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.”

— Walter Rodney

2.1: The Imperialist World-System

2.1.1: The overwhelming majority of humanity is integrated into a global system of capitalist-imperialism. This imperialist world-system emerged from the systemic crises and social struggles of late 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, colonialism, slavery, and the state. While these latter forms of social organization preceded the historical development of capitalist-imperialism, they were subordinated to the imperatives of capital accumulation (i.e. the production of surplus value through the exploitation of labor), and reconfigured accordingly. The compulsion to accumulate capital ultimately led to the emergence of an integrated world market and system of exchange based on money, inaugurating a rift in humanity’s metabolic relation to nature and alienation from the labor process at a planetary level.

2.1.2: 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 oppressor and oppressed nations; between capital and labor. While this system has been repeatedly challenged by popular revolutionary movements—and courageous attempts have been made to overcome it and build a new society—the neoliberal reconfiguration of capitalist-imperialism resulted in a series of tragic defeats and setbacks for the people’s struggle and international communist movement, despite the existence of objective conditions broadly favorable to socialist revolution.

2.1.3: While the internal contradictions of capital accumulation have generated recurring crises throughout its history, the present period of prolonged crisis—i.e. the crisis and decay of an imperialist world-system dominated by the United States—began circa 1967–1976, precipitated by the resurgence of Japanese and Western European capital; a series of successful national democratic revolutions (China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Algeria in 1962, and Vietnam in 1976) and the world revolution of 1968; the oil crisis of 1973; the collapse of the Bretton Woods global monetary system, beginning in 1971; and the relocation of major industries from the Global North to the Global South.

Despite a brief period of unipolar hegemony following the defeat of the socialist bloc and dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, this prolonged crisis came back into focus with U.S. imperialism’s occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent global recession of 2007. The depth and breadth of this crisis is clarified with each passing day, as we uneasily watch the rapid deterioration of our planetary ecosystem, the growing divide between rich and poor, the genocidal war waged by Israeli settler-colonialism against the Palestinian people, the eruption of new inter-imperialist and intra-imperialist conflicts, and a general trend towards the fascistization of both the imperial core and global peripheries.

The root of this prolonged crisis is not to be found in some vague “polarization” of society as suggested by liberals, nor in the “decline of Western Civilization” long-feared by conservatives. Contemporary society is indeed polarized, though we have yet to see how polarized it will get once labor draws a line in the sand against capital! And so-called Western Civilization is most certainly in decay, for it is a rotting corpse kept alive by capital only with the aid of necromancy. However, by applying dialectical and historical materialism, it becomes clear that these are mere symptoms, and the roots of the prolonged crisis of the world-system are to be located within the internal contradictions of the capital accumulation process itself.

2.1.4: The capital accumulation process is the primary factor driving the historical development and global expansion of capitalist-imperialism. Alienating humanity from ownership of the means of labor and the labor process itself (i.e. our social metabolism with nature), capital attempts to subordinate and subsume the totality of society and nature to a singular imperative: the self-expansion of value. In its relentless pursuit of profit, capital captures the surplus value generated through the extraction of surplus labor performed by workers engaged in the production and circulation of commodities. This surplus value is transformed into profit through the sale of these commodities on the world market. In turn, the profits accrued are reinvested in the further production and circulation of commodities, leading to the accumulation of immense wealth and social power by capital.

The historical development and internal contradictions of the capital accumulation process led to the formation of the capitalist state which, despite the globalizing tendencies of imperialist capital, paradoxically assumes a distinctly national form. The capitalist state serves, in the words of István Mészáros, as the “totalizing political command structure of capital.”¹ This state attempts to contain and suppress the irreconcilable antagonisms generated by the internal contradictions of capital, in all their many forms and variations, deploying all available means at its disposal to prevent the emergence of a revolutionary counterpower.

2.1.5: A condition for the development of this historical social system was the creation of the “free” worker. During the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism, this 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 “freed” from all independent means of subsistence and, increasingly, ownership of the instruments of labor. This left workers no choice but to sell their labor power, or their capacity to work, to the capitalists in exchange for a wage, or to otherwise gain access to a wage equivalent (by way of marriage, illicit markets, welfare programs, 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 in the circulation process through the sale of commodities on the world market. This system of exploitation sets in motion an ongoing historical process of accumulation by dispossession, or primitive accumulation, whereby the insatiable appetite for profit compels 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, primitive accumulation is the condition for the emergence of a class of proletarians who are “free” in a double sense: free to sell their labor power to capital, or starve.² This is the brutal reality of capital’s historical genesis and ongoing self-reproduction, as it enters the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”³

2.1.6: While universalizing the capital accumulation process and generalizing a system of commodity production and exchange based on money on a world scale, capital did not universalize the exploitation of wage labor once capitalist social relations and institutions were consolidated in the imperial core countries. In fact, the exploitation of wage labor by capital is only made possible through various forms of unwaged labor, including the productive and reproductive labors of women, peasants, debtors, and enslaved peoples. Developing in a uniquely imperialist fashion, capital integrates and reconfigures various pre-capitalist forms of social organization, such as patriarchy, slavery, and caste oppression, while also inventing new forms of oppression, especially racial and national oppression (i.e. white supremacy). These forms of social organization serve the dual purpose of keeping the exploited and oppressed masses divided, while legitimizing and facilitating the impoverishment, subjugation, and ruthless exploitation of the peripheral proletariat and peasantry.

2.1.7: The process of colonization has generalized these dynamics on a global scale, suspending all forms of autonomous social development within those social formations designated as peripheries by the imperial core. A social relation of dependency has been consciously cultivated by the imperial core, mediated through an integrated world market, and backed by the political and military power of the imperialist nation-states. This process was first unleashed internal to Europe 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 a regime of super-exploitation in order to generate superprofits for the imperial core. In such an arrangement, access to the wage does not guarantee access to those basic necessities required for social reproduction above a bare subsistence level, resulting in the immiseration of the laboring masses of proletarians and peasants in the peripheral nations, as well as the internal colonies of the imperial core itself.

2.1.8: The historical process of capital accumulation does not develop within the framework of a closed national economy. From the outset, capital develops 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. In short, capital has always been imperialist.⁴

Let’s summarize the argument thus far. In accordance with the laws and tendencies of its real historical development, capital is driven by an internal logic of boundless accumulation. This is achieved through the generalization of commodity production and exchange on a world scale. In turn, 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, the global peripheries have also served as sites for the dispersal of class struggles within the core nation-states through the relocation of workers and peasants from the metropole to colonial settlements. The mass deportation of Irish convicts and political prisoners to Australia by the British Empire, the enlistment of European immigrants in the genocide and dispossession of the Indigenous nations of North America with the promise of “free land,” or the coordinated mass migration of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine in the aftermath of the Holocaust and their subsequent participation in the settler-colonial project of Zionism all had the effect of displacing a number of the imperial core’s internal contradictions.

In turn, settler workers were transformed into the foot soldiers of empire and bourgeoisified both culturally and ideologically. The settler working class of this or that country came to identify with “their” imperialist nation-state and its “civilizing mission.” Not only did they make a deal with the devil when they accepted scraps from the master’s table: they implicated themselves in the crimes of imperialism by participating in the theft of Indigenous land, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the maintenance of a status quo based on super-exploitation facilitated through the racial and national oppression of colonies. Imperialism continues to divide the working class, and these internal divisions will not be overcome spontaneously. Instead, the unity of the global working class must be actively cultivated through mass struggles waged on an explicitly anti-imperialist basis.

While the global value chains of capitalist-imperialism facilitate the free movement of capital, the global movement of labor power is tightly controlled and militarized. This control of labor is necessary to maintain the social domination of capital, providing it with a reliable reservoir of migrant labor power to be exploited. Despite the national form taken by the capitalist state and the propagation of chauvinistic national ideologies by the ruling class, imperialist capital respects no national borders. Ultimately, the social domination of capital can be effectively overcome only by the revolutionary internationalism of an organized working class united with the liberation struggles of all oppressed social groups.

2.1.9: Capitalist-imperialism has engendered a global system characterized by the hierarchical division of the world into distinct zones of activity, wherein the corporations and financial institutions of the imperial core, bolstered by the armed power of the imperialist nation-states and their proxies, 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 (i.e. profit maximization and market competition), the metropoles of imperialism expanded their global domination at a rapid pace, catalyzing profound transformations across all spheres of social life and suspending the autonomous social development of the non-capitalist societies they encountered and subjugated.

2.1.10: Geographically, the capital accumulation process has divided the world 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.

2.1.11: Today, the geopolitical and economic dominance 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 serves as the global police force responsible for securing and defending the collective imperialism of the metropole. It is crucial for communists to recognize that the imperialist tendencies of capitalism have not diminished over time. Rather, they are integral to its emergence and development as a historical social system, and have actually intensified as capital has extended its dominion over the whole of humanity and the planet. However, despite the existence of a collective imperialism characterized by joint management under the leadership of U.S. imperialism, inter-imperialist rivalries continue to pose the threat of new inter-imperialist wars (particularly in an era of increasing multipolarity), and regional inter-state conflicts become increasingly common as the system is further destabilized.

2.1.12: On the basis of their position within the imperialist world-system, it is possible for semi-peripheral countries to develop into subimperialist powers.⁵ 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, or even promote themselves into the ranks of the imperial core, by developing new metropolitan centers of capital accumulation.

Subimperialism can be defined as the process whereby a semi-peripheral nation-state and its capitalist firms engage 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 primary control over the transfer of surplus value from the peripheries. Subimperialist countries are thus capable of developing both tense collaboration, as well as a limited degree of direct competition, with the nation-states and corporations of the imperial core.

2.1.13: Today, subimperialism is a process associated with the forms of regional imperialism practiced by countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and India. Accepting the exploitative and oppressive social relations and institutions of capitalist-imperialism—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 participation in the co-management of the world-system, 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.

2.1.14: 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 its colonial policies (i.e. the national oppression of Jews, Muslims, and the peoples of Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Alaska, the Baltic region, Poland, etc.), and inter-imperialist rivalry (i.e. the eruption of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and the conflicts with the Central Powers during the First World War).

2.1.15: While this historical trajectory was interrupted by the October Socialist Revolution of 1917, it was resumed in the late Soviet Union with the development of social imperialism (“socialist in words, but imperialist in deeds,” to use Lenin’s expression), perhaps best exemplified by the Soviet military 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 Africa, Asia, and Latin America (most notably Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, and Palestine), though this aid rapidly evaporated as the Soviet Union sank deeper into crisis. While Russia was demoted in the geopolitical hierarchy of the imperialist world-system after the disbandment of the Soviet Union in 1991, having been 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.”

2.1.16: The case of China, however, is less straightforward than Russia. Social imperialism became dominant in China following the death of Mao Zedong, the arrest of the Gang of Four, Chinese intervention in both the Third Indochina War and Angolan Civil War, and, most importantly, Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power. The Deng period was characterized by widespread political repression (which included a great many communist workers, peasants, and students), decollectivization and the disbandment of the commune system, and sweeping neoliberal economic reforms.

In order to facilitate the transfer of technology from the imperial core to China, Deng sold low-wage Chinese workers to multinational and transnational corporations, justified on the basis of “developing the productive forces.” Under Deng, the Communist Party of China began to promote the revisionist doctrine of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is shorthand for bureaucratic state capitalism’s exploitation of the Chinese proletariat, the super-exploitation of peripheral labor power 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.

2.1.17: However, any analysis of Chinese social imperialism must be situated historically, and understood in light of the empirical reality that a higher proportion of surplus value is today transferred from China to the imperial core than China is able to extract from its internal and external peripheries.⁶ Furthermore, in the wake of the global recession of 2007, Xi Jinping—who assumed power in 2012-2013—has pursued policies of sovereign economic development that address certain effects of Deng’s “opening up” during the neoliberal era, such as environmental destruction, extreme poverty, and the urban-rural divide. While China’s assertion of political sovereignty and rapid economic growth pose a threat to the ruling classes of the imperial core (as seen with U.S. imperialism launching of a New Cold War), China’s economic life remains deeply entangled with—and complementary to—the imperialist world-system.

More to the point, communists must ask ourselves: Is sovereign economic development synonymous with the socialist transformation of a country? Is socialist consciousness being developed among the masses of people? What social relations and institutions must be present for us to conclude that a process of socialist transition is, in fact, underway? While it is clear that the national independence of China should be defended and all attempts by the imperial core to incite war with China must be vigorously opposed, we must determine if communist politics are really in command. If we conclude that they are not, then it is our duty to align ourselves with those revolutionary forces among the Chinese people who dare to uphold revolutionary Marxism in the face of bureaucratic state capitalism and social imperialism, and who are prepared for the difficult task of retaking the socialist road to communism.

2.1.18: The development of imperialist tendencies in both Russia and China can be situated historically. On the one hand, these tendencies can be grasped as expressions of the internal contradictions generated by the dynamics of class struggle and post-socialist capital accumulation within each country. On the other hand, the development of imperialist tendencies can be understood as expressions of the competitive dynamics generated by the imperialist world-system as a whole, especially in the wake of the crisis of the neoliberal model and the decline of the United States.

Facing a crisis of profitability as well as a crisis of hegemony stemming from its imperialist war in Vietnam, the global revolutionary uprisings of 1968, the emergence of national liberation movements among its internal colonies, and the intensification of domestic class struggle, the decision was made by U.S. imperialism to deindustrialize whole regions of the country by relocating a significant portion of industrial production from the continental United States to the global peripheries, especially China.

2.1.19: While U.S. imperialism appeared triumphant in the wake of the defeat of the socialist bloc and destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991, the “end of history” was rather short-lived, shattered by the spectacular failure of the U.S. military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the global recession of 2007, and the realities of climate change induced by capitalist-imperialism. In subsequent years, U.S. imperialism sought to maintain the unity of the geopolitical bloc under its command while containing potential rivals, such as Russia and China, by undermining their political and economic sovereignty.

The United States hoped to rebuild its hegemony and reestablish a unipolar world-system under its leadership using the methods it knew best, namely, by fomenting inter-ethnic conflict and balkanization, imposing economic hardships through the use of sanctions and blockades, manufacturing political crises and orchestrating regime change, and, when all else fails, waging war. 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.

2.1.20: In 2025, however, divisions within the U.S. ruling class led to the adoption of a different approach. Reasserting “America First” ultra-nationalism and the Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the fascist Trump regime has called for the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal, reduction of U.S. financial support for NATO, an armistice between Russia and Ukraine (to be secured at the expense of Ukrainian national sovereignty, and leaving open the possibility of rapprochement with Russia), an unprecedented expansion of public spending on military industries (including the rapid expansion of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal), and a strategic retreat from Western Europe, Korea and Japan, and the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere (i.e. U.S. imperialism’s historical zone of influence), with the strategic objective of pivoting to the Indo-Pacific.⁷

In December 2025, the U.S. announced an $11.1 billion arms package for Taiwan—the largest ever—in a major escalation of tensions with China. On January 3, 2026, the Trump regime exercised its so-called “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, launching a brazen military assault on Venezuela, illegally kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, and openly calling for the expropriation of the Venezuelan oil industry by the U.S. Empire. Taken as a whole, these measures are intended to secure the political, military, and economic position of the United States in preparation for an imperialist world war with China. While the long-range goal of such policies is to reestablish the hegemony of U.S. imperialism, their implementation is more likely to accelerate its decline and decay or, perhaps, our mutually assured destruction.

2.1.21: Capital is compelled to expand globally. Engaged in a war of aggression against Ukraine, Russian capital aims to expand its regional sphere of influence. Similarly, Chinese capital aims for regional expansion, though the Chinese state has thus far sought to avoid direct military conflict with the warmongering United States and NATO in order to facilitate the unobstructed growth and development of its bureaucratic 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 and inter-state warfare.

