eventually becomes disillusioned with the electoral carousel, their goal is neither new nor actually breaking with Capitalism. Stalinism was birthed from the death of revolution, and ever since its rotting corpse has continued to seek the flesh of the living movement. But the Stalinists and their preeminent organizations have not always aimed only for personal ascension, much to the chagrin of their younger counterparts who still see in themselves a revolutionary potential, and mistakenly confuse the excesses and corruption of the legacy organizations as the source of their degeneration, rather than a result of their deeper nature.

Starting from its origins, the essence of this counter revolutionary strain was discipline to a party line which was identical with the national interests of the Russian state and its satellite governments. To enforce loyalty to Moscow, show trials, assassinations, espionage, threats, not to mention the numerous military and police tragedies were all employed from the beginning.

Today, these groups take on this same state structure, their methods always stinking of the rigid structuralism used to enforce discipline not to a programme, but to a central committee of individuals. This is of course something necessary to their praxis, which is at all times built upon the assumption that the job of the party is to agglomerate as many poor whelps as it can into its structure, regardless of whether or not those whelps actually agree with or even understand the ends that the organization is fighting for, and then to leverage those whelps to overtake and become the replacement state of Capital. Within such a structure, failure to centralize power to the individuals at the top would surely lead to them losing even the crumb of militancy within their stated aims, not to mention giving their members the possibility of subverting the new state they wish to lead. As their opportunism leads them further off the path of anything actually communist in nature, their hierarchies must extend themselves further and further until they remain the only thing that the organization is, aside from a collection of activists and bank accounts for the accrual of dues.

This leads us finally to the state of the modern Stalinist left, where at last the party functionaries themselves hardly believe in the cause they are fighting for, only capitalizing on those who do, both for profit and to recruit new victims to satiate their desires.⁴ We reiterate, the fact that so many of these organizations are financially, emotionally, and sexually abusive is not incidental, nor is it something we point out only to disparage them and aggrandize ourselves. These problems are a direct result of the hierarchical and rigid structures which substitute the organically revolutionary content of the class party with structurally enforced absolute discipline not to a shared programme, but rather to senior party members. Something which is harmful not only to the members individually, but antithetical to their supposed goal of the establishment of socialism.

Whereas the electoral reformists pander to the fragile sensibilities of the members of the class either too afraid or too unaware of the real workings of the world to act with force, these insurrectionary reformists market to the members of the working class who are more radicalized. Those who rightly see the capitalist system for what it is, and understand that the electoral system is a pointless puppet show not worth their effort, but who remain (for the time being) unable to see what overcoming it actually means and requires. If the purpose of something is what it does, then we can clearly see that Stalinism exists to poach naive radicals and then to exploit their budding enthusiasm for “party” benefit, all the while keeping them far removed from actually revolutionary politics and activity.

This state of things is quite advantageous both for the Priests and their capitalist masters. Not least of all because it allows them to turn much of the proletariat against itself. The Stalinists mock the social democrats whom they perceive as cowards, and the social democrats detest the Stalinists by calling them dogmatic brutes. In reality both are minor variations of the same counter revolutionary movement which suffocates revolutionary opposition to the status quo. We point out that the only difference between these groups is ultimately caused by who they try to swindle, and how they try to swindle them, not because we believe one section of our class to be superior to the other (as the Priests do) but because we see them as equal. The social purpose of all Priests is identical, all containing exactly zero revolutionary content or energy.

We could go on to discuss the pitfalls of liberalism, fascism, conservatism, etc etc, all the various flavors the Priests of capital manifest as, but why waste the time? The multitude of impotent capitalist ideologies are rabbit holes with only psychosis at their bottom. Their real nature is uncovered only when we understand them not as independently existing things, but as intentionally manufactured horseshit, used only to misdirect us and to justify the existence of the world as it currently is.

