Chapter II: Capitalist-Imperialism and the World Socialist Revolution

"The goal of our international activity... is to develop a perspective that is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and that speaks to the exploitation and oppression of all people."

2.1.1: The overwhelming majority of the world's peoples and social formations are integrated into a global system of capitalist-imperialism. This imperialist world-system emerged from the systemic crises and social struggles of feudalism in Europe during the fifteenth century. It materialized through the fusion of the capital accumulation process with the social relations and institutions of private property, patriarchy, the state, and colonialism. In turn, an integrated world market and system of exchange based on money emerged, inaugurating a rift in humanity's metabolic relation to nature at a planetary level. Evolving in a decidedly white supremacist and heteropatriarchal direction, capitalist-imperialism has divided the world between a dominant imperial core and dominated global peripheries; between the imperialist bourgeoisie on the one side, and the masses of workers and oppressed peoples on the other. This system has been repeatedly challenged by revolutionary movements of the people, and courageous attempts have been made to overcome this system and build a new society. However, with the neoliberal reconfiguration of capitalist-imperialism, the people's movement and the communist tendency within it have suffered tragic defeats and setbacks, despite the system now being in a perpetual state of crisis (which itself started in 1967 during U.S. imperialism's war against Vietnam, and which came into focus with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and the global economic crisis in 2007). The root of this crisis is to be found within the internal dynamics and contradictions of capital accumulation itself.

2.1.2: The process of capital accumulation is the primary driver of capitalist-imperialism's global expansion, whereby capital attempts to subordinate and subsume the totality of society and nature to a singular imperative: the accumulation and self-expansion of value. In its relentless pursuit of profit, capital captures the surplus value generated through the surplus labor of workers engaged in the production of commodities. This surplus value is then transformed into profit through the sale of these commodities on the world market. In turn, the profits accrued are reinvested in the further production of commodities, leading to the accumulation of wealth and amassing of social power by capital.

2.1.3: A condition for the development of this historical social system was the creation of the "free" worker, which during the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism was achieved through the enclosure of the agrarian commons and the proletarianization of peasants and artisans. With the expansion of capital, the worker was freed from certain feudal obligations, but also from all independent means of subsistence. This left the worker no choice but to sell their labor power to the capitalist in exchange for a wage or its equivalent (by way of marriage, welfare programs, illicit markets, etc.) in order to reproduce their meager existence. Through the commodity production process, the capitalist extracts surplus value from the worker, which is subsequently realized as profit through the sale of commodities on the world market. This system of exploitation sets in motion an ongoing process of accumulation by dispossession, or primitive accumulation, whereby their boundless quest for profits compels the capitalist firms and nation-states of the imperial core to expropriate the land, exploit the labor power, and extract the resources of the global peripheries. As Karl Marx explained, this is the condition for the emergence of the "free" worker, and the brutal historical reality of capital's genesis, which comes into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."¹

2.1.4: While having universalized the capital accumulation process and a system of exchange based on money on a world scale, capital did not universalize the exploitation of wage labor on a world scale once capitalist social relations and institutions were consolidated in the imperial core. In fact, the exploitation of wage labor by capital has only been made possible through various forms of unwaged labor, including the productive and reproductive labor of women, peasants, debtors, and enslaved peoples. Developing in a uniquely imperialist manner, capital integrated and reconfigured various pre-capitalist forms of social organization such as patriarchy, slavery, and caste oppression, while also inventing new forms of social oppression, especially racism and national oppression. These forms serve the dual purpose of keeping the masses of workers and oppressed peoples divided, while legitimizing and facilitating the pauperization and ruthless exploitation of the peripheral proletariat and peasantry.

2.1.5: The process of colonization has generalized this dynamic on a global scale, suspending all forms of autonomous social development within the social formations designated as peripheries by the imperial core. A social relation of dependency has been consciously cultivated by the imperial core, mediated through the integrated world market, and backed by the political and military power of the imperialist nation-states. This process was first unleashed internal to the European continent itself by conquering neighboring peoples and nations, as in the case of English capitalism's colonization of Ireland, thereby increasing the capitalist nation-state's access to land, labor, and resources, as well as homogenizing the cultures of the incipient imperial core on the basis of a conservative Christianity and racist Eurocentrism. From its inception to present, capitalist-imperialism has rested upon the transfer of surplus value from the peripheries to the imperial core. While nominally paid wages, the vast majority of colonized proletarians are subjected to super-exploitation in order to generate super-profits for the imperial core, whereby access to the wage does not guarantee access to the basic necessities required for social reproduction above a bare subsistence level, resulting in the immiseration of the masses of workers and peasants in the peripheral nations.

2.1.6: Historical capitalism did not develop within the framework of closed national economies. From the outset capital developed globally through the violent external imposition of an integrated system of social control that divides the world between core and periphery, oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited, colonizer and colonized: capital has always been imperialist.² In accordance with the laws and tendencies of its real historical development, capital is driven by an internal logic of boundless accumulation achieved through the generalization of commodity production and circulation. This capital accumulation process requires the creation of oppressed peripheries from which capital can expropriate land, extract natural resources, and exploit human labor power, as well as to which it can export waste. In the case of the imperial core's settler-colonies, peripheries have also been used to disperse class struggle within the core nation-states through the voluntary or forced relocation of workers from the metropole to colonial settlements. In turn, these settler workers were transformed into the foot soldiers of empire and bourgeoisified both culturally and ideologically. While capitalist-imperialism's global value chains are designed to facilitate the free movement of capital, the global movement of labor is tightly controlled and militarized. This control of labor is necessary to maintain capital's social domination and exploitation of the global working class. Capital knows no national borders, and can only be effectively countered by the revolutionary internationalism of the working class and all oppressed peoples.

2.1.7: Capitalist-imperialism has engendered a global system characterized by the hierarchical division of the world into distinct zones, wherein the corporations and financial institutions of the imperial core, bolstered by the armed power of the imperialist nation-states, systematically oppress and exploit the peoples and nations of the global peripheries, which encompass the vast majority of humanity. Motivated by the imperatives of capital accumulation—profit maximization and market competition—these ascendant capitalist social formations have undergone rapid development and expansion, catalyzing profound transformations across all spheres of social life and suspending the autonomous social development of the non-capitalist societies they encounter and subjugate.

2.1.8: Consequently, the world has been divided into an imperial core initially concentrated in the nation-states of Europe but later encompassing Japan and the European settler-colonies of North America (the United States and Canada), Australia, New Zealand, and Israel; a global periphery encompassing the oppressed peoples and nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and the internal colonies of the core countries; and an intermediate semi-periphery composed of nation-states embodying characteristics of both core and periphery, at times benefiting from interactions with the imperial core, while also encountering contradictions arising from the imperial core's dominant position in the world-system.

2.1.9: Today, the geopolitical and economic dominance of the multinational corporations and nation-states of the imperial core is secured by the military power of U.S. imperialism. The United States acts as the hegemonic nation-state within the world-system's geopolitical and economic order, and the global police force responsible for securing and defending the core's collective imperialism. It is crucial for communists to recognize that the imperialist tendencies of capitalism have not diminished over time. Rather, they are integral to its historical emergence and structure as a social system, and have actually intensified as capital extends its dominion over the whole of humanity and the planet. However, despite the existence of a collective imperialism characterized by joint management under U.S. imperial leadership, inter-imperialist rivalries continue to pose the threat of new inter-imperialist wars, particularly in an era of increasing multipolarity.

2.1.10: On the basis of their position within the imperialist world-system, it is possible for semi-peripheral countries to develop into subimperialist powers.³ While their subordinate status in relation to the imperial core remains intact at the level of the world-system, the subimperialist countries have a relative degree of autonomy at the regional level in their economic, political, and military affairs. The national ruling class of a subimperialist country aspires to move up the global imperialist hierarchy, even to promote themselves into the ranks of the imperial core itself, by developing new centers of capital accumulation. Subimperialism is characterized by a semi-peripheral nation-state and its corporate firms engaging in the super-exploitation of workers and the extraction of natural resources from their country's hinterland and internal colonies, as well as from the countries of the global peripheries located in their sphere of influence, in order to compensate for the imperial core's control over the transfer of surplus value from the peripheries. Subimperialist countries are capable of developing both tense collaboration, and a limited degree of direct competition, with the nation-states and multinational corporations of the imperial core.

2.1.11: Today, subimperialism is a phenomenon associated with the regional imperialisms of countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and India. Accepting the exploitative and oppressive social relations and institutions of capitalist-imperialism's world-economy—which includes dependent development, unequal exchange, and maintaining a global core-periphery divide—the ruling classes of these semi-peripheral countries reject their subordinate position within the geopolitical configuration of imperialism at the regional level, seeking to expand their regional hegemony in exchange for participating in the co-management of the world-system by acting as a regional gendarme of the imperial core. The position of the subimperialist powers within the world-system is deeply contradictory, reflecting both a degree of relative autonomy and expansionary ambitions on the one hand, and subordination and obedience to the dictates and directives of the imperial core on the other.

2.1.12: In addition to the subimperialist countries, we can identify non-hegemonic empires in formation, emerging from the semi-peripheries of the world-system. Today, this category includes the rising imperialist powers of Russia and China, both of whom are in competition against, but also economically enmeshed with, the collective imperialism of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. As is well-known, Russia has a long history as an imperialist power under the rule of the Tsar, both in terms of a policy of internal colonialism (i.e. national oppression of Jews, Muslims, and the peoples of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Siberia, etc.) and inter-imperialist rivalry (i.e. the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and conflicts with the Central Powers during the First World War). While this historical trajectory was interrupted by the October Socialist Revolution of 1917, it was resumed in the late Soviet Union in the form of social imperialism—"socialist in words, but imperialist in deeds," to use Lenin's expression—exemplified by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. At the same time, this period was riddled with contradictions, as the Soviet Union also provided military and economic aid to revolutionary movements in southern Africa, Indochina, and Palestine. While Russia was demoted in the geopolitical hierarchy of the imperialist world-system after the disbandment of the Soviet Union in 1991 and subjected to the "shock therapy" of neoliberal austerity measures during the period of so-called "decommunization," Russia's continuing role as an imperialist power was made obvious to all following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the promotion of the ultranationalist project of building "Greater Russia."

2.1.13: In the case of China, social imperialism became dominant in the period following the death of Mao Zedong, the arrest of the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping's rise to power, and Chinese participation in both the Third Indochina War and Angolan Civil War. This period was characterized by widespread political repression, decollectivization, and neoliberal economic reforms in China. Today, the Communist Party of China continues to promote the revisionist doctrine of "socialism with Chinese characteristics," which is shorthand for Chinese state capitalism's exploitation of the proletariat on behalf of multinational corporations, the super-exploitation of peripheral labor internationally, the establishment of relations of unequal exchange with oppressed nations, and the promotion of a developmental model for the global peripheries which maintains capitalist-imperialism's international division of labor by focusing on resource extraction while undercutting domestic industries by flooding local markets with Chinese commodities. However, the position of China within the world-system is complex, for though its assertion of political sovereignty and rapid economic growth pose a threat to the ruling classes of the imperial core, China's economic life is also deeply entangled with and complementary to the imperialist world-system, and at present a higher proportion of surplus value is in fact transferred from China to the imperial core than China is able to extract from its own super-exploited peripheries.⁴

2.1.14: The development of imperialist tendencies in the social formations of Russia and China must be situated historically. In part, they can be understood as expressions of both internal pressures generated by class struggles and legitimation crises within each country, as well as external pressures generated by the geopolitical and military aggression of U.S. imperialism and its NATO partners. Facing a crisis of hegemony—in large part due to politico-military defeats suffered first in Vietnam, and later in Afghanistan and Iraq—U.S. imperialism previously sought to maintain the unity of the geopolitical bloc under its command, and contain potential rivals by undermining their political and economic sovereignty. The United States hoped to achieve these aims by fomenting inter-ethnic conflicts, balkanization, economic hardship, political crises, regime change, and wars.

It was in such a context that U.S. imperialism hoped to rebuild its hegemony and reestablish a unipolar world-system under its leadership. Indeed, the United States escalated tensions and contributed to the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine War by covertly interfering in the domestic affairs of both Russia and Ukraine, surrounding Russia with missiles, and working to expand NATO to the Russian frontier. Under Biden, U.S. imperialism attempted to provoke a similar conflict with China, using the question of Taiwan as a pretense.

However, divisions within the U.S. ruling class have led to a different approach: reasserting "America First" ultra-nationalism and the Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the neo-fascist Trump regime has called for the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal, withdrawal of financial support for NATO, an armistice between Russia and Ukraine (to be secured at the expense of Ukrainian national sovereignty), and a strategic retreat from Western Europe to the Western Hemisphere, U.S. imperialism's historical zone of influence. In combination with tentative moves towards rapprochement with Russia, these measures are intended to secure the strategic position of the United States in preparation for an inter-imperialist war with China.

2.1.15: While Russia is engaged in a war of aggression against Ukraine, its economic ambitions are largely circumscribed to its regional sphere of influence. The economic ambitions of Chinese monopoly-finance capital are global, though the Chinese state aims to avoid direct military conflict with the warmongering U.S. Empire and its NATO partners in order to facilitate the unobstructed growth and development of its state capitalist project. It must also be emphasized that conflicts between the imperial core and these empires in formation are profoundly unequal when assessing access to resources and the general balance of forces (which at present greatly favors the former over the latter).

Though Russia and China may defend the sovereignty of (some) nations, "multipolarity" is merely a program for the admission of new members into the ranks of the global power elite, or for otherwise reshuffling the global imperialist hierarchy to their benefit. "Multipolarity" is not a program for the people's empowerment and self-emancipation, which can only be achieved through the world socialist revolution and the construction of communism. With the accelerating decline of the United States as the hegemonic imperialist superpower, "multipolarity" is a mere euphemism for a new age of inter-imperialist rivalry, warfare, and, let us hope, revolutionary internationalism.