2.1.22: 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. At our present historical conjuncture, we cannot assume that processes of imperialist consolidation will prove successful. Indeed, the entry of new nations 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, let alone for our planetary ecosystem to sustain the imperial mode of living corresponding to the global system of commodity production and exchange on such an expanded scale.

The loss of China as a source of net surplus value extraction for the imperial core would need to be compensated by intensifying the exploitation and super-exploitation of labor power in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or internal to the metropole itself.⁸ Unable to satisfy this demand, such a crisis of profitability could send the capitalist world-economy and imperialist world-system into a serious crisis, which could in turn act as a catalyst for the development of popular revolutionary consciousness and renewal of the international communist movement. If such economic limitations could hypothetically be overcome by capital, then the imperialist world-system would face the challenge of our planetary ecosystem’s limited biophysical capacities to withstand the increased material and energy demands of the capital accumulation process, as well as the increased production of waste and greenhouse gas emissions generated by the further expansion of the imperial mode of living.

Finally, we must note the possibility that a socialist breakthrough in any one area of the world-system could serve as the spark reigniting the world socialist revolution, which could in turn interrupt or reverse the process of imperial formation, rekindling the revolutionary internationalism and communist imagination of the exploited and oppressed masses of not only Russia and China, but the world. 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 waged in the imperial core countries), it goes without saying that a socialist revolution within the borders of the present-day United States would serve to advance the people’s struggle for liberation and help secure the ultimate victory of communism.

2.1.23: 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 a 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 we 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.⁹ Communists of all countries, particularly those concentrated in the belligerent imperialist countries, must consciously agitate, educate, and organize to transform a war between capitalist nation-states—which, when viewed from the proletarian class standpoint, can be seen clearly for what it is: a bloody fratricidal conflict in which workers slaughter their fellow workers to line the pockets of “their” respective national capitalists—into a revolutionary struggle for the global self-emancipation of the working class and all oppressed social groups. The world socialist revolution is the only path to lasting peace and freedom for humanity.

2.1.24: 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 social relations governing their use; between the growing interconnectivity of all human social activity and the alienation of humanity from the labor process; between the social production of immense wealth and its private appropriation by the owning class.

On the one hand, the historical development of the labor process brings forth the objective possibility of building a communist society, that is, a society organized on the basis of a free association of social individuals who, with the means of labor held in common, rationally and democratically govern their metabolism with nature in order to directly satisfy the needs of the people, develop human capacities in an all-round way, and sustain our planetary ecosystem for future generations.

On the other hand, capitalist-imperialism squanders the realization of this immanent potential by destroying our natural environment and increasing the poverty, misery, and alienation of the masses, while the imperialist bourgeoisie accumulates immense private wealth and tightens their grip over the state in order to protect their riches. Social progress in the direction of communism is thus blocked by capital, and the bourgeoisie threaten to drag humanity further into the depths of barbarism as they battle for the control of new markets. This contradiction will only be resolved through the world socialist revolution.

2.1.25: A second contradiction is between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which is generalized throughout the social fabric of the imperialist world-system. On one side stands the bourgeoisie, who own the means of social production and reproduction, organize and control the labor process, and accumulate capital through the appropriation of surplus value. On the other side stands the proletariat, who are dispossessed of all independent means of subsistence, and thus forced to sell their labor power to capital in order to obtain access to a wage. This contradiction is generated wherever the accumulation of capital predominates, producing a global class struggle that will only be resolved with the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of capitalist social relations and institutions, as well as all forms of class society, through proletarian revolution.

2.1.26: 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 colonizers, who monopolize the control of land, labor, and natural resources, as well as science, technology, and culture, through a historical process of enclosure, racialization, enslavement, and proletarianization. On the other side stand the colonized, who want freedom, dignity, and national independence. For the peoples of an oppressed nation, colonialism presupposes the interruption of their autonomous historical development, the undermining of national sovereignty, and the cultivation of a relationship of dependency on the oppressor nation. From Standing Rock to Palestine, this contradiction will only be resolved with the victory of the liberation struggles of all colonized peoples against national oppression, racial oppression, and all forms of colonialism through decolonial revolution.

2.1.27: A fourth contradiction is that between the privatization of kinship relations in the form of the nuclear family on the one hand, and the necessity for the communal organization of social reproduction on the other. The nuclear family imposes oppressive gender roles and sexual norms of a distinctly patriarchal and heteronormative character, reproduces the dominant ideology, individualizes consumption, and both privatizes and devalues various forms of reproductive labor that are necessary not only for the all-round development of social individuals, but for the cohesive functioning of any social system. From procreation and childrearing to cooking and cleaning, from providing emotional support to satisfying affective needs, the heteropatriarchal nuclear family is a strategic site for feminist struggles aiming to achieve reproductive and sexual freedom, bodily autonomy, and the collectivization of social reproduction. The contradiction between the privatized nuclear family and the necessity for communal social reproduction will only be resolved with the victory of the liberation struggles of women and LGBTQ+ peoples against heteropatriarchal oppression in all areas of society through feminist revolution.

2.1.28: Finally, we come to the fifth contradiction—the contradiction between humans and nature—which has come to define our historical conjuncture. This contradiction is rooted in the alienation of humanity from the labor process and the commodification of everything by capital.

Thus far, we have emphasized the role of labor in mediating, regulating, and controlling humanity’s social metabolism with nature. It is through this dialectical relationship between society and nature that humans reproduce our existence, metabolizing matter and energy to satisfy our needs as we develop our capacities. 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 reality 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.¹⁰

2.1.29: Grasped as parts of a whole, the aforementioned revolutions develop organically from the internal 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 local, 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 the imperialist world-system and the completion of the socialist transition to communism on a world scale.

2.2: Imperialism in the Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital

2.2.1: During an initial phase of market competition, capitalist-imperialism was characterized by the proliferation of relatively independent companies of various sizes, which competed for market shares. At this time, it was not uncommon for there to be 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, however, the phase of inter-firm market competition gave way to monopoly-finance capital.

Arising from the tendency of the capital accumulation process towards increasing concentration and centralization of capital, inter-firm competition led to the emergence of monopolies (or oligopolies) through a sequence of mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships, with the various units of capital gradually brought under the centralized control and coordination of financial institutions. This initial monopoly-finance phase has since given way to generalized monopoly-finance capital, in which all capitalist firms are enmeshed within a global network of commodity production and exchange controlled by 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 evolved historically from its origins in European feudal society to the mercantile empires of the early colonial period and the national markets of the early twentieth century, it led to the emergence of by an integrated world market dominated by the forces of monopoly-finance capital. In this phase, a few multinational and transnational corporations and their subsidiaries—from their headquarters in the imperial core—exert disproportionate control over global industry, with metropolitan finance capital playing a dominant role. With the emergence of this gang of international cartels, transnational political and economic institutions are established to “democratically” partition the world and divide its riches among the representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie, leading to the formation of regional geopolitical, military, and economic alliances among the corporations, banks, and nation-states of the imperial core.

Within the capitalist nation-state, the representatives of monopoly-finance capital (i.e. multinational and transnational corporations intertwined with global financial institutions) occupy a hegemonic position. In turn, this leads to the global interdependence of nation-states and poses for capital the problem of transnational coordination, planning, and governance.

However, the capital accumulation process presupposes private property. This leads to the emergence of a legal system capable of enforcing and protecting the property rights of the owning class, and complementing the social domination of capital. Thus the nation-state within which a particular capitalist firm is based will always play a central role in securing the hegemony of capital, being the primary instrument through which its politico-military power is exercised against the organized resistance of labor, 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 inter-state warfare, imperialist globalization intensifies it.

2.2.3: Accelerated by the drive to accumulate, the concentration of capital led to the formation of industrial monopolies, principally in the form of multinational and transnational corporations. This centralization of capital resulted in the merger of industrial capital with bank capital, and the subsequent emergence of finance capital, which continues to enable and maintain the industrial monopolies. In turn, finance capital results in the export of money capital, which in this historical phase supersedes the export of commodities. These transformations led to the development of global capitalist economic institutions (such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization), which were established to maintain the dominant economic position of monopoly-finance capital within the world-system, and 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 exchange has increased; and the scale of capital accumulation has greatly expanded. In the aftermath of World War II, the imperial core was reconfigured in accordance with the hegemonic role assumed by the United States, establishing the dominance of the U.S. dollar at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. While this alliance remains intact today, it is increasingly fractured.

From the Great Recession of 2007 to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, the world-system flounders from crisis to crisis, and the internal contradictions of capitalist-imperialism continue to sharpen. Nonetheless, whatever disagreements may exist within the alliance led by the United States, they remain united in their goal of ruthlessly looting and pillaging the labor power and natural resources of the Global South. Multinational and transnational corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, General Electric, BlackRock, Royal Dutch Shell, BHP Group, Nestlé, Volkswagen, IBM, Berkshire Hathaway, and Pfizer maintain monopolies in key strategic sectors of the world-economy, such as industrial manufacturing, trade, investment, finance, energy, mining, 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, having generalized the contradictions of capitalism-imperialism throughout the fabric of everyday life. The contradictions between capital and labor, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, between colonizer and colonized, between the atomized nuclear family and the necessity for communal social reproduction, and between the social metabolism of capital and the universal metabolism of nature, are truly global contradictions, confronting humanity as a whole. This renews the possibility of successfully uniting the people’s revolutionary struggle on a world scale, for the proletarian class struggle is inextricably linked and complementary to the decolonial, democratic, feminist, 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 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, as well as the structural crises of the capitalist world-economy (principally a decline in the average 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 this accumulation strategy is today in crisis, neoliberalism remains the hegemonic ideology and mode of imperialist governance.

2.2.7: From the Congo and Sudan to Palestine and Ukraine, it is clear that, especially in the age of generalized monopoly-finance capital, the capital accumulation process accelerates militarism and war. In this historical period, there are two principal types of military conflict waged by monopoly-finance capital: (a) imperialist wars of conquest to establish and maintain colonies and neocolonies, and (b) inter-imperialist wars for the redivision of the world market, taking the form of inter-state proxy wars or world wars.

At the same time, capitalist-imperialism’s global system of exploitation and oppression generates organized resistance in the form of people’s movements in all corners of the world. In response to the struggles waged by the exploited and oppressed masses of the world to overthrow imperialist domination, delink their countries from the imperialist world-system, and win their liberation, the imperialist bourgeoisie and their compradors have proven themselves to be more than prepared and willing to mount the most genocidal counterinsurgency campaigns (as seen in Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kurdistan, Turkey, Palestine, 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 continuing its settler-colonial occupation and genocide of Palestine while waging war against the peoples of Lebanon and Iran. 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 (the latter backed by NATO), and with the initiation of war against Iran by Israel and the United States in February 2026 with the explicit goal of regime change. Threatened with the danger of an imperialist war, the only justifiable position for communists is to build a people’s movement to oppose imperialist war while supporting the progressive demands and liberation struggles of the working class and all oppressed social groups. However, should the imperialists succeed in dragging the peoples of the world into another global conflagration, Marxists call for the transformation of an inter-imperialist world war into a revolutionary people’s war for communism.

2.3: U.S. Imperialism in Decline

2.3.1: According to Giovanni Arrighi, capitalist-imperialism has undergone four distinct cycles of capital accumulation, each being led by a hegemonic nation-state.¹¹ 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 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, characterized by “the collective imperialism of the triad,” to use Samir Amin’s expression.¹² 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. While this alliance remains nominally intact, it is in crisis.

2.3.2: While long expected, it is now clear that the neoliberal cycle of capital accumulation is coming to an end, the collective imperialism of the triad is collapsing, and we are entering a new phase of capitalist-imperialism defined by the resurgence of fascism and intensification of inter-imperialist conflict. This historical 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.

The Trump regime’s swift implementation of “America First” neo-fascist policies have remade the political economy of both the United States and the world-system through the mass deportation and detention of immigrants, the repression of political opponents (especially the anti-imperialist student movement on college campuses), sweeping attacks on the people’s basic democratic rights (including the rights won by people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, homeless people, people with disabilities, and trade unions in previous cycles of struggle), the paramilitarization of the repressive state apparatus, the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine and the proposed annexation of Greenland, the strategic retreat from the Middle East and Western Europe, and the strategic pivot towards the Indo-Pacific, ultimately increasing the possibility of an inter-imperialist war with China.

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.¹³ While the precise contours of this new cycle of capital accumulation are not yet clear, and it is possible that the ascendance of China will continue until it successfully establishes itself as the hegemonic nation-state within the world-system, 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: In the eighteenth century, European imperialism gave birth to a monster, the United States of America, a social formation in which, according to the clinical diagnosis of Frantz Fanon, “the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.”¹⁴ From its founding as a racist and genocidal settler-colonial slavocracy, to its role as the hegemonic nation-state of the imperialist world-system, to its present phase of prolonged decline, decay, and fascistization, U.S. imperialism has assumed a leading role in waging a bloody counter-revolution against the liberation struggles of the exploited and oppressed masses of the world. In the wake of the Haitian Revolution of 1791—when enslaved peoples inscribed the revolutionary slogan “Liberty or Death!” upon their banner of struggle—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. Refusing to acknowledge the Philippine Declaration of Independence, the United States waged a genocidal war against the Filipino people, establishing a comprador military dictatorship to solidify the U.S. imperialism’s control over its new colony.

In reaction to the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, 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-peasant struggles it unleashed globally. At the end of World War II, following the destruction of the Nazi Empire in Eastern and Central Europe by the Allies—a victory made possible only with the immense heroism and sacrifice of the Soviet Red Army and communist-led partisan guerrilla forces—the defeat of the Japanese Empire was at hand.

In August 1945, the United States became the first and only nation-state in history to deploy nuclear weapons, incinerating the largely civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While this heinous act was justified as being necessary to secure Japan’s surrender, there were other motivations at play: to ensure that the Japanese surrender and military occupation would be facilitated by the United States, not the Soviets (so as to prevent the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence in Asia); to field test nuclear weapons on human subjects; and to use terror to frighten into submission the emerging socialist bloc, decolonial national liberation movements, and all others who would challenge U.S. imperial hegemony.

2.3.5: It is not uncommon for the Cold War to be 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. Labeled “the Jakarta Method” by journalist Vincent Bevins, U.S. imperialism exported this strategy of mass murder across the world.¹⁵ State terrorism sponsored by the United States included mass disappearances, detentions, torture, and sexual violence, mainly targeting peasants, workers, and students. In short, the Jakarta Method is a frequently omitted episode of Cold War history which facilitated the triumph of U.S. imperialism over the international socialist bloc.

2.3.6: Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the United States imposed a trade embargo which continues to this day. Hellbent on preventing the socialist transformation of the island, the United States has made extensive use of state terrorism to intimidate the Cuban people and all 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 rebranded as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation—trained, armed, and financed right-wing death squads in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, which helped the fascist neocolonial state to contain and suppress the people’s struggle for liberation.

In the wake of the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the United States unleashed genocidal violence 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, as well as the Portuguese colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé, Príncipe, Cape Verde, and Guinea-Bissau. This legacy continues today with the ongoing support of the United States for settler-colonial occupation of Palestine by Israel, 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 the global cartels and syndicates of 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. Utilizing 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. Though this coup attempt was successfully defeated by a popular uprising, leading to the further radicalization of the Bolivarian Revolution and the founding of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the United States has never forgiven the Venezuelan people and continues to punish the Bolivarian Republic for its defiance in the face of imperialist aggression in the form of sanctions and tariffs.