Deconstruction

As we stated earlier, the conditions we live through autonomously create a basic understanding that we have the ability to take our homes, our workplaces, and our cities into our own hands. This is such an obvious discovery that it will continue to occur independently despite how radical it may be. The proletariat inherently contains the ability to organize the world for itself. It is from this capacity for strength within our class that the Priests derive their own, yet it is also from it that the Priests will be sloughed off. As the world draws closer and closer to climate catastrophe, world war, economic collapse, and all the other factors which threaten our futures, the absurdity of this system and the necessity of a new one will become simply unavoidable.

Yet this does not mean that we must merely sit in our armchairs and wait for things to get worse so that people begin to wake up from their dreams.

“[The] proletarian political cycle is defined exclusively from the point of view of political struggle, the best expression of which is the tendency towards workers’ self-organization. Unlike other revolutionary classes of the past, the proletariat cannot progressively emancipate itself from the capitalist mode of production without confronting the state, as the privileged representative of the dominant social relation: wage slavery. Unlike the transitional periods between modes of production in class societies, the transition to communism cannot be based on any material foundation existing in capitalist society. Within capitalism, the proletariat has had, has, and will only have its labor power to sell to capital in order to survive. The only power it can claim to have is that of radically opposing the social system that oppresses and exploits it, in order to completely revolutionize it.”
“What is the counter revolution?”, Materiaux Critiques, August 2025⁵

The strength of the class movement ebbs and flows, but the foundations underpinning class consciousness are forever present in our daily conditions. More and more of us are realizing that capital is a beast which has begun to eat itself, and in its pain it has started to lash out at the systems that make life itself possible. In response our only real option is to organize along class lines (rather than between them) to achieve our shared interests.

We must go further than only complaints and rejections of what exists. We each have to do the deliberate work of dismantling the deep seated ideological, psychological, and philosophical advertisements inserted into our brains, and instead imagine what we could establish without the limitations of our current time. Luckily we don’t have to do this alone, by working with fellow revolutionaries in disciplined collectives we can concentrate and direct our energy towards building a new world, totally divorced from the thousands of years of class domination that have kept humanity in chains.

And the social aspect of this work is no accident. It is not enough for a majority of individuals nor a vast multitude of book clubs to free themselves ideologically and understand the doctrine of communism. Rather, we must act in ways which build our capacity for self-organization. This organization must be independent of the control and influence of our class enemies who dominate the political parties, ngos, and minds of the non-communists who declare themselves to be leftists. This is what will allow us to invert the relation through which the world influences us while we stand by as idle spectators in our own lives, to not just understand our predicament but to act on it.

The minority who understands this and refuses to be kept meek bystanders in their own existence represent a genuine danger to the continuation of class domination. As such, all of us who consider ourselves part of genuinely radical tendencies must evolve into a genuinely revolutionary class movement, one capable of understanding the historical necessity of the Communist revolution and acting to see it through. As part of the proletariat ourselves, our role is to help our class move beyond mere opposition to what exists on a day to day basis. We will only succeed when we are capable of acting as a unified body towards our unified goals. Goals which must represent our long term historical interests, constituting the necessity for total revolution.

What the bourgeoisie and their Priests decry as both ignorant aggression and intellectual masturbation, the communist revolutionary understands to be necessary acts of class self defense and reorganization. We did not cause capital to enter a crisis, through its own operation it has driven so many of us into the choice of either revolution or death.

Our lives are often measured in mere decades, and the world appears to change much more slowly. Yet in the historical sense; our world is fast approaching a Communist horizon. No prophets exist to say when our class will be capable of revolution, but for it to end in success, we must act now.

“Our theses insist heavily on the concept of transmission, not by chance. The programme, for us, has never been synonymous with a political platform, with banal revolutionary vindictiveness, with an end result divorced from the political path necessary for its realisation. Dialectically, the programme is the political and social projection of the future into the present. We need the concept of transmission to understand that there is no separation between ‘revolutionary preparation’ and ‘revolution’, between tactics and programme”
Militants of Revolutions, N+1 Quinterna, 1993⁶

Communism or Extinction

The Sonoran Internationalists

Intro

But First, What is Escape?

And Now, The Priests

Deconstruction

Sources

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