2.1.16: The formation of a new empire is a contradictory historical process, and in the case of both Russia and China, the process is far from complete and at our present historical conjuncture, we cannot assume that processes of imperial consolidation will prove successful. Indeed, the entry of new nation-states into the club of empires may not even be feasible given certain systemic limitations. It may prove impossible for an enlarged imperial core to extract from the global peripheries the necessary surplus value required to maintain profitability.

The loss of China as a source of net surplus value extraction, for example, would need to be compensated by intensifying the exploitation and super-exploitation of labor in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.⁵ Unable to satisfy this demand, such a crisis of profitability would send the capitalist world-economy and imperialist world-system into terminal crisis, catalyzing popular resistance and revolutionary consciousness. If such economic limitations could be hypothetically overcome, then the imperialist world-system would face the challenge of our planetary ecosystem's limited capacity to satisfy the increased material and energy demands of capital, as well as the increased production of waste and greenhouse gas emissions generated by the further expansion of the imperial mode of living and the capital accumulation process which enables it.

Finally, we must note the possibility that a socialist breakthrough in any one part of the world-system could serve as a catalyst for the world socialist revolution, which could in turn interrupt processes of imperial formation and serve to rekindle the revolutionary internationalist spirit of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world, including both Russia and China. And though it is more likely that the weak links on the imperialist chain will be the first to break (and in this way contribute to the development of the objective conditions necessary for the victory of protracted revolutionary struggles in the imperial core), it goes without saying that a socialist revolution within the borders of the present-day United States, or a second socialist revolution in either Russia or China, would serve to advance and secure victory for the world socialist revolution.

2.1.17: While recognizing Russia and China as rising imperialist powers, as well as the obvious dangers posed by intensifying inter-imperialist rivalries and renewed prospects for world war, communists must actively and consistently oppose the warmongering and military aggression of U.S. imperialism against all peoples and nations of the world—including Russia and China—without falling into the trap of blindly supporting the imperialist ambitions of Russia, China, or any other capitalist nation-state under the auspices of a dogmatic and uncritical "anti-imperialism" and "internationalism." U.S. imperialist aggression serves only to bring humanity closer to another inter-imperialist world war.

Should the people's movement fail to prevent such a disaster from befalling humanity, then the slogan raised by Lenin in 1915 to "convert the imperialist war into civil war" retains all its relevance.⁶ Communists of all countries, particularly in the belligerent imperialist countries, must consciously agitate, educate, and organize to transform a war between capitalist nation-states—which, when viewed from a proletarian class standpoint, is seen clearly for what it is: a fratricidal conflict, with workers slaughtering their fellow workers to line the pockets of "their" national capitalists—into a revolutionary struggle for the global liberation of the working class and all oppressed peoples. The world socialist revolution is the only path to lasting peace and freedom for humanity.

2.1.18: Viewed through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism, we can see that capitalist-imperialism is rife with internal contradictions. We shall first turn our attention to the contradiction between the development and expansion of society's productive capacities, and the prevailing social relations which govern their use; the contradiction between the growing interconnectivity of all human social activity, and the alienation of the worker from the labor process; between the production of immense social wealth, and the private appropriation of this wealth by a tiny minority of exploiters and oppressors.

On the one hand, this historical social development (increased productive capacity, growing social interconnectivity, and immense social wealth) brings forth the objective possibility of building a communist society organized on the basis of a free association of social individuals, rationally and sustainably regulating their metabolic interchange within nature, motivated by the aim of satisfying people's needs and developing people's capacities in an integral fashion. On the other hand, capitalist-imperialism squanders this potential by increasing poverty, misery, and alienation for the masses of people while the imperialist bourgeoisie accumulate immense wealth, blocking social progress in the direction of communism and threatening to drag humanity into the depths of barbarism. This contradiction will only be resolved through the world socialist revolution.

2.1.19: A second contradiction is between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which is manifest in the nation-states of the imperial core and periphery alike, as well as the imperialist world-system as a whole. On one side is the bourgeoisie, who own and control the means of social production and reproduction, and who accumulate capital through the exploitation of the proletariat. On the other is the proletariat, who are dispossessed of all independent means of subsistence, and whose labor power is exploited by capital. This contradiction is generated by the capital accumulation process, and produces a global class struggle which will only be resolved with the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of capitalist social relations and institutions through proletarian revolution.

2.1.20: A third contradiction is that between the oppressor nations of the imperial core and the oppressed nations of the global peripheries. On one side stand the colonizer nation-states, who want to maintain the ruthless exploitation of land, labor, and resources through processes of colonization, enclosure, and proletarianization, which requires they interrupt processes of autonomous social development and maintain the colonies in a position of dependency. On the other side stand the colonized peoples and nations of the peripheries who want independence. This contradiction will be resolved only with the victory of the liberation struggles of all oppressed peoples and nations against national oppression, racial oppression, and all forms of colonialism through decolonial revolution.

2.1.21: A fourth contradiction is that between the heteropatriarchal nuclear family, the invisibilization and devaluation of the social reproduction process, and the authoritarian social control of gender and sexuality on the one hand, and the need for reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, and communal forms of social reproduction on the other. This contradiction will be resolved only with the victory of the liberation struggles of women and LGBTQ+ peoples against heteropatriarchy achieved through feminist revolution.

2.1.22: Finally, we come to a fifth contradiction which has come to define our present historical conjuncture. This contradiction is rooted in the alienation of workers from the labor process. It has been established that labor mediates, regulates, and controls humanity's social metabolism with nature. It is through this dialectical interaction or metabolic interchange between society and nature that humanity reproduces our existence, metabolizing matter and energy to grow and develop. In the course of the historical development of the labor process, both nature and society are transformed; it is thus through the labor process that we transform both the world and ourselves. However, capital accumulation presupposes the alienation of the worker from conscious control of the labor process, and from this a contradiction emerges between the systemic imperatives of the capital accumulation process—that is, the self-expansion of value and relentless pursuit of profit through the production and circulation of commodities, i.e. the ever-intensifying extraction of surplus labor—and the reproduction of our planetary ecosystem's capacities to sustain complex forms of life, including the human species itself. This contradiction—one of the absolute limits of capital—can only be resolved through an ecological revolution that successfully establishes a new social metabolism between humans and nature.⁷

2.1.23: Grasped as parts of a whole, the aforementioned revolutions develop organically from the social contradictions generated by capitalist-imperialism, and thus constitute distinct moments in the general historical development of the world socialist revolution. It is from the unification of these diffuse points of struggle at the national, regional, and international scales that a global people's movement for socialism can be constructed. With the successful advance of the world socialist revolution, a sixth contradiction will inevitably arise: the contradiction between socialist countries and non-socialist countries. As a new type of socialist bloc takes shape on the world stage it will, on pain of extinction, need to struggle with capitalist-imperialism for hegemony while hastening its ultimate overthrow and abolition. This contradiction will only be resolved with the final destruction of capitalist-imperialism and the completion of the socialist transition to communism on a world scale.

2.2.1: During its initial competitive market phase, capitalist-imperialism was characterized by the proliferation of relatively independent firms of various sizes, who competed for market shares. In this context, there were numerous firms in the same market for the same product or service, with the owners of these firms making decisions on the basis of a competitive market pricing system. As this cycle ran its course, the competitive market phase of capital gave way to an initial phase of monopoly-finance capital, arising from capital's tendency towards increasing concentration and centralization of capital, whereby competition gives way to monopolies through mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships, and various units of capital are brought under the centralized control and coordination of financial institutions. This initial monopoly-finance phase has now given way to generalized monopoly-finance capital. In this phase, all capitalist firms are enmeshed within a network controlled by the industrial and financial monopolies, effectively reducing the vast majority of non-monopoly firms to the status of subcontractors.

2.2.2: As the imperialist world-system has evolved historically from its beginnings within the shell of European feudal society, to the mercantile empires of the early colonial period, to the national markets of the early twentieth century, and through phases of restructuring in response to various systemic crises and cycles of struggle generated by its internal contradictions, it has come to be characterized by an integrated world market dominated by the forces of monopoly-finance capital, in which a few multinational corporations based in the nation-states of the imperial core dominate industry, metropolitan finance capital plays a leading role, and transnational political and economic institutions play a central role in the partitioning of the world among the imperialist bourgeoisie. This has led to the formation of various regional alliances. Within the capitalist nation-state itself, multinational and transnational corporations and financial institutions play the leading role, which in turn leads to global interdependence of nation-states and poses the problem of transnational coordination, planning, and governance through financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

However, because capital is based on private property, the nation-state within which a given multinational corporation or financial firm is based will always play a central role as an instrument of their political-military power, both to defend capital from the working class, as well as to protect and expand their market hegemony against rival factions of international monopoly-finance capital. This means that, far from minimizing the role of the nation-state and the risk of war, imperialist globalization intensifies it.

2.2.3: Accelerated by capital's drive to accumulate, the concentration of capital leads to the formation of industrial monopolies, principally in the form of multinational corporations. The centralization of capital leads to the merger of industrial capital with bank capital and subsequent formation of finance capital, which enables and maintains the industrial monopolies. In turn, finance capital is used to export money capital, which supersedes the export of commodities. These transformations lead to the development of global capitalist economic institutions (such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization), which are necessary to govern the world-system, as well as to secure the territorial division of the world into the oppressor nations of the imperial core, and the oppressed nations of the global peripheries and semi-peripheries.

2.2.4: In recent years, the number of multinational and transnational corporations of monopoly-finance capital has grown; the socialization and globalization of commodity production and circulation has increased; the scale of capital accumulation has expanded, forming an imperial core composed of multinational and transnational corporations enmeshed within an inter-state geopolitical and military alliance consisting of the United States and Canada, Western and Central Europe, and Japan. Today multinational and transnational corporations maintain monopolies in key strategic sectors of the world-economy, such as industrial manufacturing, trade, investment, finance, energy, information and communications technologies, pharmaceuticals and biotechnologies, armaments, and intellectual property.

2.2.5: The integrated world market of monopoly-finance capital has socialized the process of commodity production and circulation to an unprecedented degree, which has in turn socialized the contradictions of capitalism-imperialism. The contradictions between bourgeoisie and proletariat, colonizer and colonized, heteropatriarchy and feminism, the state and democracy, and capital's social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature, are truly global contradictions which confront humanity as a whole. This creates renewed potential for the unification of the people's revolutionary struggle on a world scale, for the proletarian class struggle is inextricably linked and complementary to the decolonial, feminist, democratic, and ecological struggles of oppressed peoples. It is for this reason that we uphold the slogan first raised by the Communist International in 1920: "Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!"

2.2.6: The multinational corporations and financial institutions of generalized monopoly-finance capital have been the driving force behind neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism emerged in the late twentieth century in response to both gains won by workers' and national liberation movements, and the structural crises of the capitalist world-economy—principally a declining rate of profit—which reached their breaking point in the 1970s. Through the deregulation of markets, the privatization of public services and assets, and the reduction of state intervention into the national economy, neoliberalism aimed to restore capitalist class power and counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by jumpstarting a new cycle of capital accumulation. While in crisis today, neoliberalism remains the hegemonic ideology and mode of imperialist governance.

2.2.7: Imperialism in the age of monopoly-finance capital generates a drive towards war in the form of imperialist wars of conquest to establish and maintain colonies and neocolonies, and inter-imperialist wars in the form of proxy wars and world wars. At the same time, capitalist-imperialism's global system of oppression and exploitation generates people's movements in all corners of the world.

In response to the efforts of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world to defeat imperialist domination and win liberation, the imperialist bourgeoisie and their comprador lackeys are prepared and willing to mount the most genocidal counterinsurgency campaigns, as we've seen in Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kurdistan, Turkey, etc. The twentieth century witnessed two inter-imperialist world wars alongside numerous genocidal wars of colonial and neocolonial conquest. The twenty-first century opened with U.S. imperialism's invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israeli imperialism's continuing settler-colonial occupation and genocide of Palestine and war against Lebanon. The region of West Asia and North Africa is of great strategic importance not only for imperialism, but for the world socialist revolution. Indeed, it has also been the site of the one of the twenty-first century's major revolutionary experiments—the Rojava Revolution—which emerged from the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War.

Today, the threat of inter-imperialist world war has materialized, with the unleashing of war between Russian and Ukraine, with the latter backed by NATO, and intensifying military aggression of both Israel and the United States against Iran. In the context of an imperialist war, the only revolutionary communist position is to build a people's movement to oppose imperialist war, support the liberation struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples of the world, and, should war prove to be inevitable, transform the inter-imperialist world war into a revolutionary people's war for communism.

2.3.1: According to Giovanni Arrighi, the world-system of capitalist-imperialism has experienced four distinct cycles of capital accumulation, each led by a hegemonic nation-state.⁸ The first cycle was the Iberian-Genoese cycle from 1450-1640, during which capital in Genoa allied itself with the Iberian states of Spain and Portugal. The second was the Dutch cycle from 1640-1790. The third was the British cycle from 1790-1925. The fourth and most recent cycle is the cycle dominated by U.S. imperialism, which began in 1925, but is now beginning to unravel. During this cycle, a new imperialism emerged in the aftermath of World War II, in which "the collective imperialism of the triad," to use Samir Amin's expression, came to dominate the world-system.⁹ This triad was composed of the hegemonic United States (with its junior partners Canada and Israel); Western and Central Europe (and their satellites Australia and New Zealand); and Japan.