U.S. imperialism continues to support right-wing counterinsurgencies against revolutionary communist movements in the Philippines and India. Since 2014, the United States 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, as was the case in Venezuela under Chávez, 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, using the question of Taiwan as a pretext. Brazenly defiant of international law and the sovereignty of oppressed nations, with more than 750 military bases around the world and nuclear weapons pointed at any country considered to be a potential threat to its political and economic 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 ushered in 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 systematic exploitation and devastation of our planetary ecosystem by capital—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 reconstruction of the international communist movement, if we can learn to seize the time and tip the global balance of forces in favor of the people’s struggle for socialism.

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 today, albeit one in an accelerated phase of decline and decay. Indeed, it is due precisely to the deepening crisis and stagnation of the U.S. economy that, when combined with the rise of BRICS alliance (composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as well as Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates), the U.S. ruling class is compelled to pursue increasingly authoritarian and militaristic measures in order to reassert its global political, economic, and cultural hegemony, as well as to secure power domestically.

At the start of 2025, the fascist Trump regime sloppily initiated a strategic retreat in an effort to regroup and consolidate U.S. imperialism within its regional zone of influence. Indeed, Trump’s aggressive posture towards Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for the annexation of Greenland, can be understood as reflecting this geopolitical, military, and economic policy shift. This international trend away from a unipolar world-system towards “multipolarity” (e.g., regional imperialist alliances competing for hegemony) merely reflects the return of “great power rivalries” to the stage of world history, which has been an integral feature of capitalist-imperialism since the beginning.

Make no mistake: this does not mean a less violent form of U.S. imperialism. On the contrary, embargoes, tariffs, sanctions, death squads, disappearances, and drone strikes continue to be deployed against the oppressed nations and peoples of the global peripheries who dare to defy the dictates of U.S. imperialism. Though the United States is in the midst of a prolonged crisis, it nonetheless remains the hegemonic nation-state within the world-system, and is the main enemy of the global working class and all oppressed social groups. Indeed, the settler-colonial and imperialist United States is becoming increasingly dangerous as it sinks deeper into the throes of crisis and fascist decay.

2.4: Capital Accumulation and Proletarian Revolution

2.4.1: The economic organization of the imperialist world-system is capitalism. Under this system of class exploitation, the labor process—understood as the process through which humans appropriate, metabolize, and transform nature through purposeful activity in order to satisfy social needs—is organized in accordance with the logic of capital accumulation. What is capital? Abstractly speaking, we can define capital as value in motion, self-valorizing value, or, what is the same thing, self-expanding value.

Speaking more concretely, we can say that capital is a social relationship, in which one class of people own the means of labor (such as land, buildings and infrastructure, tools, machinery, sources of energy, etc.), while another class owns nothing but their capacity to work—or labor power—which they are compelled to sell to the owning class for a definite period of time in exchange for a wage. This labor power is deployed in the labor process to produce commodities, which are sold at a price on the world market by the owning class. In this way, the owning class is able to control the labor process and appropriate the product of social labor, accumulating unthinkable wealth and power. In other words, one class owns but does not work, while another class works but does not own.

However, the production and exchange of commodities is not, in and of itself, a recent historical phenomenon, nor is the mere occurrence of this social interaction sufficient to make a society capitalistic. Rather, what distinguishes capitalism from the standpoint of world history is the generation and accumulation of surplus value through a global system of generalized commodity production and exchange. Whenever a commodity is exchanged at a value greater than the initial sum of value invested in its production, surplus value is generated. In turn, this surplus value is transformed into profit through the successful exchange of a given commodity on the world market at a price exceeding the costs of investments in wages, raw materials, and the instruments of labor. The profits accrued through the process of exchange are reinvested to expand the scale of commodity production, ultimately yielding the possibility of realizing still greater value for the capitalist. Money begets money. Capital is the self-expansion of value.

Where does surplus value come from? Under capitalism, it is labor—commodified as labor power—that functions as the exclusive source of value for capital. In its relentless drive to maximize the extraction of surplus value and the realization of profit, capital must continuously intensify the exploitation of the working class, appropriating the fruits of their surplus labor. Capital is driven to commodify the totality of social and natural life, subordinating everything to the profit motive. However, as the accumulation of capital expands, it encounters the manifold resistance of both labor and nature. In due time, crises occur with greater frequency, increasingly violent class struggles erupt, and capital is compelled to creatively adapt and reconfigure the prevailing structures of society in accordance with its logic of boundless accumulation to ensure its continued reproduction and stave off decay.

2.4.2: The social domination of capital is premised upon and secured through the social institution of 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 do not own independent means of subsistence—must attempt to sell their labor power, or capacity to work, in exchange for a wage, or to 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: The working class, or proletariat, is composed of several core groups: (a) waged workers who are employed full-time and part-time as the active army of labor for capital; (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 lumpen proletariat 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 labor in the hidden abode 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: The historical development of the capital accumulation process initiates important social transformations, as capital establishes and maintains its social domination through a set of unique social relations and institutions. For example:

• In its drive to maximize productivity in the service of accumulation, within both the workplace and society capital institutes a technical division of labor, initiating an unprecedented degree of specialization and cooperation in the labor process as well as innovation of the instruments of labor, with the effect of intensifying the separation of manual from intellectual labor.
• To facilitate the exchange of commodities produced in the labor process as far and wide as possible, the accumulation of capital presupposes the establishment of an integrated world market based on inter-firm competition.
• At the same time, to secure the social domination of capital over labor, consolidate the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, and establish a political framework for the generalized production and exchange of commodities, capital creates the nation-state system.
• Uprooting communal forms of kinship, capital establishes the nuclear family as the central unit of privatized social reproduction, which stands in sharp contrast to an increasingly socialized labor process. Through the reproduction of heteropatriarchal gender roles within the nuclear family, a social division of labor is established based on the general devaluation of reproductive labor and the further separation of the sphere of social production from reproduction. The replacement of communal kinship forms by the nuclear family of capital has intensified gender and sexual oppression, increased the alienation of the individual from society, and created a mechanism for the reproduction of the authoritarian social relations of the capitalist state at the most intimate, molecular level.
• Finally, capital has initiated a rift in humanity’s social metabolism with nature through the systematic commodification of the environment and wanton destruction of our planetary ecosystem.

In addition to serving as a catalyst for these radical transformations in social life, the capital accumulation process has also accommodated and integrated pre-capitalist social relations and institutions, specifically patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism. However, in true entrepreneurial fashion, capital did not merely inherit and adopt these pre-capitalist forms, but repurposed and reconfigured them to satisfy its rapacious lust for profit. At the same time, capital invented new forms of social oppression, specifically white supremacist racial oppression, further intensifying the exploitation of labor. If its reign of terror continues unabated this century, capital will surely unleash new horrors still as it continues to subordinate the web of life to a singular imperative: the self-expansion of value.

2.4.5: If the world-economy of capital is based on the ceaseless extraction of surplus value through a system of generalized commodity production and exchange, this raises a central question: what is a commodity? We can define the commodity as a useful article or service, produced through a social labor process, for the purpose of exchange rather than direct use. A commodity is a useful thing, a product of labor, that has the ability to satisfy a definite human need—be it fundamental or ephemeral, physiological or cultural—which is then exchanged on the world market in accordance with a quantifiable social average via the mediation of a universal equivalent, i.e. money. Thus the commodity has a contradictory dual character. On the one hand, commodities have a qualitative aspect, or use-value, satisfying a particular human need; while 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 accumulation.

2.4.6: Be it achieved 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, reduced to 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 activities that were once autonomous from the capital accumulation process are subordinated to and subsumed under its social domination.

Formal subsumption occurs when the prevailing labor processes are integrated directly into the system of commodity production and circulation, without significant changes to their social organization. Thus the capitalists impose the wage relation and extract surplus value generated by workers within their preexisting roles, but the social organization of the labor process remains largely unchanged. We see this in the case of dispossessed peasant farmers who, while continuing to produce using traditional methods, must sell their labor power to the landowners of large agricultural estates or plantations for a wage, and whose products are transformed into commodities through their sale on the world market. 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 internal 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 surplus value extraction and profit maximization. Real subsumption thus reflects a profound shift in the character of social production and reproduction, whereby the labor process—and indeed, society itself—is fully integrated within the logic of capital accumulation, leading to intensified exploitation, oppression, and alienation for the masses of people, as well as, however, 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 boundless drive to accumulate, accumulate, and accumulate, capital aims to subsume the totality of human existence within its system of generalized commodity production and exchange. In the process, capital creates a veritable social factory, subordinating the totality of society and nature to the law of value. Everything is assigned a value by capital, everything is given a price, everything is subordinated to the rules of market exchange and the profit motive. “Cash rules everything around me,” as Wu-Tang Clan bluntly put it.

Capital “becomes the master of all the other spheres of society, invading the entire web of social relations,” Mario Tronti explained.¹⁶ Work becomes an estranged social activity, in which the worker—dispossessed of ownership of the means of labor and all autonomous means of subsistence, and compelled to sell their commodified labor power to capital in exchange for a wage—is dominated by an abstract social force that has completely alienated the individual from the labor process. Society is artificially separated from its ecological matrix, humanity is alienated from our social being, and the social domination of capital becomes ever more totalizing.

As Tronti argued, “when the factory extends its control over the whole society—all of social production is turned into industrial production—the specific traits of the factory are lost amid the generic traits of society.”¹⁷ Indeed, despite much fanfare in the last century about the rise of “the post-industrial society,” it should be painfully obvious to every worker that the factory of capital—and alongside it, the capitalist state—is more pervasive than ever before.

2.4.10: Not only are workers alienated from the means of labor and the social product we create in the course of the labor process, we are also alienated from each other and nature. This social alienation is one of the main contradictions of capital, for capital simultaneously connects diverse peoples, societies, and natures in a global commodity production and circulation process by way of various forms of indirect social cooperation, while separating these producers using a myriad of social hierarchies operating at multiple scales of the social factory. More than a means of accumulating self-expanding value, the imposition of commodity production and circulation—and with it the social alienation resulting from the commodification of nature, society, and 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, or primitive accumulation, 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 its associated forms of disciplinary violence are necessary prerequisites—and ongoing imperatives—to forge the working class required for the valorization of capital, i.e. the creation of the proletarian as a machine of commodity production and circulation 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 crucial to the historical development of the capital accumulation process has been the systematic devaluation of the labor power of Indigenous workers and the workers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America through processes of racialization. From a system of commodity production and circulation based on the enslavement of African labor emerged white supremacy. While today slavery has become relatively less common (though it persists in a myriad of forms, as seen in the case of modern prison slavery), racial oppression remains a central instrument for facilitating the super-exploitation of labor power by capital (i.e. the realization of superprofits through the ruthless extraction of the surplus labor of racialized proletarians), as well as for hierarchically dividing the working class on the race. The struggle against white chauvinism, and for the overthrow of white supremacy and abolition of white privilege, is an essential front of the proletarian movement for communism.

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 capitalist-imperialism. As we have thus far established, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class constitute the ruling class in any social formation where the capital accumulation process predominates. Capitalists own and control the means of social production and reproduction; they exploit workers in order to extract surplus value with the aim of turning a profit; and they maintain, legitimize, and reproduce their dominant social position as ruling class through the capitalist 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 low-level “white collar” employees, today this class includes workers employed in sectors such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction, energy, engineering, utilities, retail, food service, hospitality, tourism, customer service, transportation and logistics, cleaning services, building and facilities maintenance, information and communications technology, healthcare, childcare, eldercare, 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; therefore, to obtain access to the necessities of life and reproduce their existence, they are compelled to sell their labor power as a commodity to the capitalists in exchange for wages. The proletariat is a class exploited by capital, whose surplus labor is the source of surplus value, and hence profit, for the capitalist. On a daily basis, proletarians are subjected to the harsh discipline of capitalist management systems in the workplace, and the authoritarian social control of the capitalist state in everyday life. The global working class, however, shall be the gravedigger of capital: proletarians share a common historical interest in overthrowing the capitalist state, abolishing capitalist-imperialism, and leading humanity along the socialist road to communism. Given the central importance of their social position within the international circuits of commodity production and circulation, workers are strategically positioned to do so.

However, most crucially, the bourgeoisie and proletariat form two opposing poles of the antagonistic contradiction between capital and labor, which generates class struggle. It is through their common participation in this class struggle that proletarians are united as a revolutionary class, and prepared for the constructive tasks of socialism. “Struggles,” writes Michael Lebowitz, “are a process of production: they produce a different kind of worker, a worker who produces herself as someone whose capacity has grown, whose confidence develops, whose ability to organize and unite expands.”¹⁸ Thus a new communist humanity is created through class struggle.

Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, grasped this historical process of class struggle when he wrote how, after the long winter of capital, the spring of the commune would finally bloom:

The first of May:

When the flowers break through the earth,

When the sap rises in the trees.

When the birds come back from the South.

Workers:

Be like the flowers

Bloom in the strength of your unknown

power,

Grow out of the passive earth,

Grow strong with Union

All hands together –

To beautify this hour, this spring,

And all the springs to come

Forever for the workers!

He concludes:

Proletarians of all the world:

Arise,

Grow strong,

Take Power,

Till the forces of the earth are yours

From this hour.¹⁹

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 labor (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 and transnational corporations, and agribusiness. While constituting a majority of the total human population 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 the global supply chains of capital.

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 against capital is approached from a global perspective, it becomes clear that the international communist movement must build a revolutionary united front based on the 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 eliminating 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 full collectivization and the formation of communes. Furthermore, from agroecological farming methods to Indigenous philosophies of land stewardship, the people’s movement for socialism has much to learn from the peasant way of life.

2.4.17: Also having roots in pre-capitalist social formations, we find the “old middle class” composed of the petite bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. This includes small business owners, small farm owners, 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 support 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 support for capitalist-imperialism 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 nineteenth and early twentieth 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, trade union bureaucrats, 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, and for containing, suppressing, or otherwise co-opting eruptions of proletarian class struggle. Today, it is the bureaucratic class who are largely responsible for designing cybernetic systems and algorithms which permeate the processes of commodity production and circulation, and for managing the flows of data and information used to make decisions at the level of firm, industry, and market, as well as to 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 their potential support for socialism, and thus create the possibility for a more rapid process of declassing and proletarianizing sectors of 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 their potential to build alliances with the imperialist 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 peculiar form of bureaucratic central planning and a hierarchical division of labor largely 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 surplus social product 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:

If those in management roles do not join the workers on the shop floor by living, working, and eating with them, and if they do not modestly learn one or more technical skills from the workers as their teachers, they will remain forever locked in acute class struggle with the working class. Ultimately, they will be overthrown by the workers as a new bourgeoisie. Without learning technical skills from the workers, they will remain outsiders, unable to effectively manage. They will spread confusion rather than enlightenment.

The bureaucratic class on the one hand, and the working class and the poor peasants on the other, are two sharply antagonistic classes. These managers have already become, or are in the process of becoming, new bourgeois elements who exploit workers. How could they possibly recognize this? They are targets of revolutionary struggle. The Socialist Education Movement cannot rely on them. Instead, we must rely on those cadres who harbor no hostility toward the workers and who exhibit revolutionary fervor.²⁰

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: In the historical development of the Chinese Revolution, the socialist projects which aimed to empower workers and peasants, revolutionize social relations, overcome the divisions of labor inherited from capitalism, proletarianize the bureaucratic class through their collective participation in manual labor, and ultimately build the foundations of a communist society, all came to an abrupt halt 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, the implementation of sweeping neoliberal economic reforms, and the repression of mass movements of workers, peasants, and students. Most infamously, Deng deployed the Chinese military against demonstrations in Beijing in what came to be known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 which—contrary to the claims of both bourgeois media and the official account of the Chinese government—was one moment in a broader countrywide rebellion, in which workers played a significant role. In the face of corruption, rampant inflation, and the privatization of public enterprises, workers demanded freedom of association and the right to strike, alongside the repeal of Deng’s neoliberal reforms.