2.3.2: While long expected, it is now clear that this accumulation cycle is coming to an end, and we are entering a new phase of capitalist-imperialism. The collective imperialism of the triad is collapsing. This reality has been brought into sharp relief by the Russia-Ukraine War, Israel's genocide in Gaza, and the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. In particular, the Trump regime's swift implementation of "America First" neo-fascist policies are remaking the political economy of both U.S. imperialism and the world-system. The mass deportation and detention of immigrants, repression of political opponents (especially the anti-imperialist student movement on college campuses), attacks on basic democratic rights (for people of color, LGBTQ+ people, trade unionists, etc.), fracturing the NATO alliance, reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine (and with it the threat of annexing Greenland and imposition of trade tariffs against Mexico and Canada), and preparation for war with China.

Indeed, in 2025, Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that "it's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly, it was a product of the end of the Cold War," and thus a return to multipolarity—that is to say, inter-imperialist rivalry and war—was bound to happen eventually.¹⁰ While the precise contours of this new cycle of capital accumulation are not yet clear, and it is possible that China's ascendance will continue until it successfully establishes itself as the global hegemonic nation-state, it is clear that we have entered a new phase of inter-imperialist rivalry and with it the renewed possibility of inter-imperialist world war.

2.3.4: From its founding as a racist settler-colonial slavocracy to its present form as the dominant capitalist nation-state within the imperialist world-system, the U.S. Empire has assumed a leading role in waging a bloody counter-revolution against the liberation struggles of the exploited and oppressed peoples of the world. In the wake of the Haitian Revolution of 1791—in which enslaved peoples inscribed upon their banner the slogan "Liberty or Death!"—U.S. imperialism quickly marshaled support for the slave-owning settler ruling class in a last-ditch effort to undermine and destroy the first independent Black republic in the Americas.

After Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, the United States routinely interfered in Mexican affairs before annexing Texas in 1845 and unilaterally invading Mexico in 1846. The resulting Mexican-American War ended with the United States seizing more than half of Mexico's national territory, which constitutes much of the present-day southwest and western regions of the U.S. Empire.

With the eruption of the Philippine Revolution of 1896-1898, the defeat of the Spanish Empire by the Filipino people, and the establishment of a new national democratic government, the U.S. Empire provoked the Spanish-American War of 1898 in order to seize control of the Philippines, along with Cuba and Puerto Rico. The United States refused to acknowledge the Philippine Declaration of Independence, waged a genocidal war against the Filipino people, and established a comprador military dictatorship to solidify the U.S. imperialism's control over its new colony.

Following the October Socialist Revolution in the former Russian Empire, the United States led a coalition of more than a dozen foreign armies in an effort to crush the nascent soviet system and contain the wave of revolutionary worker and peasant struggles it unleashed globally. At the end of World War II, following the defeat of the Nazi empire in Eastern and Central Europe by the Soviet Red Army and communist-led partisan guerrilla forces, and with the defeat of the Japanese empire at hand by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese partisans, the U.S. Empire became the first and only nation-state in history (and hopefully the last) to deploy nuclear weapons—with the primary objective of frightening the Soviet Union and all anti-imperialist forces into submission—resulting in the incineration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

2.3.5: The Cold War is falsely characterized as a bloodless ideological battle between two global superpowers: the United States and Soviet Union. During this period U.S. imperialism led and supported anti-communist extermination campaigns throughout the Global South. In 1965, the United States supported Suharto's genocidal campaign against the Communist Party of Indonesia, which led to the murder of more than one million people. U.S. imperialism then exported its strategy of mass murder, labeled "the Jakarta Method" by journalist Vincent Bevins, across the world.¹¹ State terrorism, which included mass disappearances, detentions, torture, and sexual violence, mainly targeted peasants, workers, and students. In short, the Jakarta Method enabled the U.S. Empire's triumph in the Cold War.

2.3.6: Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the United States imposed a trade embargo which continues to this day in order undermine social reconstruction in a free territory, and has made extensive use of state terrorism to intimidate the peoples of the global peripheries from delinking their countries from the imperialist world-system. With the eruption of revolutionary armed struggles throughout Latin America, the U.S. military's School of the Americas—now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation—trained, armed, and financed right-wing death squads in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.

In the wake of the Chinese Revolution, the United States waged genocidal wars to crush communist-led national liberation wars throughout Asia, committing unspeakable atrocities against the peoples of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a steadfast supporter of the settler-colonial apartheid regimes in South Africa and Namibia and the Portuguese colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé, Príncipe, Cape Verde, and Guinea-Bissau, and continues this legacy today with its ongoing support for Israel's settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and the corrupt authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

In 1983, the U.S. invaded Grenada, taking advantage of internal power struggles within the People's Revolutionary Government following the execution of Maurice Bishop. In 1986, it bombed and imposed economic sanctions against Libya. It worked diligently for the destruction of the Soviet Union in an effort to establish a unipolar world-system and open new markets in Eastern Europe for ruthless exploitation by imperialist capital.

2.3.7: In the era of unipolar imperialism, the United States and its imperialist allies waged war against Iraq in 1990-1991. Under the banner of NATO, U.S. imperialism instigated the breakup of Yugoslavia, resulting in horrific war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-2001. In 1991, the United States helped overthrow the progressive presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in a coup d'état.

Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, under the banner of the so-called "War on Terror," the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan from 2001-2021 and Iraq from 2003-2020, and waged relentless bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Syria. In 2002, U.S. imperialism orchestrated a coup d'état against the progressive government of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (which was successfully defeated through a popular uprising, leading to further radicalization of the Bolivarian Revolution and the founding of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela).

The United States continues to support right-wing counterinsurgency against revolutionary communist movements in the Philippines and India. Since 2014, U.S. imperialism stoked NATO aggression against Russia, providing extensive material support for the Ukrainian war effort (though the Trump regime has made moves to build an alliance with Russia in preparation for war with China). In 2019, the United States organized a coup d'état against the progressive government of Evo Morales, Álvaro García Linera, and the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia. However, this coup attempt was eventually defeated through a popular uprising, resulting in MAS returning to power in 2020.

U.S. imperialism is currently fanning the flames of war with China, mainly over the question of Taiwan. Brazenly defiant of international law and the sovereignty of oppressed peoples and nations, with more than 750 military bases around the world and nuclear weapons pointed at every country considered to be a potential threat to its interests, U.S. imperialism threatens the very existence of human civilization itself as we approach the precipice of another inter-imperialist world war.

2.3.8: Due to the convergence of several historical factors—including the overextension of U.S. imperialism's military forces, the evolution and transformation of modern warfare, a global wave of national democratic and socialist revolutions unleashed by the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions, a world-systemic economic crisis generated by overproduction and the falling rate of profit, the rise of new economic competitors, and climate change induced by centuries of capitalist-imperialism's systematic exploitation and devastation of our planetary ecosystem—the hegemony of U.S. imperialism is now in a phase of crisis and decline, which is itself a symptom of the much deeper rot and decay of the imperialist world-system itself. This presents a unique opportunity for the international communist movement, which could be seized upon in order to tip the balance of forces on a world scale in favor of the people's movement.

2.3.9: However, despite military defeats suffered by U.S. imperialism first in Vietnam, and later in Afghanistan and Iraq, it remains the dominant—and most dangerous—imperialist nation-state in the world-system. At the start of 2025, the fascist Trump regime initiated a geopolitical strategic retreat in an effort to regroup and consolidate its forces within U.S. imperialism's historical zone of interest (indeed, Trump's aggressive posture in relation towards Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for the annexation of Greenland by the United States, can be seen as reflections of this policy shift). This international trend towards the "regionalization" of imperialism (which has its own manifestations in Western Europe, Euroasia, China, and Japan) is, of course, a mere reflection of the general trend towards "great power rivalries" which has been a characteristic of capitalist-imperialism from the beginning. Embargoes, sanctions, death squads, disappearances, and drone strikes continue to be deployed against the oppressed nations who dare to defy the dictates of U.S. imperialism. Though its hegemony is in crisis, an increasingly fascistic U.S. imperialism nonetheless remains the dominant political, military, economic, and cultural power within the world-system, and is the main enemy of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world.

2.4.1: To develop a scientific understanding of the imperialist world-system from the standpoint of historical materialism, we must comprehend the general characteristics and dynamics of the capitalist world-economy, as well as the internal contradictions which drive the historical development of the capital accumulation process. The dominant mode of economic organization within the imperialist world-system is capitalism, a system of social production, allocation, consumption, and metabolism dominated by the social relation of capital. We understand capital as a totalizing social relation that embeds itself within the web of social and natural life through the articulation of a world-economy, defined by processes of value-generating commodity production and circulation. In its relentless drive to commodify and subordinate the totality of life to the profit motive, the capital accumulation process encounters the resistance of both humanity and nature, forcing it to continuously adapt and reconfigure.

2.4.2: Institutionally, capital's social domination is premised upon and secured through private property, specifically the private ownership and control of the means of social production and reproduction by the capitalist class or bourgeoisie. With this premise established, the wage relation arises, whereby the working class or proletariat—who own no independent means of subsistence—must attempt to sell their capacity to work, or labor power, in exchange for a wage, or otherwise obtain access to a wage (e.g., via the family), which is then used to purchase the necessities of life from capital.

2.4.3: This working class, or proletariat, includes (a) waged workers who are employed full-time and part-time; (b) workers who are chronically underemployed, unemployed, or incarcerated (who constitute a reserve army of labor for capital); (c) various surplus populations composed of those who are unemployable (such as people with certain disabilities, as well as the lumpenproletariat who voluntarily or involuntarily exist outside the realm of the formal economy, and whose modes of life and often illegal methods for obtaining means of subsistence tend to make them unemployable); (d) those who are dependent upon wage earners for survival (especially women and children who perform unpaid labors of social reproduction); and (e) masses of semi-proletarians (such as seasonal workers and peasants who are integrated into the world market of capitalism, but whose pre-capitalist ways of life persist in various ways).

2.4.4: Capital establishes and maintains its social domination through the development of a technical division of labor separating manual from intellectual labor in the workplace and society; an integrated world market based on inter-firm competition; the nation-state system, which includes repressive, ideological, and regulatory state apparatuses used to ensure the defense and reproduction of capital accumulation; the nuclear family, which, as the most basic social unit of capitalist society, is premised upon the oppression and exploitation of women and children, the privatization of social reproduction, and the reproduction of the authoritarian capitalist state in miniature; and a rift in humanity's metabolism with nature through the systematic destruction and commodification of our planetary ecosystem. Throughout the course of its historical development, capital has accommodated and integrated various pre-capitalist social relations and institutions, specifically patriarchy and colonialism, while also transforming the structure of these institutions to meet its needs and inventing new forms of social oppression, thereby shaping the violent gendering, sexualization, and racialization of the imperialist world-system in an ongoing effort to subordinate the web of life to a singular imperative: capital accumulation, or the self-expansion of value.

2.4.5: What does it mean that capital creates a world-economy governed by value-generating commodity production and circulation? To begin, we must define a commodity as a useful product or service, produced for exchange on the market. A commodity is a useful thing, a product of labor combined with nature, that has the ability to satisfy a human need—be it fundamental or ephemeral, biological or social—which is exchanged in accordance with a quantifiable social average, via the mediation of a universal equivalent such as money. The commodity thus has a contradictory dual character. On the one hand, commodities have a qualitative aspect, or use-value, satisfying a particular human need. On the other hand, commodities have a quantitative aspect, or exchange-value, and it is this particular aspect of the commodity that is central from the standpoint of capital.

2.4.6: Be it through the direct violence of enslavement or the indirect violence of wage dependency, capital transforms the worker into a mere input in the capital accumulation process. Like the commodity, the waged worker of capital is also defined by a peculiar dual character. With the exception of those workers dominated by systems of slavery (who have their whole existence transformed into that of a commodity), or those who are strictly confined to the unwaged labors of social reproduction (such as a full-time housewife), the waged worker is a twice "free individual" who is "free" to sell their labor power to the capitalist as a commodity in return for a wage, and "free" of all independent means of subsistence and autonomous forms of social reproduction. Thus capital accumulation establishes a situation in which the worker is forced into a relation of dependency, selling the only commodity they possess: their labor power.

2.4.7: There are two moments in the historical development of capitalist-imperialism through which labor processes and social spaces that were once autonomous from the capital accumulation process are subordinated and subsumed under capital's social domination. Formal subsumption occurs when the prevailing labor processes are integrated directly into capital's circuits of commodity production and circulation, without significant changes to their social organization. Capitalists impose the wage relation and extract surplus value generated by workers within their existing roles, but the social organization of the labor process remains largely unchanged. We see this when peasant farmers continue to produce using traditional methods, but their product is now transformed into a commodity through its sale on the market and they are transformed into waged workers. Formal subsumption thus plays an integral role in the transformation of peasants, artisans, and other classes into a new class of proletarians exploited and oppressed by capital.

2.4.8: Real subsumption goes further, for it is characterized by the radical transformation of labor processes such that they fully conform to the logic of capital. Here, the social organization of the labor process is restructured to better facilitate capital accumulation, with new technologies, work rhythms, divisions of labor, and systems of social control developed in accordance with the goal of profit maximization. Real subsumption thus reflects a profound shift in the character of social production and reproduction, whereby labor processes—and indeed, society itself—are integrated within the logic of the capital accumulation process, leading to intensified exploitation, oppression, and alienation for the masses of people, as well as the diffusion of the proletarian class struggle into all areas of social life.