2.4.22: Since Xi Jinping assumed leadership of the party-state in 2012–2013, China has pursued a more independent path of economic development when compared to the Deng Xiaoping period, actively cultivating a degree of cooperation among the countries of the Global South through its “Belt and Road” initiative. Indeed, Xi’s administration can in certain respects be understood as an attempt to grapple with the contradictions inherited from China “opening up” to global capital, as well as a challenge to the hegemony of U.S. imperialism. However, while certain economic development objectives can be viewed as broadly progressive when compared with the rapacious policies of the imperial core (and lifting over 800 million people out of extreme poverty is no small achievement), whether China today is on the socialist road is an entirely different question.

2.4.23: If socialism refers to the construction of communism through a revolutionary process of self-emancipation, then how are we to understand the repression of independent trade unionism in China, the arrest of Maoist labor organizers, and the repression of Marxist study groups following a series of struggles led by workers at the Shenzhen Jasic Technology factory in 2018? Where are the efforts to cultivate proletarian assemblies, councils, committees of struggle, and communes in China today? What are we to make of a “socialism” that has not only produced a class of billionaires, but which continues to grow them? Are such blatantly capitalistic features compatible with the socialist transition to communism? We think not.

While it is true that China has in recent years pursued economic policies that break with the neoliberal Washington Consensus—and the warmongering United States is pursuing a policy of imperialist aggression against China with the launching of a New Cold War—the domestic policies of China do not reflect a commitment to the revolutionary process of socialist transformation, Marxian rhetoric notwithstanding. Indeed, Mao’s analysis of the bureaucratic class as the headquarters of a new bourgeoisie remains prescient. If a particular country is said to be pursuing the path of socialist transformation, then it necessitates more than the development of the forces of production: it calls for putting communist politics in command of the development of new communal social relations among people, and the construction of new communal social institutions.

2.4.24: We can summarize the character of the middles classes of capitalism as follows: they exist at the crossroads of the capital-labor 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 world 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.

2.4.25: 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 coordinated by the revolutionary united front under the class hegemony of the proletariat and political leadership of an organized communist movement. They must come to associate their ultimate material interests with the victory of the world socialist revolution and the class standpoint of the global working class. They must display a willingness to declass themselves and undergo proletarianization, and thus to join the ranks of organized labor in the struggle against capital.

2.4.26: Social classes are not monolithic, but 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, straddling both the working class and bureaucratic class. Connecting these two classes within this sector, we can identify a contradictory middle strata which embodies elements of both classes (such as teachers and nurses, for example). Further study and analysis will likely reveal the existence of several such sectors and strata throughout the world today.

2.4.27: Classes are internally contradictory, and the class struggle is waged not only between capital and labor, but within the working class itself. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the historical development of the class struggle in the imperial core countries led to the emergence of a privileged strata within the metropolitan working class, known as the labor aristocracy. Initially composed of educated and skilled workers employed in craft industries, this strata developed its own economic and political associations in the form of reformist trade unions and labor parties to represent the sectoral interests of its members in negotiations with capital.

From wages and benefits to union contracts and influence in government, the labor aristocracy negotiated access to a series of economic, political, and cultural privileges—often building upon privileges derived from racial, national, and gender oppression, especially in the settler-colonial context—in exchange for their loyalty to the imperialist nation-state. These privileges afford members of this strata a higher standard of living relative to the majority of workers in their own country, as well as the global working class, ultimately resulting in their “bourgeoisification.”

2.4.28: The oppression and super-exploitation of the global peripheries by an imperial core as colonies facilitates the extraction of superprofits by monopoly-finance capital, which Lenin defines as “a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world.”²¹ In turn, “capitalists can devote a part (and not a small one, at that!) of these superprofits to bribe their own workers,” which forms the basis of an alliance between these workers and capitalists against other countries.²²

Bribed with these superprofits, the labor aristocracy has a material interest—however shortsighted—in maintaining and defending the imperialist status quo. It is for this reason that Lenin described members of the labor aristocracy as “agents of the bourgeoisie” within the labor movement, and the chief force propagating reformism, revisionism, and all varieties of opportunism and chauvinism in the ranks of the metropolitan working class.²³ While there is nothing intrinsically reactionary about educated and skilled labor as such, in the absence of “the conscious element” (i.e. a communist party), the transformation of this strata and its associations into a pro-imperialist labor aristocracy is a probable outcome.²⁴

2.4.29: The historical emergence of the labor aristocracy is rooted in the core-periphery relations at the heart of the imperialist world-system itself. As the social contradictions generated by the accumulation of capital sharpened, and in the face of an increasingly combative industrial unionism guided by revolutionary internationalism, the imperialist bourgeoisie was compelled to take measures to dampen and dissipate the class struggle within the imperial core. In this context, the bourgeoisie sought an alliance with the labor aristocracy and their peculiar brand of conservative trade unionism, ultimately agreeing to a historic compromise with the representatives of organized labor drawn from the labor aristocracy.

Such agreements—exemplified by the very language of “the New Deal” in the United States—aimed to establish a degree of social peace within the core nation-states in exchange for access to limited social welfare gains and certain privileges for this strata, such as the legalization and regulation of their trade unions. In enlisting the active support of a strata of workers for imperialism, such compromises divide the working class—in terms of class consciousness as much as class organization—both within the countries of the imperial core, and at a world scale.

2.4.30: The narrowly sectoral and exclusionary nature of the privileges negotiated by the labor aristocracy distinguishes them from the broader democratic rights won by the struggles of the working class. For instance, when the labor movement successfully pressured the federal government of the United States to adopt the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, workers employed in agriculture, domestic labor, and the public sector were explicitly excluded from its protections. This exclusion meant that many of the most exploited and oppressed proletarians—such as Black and Mexican farm workers—were effectively denied the legal right to unionize, collectively bargain for better terms and conditions of employment, and strike.

Under the hegemony of the labor aristocracy, subsequent collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the union bureaucracy of the “official” labor movement often perpetuated these exclusions, reproducing divisions formed along lines of race, nationality, and gender within the working class. As a result, masses of proletarians were relegated to dirty, dangerous, and precarious jobs with low wages and few benefits.

2.4.31: The historical privileges negotiated by the labor aristocracy have come at the expense of the unity of the global working class. Such a divided class is unprepared to tackle the fundamentally international tasks facing the movement for proletarian self-emancipation. The labor aristocracy rots the minds of many workers, leading to a form of Stockholm syndrome, with a significant number of metropolitan workers learning to identify not with the common historical interests of their class, but with those of their exploiters and oppressors. In such a scenario, Lenin asserted that it was the duty of Marxists “to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses,” and to win them to the protracted revolutionary struggle for communism.²⁵

2.4.32: 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, the labor aristocracy disarms the working class by misdirecting it from the task of organizing its own system of counterpower on the road to proletarian class dictatorship in the socialist transition to communism. Thus the labor aristocracy has historically functioned as an anticommunist and counterrevolutionary fifth column within the labor movement, inhibiting the development of revolutionary class consciousness, self-organization, and self-activity among proletarians. Actively repressing the revolutionary communist tendency within the labor movement, and going so far as to directly collaborate with various agencies of the imperialist state to sabotage proletarian internationalism and provide support for fascist regimes in the Global South, historical experience shows that the labor aristocracy will go to nearly any length to protect its historic compromise with capital.²⁶

2.4.33: Given the internal contradictions of the capital accumulation process, any historic compromise between capital and labor is necessarily temporary. Indeed, for any group of workers, such an agreement is a Faustian bargain—a deal with the devil—as the imperialist bourgeoisie will not (and simply cannot) agree to implement a historic compromise in such a fashion that it would benefit the working class in a universal way. The metropolitan centers of capital accumulation must establish peripheries—be they internal or external to the imperial core itself—from which they can extract surplus labor and, through the process of super-exploitation, realize superprofits. At best, the labor aristocracy wins for the most privileged strata of the working class a greater share of the spoils of imperialist plunder, until the ruling class decides that even such a tepid compromise goes too far in restricting the maximization of profit.

2.4.34: Trade unions, labor parties, and any other form of mass organization to emerge from the class struggle can fall under the hegemony and administrative control of the labor aristocracy. When this occurs, they must be considered part of the ideological state apparatus of capitalist-imperialism, as such organizations objectively serve to legitimize, maintain, and reproduce the social domination of imperialist capital. It is the task of communists in the labor movement to wage a relentless struggle against these class traitors, and to either seize control of our class organizations by waging campaigns to overthrow them, or 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 relative 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 situation is advantageous for communists today, as it may allow us to recover ground lost in preceding cycles of struggle. However, this does not mean that capital will not resuscitate the labor aristocracy in its effort to maintain social control.

2.4.35: The defining class antagonism, and one of the main contradictions driving the historical development of capitalist-imperialism, is the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. 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 the prevailing class relations. A new breakthrough for the world socialist revolution will unleash an asymmetric and multidirectional class struggle on a world scale, for which the global working class must be prepared to exercise political leadership in order to secure further 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. Instead, the class struggle must continue after the working class has conquered political power, and the struggle will continue until the material basis for class society itself has been completely abolished, and a new social system has been established. 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, to prevent the emergence of a new bourgeoisie and maintain proletarian leadership of society until the abolition of classes has been achieved.

2.4.36: Waged or unwaged, employed or unemployed, in the upper, middle, or lower stratum of the working class, it is the masses of proletarians who, through the deployment of their varied forms of labor power, combined and organized into 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.

2.4.37: The central imperative of communist society is not the endless 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—such as the contradiction between intellectual and manual labor, town and country, industry and agriculture, humanity and nature—and wages struggles to abolish all forms of exploitation, oppression, and alienation which may persist in the period of socialist transition.

In the course of the proletarian revolution, workers create their own organs of counterpower. These organs of counterpower have historically included popular assemblies, councils, committees of struggle, self-defense formations, and revolutionary party organizations. It is our conviction that only with the emergence of such organs of counterpower will it be possible for the working class to smash the capitalist state, seize political power, collectivize the instruments of labor and democratize the labor process, and ultimately revolutionize all aspects of social life. Only when armed with their own organs of counterpower can workers effectively defend the world socialist revolution against the imperialist counterrevolution, and advance the global struggle for proletarian self-emancipation.

2.5: Heteropatriarchy and Feminist Revolution

2.5.1: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir famously said.²⁷ We can extend the logic of this statement to the historical development and imposition of the gender binary, the diversity of human sex characteristics (i.e. hormonal and chromosomal variations that do not conform to a simplistic male-female sex binary), and the dynamism—as well as repression—of human sexuality throughout history. We can thus conclude that one is not born, but rather becomes, cisgender or transgender; masculine or feminine; male, female, or intersex; queer or straight; and so on. The categories of gender, sex, and sexuality are not fixed biological realities, but social constructs formed through processes of historical development, shaped by the mutual entanglement and reciprocal determination of both society and nature.

A historical materialist analysis of capitalist-imperialism would therefore be incomplete without a scientific understanding of gender and sexual oppression, the struggle for gender and sexual liberation, and the historical development and recomposition of kinship systems. Furthermore, there can be no serious discussion of the socialist transition to communism without the articulation of a program for the feminist transformation of the labor process, with special attention paid to the question of women’s liberation, LGBTQ+ liberation, and overcoming the separation of social production from reproduction. Communists must grapple with the historical emergence and generalization of heteropatriarchy as a unique configuration of kinship relations that is enmeshed with the capital accumulation process.

While there are many historical and geographical variations, a social formation can be considered heteropatriarchal if some combination of the following characteristics are present:

1. Hegemony of heterosexuality and the male-female gender binary;
2. Repression of human sexual drives, oppression of queer and gender nonconforming people, and alienation of humanity from life-making activity;
3. Naturalization and devaluation of feminized labor power to facilitate super-exploitation;
4. Institutionalization of women’s oppression and male supremacy in both the household and throughout society (i.e. through laws regulating marriage, divorce, reproductive rights, etc.);
5. Naturalization and universalization of the nuclear family as the primary unit of privatized social reproduction embedded within a global system of commodity production and circulation; and
6. Emergence of the figure of the “productive” male breadwinner and the “unproductive” female housewife.

2.5.2: Prior to the emergence of private property, the division of society into antagonistic classes, and the rise of the state, a diversity of non-patriarchal kinship systems prevailed in communal hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies.²⁸ In these societies non-monogamous partnerships, the practice of bisexuality, and third genders were common; childrearing and education were organized on a collective basis; and politics, economics, and culture were seamlessly integrated as component parts of a cohesive social system, without a gendered separation of social production from reproduction.

While a rudimentary sexual division of labor evolved on the basis of the division of biological functions between sexes, this was not yet a social division of labor. Indeed, primitive communist societies were often matricentric, tracing kinship through the maternal line and affording women significant influence over communal decision-making processes. Relatedly, an ecological worldview prevailed, as these communal societies did not conceive of humanity apart from nature, nor the individual apart from the collective, viewing humanity’s relationship to nature as one of interconnection and reciprocal determination, not domination.²⁹ As Maria Mies explains, such modes of social organization empowered women in a variety of ways:

In the course of their history, women observed the changes in their own bodies and acquired through observation and experiment a vast body of experiential knowledge about the functions of their bodies, about the rhythms of menstruation, about pregnancy and childbirth. This appropriation of their own bodily nature was closely related to the acquisition of knowledge about the generative forces of external nature, about plants, animals, the earth, water and air.³⁰

Thus the production of new life by women was, according to Mies, “inseparably linked to the production of the means of subsistence for this new life.”³¹ Whether through foraging or horticulture, the necessity to provision means of subsistence at a level sufficient to ensure healthy childbirth and nursing made women the first producers of everyday necessities for society (i.e. for their children), thus making them participants in a social labor process from the outset. Indeed, despite later attempts by capital to invisibilize and devalue the activities of social reproduction performed in the community, the crucial role of domestic labor in the reproduction of society—and the social evolution of humanity—is undeniable. As Wally Seccombe has emphasized:

The replacement of labor power consumed in production involves a daily and a generational cycle in all societies. The members of a household eat together, socialize, rest and sleep; in the process, adult producers restore their energies to be able to work again tomorrow. Since consumption of the means of subsistence never stops, the domestic labor directly associated with it (food preparation and cleaning) is the most ceaseless year-round labor of all in human societies. Domestic labor knows no holidays; holidays taken from other labors tend to increase the time and effort required in domestic labor. Domestic labor is skilled labor, universally. A series of technological breakthroughs in human history originated in domestic activities and were probably the result of women’s ingenuity and diligence: fire, cooking, earthenware pottery, tanning, and cloth-making. Furthermore, women, as food-gatherers, almost certainly discovered seed cultivation and initiated hoe agriculture.³²

2.5.3: In the transition away from hunting and gathering to agriculture, three social groups tended to emerge in classless agrarian societies: (1) an adult population, consisting of workers engaged in direct production; (2) children, who replace the working adult population when they come of age; and (3) elders and the infirm, who are unable to participate directly in agricultural labor.³³ The advent of settled agriculture introduced a mode of social life in which the survival of both present and future generations came to rely upon the activities of past generations, since the reproduction of the labor power of those workers planting and harvesting today is dependent upon the surplus produced by other workers the previous year. Culturally, this was perceived as a social dependence upon the elders of the community, which in turn increased the relative political authority of those elders, leading to the development of ancestor cults.