2.4.9: What all commodities share in common is that they are products of labor, and this alone is the source of value for capital. In its drive to accumulate, capital aims to subsume the totality of human existence to the capitalist production process—the social factory—and the totality of society and nature to the capitalist law of value. Work becomes an estranged social activity in which the worker—uprooted from all autonomous forms of social reproduction—is dominated by an abstract social force that alienates the individual from all sensuous and creative forms of social activity. Capital thereby banishes all creative social activities which do not directly contribute to the imperative of capital accumulation, thus relegating various forms of culture, politics, kinship, and so on to separate spheres. Society is artificially separated from its natural matrix, and humanity is alienated from its social being.

2.4.10: Not only are workers alienated from the means of social reproduction and the social products we create through the labor process, but we are alienated from each other. This social alienation is one of the main contradictions of capital, for capital simultaneously connects diverse peoples, societies, and natures in a global production process by way of various forms of indirect social cooperation, while separating these producers through a myriad of social hierarchies operating at multiple scales of capital's social factory. More than a means of accumulating self-expanding value, the imposition of commodity production—and with it the social alienation resulting from the theft or sale one's labor power—is a central organizing principle for capitalist society, a mechanism for the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and a weapon in the arsenal of capitalist-imperialism's social domination.

2.4.11: The capitalist world-economy is grounded in an ongoing process of accumulation by dispossession, which is not only necessary for the social relations and institutions of capitalist-imperialism to take root within a given society, but a process capital must continuously stimulate in order to renew itself. Dispossession and the associated forms of disciplinary violence are necessary prerequisites—and ongoing imperatives—to forge the working class required for the valorization of capital: the creation of the proletarian as a machine of social production in the service of capital accumulation. Accumulation by dispossession systematically uproots and destroys autonomous forms of social development outside capital, thereby forging a mass of dispossessed proletarians. Absolutely central to capital's project has been the devaluation of the labor power of workers of color through processes of racialization. From a system of production based on slavery emerged social relations based on white supremacy. While systems of slavery have become less common (though they persist in a myriad of ways), race is maintained as a method for the hierarchical differentiation, dispossession, devaluation, and super-exploitation of non-white social groups in the service of capitalist-imperialism.

2.4.12: Marxism asserts that the working class must play a leading role in the socialist revolution. To understand why, we must first understand the class structure of capitalism. As we have thus far established, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class constitute the ruling class in any social formation where capital accumulation predominates. Capitalists own and control the means of social production and reproduction; exploit workers in order to extract surplus value and realize profits; and maintain, legitimize, and reproduce their dominant social position as ruling class through the state. From police and prisons to schools and media, capitalist state power is exercised through various state apparatuses of a repressive, ideological, and regulatory character.

2.4.13: Standing in opposition to the bourgeoisie, we have the proletariat or working class. Encompassing the vast majority of both "blue collar" and "white collar" employees, today this class includes workers employed in sectors such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction, engineering, utilities, retail, food service, hospitality, tourism, customer service, transportation and logistics, cleaning services, building and facilities maintenance, information and communications technology, healthcare, childcare, education, and the gig economy, as well as the chronically unemployed, underemployed, and unemployable, prisoners, and members of the armed forces drawn from the ranks of the proletariat.

Workers do not own or control the means of social production and reproduction, and must therefore sell their labor power to the capitalists in exchange for a wage or salary in order to reproduce their existence. This class is exploited by capital, disciplined by capitalist management systems in the workplace, and dominated by the capitalist state. The global working class, however, is the gravedigger of capital: proletarians have an objective historical interest in overthrowing and abolishing capitalist-imperialism, and leading humanity along the socialist road to communism. Furthermore, given their central location within capital's international circuits of commodity production and exchange, they are strategically positioned to do so. Taken together, the bourgeoisie and proletariat occupy two opposing poles of the contradiction between capital and labor.

2.4.14: Between the bourgeoisie and proletariat we can locate the existence of various middle classes. In close proximity to the proletariat stands the peasantry, which can be defined as a class of small-scale agrarian laborers who are dependent upon the land for their social reproduction, and overwhelming concentrated in the nations of the global periphery and semi-periphery. Often owning limited means of production (i.e. land and/or tools), peasants have historically engaged in subsistence agriculture or production for local markets in order to survive. From pre-capitalist social formations to the imperialist world-system today, the peasantry has been subjected to various regimes of exploitation and oppression by feudal landlords, the state, multinational corporations, and agribusiness. While historically constituting a majority of humanity until recent decades, capitalist-imperialism has decimated the global peasantry through the enclosure of the commons, the displacement of peasant families from the land, the commodification of global agriculture, and the subjection of peasant communities to processes of mechanization, urbanization, proletarianization, and integration into capital's global supply chains.

2.4.15: While reduced by capital to roughly 20-25% percent of the total human population (i.e. 1-2 billion people), the global peasantry remains a formidable albeit internally fragmented class with immense revolutionary potential. Today, this class is divided into several key sectors: the agrarian semi-proletariat (communities of workers who identify with the traditions and customs of various peasant cultures, but depend upon a mixture of wage labor and subsistence farming for survival; this sector includes seasonal workers, itinerant workers, landless workers, and fisherfolk, and could be classified as occupying a contradictory class position between the global working class and global peasantry); the landed peasantry (peasant farmers who continue to depend entirely on the land for their survival; this sector includes landowning peasant families engaged in subsistence or commercial farming, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers); and pastoralists (nomadic or semi-nomadic communities dependent on herding livestock for survival).

2.4.16: When the question of class struggle is approached from a world scale, the international communist movement must build a revolutionary united front based on a worker-peasant alliance. The proletariat must build solidarity with the peasantry's struggles against exploitation and oppression, upholding demands for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, Indigenous autonomy, women's liberation, and environmental sustainability. Far from promising the elimination the peasant way of life, socialism must offer the peasantry a desirable alternative to capitalist-imperialism without conceding to the permanence of private property and small-scale commodity production. The socialist transition to communism must be achieved without the coercive expropriation of the peasantry. Instead, the peasantry must be won to the program of the socialist revolution, and mobilized to voluntarily establish agricultural cooperatives on the road to collectivization. Furthermore, the people's movement for socialism has much to learn from the peasant way of life, from agroecological farming methods to Indigenous philosophies of land stewardship.

2.4.17: Also with roots in pre-capitalist social formations, we find the "old middle class" composed of the petite bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. This includes small business owners, farmers, craftsmen, contractors, freelancers, the self-employed, small landlords, writers, journalists, editors, artists, accountants, lawyers, doctors, architects, tenured professors at prestigious universities, and so on. Often owning some means of production, either working independently or employing a small number of workers, the petite bourgeoisie have some stake in the capitalist system, which in turn generates a contradictory class consciousness and political viewpoint. On the one hand, members of the petite bourgeoisie are subjected to the pressures of market competition and proletarianization, and run the risk of being ruined at the hands of monopoly-finance capital. This forms the material basis for the petite bourgeoisie's alliance with the working class and potential sympathy for socialism. On the other hand, the petite bourgeoisie tends to see itself as a class of owners and entrepreneurs, which forms the material basis for alliances with the big bourgeoisie and sympathy for capitalism (and fascism).

2.4.18: With the historical development of capitalist-imperialism and its attendant drive to constantly revolutionize the forces of production and organization of the labor process we can locate the emergence of a "new middle class" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We call this new middle class the bureaucratic class, which is today composed of high-level "white collar" professionals, managers, administrators, engineers, scientists, designers, specialists, academics, consultants, data analysts, project planners, content creators, party officials, employees of non-governmental organizations and the non-profit industry, the trade union bureaucracy, and many government workers. While this class does not typically own means of production (though they may own stock options in the companies which employ them or possess various forms of passive income), they often have considerable autonomy and control at work when compared with the proletariat. Members of the bureaucratic class are often responsible for coordinating and managing the labor of others, or for containing, suppressing, or otherwise co-opting eruptions of proletarian class struggle. Today, it is the bureaucratic class who are largely responsible for designing capital's cybernetic systems and algorithms, and managing the flows of data and information used to make decisions in firms, industries, and markets, as well as influence human psychology and behavior.

2.4.19: The bureaucratic class is distinct from the petite bourgeoisie in that members of this class do not typically own means of production, are usually employed by a company or the state for a wage or salary, and participate in a social labor process which brings them into varying degrees of social cooperation with the proletariat and other members of the bureaucratic class. These factors form the material basis for this class establishing alliances with the working class, as well as for their possible support for socialism, and pose potential for a more rapid process of declassing and proletarianizing the bureaucratic class when compared with their petite bourgeois counterparts. However, members of this class—due largely to their position within the matrix of hierarchical power relations generated by the capitalist division of labor, as well as their close working relationship with the capitalist class—tend to adopt an elitist, technocratic, and frequently entrepreneurial political viewpoint which forms the basis for an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

2.4.20: The study and analysis of the bureaucratic class is of special importance for communists today because in the course of development of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century, the party-state system—with its particular form of bureaucratic central planning and hierarchical division of labor inherited from capitalism—served to elevate the bureaucratic class to a dominant social position. Often well-educated, ambitious, career-oriented, motivated by the pursuit of material self-interest and social status, and occupying the heights of political and economic decision making, this bureaucratic class exercised considerable influence and control over the allocation of the social surplus and the affairs of the party-state. In turn, this bureaucratic class served as the headquarters for the formation of a new bourgeoisie, and ultimately provided the material basis for the restoration of capitalism in the countries of the former socialist bloc. As Mao Zedong explained in 1965 during the Socialist Education Movement:

Mao argued that only the mass mobilization of workers combined with the regular participation of professionals, managers, and party cadres in productive labor alongside the working class could gradually breakdown the division between manual and intellectual labor, and keep China on the socialist road to communism. Indeed, it was members of the bureaucratic class—dubbed "capitalist roaders" by Mao—who became the main targets of the Cultural Revolution. When the slogan "Bombard the Headquarters!" was raised by Mao in 1966, it was in reference to the headquarters of a new bourgeoisie: a bureaucratic class of selfish careerists inside the Communist Party itself.

2.4.21: However, as we know from the course of the Chinese Revolution, the socialist projects which aimed to empower the working class, revolutionize the relations of social production and reproduction, overcome the social division of labor inherited from capitalism, proletarianize the bureaucratic class through collective participation in manual labor, and ultimately build the foundations of a communist society and transcend the narrow horizon of bourgeois right, all came to an abrupt end when the bureaucratic class, led by Deng Xiaoping's faction within the Communist Party of China, usurped political power from the Maoist faction. In turn, Deng's faction set China back on the capitalist road through decollectivization, repression of mass movements led by workers, peasants, and students, and the implementation of sweeping neoliberal economic reforms.

Today, China is a "people's republic" in name only, the Communist Party of China is not communist, and the proletarian class struggle continues from a defensive position (as witnessed by the violent state repression in 2018 of the Jasic Workers Solidarity Group, a Maoist student-worker alliance which led an autonomous unionization campaign at the Shenzhen Jasic Technology factory). When a second socialist revolution erupts in China, it will be the alliance of the "red" bourgeoisie with the "red" bureaucratic class who the communist proletariat and its allies will need to struggle against and ultimately overthrow in order to secure a new victory for socialism.

2.4.22: We can summarize the character of the middles classes of capitalism as follows: they exist at the crossroads of the labor-capital contradiction. While they are theoretically capable of elaborating their own class projects and modes of social organization, the elevation of the middle classes to a dominant social position over and against the working class and peasantry has historically resulted in the restoration of capitalism and the emergence of a new bourgeoisie. While sections of the middle classes can and must be won to the socialist revolution under proletarian class leadership, they are on the whole unreliable and inconsistent classes, who show themselves to be equally capable of opportunistically siding with imperialism or fascism. During a period of economic boom, the relative prosperity experienced by the middle classes can yield alliances with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. In contrast, during an economic bust (i.e. recession or depression), the middle classes can be won to an alliance with the proletariat (though they are also highly susceptible to the influence of fascism in such contexts). Therefore, we can say that the middle classes are unstable, vacillating classes, who cannot be trusted as solid allies of the working class. In order for members of the middle classes to play a progressive role in history, they must be won to the political program of the socialist revolution and organized by the revolutionary united front under the class hegemony of the proletariat and political leadership of the communist movement. They must come to associate their ultimate material interests with the victory of the world socialist revolution and class standpoint of the global working class. They must display a willingness to declass themselves and undergo proletarianization, and thus join the ranks of the universal class: the proletariat.

2.4.23: As should be clear, classes are not monolithic. Rather, all social classes are themselves composed of various sectors and strata. For example, we can identify a professional-managerial sector that encompasses a number of workers in the fields of education, healthcare, science, and technology. This sector encompasses elements of both the working class and the bureaucratic class. Connecting these two classes within the sector, we can identify a contradictory middle strata which embodies elements of both classes (schoolteachers or nurses, for example). Further study and analysis will likely reveal the existence of several such sectors and strata throughout the world today.

2.4.24: Classes are internally stratified and contradictory. For example, in the course of the proletarian class struggle, the historical development of the labor movement has led to the formation of a privileged layer of the working class known as the labor aristocracy, the emergence of which is itself rooted in a process known as "the historic compromise." Today, the labor aristocracy is primarily concentrated in the countries of the imperial core, and the material basis for its existence is found in the redistribution of super-profits extracted by capital from the countries of the global peripheries through processes of super-exploitation. Historically, the labor aristocracy emerged in the late 19^th^ and early 20^th^ centuries, primarily in Western Europe and North America, as industrialization created a demand for a skilled, disciplined, and organized layer within the workforce, and imperialism required a degree of domestic stability to avert revolutionary crisis. This period saw the integration of trade unions and labor parties into the capitalist state through the development of collective bargaining agreements and legal protections for workers. While the historic compromised empowered the official leaders of the trade unions and labor parties to negotiate better wages and working conditions for some workers, these privileges were granted in exchange for the labor aristocracy's loyalty to the capitalist state, their promotion of anticommunism and social chauvinism within the ranks of the working class, and for regulating labor's conflict with capital.