2.5.4: It must be emphasized that there is nothing intrinsic in the transition from hunter-gatherer and horticultural communities to those based on pastoralism or settled grain agriculture that necessitates the construction of patriarchal social relations (i.e. the domination of women and children by adult men). However, historical evidence indicates that demographic fluctuations (i.e. the development of imbalances in male-female sex ratios within a particular social formation) led some agricultural communities to launch raids against their neighbors with the aim of abducting young women in order to maintain the workforce necessary for the social reproduction of their communities.³⁴ This was facilitated by the transfer of hunting skills and technologies—disproportionately monopolized by men—to the business of warfare.

In turn, an ideology of “man the hunter” and “man the warrior” began to emerge, justifying the continuing oppression and exploitation of women, relegating them to the sphere of domestic labor.³⁵ While these pastoral and agricultural societies likely remained internally matricentric and classless for significant periods of time, they gradually institutionalized the social oppression of women, severing abducted women from the social ties of their communities of origin and subordinating them to the cultural customs and conventions of their captors.³⁶

2.5.5: As the agricultural surplus produced through the farming of grain facilitated sustained population growth, it is likely that the redirection of social resources towards the raiding of neighboring communities to kidnap women—and the endemic warfare generated in the wake of such raids—became less attractive. In turn, it is speculated by anthropologists that this may have given way to processes of mutual exchange between communities to address demographic imbalances, including the transfer of young women of childbearing age as brides. While perhaps less terroristic than the invasion of a community by marauders, this process of exchange did not restore relative social equality between men and women. “Women moving to another community, where they lack maternal support,” Paul Cockshott explains, “are likely to be assimilated to the status that was formerly held by female captives: subordinate to their mother-in-law and husband.” As the transfer of women between communities becomes more widespread, “an increasing number of women are in a subordinate status which then generalizes to all brides being subject to the authority of the existing matriarch and the new husband.”³⁷

2.5.6: In this historical context, daughters came to be viewed as a valuable resource. The process of exchanging young women between communities was typically facilitated by community elders, from which the elders derived varying degrees of social status and influence. However, as this process of exchange led to population growth, male-female sex ratios stabilized and the endogenous social reproduction of the community once again became possible. Yet the incipient political authority of the elders was based on their control of the marriage exchange process to secure intergenerational social reproduction. Taking stock of this contradiction, anthropologist Claude Meillassoux argues that, in order for the community elders to maintain their privileged social position, it became necessary to invent and enforce increasingly authoritarian ideologies. Thus religion, magic rituals, and terrorism were deployed to regulate the sexual activities of the community and punish transgressions, especially among pubescent women.³⁸

Women were expected to conform to strict norms of fidelity in marital partnerships. Nonetheless, even as the oppression of women became increasingly entrenched, partnerships could still be voluntarily dissolved, and children remained with their mother in the event of separation. While the instruments of labor (such as tools and livestock) were considered the personal property of the man, the wealth accumulated by men could not be inherited by their children due to the prevailing matrilineal social structure. 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.

This was a definitive turning point in human history, described by Frederick Engels as “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”³⁹ The man became the ruler of the household and community, and women were reduced to the status of his private property as domestic and sexual servants.⁴⁰ It is at this moment that heterosexual marriage came to predominate as the main institution of patrilineal inheritance through which intergenerational wealth would be accumulated for thousands of years. As a general rule, the heterosexual marriage could not be freely dissolved voluntarily by either partner in such a society (as was the case with previous forms of partnership in communal societies); rather, the marriage could only be dissolved by the man, typically with the sanctification of the church and state.

2.5.7: In the wake of the profound transformation of the labor process unleashed by advancements made in agricultural production, a whole series of changes in human social organization followed, including the emergence of private property and the patriarchal family, the division of society into antagonistic classes, and the formation of the state. It is at this historical conjuncture that we can locate the emergence of patriarchal class societies. Early patriarchal social systems dispossessed women of the knowledge they accumulated and the autonomy to which they had been accustomed in the preceding centuries of communal hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies. This was not a natural development, nor was it compelled by historical necessity. “Patriarchy was not developed universally all over the globe but by distinctive patriarchal societies,” Maria Mies explains.⁴¹ The universalization of patriarchal forms of social organization beyond their places of origin was achieved only through the medium of warfare and conquest.

2.5.8: According to Wally Seccombe, patriarchy—which we can understand historically as a system of kinship organization securing intergenerational social reproduction on the basis of male headship of family households, and the oppression and exploitation of women—has historically entailed some combination of the following five prerogatives held by husbands and fathers:

(a) the right to represent the family group and to speak in its name in the community; (b) effective possession of, entitlement to, and ultimate disposal rights over family property, including income; (c) supervision of the labor of other family members; (d) conjugal rights of sexual access to, and exclusive possession of, one’s wife in marriage (hence securing paternity); (e) custodial rights over children, entailing ultimate authority in their upbringing.⁴²

The violent imposition of a gendered division of labor upon society was complemented by the institutionalization of the family, private property, and the state, and the emergence of complex ideological systems (of religion, law, medicine, etc.) which “naturalized” women to justify their “domestication” (i.e. domination) by men.⁴³ As Marx and Engels put it, the enslavement of women and children in the patriarchal family—whereby the husband holds the exclusive right to command their labor power and appropriate the product of the labor process—constitutes “the first form of property.”⁴⁴ This social relation became the model for all subsequent forms of class exploitation (ancient slavery, feudalism, and capitalism) when it was discovered that the individual, like the woman within the patriarchal family, could be transformed into an object of exchange, that is to say, a commodity.⁴⁵

2.5.9: Under ancient slavery, patriarchy was established on the basis of the pater familias, or “father of the family.” As owner of a landed estate, the patriarch had the right to own, control, and exchange unrelated men, women, and children as commodities. Thus the relationship between men and women becomes stratified on the basis of class, where, according to Leopoldina Fortunati, “one potential relationship is that between the woman who is apparently free, but a latent slave within the family, and the pater familias; another relationship might be that between the woman and the man as slaves; and yet another could be the relationship between the female slave and the pater familias as her master.”⁴⁶ Thus the class struggle between women and men develops in tandem with the class struggle between slaves and masters. However, in their capacity as members of an enslaved class, men and women were essentially equal, as both were legally classified as the undisputed property of their masters, and both were objectified as commodities to be bought and sold on the market.

Even with the emergence of the patriarchal class societies of antiquity, however, it was not uncommon for men to maintain non-monogamous partnerships, third genders were often recognized, and a variety of sexual activities that would today be classified as “gay” or “queer” were socially accepted. Yet no distinctions such as “queer” and “straight,” or “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” existed. It was not until the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire—initially with the Edict of Milan in 313 under Emperor Constantine, and officially with Emperor Theodosius I’s Edict of Thessalonica in 380—that heterosexuality was elevated to hegemonic status and the oppression of LGBTQ+ people was gradually institutionalized. Even then, it would not be until the Lateran Councils of 1123, 1139, and 1179 that marriage would be declared a sacrament, clerical marriage and concubinage outlawed, “sodomy” condemned, and homosexuality declared “an incontinence which is against nature.”⁴⁷

2.5.10: The transition from ancient slavery to feudalism deepened social inequality between men and women of all classes, further gendered the social division of labor, and intensified the oppression of LGBTQ+ people. While both men and women of the peasantry were subjected to the social domination of the feudal lord as a class (and in this capacity both were considered “accessories to the land” owned by the feudal lord), as individuals they encountered a different set of social relations in the labor process. The male peasant became the owner of his plot of land (however pitiful), while women could only exercise such rights if they were widowed and, in any case, could only do so legally in the name of their sons. This is in contrast to ancient slavery, where the wives of the patriarch had usufruct, or the right to utilize the property of their husbands. Under feudalism, the social status of women was further degraded.

2.5.11: The historical development of the capital accumulation process within the shell of feudal society introduced profound transformations to patriarchal kinship relations, which in turn generated new social contradictions and, accordingly, social struggles. On the one hand, capitalism deepened gender and sexual divisions in society by organizing the labor process and disciplining the body in accordance with the gender binary, “naturalizing” women’s oppression and heterosexuality, and generally devaluing reproductive labor in ways previously unseen.

On the other hand, capital accumulation created objective conditions broadly favorable for achieving gender and sexual liberation by socializing the labor process to an unprecedented degree and, however unevenly, liberating people from certain antiquated traditions characteristic of serfdom and slavery. “Never before, as in capitalism, has man been divided from woman by such a deep chasm,” Leopoldina Fortunati tells us, “But at the same time, never until this new mode of production have the possibilities of destroying this power relationship been so great.”⁴⁸

2.5.12: Dispossessed of all autonomous means of subsistence, the proletarian family ceased to serve as the main institution for the transmission of productive property by way of inheritance. Corresponding to this dispossession, households became the primary sites for the production and reproduction of commodified labor power. Access to the means of subsistence came to be mediated through the wage provisioned by capital to male labor power.

With this transformation arose the figure of the male breadwinner and female housewife, thereby generating new forms of dependency in which married women increasingly lost opportunities to obtain means of subsistence outside a relationship of wage dependency. Thus the domestic sphere was removed from the direct oversight of the ruling class, as was the case with the male pater familias under ancient slavery, or the male landlord under feudalism (though to be clear, it was only a matter of time before capital invented new methods of impersonal social control and compulsion, including education, advertising, and the invasion of seemingly private spaces with new technologies of surveillance).

In the case of both ancient slavery and feudalism, the relationship between women and men of the same class was based on the direct exchange of labor for labor. With the emergence of capitalism, however, the relationship between men and women in the family was reorganized on the basis of an indirect exchange, mediated by the wage, which was overwhelmingly commanded by men until the twenty-first century. While under capitalism women are nominally free to choose the partner with whom such exchange occurs, this remains a fundamentally unequal exchange, as the woman is indirectly waged as both houseworker and sex worker: her labor power is purchased by the man and, through the domestic labor performed in the household, a great many use values are derived.⁴⁹

Erotic and sexual activities have become increasingly contractual affairs, commodified and regulated in accordance with logic of the world market. The capital accumulation process has profoundly transformed the most intimate and sensuous needs and desires of people through the creation of new markets for commodities, which has reached new extremes through the rewiring of human behavior using algorithmic technologies. The fashion, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, therapy, diet and nutrition, fitness, surgery, gaming, pornography, and sexual training industries have become new frontiers for the accumulation of capital, subsuming interpersonal relationships to the logic of commodity production and exchange, and largely reinforcing heteropatriarchal gender and sexual relations.⁵⁰

2.5.13: The transition from feudalism to capitalism resulted in a technical recomposition in kinship relations among the exploited classes. Most notably, we observe the transformation of the extended family network organized as a cooperative work team (as was the common form of kinship organization for both enslaved peoples under ancient slavery and peasants under feudalism) into the nuclear family. Building upon Marxist feminism, we can define the nuclear family as a unit of privatized care for the production and reproduction of commodified labor power.⁵¹ As Lise Vogel has pointed out, for the working class this form of family organization has assumed a wide range of configurations, and the historical development of the nuclear family among proletarians was an uneven, contradictory, and contested process:

Ordinarily, the site takes the form of a household, or a series of households linked by networks of mutual obligation. For example, a working-class family may include several generations of adults, with their children, living in adjacent rental units. Or it may consist of two persons, with or without children, living in their own home. In the case of migrant-labor, a single worker may participate in two households. One will be in his or her place of origin, and include dependent kin; the other will be at work, and may take the form of dormitory quarters, lodgings, and the like. In most capitalist societies, working-class family households have the major responsibility for the processes that maintain and renew the bearers of labor power.⁵²

With the rise of capitalist-imperialism, the rhythms of domestic labor and leisure time were tethered to wage labor, and housework was subsequently reorganized in accordance with the imperatives of capital accumulation; domestic service and formal apprenticeship were replaced with compulsory schooling; the transmission of knowledge shifted from oral to literary cultures; the central role of community elders gradually declined; and marriage became less important as an institution for facilitating property transactions and alliances between two families, transforming interpersonal dynamics in accordance with the logic of market exchange.⁵³

The nuclear family became a central unit for the consumption of commodities. “Not only was the housewife called on to reduce the labor power costs,” Mies tells us, “she was also mobilized to use her energies to create new needs.”⁵⁴ From cleaning chemicals to household appliances, increasing the efficiency of domestic labor became an important mechanism for creating profitable markets of investment for capital, exerting downward pressure on the real wage of the male worker, implementing sweeping austerity measures to reduce state investment in public services and social welfare infrastructure, and privatizing the public sector.

2.5.14: According to Karl Marx, “every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.”⁵⁵ And so it is the case that the nuclear family—and we are primarily concerned here with the proletarian family—is not only a center of consumption and a reserve of human labor power for capital. Above all, it serves as a center of production. And what, precisely, does the nuclear family produce? While the role of the family unit in agriculture and handicraft industries has steadily declined with the industrialization, socialization, and globalization of the labor process, the family remains a center for the production of labor power for capital.⁵⁶ As Mariarosa Dalla Costa has emphasized, the family under capitalist-imperialism is not “an auxiliary of the factory,” but one workstation in a globalized social factory. It is for this reason that we must grasp the unity of social production and reproduction at the material level, for these are distinct yet integrated moments in the process of capital accumulation.

However, this productive role of domestic labor has been obscured by the heteropatriarchal ideology of capitalist-imperialism, which attempts to devalue domestic labor and render it invisible by “naturalizing” women’s oppression, male supremacy, heterosexual hegemony, and the gendered division of labor. “It is only by positioning the process of reproduction as a natural process, and the work of reproduction as a natural force of social labor,” Fortunati tells us, “that reproduction costs nothing and capital can self-valorize.”⁵⁷ In the course of the labor process, the capitalist “applies natural forces which cost him nothing, but which make labor more productive, and, in so far as they cheapen the production of the means of subsistence the workers require, increase surplus value and hence profit.”⁵⁸ Thus by casting feminized labor power and the fruits of domestic labor as “free gifts of nature,” capital reduces the costs of social reproduction incurred in the labor process, thereby maximizing the extraction of surplus value.

2.5.15: Bourgeois mythology notwithstanding, women and children have always formed an integral component of the industrial proletariat, saddled with the burden of “the double shift.” In addition to their disproportionate role in domestic labor, women and children continue to form a majority of the global working class in key industries, such as textile production, retail and services, healthcare, education, and the informal economy. Yet the intensity of their exploitation and constant exposure to toxic working conditions by capital have periodically undermined procreation. In tandem with the class struggle waged by workers to improve their working and living conditions, these factors have at times compelled the bourgeoisie to ensure the minimum conditions necessary for the reproduction of labor power.

2.5.16: From the outset, workers resisted the imposition of the nuclear family structure and bourgeois conventions concerning marriage, childrearing, and sex. As Maria Mies explains, “the propertyless proletariat had no material interest in the production of children, as children were no insurance in old age, unlike the sons of the bourgeoisie.”⁵⁹ In order to facilitate the breeding of more workers and soldiers, the capitalist state had to first domesticate the proletarian woman: “She had to be made to breed more workers.”⁶⁰ Thus the state intervened in the social reproduction process to ensure proletarian conformity to the gender binary as well as bourgeois conventions concerning sexual morality and family life.