2.4.25: In the United States, for example, the New Deal era of the 1930s brought about the expansion of certain labor rights and protections that favored a layer of organized labor, particularly white settler workers in industries such as manufacturing and construction. However, these reforms largely excluded Black, Chicano, Indigenous, and immigrant workers, and women workers of all races and nationalities, further entrenching a white, male labor aristocracy within the framework of the capitalist state. This exclusion was reinforced by discriminatory practices and policies that limited access to union membership and living wages for whole masses of workers. As a result, the labor aristocracy in the U.S. became a fixture of the capitalist state and a relatively privileged segment of the working class that benefited from the spoils of imperialism, while the vast majority of precarious workers remained outside the protective legal framework of so-called "industrial relations" established by the National Labor Relations Act.

2.4.26: The ideology of the labor aristocracy in the United States can be best classified as "class collaborationist." The origins of this spineless corporatist ideology can be traced to the peculiar configuration of class relations typical of settler-colonial and imperialist social formations, and found its most vociferous proponent in the figure of Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Recasting the struggle between labor and capital as decidedly non-antagonistic and denying the status of the bourgeois democratic state as a form of class dictatorship (and thus denying the necessity for the working class to organize its own system of counterpower on the road to proletarian class dictatorship), the labor aristocracy has historically acted as an anticommunist and counterrevolutionary "fifth column" within the working class by inhibiting the development of revolutionary class consciousness, self-organization, and self-activity. Repressing the revolutionary communist tendency within the labor movement, and going so far as to directly collaborate with the FBI and CIA to sabotage proletarian internationalism and provide support for fascist regimes in the Global South, historical experiences shows that the labor aristocracy will go to nearly any length to protect its historic compromise with capital and the meager benefits it receives.¹³

2.4.27: We can say thus conclude that trade unions, labor parties, and any other form of organization to emerge from the class struggle that comes under the hegemony and administrative control of the labor aristocracy can be considered a part of the ideological state apparatus of capitalist-imperialism, because they objectively serve to legitimize, maintain, and reproduce the social domination of the imperialist ruling class. In such historical contexts, it is the task of communists in the labor movement to wage a relentless struggle against these class traitors, and to either take back control of our class organizations by overthrowing them, or to generate new autonomous organizations to advance the class struggle. While the labor aristocracy persists today—and we should remain vigilant in the struggle against its corrosive effects on our movement—we must also realize that its power and influence has declined in the face of neoliberalism, as capital has shown itself to be increasingly hostile to all forms of proletarian organization and is reluctant to make any new concessions to the organized layers of the working class. This is to the advantage of communists today, for it may allow us to recover ground lost in preceding cycles of struggle.

2.4.28: The defining class antagonism and main contradiction driving the historical development of capitalist-imperialism is the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat.¹⁴ While it should be obvious that to a certain degree capital simplifies class antagonisms (i.e. dividing humanity into owners and non-owners, and thrusting new masses of people into the ranks of the proletariat on a daily basis), it also adds varying degrees of complexity to class relations. A new breakthrough for the world socialist revolution will certainly unleash an asymmetric and multidirectional class struggle on a world scale, for which the global proletariat must be prepared to exercise political leadership over into order to secure victories for socialism. Indeed, the proletariat does not emerge victorious with the establishment of a socialist commune in one country, nor is its only enemy the imperialist bourgeoisie. Rather, the class struggle continues after the working class has conquered political power (i.e. against the bureaucratic class), and the struggle will continue until the material basis for class society itself has been completely abolished. Upon its conquest of political power, the proletariat must be prepared to both crush the resistance of the overthrown capitalist class and maintain ideological hegemony over the middle classes within the revolutionary united front. In particular, it must wage a relentless struggle against bureaucratic and reactionary tendencies within the class movement of the proletariat, the organized communist movement, and the commune state itself so as to prevent the emergence of a new bourgeoisie, and maintain proletarian leadership of society until the abolition of classes has been achieved.

2.4.29: Waged or unwaged, employed or unemployed, in the upper, middle, or lower stratums of the class, it is proletarians who, through the deployment of their labor power in a social labor process, produce surplus value for capital. Due to the structural location of workers within the capital accumulation process, the proletariat is strategically positioned to challenge the social domination of capital and lead the socialist transition to communism. The proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class in contemporary society, for it has an objective historical interest in overthrowing and abolishing capitalist-imperialism and all forms of class society, and establishing a classless, stateless society premised upon the social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and reproduction.

The central imperative of communist society is not the accumulation of capital and the pursuit of profit, but the satisfaction of human needs, the all-round development of human capacities, and the establishment of a rational and sustainable metabolic interchange with nature. The proletarian revolution aims to overcome the contradictions generated by capitalism—the contradiction between intellectual and manual labor, town and country, industry and agriculture, humanity and nature—and struggles to abolish all oppressive, exploitative, and alienated social relations which persist in the period of socialist transition. In the course of the proletarian revolution, workers create their own organs of counterpower—revolutionary trade unions, workers' assemblies and councils, self-defense organizations, and party organizations—in order to seize control of the means of social production and reproduction, democratize the labor process and all aspects of social life, defend the gains of the revolution against the forces of counterrevolution, and advance the struggle to achieve proletarian self-emancipation on a world scale by carrying forward the world socialist revolution to victory against capitalist-imperialism.

2.5.1: In communal hunter-gatherer societies, non-monogamous partnerships were generally the norm, bisexuality was common, gender fluidity and variance were often accepted, and patriarchy, classes, and the state did not exist. Society formed an integrated system, with kinship activities being inseparable from economic and political activities. Childrearing and education were organized on a collective basis with no gendered division of labor. However, with the development of pastoral and early agrarian societies and the emergence of class antagonisms, non-monogamous partnerships were superseded by pairing marriages, and it is here that we can locate the beginnings of patriarchy.¹⁵

2.5.2: In the pastoral and early agrarian context, social norms were such that men were generally permitted to maintain non-monogamous partnerships, bisexuality remained socially acceptable, but women were expected to conform to strict norms of fidelity in marital partnerships. However, these partnerships could be voluntarily dissolved, and the children remained with the mother in the event of separation. The means of production (such as tools and livestock) were considered the private property of the man. Yet the wealth that men began to accumulate could not be inherited by their children due to the matrilineal structure of inheritance which then prevailed. In order to allow men to pass on accumulated wealth to their children, matricentric systems of social organization had to be overthrown in order to establish patrilineal structures of inheritance. At this moment, heteropatriarchy was born and the first empires would soon follow.

2.5.3: The man became ruler of the household, and women were reduced to the status of his private property as domestic and sexual servants through a process of housewifization. It is at this moment that the monogamous heterosexual marriage came to predominate, which is established as the main structure of inheritance through which intergenerational wealth is accumulated for thousands of years. As a general rule, the monogamous heterosexual marriage cannot be freely dissolved voluntarily by either partner in a heteropatriarchal society, as was the case with previous forms of partnership, but can only be ended by the man, typically with the permission of religious institutions or government bureaucracies.

2.5.4: The heteropatriarchal family was generalized throughout the social fabric via the state, which enforced private property and male supremacy. It is at this historical conjuncture that queer people emerged as a distinct social group, oppressed by the heteropatriarchal family, religious institutions, and the state: queer existence challenged private property by diverging from the gender norms of the heterosexual marriage and its system of ownership and authoritarian social control. Law and religion increasingly codified human sexual norms and behaviors in an effort to reproduce a particular social system which had no use and no room for queer people. Throughout the history of ancient slavery, feudalism, and capitalist-imperialism, queer people have been put to death for their attractions, desires, and self-expressions. During the Witch Hunts in Europe, a war was waged by the heteropatriarchal church-state against women and queer people, with the intent of forcing women back into the role of housewife, and eliminating queer people from public life altogether. A systematic campaign of psychological terror, torture, and mass murder was unleashed against women and queer people, sanctioned by the church-state.

2.5.5: In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, LGBTQ+ people all over the world have gained important rights through democratic struggle, relative to previous historical periods in the era of class society. However, where such gains have been won by LGBTQ+ liberation movements, capitalist-imperialism has compelled queer people to assimilate and conform to the social structure of the heteropatriarchal family unit, which retains its function as the transmitter of private property and locus of social reproduction. Over time, the assimilated queer family unit can come to mirror the hierarchical social norms and division of labor of the cisgender heterosexual family unit. LGBTQ+ people in general, and trans people in particular, are still subjected to various forms of oppression, including laws regulating their bodies (e.g., sodomy laws, the restriction of access to healthcare services, etc.), exclusion from employment in numerous sectors of the economy, domestic abuse, mass incarceration, pogroms, and even genocide. They are disproportionately homeless and unemployed. When they're able to obtain employment, it is frequently in low-wage service sector work or sex work.

2.5.6: With the process of capital accumulation coming to dominate all aspects of social life, the heteropatriarchal nuclear family became the dominant form of kinship organization. The emergence of capitalist-imperialism required a disciplined and mobile workforce. The nuclear family, rooted in individual households, provided a unit for the social reproduction of labor power that could be easily controlled by capital, and integrated into the capital accumulation process. The nuclear family became the capitalist state in miniature, reproducing the hierarchical social relations and ideology of capitalist-imperialism, reinforcing a gendered division of labor in which women were expected to perform unpaid domestic labor regardless of their status as waged workers.

By privatizing social reproduction through the nuclear family, capital is freed from the burden of investing in essential social services such as healthcare, childcare, education, and eldercare, and thus organizes the production of commodities required for social reproduction on the basis of the individual consumer and the nuclear family. Instead of the communal social provisioning of groceries and household items, or the collective organization of housework such as cooking and cleaning, social reproduction in the home is privatized, commodified, and gendered, with women and children often held responsible for the performance of such labors. Capital accumulation and the heteropatriarchal nuclear family are intimately entangled, shaping nearly all aspects of daily life from the organization of kinship relations to product design, architecture, and urban planning.

2.5.7: The nuclear family performs multiple roles in the reproduction of capitalist-imperialism. It functions as a unit for the reproduction of capital's workforce, ensuring the continuous supply of future workers through human procreation and childrearing, as well as the regeneration of living labor power. The gendered division of labor within the family reinforces gendered roles in society, with women held responsible for unpaid domestic work and caregiving, effectively providing a free or low-cost system of social reproduction for capital. Additionally, the nuclear family socializes individuals into accepting the value-systems of capitalist-imperialism, such as the capitalist work ethic and consumerism, while also serving as an economic unit that participates in the world market. It is a key instrument for the reproduction of the ideologies of race and nation. Families are, of course, divided along lines of class: for the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie, the family perpetuates wealth inequality through the transmission of private property and inheritance; for the proletariat and peasantry, through the transmission of propertylessness and poverty. It contributes to the ideological reproduction of capitalist-imperialism by socializing people to understand the nuclear family as a normative and natural form, thereby diverting attention from the fundamentally oppressive and exploitative character of the heteropatriarchal kinship system and its role in maintaining and reproducing capitalist-imperialism. While these dynamics vary across historical social contexts, the nuclear family objectively contributes to the reproduction of capitalist-imperialism.

2.5.8: On a global scale, gender oppression and the gender binary enable the super-exploitation of women through the devaluation of gendered labor power, particularly in the global peripheries and semi-peripheries of imperialism, where they are relegated to dirty, degrading, and dangerous jobs. The ranks of the unemployed and the most marginalized, super-exploited workers of the world are overwhelmingly women. This generates an important contradiction between women's role in the capitalist world-economy as waged labor, and the expectation of women continuing to perform unwaged labors of social reproduction in their role as housewife and careworker.

2.5.9: The feminist revolution aims to liberate individual bodies from constraints of gender hierarchies and exploitation. A chant from Seoul Pride in 2023 proclaimed, "Our liberation is body liberation! Body liberation is liberation for all!" The feminist revolution aims to make every person free in their own body to choose what they do with their time and how they express themselves. Under capitalist-imperialism, the bodies of women and LGBTQ+ people are subjugated and used for the purposes of the prevailing mode of social organization, performing essential labors of social reproduction without remuneration. The feminist revolution aims to make no one bound to a social role based on the conditions of their birth, and to abolish gendered divisions of labor.

2.5.10: The communization of social reproduction and the restoration of supportive communities is another aim of the feminist revolution. Extended networks of kinship and support are needed to raise the next generation of people. Capitalist-imperialism has destroyed much of the social fabric necessary to create these kinds of communities, and the result is social instability, violence, and death on a massive scale. Nuclear families in isolation are dependent on the nation-state and employers for support, but the capitalist nation-state systematically divests in programs shown to build healthy communities, instead relying on the brutal violence of the carceral state with its police and prisons. The function of this disinvestment is two-fold. On the one hand, capitalist-imperialism doesn't need social reproduction at a higher level because pauperization enables super-exploitation. On the other hand, a pauperized surplus population is useful to capital in order to depress wages during a period of stagnation, or mobilize a reserve army of labor during a boom cycle.

2.5.11: The feminist revolution aims to redefine what actions constitute labor, and how people of all genders can collectively participate in the essential labors of social reproduction. Capitalist-imperialism has for centuries used misogynistic propaganda to devalue carework as unimportant and unskilled. As communists, we must envision the collectivization and democratization of the labors of social reproduction instead of assigning them to private individuals on the basis of gender. We must reimagine how the daily and unending household labors of cooking, cleaning, organizing, and caring for people (including children, youth, elders, and the sick) could be coordinated communally, so as to enable and ensure the free and voluntary participation of all in the various aspects of communist society.