Far from having undermined the material foundation of the nuclear family, capitalist-imperialism has ensured its expanded reproduction. Indeed, “with the help of the state and its police, it created the family first among the propertied classes, later in the working class, and with it the housewife as a social category.”⁶¹ According to the research of Gunnar Heinsohn and Rolf Knieper, this strategy proved effective in part because women’s knowledge of contraception had gradually eroded and sweeping restrictions on their basic democratic rights were imposed by church and state in the preceding centuries.⁶²

2.5.17: While in contrast to ancient slavery and feudalism, capital removed the domestic sphere from the immediate oversight of the ruling class, new methods were invented to shape and reshape the ideas and behaviors of the masses. In pre-capitalist social formations, the family served as both the central unit of agricultural and handicraft production, and the primary educational institution. However, as industrialization transformed everyday life, and following the overthrow of slavery in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie adopted the school as the privileged educational institution.

While schools were utilized by members of the dominant classes in pre-capitalist societies, under capitalism the school came to serve as one of the primary ideological and cultural instrument for disciplining the mind and body of all classes, contributing to the development of psychological character structures corresponding to one’s social position in the capital accumulation process, and securing the consent of the masses for their exploitation and oppression, ultimately shaping and reshaping the consciousness and activities of the dominated classes in accordance with the needs of the bourgeoisie. “Capitalism is the first productive system,” writes Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “where the children of the exploited are disciplined and educated in the institutions organized and controlled by the ruling class.”⁶³

At a world scale, education has been feminized by capital. This feminization facilitates the devaluation of the labor power of education workers, leading to women being overrepresented in the teaching profession (this is especially true at the primary level of education). This corresponds with the general trend whereby reproductive labor in all its forms is feminized and naturalized, and thus devalued. Furthermore, the school itself plays a central role in the production and reproduction of the dominant ideology, and this includes the imposition of gender roles.

It should come as no surprise that in the contemporary United States, for example, public education has become the frontline in the struggle for the democratic rights of LGBTQ+ people—especially trans youth—against attempts by reactionaries to censor school curriculum, ban “subversive” books, prohibit the use of preferred gender pronouns, and enforce strict conformity to the gender binary in everything from bathroom usage to the composition of sports teams. By challenging the gender binary and heteronormativity, such struggles have the potential to call into question the whole organization of the labor process by imperialist capital, whose regime of exploitation and privatized system of social reproduction presupposes gender and sexual oppression.

2.5.18: The fusion of the capital accumulation process and the heteropatriarchal oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people with racism and national oppression was achieved through the historical process of colonization. While pre-capitalist patriarchal class societies classified women as a part of nature, it was still understood that this was a relationship of dependence, if not interdependence. In contrast, “the capitalist class saw itself right from the beginning as the master and lord over nature,” Maria Mies tells us.⁶⁴ Thus the exploited and oppressed masses were divided into two groups by the rising bourgeoisie.

On the one hand, there was “domesticated” nature. This category included the women of the European bourgeoisie, who became the archetype for the housewife of the heterosexual nuclear family, as well as those proletarians and peasants who were successfully pacified by capital, who came to be viewed as an internal component of “Western Civilization.” On the other hand, there was “wild,” “untamed,” and “savage” nature. This category included the peoples of the global peripheries, encompassing both external and internal colonies. As bourgeois ideology conceived of man’s relationship to nature as one of domination, those peoples classified as “savage” could be freely expropriated, enslaved, exploited, or exterminated with the utmost cruelty and violence. “Nature,” for the European bourgeoisie, “was a reservoir of raw material and the African women an apparently inexhaustible reserve of human energy.”⁶⁵

2.5.19: The genocide of Indigenous nations, the formation of settler colonies, and the kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples, as well as the popular resistance of the exploited and oppressed to the social domination of capital, culminated in the European bourgeoisie artificially dividing of humanity into a hierarchy of “races.” Having consolidated itself on an overtly homophobic and misogynistic basis in the course of events such as the Crusades, Reconquista, and Inquisition, the European bourgeoisie expanded capitalist-imperialism through colonization. When the Spanish Empire encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, they were horrified to discover the extent to which third genders and a diversity of sexual practices were openly embraced. This provided further legitimation for the horrors unleashed by the Spanish Empire on the Indigenous peoples. From Ireland and India to Africa and the Americas, the European bourgeoisie destroyed extended kinship networks, suppressed third genders, and made heterosexuality compulsory.

The gender binary and the hegemony of heteronormative sexuality facilitated the super-exploitation of proletarian women through the devaluation of feminized labor power. Colonized women were overwhelmingly relegated to dirty, degrading, and dangerous jobs, and frequently terrorized into submission through the use of rape and murder, with little in the way of basic democratic rights when compared to the bourgeoisified housewives of the imperial core. This basic pattern of development is embedded in the imperialist world-system today, generating an important contradiction between the role of proletarian women in general, and colonized women in particular, as both waged industrial workers and unwaged domestic workers.

2.5.20: “We are not convinced,” wrote the Combahee River Collective in 1977, “that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”⁶⁶ Plagued by white chauvinism, male chauvinism, and economism, it was not uncommon in the last century for the communist movement—especially in the imperial core countries—to theorize the working class abstractly, that is, economistically and without due consideration for determinants such as gender, sexual, racial, and national oppression in the development of class consciousness and the class struggle. For the Combahee River Collective, the alternative was to develop a revolutionary Marxism that centered feminism, anti-racism, and decolonization. Only such an orientation would thus be capable of understanding the dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, and nation in the historical development of capitalist-imperialism.

The Black feminist approach to revolutionary Marxism was prefigured and pioneered by Claudia Jones, who advocated for the Communist Party of the United States to adopt a special strategy informed by the standpoint of Black proletarian women. In her 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women,” she explained that since emancipation, a large proportion of Black women were always forced to work for a living, primarily in low-wage sectors such as domestic service.⁶⁷

Thus the “stay-at-home housewife” was never a reality for most Black families. Prefiguring the theoretical framework of intersectionality, Jones argued that the two-fold character of the super-exploitation of Black proletarian women was revealed by the fact that, as a woman, she not only received unequal pay with men, but also as a woman of color, she received less than half the pay of white women workers.⁶⁸ To address these realities, Jones called for the unionization of domestic workers, for the promotion of women of color to leadership positions at all levels of the party, and for waging struggle against all manifestations of both white and male chauvinism in the ranks of the party and throughout society.

2.5.21: The dialectic of transgender oppression and liberation is of special importance for communists today. With the emergence of capitalist-imperialism, transgender people—especially transgender women—were subjected to especially violent forms of heteropatriarchal oppression. From the moment capital consolidated its social domination, the very existence of third genders has posed a challenge to a social division of labor premised upon a supposedly “natural” (and therefore immutable) gender binary, threatening the cohesion of the nuclear family as the primary unit of a privatized system of social reproduction.

As a general rule, transgender people are excluded from the nuclear family. Given that the family is the primary unit through which social reproduction is secured under capitalism, transgender people of all classes are subjected to additional economic hardships stemming from this exclusion, with transgender proletarians—especially trans women of color—being hit the hardest. If a trans person has the misfortune of residing in a community that is especially hostile, forced migration is often the only option if they wish to survive. Frequently excluded from the formal economy and access to the wage, transgender people are disproportionately forced into the worst sectors of the the informal economy—especially the sex industry—or else reduced to the status of beggars. Denied stable means of subsistence, transgender proletarians are regularly subjected to transmisogynist violence in the form of harassment, assault, homelessness, unemployment, police brutality, incarceration, rape, and murder.

Laws throughout much of the world criminalize “gender deviation,” forbid the alteration of legal sex markers, prohibit public financing of gender-affirming healthcare, and deny transgender people the right to defend themselves. The situation is especially bad for trans migrants, who are routinely detained, tortured, deported, forced into informal labor markets where they lack any semblance of democratic rights, or disappeared. In the United States, the resurgent fascist movement has scapegoated transgender people—alongside immigrants, oppressed nationalities, queer people, and leftists—for the supposed decline of so-called Western Civilization. However, it is precisely due to the structural challenge posed by third genders to capitalist-imperialism, as well as the intensity of the special oppression faced by transgender people on a day-to-day basis, that the movement for transgender liberation constitutes a formidable battalion in the struggle for communism.

2.5.22: Family forms, sex and sexuality, gender norms, and the organization of domestic labor have all been transformed by the historical dialectic of capital accumulation and feminist struggle. The heteronormative nuclear family—at least as it was once conceived in the course of preceding centuries—has become increasingly less common, more women than ever are employed in wage labor, and, while they are now under attack by the resurgence of fascism, both women and LGBTQ+ people have won limited but nonetheless important democratic rights in many countries. Furthermore, historical factors such as imperialist and inter-imperialist wars, climate change, and mass migration have compelled major reconfigurations in the organization of social reproduction. Yet it is undeniable that, at a systemic level, the process of social reproduction remains gendered and sexualized in accordance with the historical pattern of heteropatriarchy. At the heart of this process is the contradiction between the increasing socialization of the labor process, and the necessity for capital to maintain a privatized system of social reproduction.

What, then, is the meaning of feminist struggle for communists today? Why must we insist that the world socialist revolution must also be, to its very core, a feminist and anti-racist revolution? In our conception, the feminist revolution aims to liberate individuals from constraints of gender and sexual oppression, overcome the separation of social production from reproduction, and transition from the privatized social reproduction of capital to the collectivized social reproduction of the commune.

“One of the most closely guarded secrets of advanced capitalist societies,” writes Angela Davis, “involves the possibility—the real possibility—of radically transforming the nature of housework.”⁶⁹ She continues:

A substantial portion of the housewife’s domestic tasks can actually be incorporated into the industrial economy. In other words, housework need no longer be considered necessarily and unalterably private in character… the industrialization of housework, along with the socialization of housework, is becoming an objective social need. Housework as women’s private responsibility and as female labor performed under primitive technical conditions, may finally be approaching historical obsolescence.⁷⁰

2.5.23: Gender liberation, sexual freedom, and the communization of social reproduction will not be achieved overnight. Indeed, contradictions between the public and the private, the commune and the household, are bound to continue throughout the revolutionary process of socialist transformation. As Lise Vogel explains:

An opposition between two components of necessary labor—the one social, or public, and the other domestic, or private—continues in force during the socialist transition. Production cannot be organized all at once on a communist basis. Let us keep the term domestic labor to designate the necessary labor involved in the reproduction of labor power performed outside the realm of public production. Evidently, domestic labor plays an important role during the socialist transition. At the same time, it begins a long process of transformation into an integral component of social production in a communist society. […] In principle, socialist society lessens the burdens of domestic labor carried out in individual households in a planned and conscious manner, corresponding to the needs of the people as a whole.⁷¹

As one front of struggle in the socialist revolution, the feminist movement must redefine what activities constitute labor (i.e. life-making activities), transform the social organization of both production and reproduction, and take all necessary measures to ensure that women and LGBTQ+ people—especially proletarian women and LGBTQ+ people of color—are free and equal participants in a social labor process under popular democratic control. Capitalist-imperialism has for centuries used misogynistic propaganda to devalue carework as unimportant and unskilled, and homophobic and transphobic propaganda to marginalize those whose very existence is a challenge to the heteropatriarchal civilization of capitalist-imperialism.

As communists, we must envision the overthrow and abolition of the gendered division of labor and the collectivization and democratization of social reproduction. We must reimagine how the daily and unending domestic labor of cooking, cleaning, organizing, and caring for all people (including children, youth, elders, and the sick) could be planned and coordinated communally, so as to enable and ensure the free and equal participation of all in the various aspects of a vibrant communist society.

2.6: Colonialism and Decolonial Revolution

2.6.1: The accumulation of capital by the imperial core countries—and indeed, the emergence of capitalist-imperialism as a global system—was made possible through a historical process of colonization. Despite claims to the contrary, colonialism is not a thing of the past, nor was it incidental to the historical development of capitalism; rather, it has been—and remains to this day—an integral feature of the imperialist world-system. As Karl Marx wrote:

The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extermination, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the Indigenous population, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the transformation of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of Black people, mark the dawn of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield.⁷²

The basis of colonialism is national oppression, whereby one nation violently subjugates another, dominating it as a colony in order to extract wealth through the control of the land, resources, and labor power of the oppressed nation. We can broadly define a nation as a community of people who share a common history, culture, economic life, and collective memory, formed in relation to a common territory. On the basis of these characteristics, members of a particular national community develop specific forms of political consciousness and elaborate common political projects. In the course of the people’s struggle for liberation from the yoke of colonialism, oppressed nations lay claim to certain political rights, especially the right to national self-determination.

2.6.2: Through the process of colonization, the autonomous social development of an oppressed nation is effectively suspended by the oppressor nation, and it can be reanimated only through a process of decolonization. This struggle for “national liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people,” as Frantz Fanon puts it, is itself inseparable from the socialist transition to communism.⁷³ From the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism, it is impossible to envision an international union of socialist communes—a free union of free peoples—in which colonialism is allowed to persist in any form, just as it is equally impossible for decolonization to be achieved in any meaningful sense in the absence of the socialist transformation of nations.

2.6.3: As the process of decolonization advances, the peoples of an oppressed nation reclaim their historical agency, reassert their right to national sovereignty, reestablish their control over the social wealth of their nation, and restore the dignity of their national culture. The unifying principle of the decolonial revolution is, according to Amílcar Cabral, “the inalienable right of every people to have their own history.”⁷⁴ It is on the basis of this principle that national liberation struggles assert the people’s right to own and control their nation’s land, resources, and instruments of labor, as well as their right to determine both the aims and methods of the labor process itself. Only upon such a basis can an oppressed nation successfully delink itself from the imperialist world-system and chart an independent path of social development.

2.6.4: Under the boot of colonialism, the social life of an oppressed nation is actively de-developed, intentionally maintained in a state of underdevelopment, or outright destroyed through genocidal warfare waged by the oppressor nation. In turn, a relation of dependency is cultivated by the oppressor nation, whereby the colonized are forced into reliance upon the colonizers not only for the satisfaction of basic subsistence needs, but for ideas and culture. Colonization results, in the words of Aimé Césaire, in “societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.”⁷⁵ Indeed, the process of colonization entails the oppressor nations enacting violence against the oppressed nations on a colossal, incomprehensible scale.

2.6.5: It is not enough for the colonizer to deprive the colonized of the right to control their land, labor, and resources. In pursuit of their “civilizing mission,” the colonizers go further, reaching into the depths of the colonized mind, reshaping patterns of everyday thought and behavior, transforming the culture of the oppressed nation, and rewriting its history. As Cabral explained, “whatever the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.”⁷⁶

Thus the oppressed nation is remade through the historical dialectic of colonization and decolonization, and the victory of a national liberation movement leads, in fact, to the emergence of a new nation, armed with a new culture, profoundly transformed by the people’s struggle for self-determination. It is for this reason that national liberation can be viewed, in the words of Cabral, as “an act of culture.”⁷⁷ By applying dialectical and historical materialism to the study of a world divided by colonialism, by mapping “its ordering and its geographical layout,” and by analyzing its contradictions, we can thus “mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized.”⁷⁸

2.6.6: The colonizer attempts to erode the psychological, cultural, and material basis for the oppressed nation’s claims to nationhood, while simultaneously denying the very existence of a distinct national culture among the colonized masses. For example, the fascist Salazar regime asserted that “Africa does not exist” as it waged bloody counterinsurgency warfare against national liberation movements asserting their sovereignty in Portuguese colonies across Africa. Turkish colonialism continues to deny the existence of an oppressed Kurdish nation, going so far as to claim that the Kurdish people are, in fact, simply “Mountain Turks,” while violently suppressing the Kurdish language and culture.

The imperialist United States continues to deny the existence of oppressed Indigenous, Black, and Chicano nations within its borders, while continuing to wage counterinsurgency campaigns against anti-racist and national liberation struggles, deploying militarized police and immigration enforcement agencies to occupy and terrorize the communities of oppressed nationalities, building a system of mass surveillance and incarceration, rewriting history curriculum, and continuing to apply the pseudoscientific category of “race” to classify peoples of all nationalities. Israel continues to deny the existence of an oppressed Palestinian nation, which finds expression in the Zionist mythology of “a land without a people, for a people without a land,” all while expanding its settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian territories and unleashing genocidal warfare against the people of Gaza.

It is precisely this denial of an oppressed nation’s very existence—tantamount to a denial of their humanity—that makes the dignified assertion of nationhood by the colonized so profoundly revolutionary. As the Palestinian poet Yahya Al Hamarna has said, “Gaza teaches the world lessons about the true meaning of dignity.” He continues:

It is the compass of conscience when it is lost, and a test of humanity when it is forgotten.

Gaza, caught between pain and hope, tells a never-ending story.

Between a shell and a smile, between burying martyrs and planting trees, life is born from the womb of ashes.

And perhaps, whenever the world says Gaza is finished, it rises to say:

“I AM HERE. I AM STILL BEATING. I AM STILL RESISTING. AND IN MY HEART, THERE IS STILL ROOM FOR DREAMS.“⁷⁹

2.6.7: The history of modern colonialism is inseparable from the process of racialization and racial oppression. As a mode of social differentiation, racialization reorganizes everyday social life in accordance with a hierarchical logic of racial categories. According to Audrey Smedley and Brian D. Smedley, there are five ideological beliefs—which are not to be confused with scientific theories—that sustain the racial worldview: (a) a universal classification of humans as members of exclusive and discrete biological groups, or “races,” based on superficial and self-serving criteria; (b) a caste-like hierarchical ranking of these groups in terms of “superior” and “inferior” races; (c) an assumed correspondence between biophysical characteristics and culture; (d) an assumption that “race” is an inheritable package of biophysical characteristics, cultural practices, and social position; and (e) be it considered the will of God or the result of biological evolution, a belief that racial differences are essentially natural, fixed, and unalterable.⁸⁰

2.6.8: Race is indeed part of our material reality, in the sense that racism structures everyday social life, affecting people’s access to, or denial of, housing, healthcare, employment, citizenship, etc. It is, however, a social construct (as opposed to a natural one). Race had to be invented: it was not ordained by God, nor is it the product of biological evolution. There is no scientific evidence supporting the existence of distinct biological races, nor consensus regarding the scientific validity of employing racial concepts as a method for differentiating the human species. However, as Theodore W. Allen argued, “the ‘white race’ must be understood, not simply as a social construct, but as a ruling class social control formation.”⁸¹ The racial worldview emerged as a result of a conscious decision made by the colonizing ruling classes of Europe to naturalize social inequality, providing ideological cover for the continued national oppression and super-exploitation of colonized peoples. Allen explains:

The hallmark of racial oppression… is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, a status beneath that of any member of any social class within the oppressor group. It is a system of rule designed to deny, disregard, delegitimate previous or potential social distinctions that may have existed or that might tend to emerge in the normal course of development of a class society.⁸²

From the Union of South Africa to the United States of America, from Rhodesia to Israel, there are certain features held in common by all historical social formations in which a racial worldview and system of racial oppression predominate: “All have race classifications identified in law; all structure and institutionalize racial classifications hierarchically; all associate stereotyped behavior with each race category; and all hold, in an abstract sense, that racial characteristics (both physical and behavioral) are innate and unalterable.”⁸³

2.6.9: Racial oppression serves the capital accumulation process by facilitating the extraction of superprofits, providing ideological legitimation for the annexation of Indigenous land and the super-exploitation of colonized labor. In the United States, for example, super-exploitation initially took the form of chattel slavery, though other forms of unfree labor were later adopted (such as convict leasing, sharecropping, and modern prison labor). Racism is used by the ruling class to dehumanize—and thus legitimize—super-exploitation. “The development of racism,” Sai Englert explains, “is co-constitutive of a logic that abstracts the human into another unit of production to be measured, used, and exploited—or discarded if it cannot (or no longer can) be used.”⁸⁴

2.6.10: If race is a historical social construct, from where and when did it arise? The prehistory of racism can be located in three crucial historical events: the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the English colonization of Ireland.⁸⁵ During the Crusades, Christian mercenaries from across Western Europe engaged in the wholesale looting and pillaging of Muslim cities in North Africa and the Middle East from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, leading to an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the Mediterranean city-states.

In the Iberian context, several centuries of warfare between Muslim and Christian armies during the Reconquest led to the erosion of Islamic rule in al-Andalus, culminating in the consolidation of power by Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II in the fifteenth century. In an effort to establish a unified and culturally homogeneous Christian nation-state, the Catholic Monarchs organized the mass expulsion of Jews and Muslims. However, not satisfied with their victory over those deemed to be heretics, the Catholic Monarchs adopted the limpieza de sangre, or “cleanliness of blood” law, which provided the ideological pretext for the persecution of Jews and Muslims who had converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition, but were accused of continuing to practice their religions in secret.

It was in this historical context that a new ideology rooted in a concept of biological race began to take shape, justifying both the expropriation and redistribution of lands owned by those identified as Jews and Muslims, as well as the establishment of a cross-class alliance between exploiters and exploited. According to Dunbar-Ortiz, this new ideology granted psychological and legal privileges to the “Old Christians” regardless of class, “thus obscuring the class differences between the landed aristocracy and land-poor peasants and shepherds.”⁸⁶ This emerging racial ideology would soon be exported to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, where it would be further honed and developed as a racial worldview, with horrifying and disastrous consequences for Indigenous and African peoples.

2.6.11: Since the rule of Henry II in the twelfth century, the English attempted to resolve “the Irish problem” through colonization. Yet it was only in the seventeenth century that, having successfully conquered Wales and Scotland centuries earlier, England was able to bring Ireland under its dominion as a colony. Led by Oliver Cromwell, the English pursued a genocidal policy of extermination, enslavement, and settler-colonial occupation. Using settlers drawn from western Scotland, the English aimed to accomplish the complete destruction of Irish national culture. “The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked,” writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized.”⁸⁷

The English argued that the Irish were innately savage and backwards, and thus not only inferior, but incapable of acting in a civilized manner: they were, for all intents and purposes, a subhuman race.⁸⁸ As the English learned of the encounters of the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, they began to view their relationship to the Irish in the same light. After the defeat of Hugh O’Neill in 1603, the English set as their goal the establishment of a plantation system utilizing bonded Irish labor, based on the Spanish model. However, the continuous resistance of the Irish people to English colonial domination led the English to conclude that the only solution to the Irish question was enslavement, resulting in their mass deportation to English colonies in the so-called New World.

2.6.12: From the Crusades and the Inquisition to the colonization of Ireland, we see the gradual emergence of a worldview that naturalized social inequality, providing ideological legitimation for the domination of the colonized by the colonizer. Features which first appeared in the Iberian and Irish contexts would later be exported to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania by the European imperialists, who expanded the accumulation of capital through colonial genocide. While racial ideology has undergone many reconfigurations throughout history, it nonetheless continues to structure and legitimize the national oppression of colonized peoples today.

However, the emergence of racism as a hegemonic worldview and system of social control really begins with the English colonization of North America—specifically Virginia—in the late seventeenth century. With the eruption of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 (during which a degree of multinational class unity existed among the bonded laborers of both Africa and Europe), the English colonizers made a conscious decision to adopt a system of racial oppression in order to maintain social control over enslaved labor. It was in this context that a racial worldview based on the myth of European superiority was clearly articulated, and used to justify the annexation of Indigenous lands, the extermination of Indigenous populations, and the kidnapping and permanent enslavement of African peoples. In turn, the racial worldview would come to define the colonizing projects of all the imperial core nation-states, and continues to inform the ultra-nationalism of the new fascism in core and periphery alike.

2.6.13: “The colonial world,” Frantz Fanon reminds us, “is a world divided into compartments.”⁸⁹ According to Fanon, “it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species… The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”⁹⁰ Despite historical variations in racial worldviews, the dominant system of racial oppression in the world today is white supremacy. Shaped by the Eurocentric developmental trajectory of capitalist-imperialism, this system of both material and psychological privileges for those peoples classified as citizens of the white race was institutionalized in the imperialist nation-states of Western Europe and their settler colonies.

Writing on the history of the United States prior to the period of Civil War and Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois explained how racial oppression distorted the class consciousness of white workers:

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.⁹¹

This system of white privilege is based on what David R. Roediger calls “the wages of whiteness.”⁹² The social reproduction of whiteness, the stubborn persistence of white identity and “the wages of whiteness,” remain the primary barriers to the development of revolutionary class consciousness among European workers. Echoing W.E.B. Du Bois, Joel Olson explains how the wages of whiteness not only afford white workers with certain tangible material benefits when compared to the colonized and racialized workers of the oppressed nations (in terms of higher wages or access to land, for example); they also raise their social status, imparting to white workers “the same political rights and privileges accorded elites: legal equality with all other whites, the right to elect leaders, join political parties, assemble and speak freely, bear arms.”⁹³

In social formations where white supremacy predominates, the wages of whiteness “provide the white citizen with an air of both equality and superiority: equal to all white people—even the rich—yet superior to all Black people—even the rich.”⁹⁴ While there are regional variations, this system of racial oppression and privilege provides fertile ground for the cultivation of reactionary tendencies within the labor movement, and it is the responsibility of communists to lead the struggle against all manifestations of racism and social chauvinism, to uphold revolutionary internationalism, to support the liberation struggles of all oppressed nations, and to articulate a program for socialist revolution that centers decolonization and self-determination.

2.6.14: Black communist Harry Haywood explained that racial oppression in the United States is itself “a particular form and device of national oppression,” arising from the historical development of settler-colonialism and chattel slavery, part and parcel of the “divide and rule” strategy utilized by the imperialist bourgeoisie against the working class.⁹⁵ In analyzing the history of the United States, it is clear that an oppressor nation composed of white European settlers utilized racism to deny the national status of the colonized, rejecting their claims to national self-determination in the process. The racialized peoples of the oppressed nations internal to the United States, as well as immigrant workers from the oppressed nations of the global peripheries, were excluded from the same rights and privileges afforded to the white citizens of all classes (including access to public services, housing, freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms and join a militia, collective bargaining rights, etc.).

However, while the Civil Rights Movement and the global upsurge of national liberation struggles challenged and transformed the structure of racial oppression in the United States, the right to exclude racialized peoples continues in the supposedly “color-blind” context of contemporary society. “Rational whites act to secure whatever advantages they can by opposing those policies that undermine white advantage, such as affirmative action and school desegregation,” Joel Olson explains. “White advantage,” he continues, “is deposited into the social structure through means as ostensibly race neutral as the generational transfer of wealth, criminal profiling, college entrance exams, and tracking in schools.”⁹⁶

To be racially oppressed is to be occupied, dispossessed, enslaved, ghettoized, manipulated, controlled, marginalized, conscripted, surveilled, brutalized, incarcerated, tortured, erased. Racial oppression is now an integral component of the capital accumulation process itself, acting as both a mechanism through which the imperial core legitimizes both the expropriation of land and resources, and the super-exploitation of peripheral labor power. It is a system of social control through which class struggle is contained and suppressed, and the disunity of the global working class maintained. It is for this reason that we can speak of capitalist-imperialism as an evolving system of racial capitalism, for the logic of racial oppression and class exploitation are co-constitutive and internal to the structure of capital accumulation. Mirroring this material reality, anti-racist and decolonial liberation struggles must be united with the class struggle of the proletariat in the historical process of socialist revolution.

2.6.15: Despite the initial victories of national democratic revolutions against colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the twentieth century, the imperialist world-system remained intact and colonialism underwent a process of recomposition, ushering in an era of neocolonialism (or semi-colonialism). Under neocolonialism, oppressed nations gain nominal independence but continue to be dominated in all respects—politically, economically, culturally—by the imperial core. This subordination of neolcolonies to the imperialist metropole is maintained through an economic structure of bureaucratic-comprador capitalism. Through foreign direct investment, local elites are recruited by imperialist capital to act as compradors, facilitating the super-exploitation of their nation’s labor power and resources on behalf of imperialist corporations and finance. In turn, this comprador bourgeoisie collaborates with the bureaucratic institutions of the neocolonial state (the police, courts, military, etc.) to maintain conditions conducive for ongoing capital accumulation by the imperial core, all at the expense of the autonomous social development and welfare of the oppressed nation.

2.6.16: In contrast to the national bourgeoisie (who are interested in the development of an endogenous national capitalism), the comprador bourgeoisie is a ruling class created by, acting on behalf of, and ultimately beholden to the multinational and transnational corporations and financial institutions of the imperial core. While nominally acting as the ruling class within the neocolonial nation-state, the comprador bourgeoisie 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 continued privatization and pillage of the oppressed nation’s land and natural resources, the super-exploitation of peripheral labor power, and the control of its markets, which together enable the extraction of superprofits by imperialist capital.

2.6.17: 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 domestic servants of global capitalist-imperialism. In his critique of the narrow outlook of cultural nationalists in Ireland who overlooked the necessity of pursuing a socialist program in order to achieve national self-determination, the revolutionary Marxist and Irish republican James Connolly brilliantly anticipated the development of neocolonialism:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.⁹⁷

So long as capitalist-imperialism remains dominant, there will be neither peace nor equality among nations, for this system presupposes the division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations, and has institutionalized systems of racial oppression. In complete opposition to all forms of colonialism, the world socialist revolution aims to lay the foundations for a communist society in which racial and national oppression are overcome, and the system of competing 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 all colonized peoples.

2.6.18: “For a colonized people,” Frantz Fanon emphasized, “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.”⁹⁸ Malcolm X expressed the same position when he declared: “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”⁹⁹ And it is for precisely this reason that “Free the Land!” was raised as the battlecry of the New Afrikan Independence Movement fighting against internal colonialism in the heart of the imperialist United States.¹⁰⁰

The liberation of colonized peoples from racial and national oppression will only be achieved by upholding and applying the principle of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, and by waging national democratic revolutions to achieve independence and restore the sovereignty of colonized peoples. However, the presence of an organized communist movement within a national liberation struggle against colonialism or neocolonialism is the only way to guarantee that national democratic revolutions develop as socialist revolutions, which is the only real path to decolonization. Lenin explained:

The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e. battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent, and revolutionary struggle for democracy.¹⁰¹

Communists of all nations and nationalities—but especially those belonging to the oppressor nations—must unequivocally uphold and lend support to the struggles waged by oppressed nations for full social equality and democratic rights, including the right to reparations and national self-determination. The decision to pursue integration within a unified socialist commune, territorial autonomy and self-governance within the federative framework of a plurinational union, or complete separation and national independence, is to be made by the peoples of the oppressed nation.

2.7: Ecology and Socialism

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.”¹⁰² 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.”¹⁰³

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:

Communism is the positive abolition of private property as human self-alienation, and hence the actual appropriation of human nature by and for humanity; it is the complete restoration of the individual as a social—i.e., human—being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between humans and nature, and between humans and humans, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.¹⁰⁴

2.8: The State and Revolution

2.8.1: Historical materialism defines the state as an organized system of social power through which the dominant classes and social groups in a society secure and reproduce their rule over and against the dominated classes and social groups. Whether it is claimed that the legitimacy of the state is ordained by the heavens or necessitated by the laws of nature, and regardless of whether the form assumed by the state is that of an absolute monarchy or democratic republic, the social domination of the state is always and everywhere presented by the ruling classes and social groups as being in the general interest of society. Today’s apologists for the bourgeois state, for example, make the absurd claim that this bureaucratic and militaristic leviathan serves as an effective and neutral mediator of opposing interests in society, standing outside and above all class and social group antagonisms, and thus constituting an instrument for resolving social conflicts in a most impartial and nonpartisan fashion.