2.6.1: From its inception, the profits of capitalist-imperialism have been made possible through processes of colonization. The basis of colonialism is national oppression, whereby the ruling class of one nation violently dominates and exploits the peoples, land, and resources of another nation as a colony, thereby establishing itself as an oppressor nation. Through the colonial policies of the oppressor nation, the autonomous social development of the oppressed nation is suspended. The social life of the oppressed nation is actively de-developed, underdeveloped, or outright destroyed through genocide waged by the oppressor nation, and a relation of dependency is consciously cultivated whereby colonized peoples are forced into reliance upon the imperial core and their local compradors for their basic subsistence needs. Colonialism attempts to erode and ultimately destroy the histories of peoples and their cultural identities. The colonizing oppressor nation expropriates the land and loots the natural resources of the colonies, imposes super-exploitation on the colonial proletariat and peasantry, and controls the markets of the oppressed nation. In some cases, the oppressor nation comes to dominate what was once a sovereign nation-state, as in the case of U.S. imperialism's settler-colonization of the Kingdom of Hawai'i. In other cases, a nation within a nation is formed through the process of settler-colonial oppression, as in the case of the Black (New Afrikan) and Chicano nations formed within the U.S. Empire. Decolonization is the revolutionary process through which the peoples of an oppressed nation reclaim their historical agency, assert their right to national sovereignty, restore dignity to their communities, and build a social system that recognizes the equality and autonomy of all peoples, starting with the right of self-determination for all oppressed nations.

2.6.2: National oppression takes a range of forms, though the dominant form assumed in the imperialist world-system has been white supremacist national oppression, whereby the European imperial core nations and their settler-colonial offshoots dominate and exploit the peoples and nations of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. At the core of this system of national oppression is racial ideology and institutional racism. Basing itself on religious or pseudoscientific dogma, racial ideology divides humanity into a hierarchy of social groups ordered on the basis of "race," and an institutionalized system of privileges for those classified as members of the white race. The invention of the concept of race was used by European capitalists as a means of categorizing, separating, controlling, and devaluing entire peoples, specifically African and Indigenous peoples subjected to slavery and genocide.

Racial differentiation directly serves capital accumulation by enabling the extraction of super-profits by legitimizing super-exploitation through dehumanization. For a colonized people, racial oppression entails exclusion from public services, civil rights and liberties, collective bargaining agreements, and union protections afforded to the citizens of the oppressor nation, alongside the imposition of high taxes, rent, and debt which siphon wealth away from oppressed nationality communities to the ruling class of the oppressor nation. To be racially oppressed is to be subjected to slavery, ghettoization, psychological manipulation, police surveillance and brutality, mass incarceration, torture, human experimentation, and military conscription. More than a historical incident, race is integral to the capital accumulation process, and we can in fact speak of racial capitalism.

2.6.3: In the fifteenth century, the capitalist nation-states of Europe established a system of direct colonialism, whereby they openly dominated and controlled all aspects of the oppressed nation's social life and development, reducing whole countries to the status of the oppressor nation's colonial property. Direct colonialism persists today with the Israeli settler-colonial oppression of Palestine, the Turkish colonial oppression of Kurdistan, and British imperialism's colonial domination of the occupied six counties in the north of Ireland, to name only a few. However, while forms of direct colonialism persist, they have been largely superseded by forms of neocolonialism (or semi-colonialism), defined as the continuing colonial domination of a nominally independent nation-state by one or more of the nation- states and multinational corporations of the imperial core.

2.6.4: While neocolonies have nominal political independence, their subordination to the imperial core is maintained through the economic structure of bureaucratic-comprador capitalism. In such neocolonial contexts, a comprador bourgeoisie is cultivated from among the peoples of oppressed nations by imperialist capital through foreign direct investment, which becomes the ruling class within the neocolonial nation-state, but remains subordinate to the imperialist bourgeoisie at the level of the world-system. This comprador bourgeoisie is dependent upon and serves the interests of the multinational and transnational corporations of the imperial core, as opposed to the development of an endogenous national capitalism. This economic structure facilitates the privatization and pillage of the oppressed nation's land and natural resources, the super-exploitation of the labor power of its workers, and the control of its markets, which together enable the extraction of super-profits by imperialist capital.

Under the influence of these compradors, the neocolonial nation-state becomes a bureaucratic appendage of global imperialism, leading to the emergence of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie who, bribed by monopoly-finance capital and their comprador servants, deploy state power to further the super-exploitation of the country by imperialism. While a new flag may fly, the oppressed nation remains a colony without real independence, governed by a bureaucratic-comprador bourgeoisie who act as the local servants of capitalist-imperialism. In his critique of the narrow outlook of cultural nationalists, the Irish revolutionary James Connolly brilliantly predicted:

2.6.4: So long as capitalist-imperialism dominates the planet, there will be neither peace nor equality among nations, for this system presupposes the division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations. In complete opposition to all forms of colonialism, the socialist revolution aims to lay the foundations for a communist society in which all forms of racial and national oppression are overcome, and the global system of nation-states is superseded by the world commune of communes. However, this world commune will only be established with the redress of longstanding injustices and the restoration of national sovereignty to the peoples.

As Frantz Fanon emphasized, "For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity."¹⁷ Malcolm X expressed the same position when he said, "Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality."¹⁸ And it is for precisely this reason that the battlecry of the New Afrikan Independence Movement in the heart of the settler-colonial U.S. Empire is: "Free the land!"¹⁹ The liberation of oppressed nations and nationalities will only be achieved by upholding and applying the principle of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, and by unleashing national democratic revolutions which restore national sovereignty to the peoples. With the presence of an organized communist movement within national liberation struggles, these anti-imperialist revolutions have the potential to become socialist revolutions (as seen in the Philippines today), which is the only real path to decolonization.

2.6.5: Within a given nation-state, there may exist multiple nationalities who are oppressed by the dominant nationality or nationalities. While communists support the establishment of a plurinational, polycultural, and intercommunal society—and an authentically revolutionary government will pursue policies to such effect in a period of socialist transition—the necessary condition for such a free union of peoples is the recognition and guarantee of the right of an oppressed nation to independence from the oppressor nation and to determine its own destiny. This does not mean that separation is always the correct path for a given nation to choose, but it is not for communists of the oppressor nation to decide that. Communists unequivocally uphold and support struggles waged by oppressed nations and nationalities for full equality, democratic rights, reparations, and self-determination. The decision to pursue integration within a union of socialist communes; territorial autonomy and self-governance within the federative framework of a plurinational, polycultural, and intercommunal union; or complete separation and full national independence, must in the final instance be the decision of the people of the oppressed nation itself.

2.6.6: The communists of the oppressed nations must, at the same time, strive to cohere within the national liberation movement support for a firmly internationalist stance, cultivating the revolutionary unity of the oppressed nations and nationalities of the world with the global working class. At the same time, while recognizing the common class interests of the global working class, this class is internally divided on a global scale and within the capitalist nation-states on the basis of race and nationality. Taking stock of this reality, we recognize that a revolutionary united front, as the organizational expression of a revolutionary people's movement, must be based on a strategic alliance of the working-class movement with the movements for national liberation.

2.7.1: Dialectical and historical materialism teaches us that our material reality is in a perpetual state of movement and flux, constructed through the universal metabolism of nature, defined as the transformative interchange between organic and inorganic substances, and between organisms and their environments. In the case of our species, the metabolic relationship between humans and non-human nature is a social relationship, mediated via a labor process, through which humanity's needs are satisfied and capacities developed. However, the social domination of capital accumulation alienates humans from nature and the labor process, systematically commodifying all aspects of both social and natural life. Capital thereby disrupts humanity's social metabolism, initiating a rift in society's metabolic interchange with nature, thus breaking the living unity of human society with the natural conditions of our existence. In fact, capital accumulation generates a rift in the universal metabolism of nature itself, disrupting the planetary ecosystem's flow of flows by ushering in an era of soil degradation, mass extinctions, depletion of the ozone layer, climate change, and the spread of new diseases.

2.7.2: While geologists have termed this epoch the anthropocene, or "the age of humans," it is not the human species in general who are to be held responsible for causing the present ecological crisis, nor are the horrific effects of this crisis evenly distributed. It is present and future generations of proletarians and peasants, the exploited and oppressed masses—especially those concentrated in the global peripheries of capitalist-imperialism—who bear the brunt of this metabolic rift. Indeed, the very terms "anthropocene" and "anthropogenic climate change" may obscure more than they clarify, for such terms fail to identify that a global social system premised upon the boundless accumulation of capital is the chief culprit and main obstacle to achieving a just transition to an ecological communist future.

It must be recognized that the global metropoles of capital accumulation—the countries of the imperial core—bear primary responsibility for the ecological crisis and climate change. This ecological debt owed by the imperial core to the peoples and nations of the global peripheries can only be settled through the payment of ecological reparations. It is for this reason that the People's Agreement of Cochabamba, produced by the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth convened in Bolivia in 2010, calls for approaching climate change and the ecological crisis on the basis of "common but differentiated responsibilities."²⁰ In accordance with this principle, primary responsibility for reducing global carbon emissions belongs to the imperial core countries, not to the victims of capitalist-imperialism's rapacious policies.

2.7.3: More than any previous mode of social organization, capitalist-imperialism uproots productive and reproductive activity from its environmental matrix, creating a metabolic rift that systematically erodes the material basis for humanity's social reproduction and continued existence. While we can speak of society and nature, we must keep in mind that these are interdependent aspects of a universal reality. While we can speak of social science and natural science, we must emphasize that these are, in fact, no more than distinct moments of emphasis in a unified process of scientific inquiry. Marx and Engels declare: "We only know a single science, the study of history." They continue: "One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of people. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of people are dependent on each other so long as people exist."²¹

The metabolic rift initiated by the capital accumulation process threatens the continued existence and reproduction of the human species, along with all complex lifeforms on our planet. The relentless pursuit of profit leads to the overextraction of natural resources and degradation of our natural environment, resulting in massive deforestation, pollution, soil erosion, depletion of water resources, the emission of greenhouse gases which produce climate change, and the unleashing of new disease pandemics. These are all examples of how the capital accumulation process sets in motion a rift in humanity's metabolic interchange with nature. Natural resources are extracted and consumed beyond the regenerative capacities of ecosystems, and the production of waste exceeds the capacities of ecosystems to sustainably absorb it. The ecological rift should thereby clarify why communists require knowledge of both social and natural sciences, and work towards the unification of multiple scientific disciplines within an integrated framework capable of guiding the socialist transition to communism.

2.7.4: The socialist transition to communism is tasked with mending the rift in humanity's social metabolism with nature. Being both decolonial and ecological in character, the socialist revolution must defend the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, respect Indigenous national sovereignty, and unleash Indigenous knowledge and leadership in the process of socio-ecological regeneration. Indigenous nations are on the frontlines of the ecological revolution, not only through Indigenous-led struggles to defend the planet from capitalist-imperialism's extractivist regime, but also through the resurgence of Indigenous systems of social organization. Indigenous modes of life present valid and compelling alternatives to capitalist-imperialism, particularly with regards to environmental stewardship, pastoral and agricultural practices, and conceptions of common ownership. The guarantee for the flourishing of Indigenous socio-ecological practices is the right of Indigenous nations to land, self-determination, and sovereignty. From Indigenous socio-ecological practices, humanity can transform our understanding of how a communist society can and should interact with the land, human and non-human life, and our planet, further enriching our conception of the socialist transition to communism.

2.7.5: For communists, the ecological question poses the urgent necessity of world socialist revolution, for it is impossible for the "green entrepreneurs" of capitalist-imperialism to adequately address the planetary ecological crisis, beholden as they are to the imperatives of capital accumulation. The ecological question has the potential to unite the forces of world revolution to an unprecedented degree. However, ecological crises also pose the danger of eco-fascism and other forms of reactionary "green" thought. Against the ideologies of eco-modernism on the one hand (in either its neoliberal or social-democratic form), and eco-fascism on the other, we must follow Marx in asserting that communism—basing itself upon the rational and democratic planning of social production and reproduction by the masses of working people—is the only sustainable future for humanity and our planet:

2.8.1: Historical materialism defines the state as an organized system of social power through which the dominant classes and social groups establish and reproduce their rule over and against the dominated classes and social groups. Whether it is claimed to be ordained by the heavens or necessitated by the laws of nature, be it a monarchy or republic, the social domination of the state is always presented by the ruling class as being in the general interest of society. Today's apologists for the state claim it is a neutral mediator of opposing interests in society, which stands outside of all class and social group antagonisms. In actuality, of course, and regardless of appearances to the contrary, all states are social dictatorships of particular classes and social groups.

The state is an alienated social power, organized along bureaucratic-military lines, that stands over and against the people in the most authoritarian fashion, through which a power bloc of the ruling class and dominant social groups maintain their social domination and reproduce their hegemony. The state is the political-military headquarters of the ruling class. The state reserves for itself a monopoly on specific social functions such as the maintenance of social order, the collection of taxes, and especially the legitimate use of violence through standing military and police forces. Without a monopoly on the deployment of armed force, no ruling class could maintain its social domination.

2.8.2: While the state claims the mantle of universality, it has not always existed and will not always exist. Rather, the state arose at a certain phase in humanity's historical social development: it is the logical result of a social system premised upon private property, patriarchy, hierarchical divisions of labor, the division of society into antagonistic classes and hierarchically-ordered social groups, the extraction of surplus labor and the private appropriation of the social product by a ruling class, the creation of colonial dependencies, and, particularly in the age of capital, humanity's alienation from nature. For hierarchical class societies, the state becomes a vital necessity for the management and suppression of antagonistic social contradictions.

In the final analysis, however, the state is ultimately powerless to resolve the contradictions generated by a social system premised upon class exploitation and social oppression. According to Marx and Engels, such systems produce class struggles which culminate "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."²³ The socialist revolution aims to achieve the ultimate overthrow and abolition of the imperialist world-system, and along with it the nation-states which serve as the gendarmerie of capital accumulation. This will only be achieved by abolishing the social contradictions of capitalist-imperialism from which the capitalist state arises, and by consciously building the foundations of communist society. Then, and only then, can we speak of the emergence of a stateless society.

2.8.3: The state is a partisan war machine. It wages war on two fronts: internally, it wages war against the exploited classes and oppressed masses, whose potential and propensity to rebel poses a permanent existential threat to social cohesion and state power; and externally, in its drive to expand its control of territory or access to resources, labor, and new markets, it wages war against other social formations and rival states. This expansionary dynamic is greatly exacerbated with the emergence of social formations dominated by capital accumulation. In the context of capitalist-imperialism, the nation-state acts as the vanguard of primitive accumulation and colonization through the conquest of territory, resources, labor, and new markets. This inevitably leads to bloody wars among the respective capitalist nation-states as they compete for profits.

2.8.4: The nation-state is the general form taken by the state in the era of capitalist-imperialism. The capitalist nation-state system arose from the crises and decay of the feudal city-state system in Europe, and was globalized by the imperial core with the extension of the capital accumulation process on a world scale through colonization and the conquest of new markets. The capitalist nation-state is contradictory because, on the one hand, once the capital accumulation process becomes dominant within a given social formation, the capitalist class in that territory set to work to build a nation-state in order to ensure the best possible conditions for capital accumulation. On the other hand, despite capital's globalizing tendencies, it has thus far been unable to constitute a world-state to act as the protectorate of capital in general, due to inter-firm competition giving rise to the inter-state rivalry characteristic of capitalist-imperialism. Thus the nation-state emerges historically as the preferred political form for facilitating the capital accumulation process and its attendant processes of colonization. We have seen a range of particular configurations of this form of state (monarchical, constitutional, republican, neoliberal, fascist, etc.).

2.8.5: The primary form taken by the capitalist nation-state has been of the centrist-liberal variety. This bourgeois democratic republic is democratic in name only, and its is the primary means through which the bourgeoisie and their allies have maintained and reproduced their class power throughout history. According to Lenin:

Is this not as true today as it ever was? In the United States, we observe how the imperialist bourgeoisie disenfranchise the masses of working people by imposing restrictions on voter rights through strict voter identification laws, the exclusion of prisoners and many former prisoners from suffrage, limiting early voting, closing polling stations in proletarian communities—what sort of democracy seeks to limit citizen participation in elections? Freedom of speech is restricted for those who dare to struggle against Israel's genocidal war against Palestine—what sort of democracy aims to silence dissenting voices? Workers are fired for daring to organize trade unions and take strike action—what sort of democracy?

The answer, of course, is bourgeois democracy: the ruling class and their functionaries make decisions, while the citizenry is occasionally called on to ratify them. If and when the people's exercise of democratic rights or participation in the formulation of public policy gets out of hand, there is always recourse to fascism or some other form of authoritarian rule. Regardless of the particular form taken at a given historical conjuncture, the main function of the capitalist state remains constant: to secure the conditions for capital accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist-imperialism as a social system. In pursuit of this aim, the capitalist state has evolved into a massive bureaucratic and military organization, through which the collective interests of the capitalist class are formulated and pursued. Given the virulently competitive character of capitalist-imperialism, it is through the intermediary of the state that conflicts internal to the ruling class are resolved.

2.8.6: While the modern capitalist state encompasses the powers of a polity—including the powers of legislation, implementation, and adjudication—it encompasses far more than formal political institutions, reaching into the depths of the social fabric. It is for this reason that the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci spoke of the modern capitalist nation-state as an integral state—i.e. the dynamic fusion of political society with civil society, or "hegemony protected by the armor of coercion"²⁵—capable of not only repressing dissent, but also manufacturing consent, shaping public opinion, manipulating human behavior, and mitigating (or consciously creating) crises.²⁶ According to Gramsci, "the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules."²⁷

This modern capitalist state is defined by several state apparatuses: repressive, ideological, and regulatory. The repressive state apparatus includes the military, police, courts, prisons, and intelligence agencies, as well as various reactionary paramilitary organizations loyal to the state. The ideological state apparatus includes schools, universities, and media, as well as more informal educational, familial, religious, political, civic, and cultural institutions. The regulatory state apparatus includes governmental institutions responsible for the stabilization of the capitalist nation-state and world-economy through the management of recurring systemic crises, including through central banking, macroeconomic policies (tariffs, subsidies, etc.), and the performance of various social welfare functions. In short, the capitalist state actively represses any possible threat to the power of the ruling class, consciously cultivates loyalty ("common sense") among the masses of people to legitimize and maintain its social domination, and attempts to control and mitigate the effects of capital's frequent and recurring crises in order to limit or prevent the eruption of the revolutionary struggle of working people and the oppressed masses, thereby stabilizing the social formation. The specific configuration of the nation-state's apparatuses depend upon its relative position within the imperial core, global peripheries, or semi-peripheries of the imperialist world-system, as well as that nation-state's particular path of historical social development as a direct colony, settler-colony, semi-colony, or metropole.

2.8.7: The concept of an integral state allows us to conceptually abstract various state apparatuses, while recognizing that these apparatuses accommodate and interpenetrate one another, and constitute a singular system of state power. For example, public schools in the settler-colonial United States can best be classified as a component of the ideological state apparatus. At the same time, however, public schools perform repressive functions (through racialized policing and the school-to-prison pipeline), as well as regulatory functions (through the provisioning of food and healthcare services which are increasingly shifted to proletarian schools as the nation-state divests and privatizes federal social welfare programs). Schools are also arenas of struggle, as education workers struggle for improvement of their working conditions and to increase their control over the labor process, and as students and communities struggle over the curriculum, instruction, and culture of schools as educational institutions. Another example: while media in most cases is privately owned and operates via the world market, it is nonetheless state media, in the sense of multinational media corporations generating and reproducing the hegemony of capitalist-imperialism in general, and their host nation-state in particular. Thus when we speak of capitalist state power, we must not only speak of the military, police, courts, and prisons, but also schools, media, religious institutions, trade unions, etc. The strategic implications of this analysis for the communist movement should be clear: our battlefield is expansive, encompassing the totality of the social fabric. To conquer the state, the communist movement must successfully construct a revolutionary counterpower on this more intimate social terrain, from the workplace to the neighborhood.

2.8.8: The state is an arena of social struggle, and it is possible for the people's movement to put in check some of the worst excesses of capitalist-imperialism, as well as to win certain concessions from the ruling class, at least for a time. However, all gains won by the people are tenuous, and the capitalist nation-state itself cannot be reformed out of existence nor seized: the apparatuses of capitalist state power must be smashed by a popular revolutionary uprising. Yet the state in general, understood as a complex of social relations and institutions produced by class struggle and expressing definite forms of class power, cannot be immediately abolished by decree or by force. For as soon as the movement of the proletariat and all oppressed peoples has overthrown and abolished the apparatuses of the capitalist state and unleashed a process of socialist revolution, they will need to exercise their collective social power to transform society in accordance with a communist vision, strategy, and program. At this moment, the people's movement constitutes itself as a revolutionary counterstate or semi-state of the commune type in transition to communism.

Such a political instrument is necessary in order to crush the resistance of the overthrown imperialists as well as their comprador and fascist allies, to withstand and break attempts to contain and suppress the socialist revolution, and to render concrete assistance to the process of socialist transition. However, we must emphasize that this revolutionary counterstate is not a state in the traditional sense of the term. Instead, the emergence of a revolutionary counterstate heralds, as Marx observed during the Paris Commune of 1871, "the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves."²⁸ It is, to use Lenin's phrase, a "commune state."²⁹

2.8.9: The socialist revolution aims to overthrow the capitalist nation-state system, and to establish in its place a union of socialist communes in the transition to communism. We envision the commune state as a federative council republic organized in accordance with the principle of direct democracy with delegations. The socialist commune would take up the task of transforming the means of social production and reproduction from a system of private ownership by a few capitalists, into a system of social ownership by the whole people. The chaos and irrationality of the market will be replaced by a system of comprehensive democratic planning and coordination of all economic activity.

During the period of socialist transition, bourgeois democracy will be replaced with socialist democracy, and an uninterrupted and continuous revolution—a cultural revolution—will continue the struggle to transform all aspects of social life in accordance with a communist program that is at once proletarian, feminist, decolonial, democratic, and ecological. The ultimate "dying out" or "withering away" of the counterstate is a necessary condition for the realization of communism, for so long as classes exist and the class struggle of the proletariat continues, for so long as the struggle for the feminist, decolonial, democratic, and ecological transformation of society continues, then it cannot be said that the state has been overcome nor communism established. Thus the state will persist in the period of socialist transition as a revolutionary counterstate, and the stateless society will only be achieved once the material basis which gives rise to states is transformed. The decisive factor in this transformation is the participation of the masses in all aspects of the revolutionary process.

2.8.10: When describing the form of revolutionary counterstate to be created in the midst of a popular revolutionary uprising and the period of socialist transition, we use the term socialist commune to convey our commitment to a revolutionary process of socialist transition that breaks free not only of the bureaucratic party-state system which came to be associated with socialism in the twentieth century, but of the state as such, and therefore to reconnect both the present and future of the socialist revolution with the historical legacy of the world's first socialist experiment: the Paris Commune of 1871. By studying and learning from the most advanced socialist experiments of the past and present, our aim is to articulate a revolutionary communist politics that points the people's movement beyond the social relations and institutions of capitalist-imperialism, and ultimately the state itself.

The commune idea did not spring from the minds of intellectuals, but was itself forged in the trenches of class struggle by the masses of working people. By raising the demand for a socialist commune today, we aim to reconnect the communist movement with the revolutionary vision Marx and Engels identified in the historical experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, which Lenin rearticulated in a new historical conjuncture by raising the demand for a "commune state" based on council democracy in his famous April Theses of 1917, which reappeared with the workers' assemblies and councils formed in Revolutionary Catalonia in 1936, and which found expression in the class struggle waged by Shanghai's rebel workers and students who, in coalition with radical soldiers and party cadres, established the short-lived Shanghai People's Commune of 1967. The persistence of the commune form can be observed in South Korea's Gwangju Commune of 1980, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca in 2006, the Rojava Revolution which began in 2012, and Venezuela's Communard Union today.³⁰ For the international communist movement, the union of socialist communes is the red horizon towards which the world socialist revolution must advance. It is our north star on this dark and stormy night. Like the comuneros of Venezuela, we too should make our battlecry: ¡Comuna o Nada! Commune or Nothing!

2.9.1: Fascism is a counter-revolutionary social movement, armed with a radical right-wing populist and ultra-nationalist ideology. This ideology shapes fascism's totalitarian, militaristic, and apocalyptic vision of national rebirth. Taking the nation-state as its fundamental building block, and assuming the nation-state to be both natural and universal, this vision is premised upon a conception of shared ethnic, religious, and/or racial heritage and destiny, which imparts to members of the national community dominant status. To legitimize this vision, fascism is virulently idealist and anti-materialist, selectively rejecting insights of the natural and social sciences when they prove inconvenient, rewriting history, and upholding an eclectic mixture of pseudoscientific, conspiratorial, mystical, occult, and esoteric beliefs, often with the common unifying thread of anti-communism (which includes opposition to all forms of class struggle, feminism, decolonization, LGBTQ+ liberation, and disability liberation). In most variants of fascism (such as Nazism), antisemitism plays a crucial role in legitimizing its political project among the non-Jewish population. Fascism is counter-revolutionary in the deepest sense, actively working to radically transform all aspects of social life in accordance with its vision of a hierarchical class society. Fascism aims to permanently reverse the gains made by democratic, feminist, decolonial, and proletarian movements through violence, viewing humanity's real historical social progress as fundamentally undermining a transhistorical vision of a heteropatriarchal warrior society organized on the basis of an authoritarian nation-state and heterosexual family unit.

2.9.2: While fascism may challenge certain aspects of contemporary capitalist-imperialism at a rhetorical level (such as the neoliberal ideology of "multiculturalism" and "globalization"), and fascists have historically seized political power only in the context of a systemic crisis of imperialism (e.g., Hitler's rise to power in the wake of the Great Depression), fascism is not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system of economic organization. Indeed, without exception fascism upholds the universal necessity of private property and the exploitation of one class by another as transcendental organizing principles for human society, upholding the possibility of achieving peace between antagonistic classes on the basis of the worker's subordination to the boss and the state. Fascism does not aim to challenge class hierarchies, but to create a new ruling class or otherwise reshuffle the prevailing class hierarchies. Fascism has yet to come to power without the support and cooperation from at least some faction of the monopoly-finance capitalists who constitute the hegemonic faction of the imperialist bourgeoisie. However, such support may be clandestine until the seizure of power by the fascist movement and, in any event, these fascist sympathizers from the old ruling class may end up subordinated to their new masters.

2.9.3: Fascism may pursue its aims through insurrectional or terroristic means, or it may utilize the opportunities for a legal seizure of power afforded to it by the bourgeois liberal state. Historical experience in the last century sets both precedents, as observed in Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922, the Nazi Party's election to the Reichstag and Hitler's subsequent appointment by Hindenburg as Chancellor in 1933, Francisco Franco's violent seizure of power following the military destruction of the Spanish Republic in 1939, or Augusto Pinochet's military coup against Salvador Allende in 1973. Regardless of the means selected, once in power, fascism is openly terroristic. Where fascism has come to power, it has relegated women to the role of mother and housewife; destroyed trade unions and other mass organizations; suspended free elections; trampled the people's democratic rights; organized the systematic mass detention, torture, and murder of communists and socialists, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and oppressed nationalities; and instituted various forms of slave labor.

2.9.4: Fascism cannot be reasoned with nor peacefully overcome, but must be destroyed root and branch utilizing the revolutionary counterviolence of the armed masses. Hitler's Third Reich was ultimately defeated through guerrilla people's wars led by anti-fascist partisans in Albania, Yugoslavia, and Italy, and was dealt the ultimate death blow by the counter-offensive of the Red Army of the Soviet Union (the entry of the Western Allies came quite late, and was largely restricted to a supporting role when compared to anti-fascist resistance movements and the Soviet Red Army). Japanese fascism was ultimately defeated by the combined forces of communist-led national liberation movements in China, Indochina, Korea, and the Philippines (who only received support from the Western Allies after the attack on Pearl Harbor). Portuguese fascism was ultimately defeated by the Pan-African national liberation movements in the colonies, in concert with the anti-war soldiers' movement and the mass revolt of workers and students inside Portugal itself.

2.9.5: There are two historical forms of fascism: imperial core fascism, and comprador peripheral fascism. The former is typified by the European regimes of Mussolini, Salazar, Hitler, and Franco, while examples of the latter can be found in the regimes of Ngô Đình Diệm and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in South Vietnam, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, or Alberto Fujimori in Peru. While building upon domestic trends and tendencies, peripheral fascist regimes were propped-up with significant political, military, and economic support from one or more of the imperial core nation-states, especially U.S. imperialism. Reflecting the advanced decay of capitalist-imperialism and the crisis of neoliberalism as a mode of governance, a new wave of fascism is today resurgent in all zones of the world-system: from the semi-peripheral comprador fascisms of Modi in India and Erdoğan in Turkey, to the imperial core and settler-colonial fascisms of Netayanhu in Israel and Trump in the United States. It is perhaps best understood as a general trend towards the fascistization of society.

2.9.6: Fascism tends to arise from and root itself among the petite bourgeoisie and declassed proletarians of various sectors and strata, as well as factions of the monopoly-finance capital sector of the bourgeoisie in the imperial core or the bureaucratic-comprador bourgeoisie in the global peripheries. It recruits extensively from the police and military, and embeds itself in strategic positions within the capitalist state's repressive, ideological, and regulatory apparatuses. In the context of the settler-colonial United States, we can see clearly various white supremacist and fascist networks boring from within the repressive state apparatuses of the police and military, alongside taking control of local school boards, and sheriffs' offices, in addition to the organization of paramilitary formations. However, it is the techno-bureaucratic authoritarian nationalism of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Curtis Yarvin, and others who—with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos in tow—are accelerating the fascistization of the United States and, indeed, the world-system as a whole.

2.9.7: The struggle against fascism creates an opportunity for the establishment of a broad-based, communist-led anti-fascist front. By uniting the progressive sectors of the middle classes within the class struggle of the proletariat and the liberation struggles of the oppressed social groups, such a front holds the potential to facilitate the transition from popular anti-fascist resistance to socialist revolution by precipitating a crisis of hegemony for an increasingly fascistic bourgeois state. In this process, the struggle against fascism—which in its present form means not only a struggle for the basic democratic rights of the people, but also socialism—becomes the point of convergence for the people's movement.

2.10.1: When we raise the slogan "all power to the people!" and call for the unity of the global working class and all oppressed social groups as a revolutionary movement of the people, what precisely do we mean? Who are "the people," and what makes a movement of the people revolutionary? Broadly understood, we can say that the people consists of all exploited classes and oppressed social groups who have an objective historical interest in overcoming capitalist-imperialism and advancing a socialist transition to communism, as well as those progressive sections of the middle classes willing to unite with and accept the political program and proletarian class leadership of the people's movement. The bourgeoisie and the reactionary sections of the middle classes are not a part of the people, and should therefore be actively excluded from the ranks of the people's movement. In summary, the people are the masses, and the masses are the real makers of history.

2.10.2: The leading class of the people's movement is the working class or proletariat, which includes not only exploited wage workers who are employed full-time, temporarily employed, underemployed, or unemployed (who constitute a reserve army of labor for capital), but also those working people who are unemployable (people with certain disabilities and the lumpen proletariat), those who are dependent upon wage earners for survival (such as housewives and children who perform unpaid labors of social reproduction), workers subjected to modern forms of slavery (such as incarcerated workers in the U.S. prison system subjected to various forms of penal labor, or indebted workers in India, Pakistan, and Nepal subjected to various forms of bonded labor), and masses of semi-proletarians (such as proletarianized peasants and seasonal workers).

2.10.3: Why is the proletariat the leading class within the people's movement? Unlike the capitalist class and middle classes, the proletariat is the only class which has absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain from achieving a socialist transition to communism. Numerically speaking, it is the largest class in the modern world, numbering between 5-6 billion people, and it is projected to continue to grow as capital continues its global enclosure and urbanization of the countryside while bankrupting and impoverishing sections of the petite bourgeoisie. In contrast to the proletariat, the global peasantry—once the majority class internationally—has undergone a radical recomposition corresponding to changes in global agriculture. Still a formidable and generally progressive class, it is today composed of approximately 1 to 2 billion people, constituting roughly 25% of the global population. The petite bourgeoisie is even smaller than the peasantry, composed of less than 1 billion people and disproportionately concentrated in the imperialist countries.

While the proletariat and peasantry must build an alliance with and lead the progressive sections of the petite bourgeoisie, this is a politically inconsistent and indecisive class. Only the proletariat and peasantry are strategically positioned within capitalist-imperialism's global networks of social production and reproduction such that coordinated transnational actions by the working class would bring the world-system to a grinding halt. The working class is global: found in every country of the world, it is a truly international class, whose longstanding practice of proletarian internationalism constitutes a central pillar of the revolutionary communist strategy and program, encapsulated in the slogan: "An injury to one is an injury to all!" Therefore, the proletariat—with its class standpoint, program, and organization—must constitute the leading class of the people's movement if we are to succeed in establishing a classless society.

2.10.4: The imperialist bourgeoisie and its comprador servants have the most to lose from the socialist revolution. They are the main enemies of the world's peoples. In contrast, the middle classes (e.g., the "old middle class" of petite bourgeois small business owners, contractors, and the self-employed; and a "new middle class" consisting of professionals, technocrats, managers, and bureaucrats) tend to vacillate politically, precisely due to the intermediary position they occupy in relation to the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. However, the middle classes can be won to a strategic alliance with the proletariat, especially when they are members of an oppressed social group and their historical interests intersect with struggles for decolonization and national liberation, gender and sexual liberation, disability liberation, and environmental sustainability. Within these liberation struggles the proletariat must exercise class leadership in its alliance with the middle classes, otherwise the workers' movement runs the risk of continuing the present cycle of progressive social struggles being co-opted and assimilated by capitalist-imperialism through the non-profit industrial complex and liberal-centrist political parties led by or otherwise serving the class interests of the bourgeoisie and/or petite bourgeoisie. In summary, the proletariat must unite with and provide political leadership for the peasantry and progressive sections of the middle classes, and exercise proletarian class hegemony within the liberation struggles of the oppressed.

2.10.5: Alongside the revolutionary proletariat and its allies drawn from the progressive sectors and strata of the middle classes, those social groups struggling for liberation from special forms of oppression also form fighting contingents of the people. This includes the liberation movements of women, LGBTQ+ people, oppressed nations and nationalities, people with disabilities, young people, and elderly people, as well as movements against ecocide, militarism, and fascism. As István Mészáros has explained, the ultimate success of the socialist transition to communism as a political project hinges upon the development of socialist pluralism, which "sets out from the acknowledgment of the existing differences and inequalities; not to preserve them... but to supersede them in the only viable form: by securing the active involvement of all those concerned."³¹

The people's movement for socialism must mobilize and enlist the direct participation of the masses in the revolutionary process, uniting the liberation struggles of all oppressed social groups with the class struggle of the proletariat, in order "to combine into a coherent whole, with ultimately inescapable socialist implications, a great variety of demands and partial strategies which in and by themselves need not have anything specifically socialist about them at all."³² In this way, partial struggles and immediate demands pertaining to issues such as healthcare, housing, reproductive freedom, transportation, education, immigration, and democratic rights can be united with the revolutionary project of socialist transformation and the self-emancipation of all exploited classes and oppressed social groups.

2.10.6: The organizational consolidation of the people's movement—the fusion of a multitude of popular struggles as a unified revolutionary struggle of the people—can be achieved through the formation of a revolutionary united front. In our strategic framework, the united front organization serves as the primary mechanism for bringing together the people's mass organizations, defense organizations, and revolutionary party organizations under one system of coordination, and acts as the central instrument for securing the victory of a popular revolutionary uprising against the capitalist state and the people's countrywide conquest of political power. In the countries located in the global peripheries of imperialism, we can identify the proletariat and peasantry (i.e. worker-peasant alliance), as well as the progressive sections of the petite bourgeoisie (and, in very particular cases within the context of semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries, sections of the non-comprador national bourgeoisie), as the main classes which compose the people. In the imperial core, we can identify the proletariat and the progressive sections of the middle classes as the main classes which make up the people. In all cases, the proletariat must organize itself autonomously, establish itself as the leading class within the people's movement, and secure its position as the hegemonic class in society.

2.10.7: Within all sectors of the united front, the organized communist movement aims to exercise political hegemony and leadership. How is this to be achieved? First and foremost, it must be made absolutely clear that the organized communist movement is itself a product of the historical development of capitalist-imperialism, and constitutes an organic part of the masses: communists do not separate themselves from the everyday life and struggles of the people, nor do they have historical interests distinct from those of the people's movement. Yet it must also be recognized that the masses are not homogeneous: they are composed of advanced, intermediate, backwards, and outright reactionary sections. It is for this reason that a communist party must, in addition to upholding a mass perspective (which asserts that the masses make history), apply the mass line method of political leadership (which means listening to and gathering the ideas and concerns of the masses, synthesizing a coherent political program on the basis of these ideas and concerns, and then implementing this program while maintaining ongoing dialogue with the people). In particular, a fighting communist party must focus its efforts on achieving the maximum level of unity possible with the advanced sections of the masses in order to develop the communist movement's capacity to win over the intermediate section, to struggle with and develop the backwards, and to isolate and defeat the reactionaries. Only upon this basis will a communist party be able to play a leading role within the people's movement, and only on the basis of this role being performed will the people's movement advance on the road to communism.

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 926.

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Samir Amin, "Contemporary Imperialism," Monthly Review, July 1, 2015, https://monthlyreview.org/2015/07/01/contemporary-imperialism/.

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Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022); Claudio Katz, Dependency Theory After Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Latin American Critical Thought (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022); Adrián Sotelo Valencia, Sub-Imperialism Revisited: Dependency Theory in the Thought of Ruy Mauro Marini (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018).

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Minqi Li, "China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?," Monthly Review, July 1, 2021, https://monthlyreview.org/2021/07/01/china-imperialism-or-semi-periphery/; Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts. "The Economics of Modern Imperialism." Historical Materialism 29, no. 4 (2021): 23—69; and Michael Roberts, "Further Thoughts on the Economics of Imperialism," The Next Recession, April 23, 2024, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/04/23/further-thoughts-on-the-economics-of-imperialism/.

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Minqi Li, "China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?"

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V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and War" (1915), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/index.htm.

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Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 142.

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Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010).

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Amin, "Contemporary Imperialism."

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Marco Rubio, "Secretary Marco Rubio with Megyn Kelly of The Megyn Kelly Show," U.S. Department of State (January 30, 2025), https://state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-with-megyn-kelly-of-the-megyn-kelly-show/.

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Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2021).

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Mao Zedong, "Comments on Comrade Chen's Field Report (1965)," published in Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (1968), original translation, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/chinese/maozedong/1968/5-145.htm/.

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Jeff Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade (New York: Verso Books, 2024).

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Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital (New York: Verso Books, 2019).

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Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020).

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James Connolly, "Socialism and Nationalism" (1897), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/01/socnat.htm.

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Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 44.

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Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 9.

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Edward Onaci, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, "People's Agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth" (2010), Climate & Capitalism, https://climateandcapitalism.com/2010/04/26/the-cochabamba-protocol-peoples-agreement-adopted-april-22-2010/.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Guilford, CT: Prometheus Books, 1998), 34.

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Karl Marx, "Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte" (1847), original translation, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/marx-engels/1844/oek-phil/3-2_prkm.htm.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1848), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm.

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V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (London: Verso, 2024), 110—111.

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Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 263.

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Peter D. Thomas notes that the concept of the integral state is Gramsci's most original contribution to Marxism. "With this concept," Thomas tells us, "Gramsci attempted to analyze the mutual interpenetration and reinforcement of 'political society' and 'civil society' (to be distinguished from each other methodologically, not organically) within a unified (and indivisible) state-form. According to this concept, the state (in its integral form) was not to be limited to the machinery of government and legal institutions (the 'state' understood in a limited sense). Rather, the concept of the integral state was intended as a dialectical unity of the moments of civil society and political society. Civil society is the terrain upon which social classes compete for social and political leadership or hegemony over other social classes. Such hegemony is guaranteed, however, 'in the last instance', by capture of the legal monopoly of violence embodied in the institutions of political society." Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony, and Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 137.

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Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 244

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Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 159.

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V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution [The April Theses]" (1917), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm.

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See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021); V.I. Lenin, "The April Theses" (1917), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm; Hongsheng Jiang, "The Paris Commune in Shanghai: The Masses, the State, and Dynamics of 'Continuous Revolution'," PhD dissertation, Duke University (2010); Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010); Chris Gilbert, Commune or Nothing! Venezuela's Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023).

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István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 699.

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Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 700.

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