What these bourgeois ideologists cannot grasp (or, more likely, what they dare not admit!) is that the state, as Lenin explained long ago, is “the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where, and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”¹⁰⁵ Thus the state is always and everywhere an expression of the social dictatorship of a definite bloc of classes and social groups, whose hegemonic fraction wields state power in order to defend and advance their collective historical interests over and against those of the dominated classes and social groups. No matter how democratic it may appear, the bourgeois state organization of capitalist-imperialism is no different from its predecessors in this regard. Indeed, a cursory examination of the composition and activities of the Trump regime in the United States drives home the fact that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” as Marx and Engels explained two centuries ago.¹⁰⁶

2.8.2: According to Engels, the state “is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable opposites which it is powerless to exorcise.”¹⁰⁷ The state is the logical result of the emergence of a social system premised upon private property, patriarchy, and the extraction of surplus labor and private appropriation of the surplus social product by a parasitic class of exploiters and oppressors. In the historical development of these antagonistic contradictions, “it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.”¹⁰⁸

2.8.3: How does the state maintain its power? At the most basic level of understanding, the state establishes a monopoly on specific social functions, such as the maintenance of “law and order,” the collection of taxes, and, most importantly, the legitimate use of violence through the organization of “special bodies of armed men” (i.e. military and police forces, with courts, prisons, and other instruments of repression at their disposal).¹⁰⁹ Without a monopoly on armed force, no ruling class could maintain its social domination and society would erupt into open civil war. Thus for all ruling classes throughout history, an organized system of violence became a vital necessity for the containment and suppression of the liberation struggles waged by the exploited and oppressed masses, as well as for the defense and expansion of the state’s frontiers.

2.8.4: The capitalist state is tasked with securing the material conditions most favorable for the accumulation of capital and ensuring the social reproduction of the imperialist world-system. In contrast to the city-states of pre-capitalist class societies, the capitalist state organization has universally assumed the form of the nation-state. Emerging from the crises and struggles of late feudalism in Europe, the nation-state became a suitable instrument for establishing an integrated market for the production and circulation of commodities, as well as a unified legal framework regulating the capital accumulation process. In turn, the expanded accumulation of capital on a world scale through imperialism led also to the globalization of the nation-state system. However, there is a contradiction between the global character of the capital accumulation process and the national form assumed by the capitalist state.

Nikolai Bukharin analyzed this contradiction, examining how the accumulation of capital propels the socialization of the labor process on a world scale, and the internationalization of the capitalist world-economy. At the same time, however, “the same process of economic development intensifies the tendency to ‘nationalize’ capitalist interests, to form narrow ‘national’ groups armed to the teeth and ready to hurl themselves at one another any moment.”¹¹⁰ Notwithstanding the globalizing tendencies of capital accumulation (as observed through the establishment of an integrated world market, the formation of multinational and transnational corporations alongside the development of international financial institutions, the creation of international laws and regulations, and the socialization of the labor process at a world scale), the imperialist tendencies of capital prevent it from constituting a supra-national capitalist world-state.

2.8.5: The drive to accumulate capital unleashes violent competition among firms as they struggle to corner markets, maximize the extraction of surplus value, and their share of global profits. This competitive dynamic leads to a further increase in the concentration and centralization of capital, resulting in the economic dominance of industrial and financial monopolies. In turn, this economic dominance is translated into political dominance, as monopoly-finance capital wields the apparatus of the bourgeois nation-state to secure, protect, and advance its interests at a world scale. The ensuing inter-firm competition inevitably leads to inter-state rivalry and warfare among the imperialist countries.

Nonetheless, some semblance of an international system regulating the affairs of capitalist nation-states was established by representatives of the imperialist countries with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In fact, the accumulation of capital has always presupposed an international system of capitalist states, based on the principle of territorial jurisdiction, in order to facilitate the generalization of commodity production and circulation on a world scale. Sol Picciotto reminds us that the imperialist world-system “is not made up of an aggregation of compartmentalized units, but is rather a single system in which state power is allocated between territorial entities.”¹¹¹ The result is neither a unified capitalist world-state, nor the total breakdown of international relations, but an informal, inconsistent, and contradictory patchwork.

For the countries of the global peripheries and semi-peripheries, however, any attempt to assert their national sovereignty, extricate their national economies from the world market, or otherwise subvert, break, or even demand the consistent enforcement of the rules and regulations of this international system in ways that do not align with the imperatives of imperialist capital are met with the most savage violence by the imperialist nation-states. The whole world has been reminded of this fact as Israel continues its genocidal war against Gaza and the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank with the unwavering support of the United States. Despite flagrantly violating international law, and in the face of both condemnation by the United Nations and the issuing of an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court for committing war crimes, the Israeli war machine continues unabated. This is the so-called “rules-based international order.”

2.8.6: The most common historical form assumed by the capitalist nation-state has been and remains the bourgeois democratic republic. This is, of course, “a government of, by, and for the people” in name only. Against the hegemonic ideology of bourgeois society, this “democratic” form assumed by the capitalist nation-state has merely proven to be the most effective mechanism for facilitating the accumulation of capital. It is precisely through the bourgeois democratic republic that the historical bloc led by the imperialist bourgeoisie has maintained and reproduced its social domination. According to Lenin:

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the ‘petty’—supposedly petty—details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for ‘paupers’!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc. – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of ten, if not ninety-nine out of a hundred, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but, in their sum total, these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.¹¹²

Is this not as true today as it ever was? In the United States, we observe the imperialist bourgeoisie going to incredible lengths to disenfranchise the masses of working people—especially oppressed nationalities—by imposing restrictions on voter rights through strict voter identification laws, excluding prisoners and many former prisoners from the franchise, limiting early voting, and closing polling stations in working-class communities. What sort of “democracy” seeks to limit citizen participation in elections? What sort of “democracy” censures the freedom of speech for those who dare to struggle against Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine or U.S. imperialist aggression against Latin America? What sort of “democracy” aims to silence the dissent of the masses but never tires of defending “freedom of speech” for fascists? What sort of “democracy” fires workers who, in the face of grinding exploitation, unionize their workplace and take strike action to better their lot? Does such a “democracy” truly serve the people? Obviously not!

What today passes for “democracy” is, in fact, bourgeois democracy at its finest. It is a system of government in which the captains of industry and banking, alongside the warlords and bureaucrats, collectively make decisions that shape the laws, policies, and general direction of the nation-state, while that segment of the masses who have been so graciously admitted into the club of citizens are occasionally allowed to choose their preferred rulers, and perhaps ratify some of their decisions. And even then, the choices for citizens are becoming rather scant! “Never before has there been such a close union of the bourgeois riffraff as there is today,” wrote Bukharin in 1915. He continues: “All of the formerly differentiated political organizations of the ruling classes are gradually losing their differentia specifica [unique characteristics], being transformed into a single imperialist party.”¹¹³

2.8.7: To moderate and suppress the antagonistic contradictions at the heart of the imperialist world-system, the capitalist state must wage war on several fronts.

As a result of the contradictions generated by the social relations of exploitation and oppression within the territory claimed by the capitalist nation-state, an internal war is waged against the people’s movement, which poses an ongoing existential threat to the cohesion of bourgeois society and the social power of the imperialist bourgeoisie. For example, the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, was launched in the United States by the FBI in 1956. This program aimed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” those organizations deemed to be “subversive” (i.e. communist). One of the main targets of COINTELPRO was the Black Panther Party, against whom the FBI deployed mass surveillance, infiltration, harassment, psychological warfare, torture, manipulation of the judicial system, and targeted assassinations.

Most infamously, COINTELPRO assassinated the outstanding Black Panther and communist revolutionary, Fred Hampton, on December 4, 1969 in Chicago.¹¹⁴ “We’re gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution,” Fred Hampton proclaimed. “That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.”¹¹⁵ Indeed, there is no greater fear which haunts the minds of the bourgeoisie than the power of the people. More than anything else, it is this factor that has compelled the capitalist nation-state to utilize such overwhelmingly brutal violence against the people, including its own citizens.

2.8.9: With the progression of the concentration and centralization of capital, the nation-state is also utilized to wage external wars against rival capitalists in the struggle to conquer new markets and eliminate competition. As the historical development of the imperialist world-system has revealed, the capitalist state acts as the vanguard of primitive accumulation through the colonization of external territories, the looting and plundering of natural resources, the extraction of surplus labor, and the creation of new markets for profitable investment. This inevitably leads to the eruption of inter-imperialist wars among the respective capitalist states, as they compete to maximize their share of the total profits of the capitalist world-economy. In addition to this category of external war, we can add counterinsurgencies waged by imperialist states against anti-imperialist movements in general, and popular revolutionary movements in particular.

2.8.10: In this age of imperialism, the modern capitalist nation-state is characterized by “an extraordinary increase in the complexity of its functions,” as well as “the growing interference of the power of the state in every realm of social life,” as Bukharin explained.¹¹⁶ While the modern capitalist nation-state assumes the formal powers of a polity (i.e. the powers of legislation, implementation, and adjudication), it encompass far more than official political institutions. It is for this reason that the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci spoke of the emergence of an integral state—that is, a state premised upon the dynamic fusion of political society with civil society, or “hegemony protected by the armor of coercion.”¹¹⁷ Such a state is not only capable of repressing dissent, but also manufacturing consent by shaping public opinion, manipulating human behavior, and mitigating or intentionally creating crises.¹¹⁸ This integral state, according to Gramsci, “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.”¹¹⁹

2.8.11: With this understanding in mind, we can build on the work of Louis Althusser to analyze the integral state through the lens of three distinct state apparatuses, each equipped with a specific function: repressive, ideological, and regulatory.¹²⁰ 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. Finally, 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.

2.8.12: 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 maintenance of a school-to-prison pipeline), as well as regulatory functions (through the provisioning of food and healthcare services, as the burden for the social reproduction of proletarian labor power is 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 organize campaigns to improve their working conditions and increase their control over the labor process, and as students and communities struggle over the curriculum, instruction, and culture of schools as educational institutions.

2.8.13: While it is possible for the people’s movement to check some of the worst excesses of capitalist-imperialism and win certain concessions from the ruling class, all gains won by the working class and all oppressed social groups are necessarily temporary so long as state power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie and not the people. As communists, we must never grow tired of struggling against the revisionist notion that the bourgeois state can be gradually democratized by the people’s struggle, and thus reconfigured as an instrument of socialist transformation. In the final analysis, the apparatuses of capitalist state power—the bureaucratic and military machinery of the imperialist bourgeoisie—must be smashed by a popular revolutionary uprising.

“In their struggle the workers must confront all the might of this monstrous apparatus,” wrote Bukharin, “for their every advance will be aimed directly against the state: the economic and the political struggle cease to be two categories,” and thus the people’s struggle against every manifestations of exploitation, oppression, and alienation must converge in a united struggle against the state organization of the imperialist bourgeoisie.¹²¹ To conquer political power—a prerequisite for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of the imperialist world-system, and the revolutionary transformation of society—the organized communist movement must successfully construct a system of counterpower on the social terrain now occupied by the integral state and saturated with bourgeois ideology. Only by transforming every workplace, school, neighborhood, barracks, and prison into a fortress of revolutionary struggle and thoroughly revolutionizing the ideological domains of culture and education, will the people be prepared to smash the bourgeois state and build a new society.

2.8.14: In regards to the general historical category of the state as such (in contradistinction to the feudal state, capitalist state, etc.), we must keep in mind the reality that capitalist-imperialism is global in scope. Therefore, any social formation that successfully breaks free from the grip of this system will remain embedded within an international system of hostile nation-states and face the competitive pressures imposed by the world market. Only when the socialist revolution overcomes capitalist-imperialismon a world scale—that is, only with the successful construction of a world commune of communes—will the horizon of a stateless society come into focus.

Furthermore, the state is itself a product of class struggle, and therefore cannot be immediately abolished by decree: it is a question of revolutionary process, for the seizure of political power by the people is a prerequisite for the abolition of class exploitation, and until class distinctions have been overcome the state will stubbornly persist. For as soon as the united front of the working class and all oppressed social groups has overthrown the capitalist nation-state and unleashed a revolutionary process of socialist transformation, they will immediately face the challenge of responding to the reactionary political forces mobilizing to destroy the fledgling commune.

2.8.15: The moment a system of counterpower succeeds in smashing the capitalist state and establishing the people’s revolutionary political power throughout territory previously under bourgeois rule, it constitutes itself as a state. However, this is not a state in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, the socialist revolution leads to the creation of a counterstate or semistate of the commune type. Its emergence 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.”¹²² It is, to use Lenin’s phrase, a “commune state.”¹²³ Historical experience reveals the necessity of a political instrument capable of crushing the resistance of the imperialist bourgeoisie and their reactionary allies, withstanding the counterrevolutionary encirclement by imperialism and thwarting all attempts to reverse gains made by the socialist revolution, and establishing a political framework to guide the process of socialist transition.

2.8.16: The socialist revolution aims to overthrow the capitalist nation-state system at the world level, 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 must assume responsibility for transforming the system of ownership from one based on the private ownership of the instruments of labor by a few capitalists, to a system of social ownership by the whole people. The chaos and irrationality of the world market must be replaced by a system of comprehensive democratic planning and coordination of all economic activity to satisfy human needs, develop human capacities in an all-round way, and sustainably steward our planetary ecosystem.

2.8.17: During the period of socialist transition, bourgeois democracy will be replaced with socialist democracy, and a continuous revolution—a cultural revolution—will advance the struggle to transform all aspects of social life in accordance with a communist program. The ultimate “dying out” or “withering away” of the state is a necessary condition for the realization of communism, for so long as classes exist and class struggle continues, for so long as the struggle for the feminist, decolonial, democratic, and ecological transformation of social relations 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 or semistate, and a stateless society will only be achieved once the material basis which gives rise to the state has been transformed at a world scale. The decisive factor in this world-historic transformation is, of course, the participation of the masses in all aspects of the revolutionary process.

2.8.18: The commune idea did not spring from the minds of intellectuals, but was forged in the trenches of revolutionary struggle by the exploited and oppressed masses. By raising the demand for a socialist commune today, we aim to convey our commitment to a revolutionary process of socialist transformation that breaks free from both the bureaucratic party-state system (which came to be associated with socialism in the twentieth century), as well as the state as such. We aspire to reconnect the future of the world socialist revolution with the historical legacy of the world’s first socialist experiment—the Paris Commune of 1871—as well as the achievements made by the most advanced socialist projects of the twentieth century.

In the midst of the First World War, and on the eve of the October Socialist Revolution of 1917, Lenin reasserted the demand for a “commune state” based on the direct democracy of the councils. This red thread of history reappeared with the formation of workers’ councils in the German Revolution of 1918–1923, popular assemblies and socialist collectives during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1936–1939, and revolutionary base areas during the Chinese Revolution and Civil War of 1927–1949. It again found expression in the class struggle waged by rebel workers and students during the short-lived Shanghai People’s Commune of 1967.

The stubborn persistence of the commune can be observed as it again and again retakes the stage of history for a glorious encore: in South Korea with the Gwangju Commune of 1980, in Mexico with the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca in 2006, in Syria with the Rojava Revolution of 2012, and in Venezuela with the formation of the communal councils in 2006 and the founding of the Communard Union in 2022.¹²⁴ 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: Fascism and Anti-Fascist Resistance

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.

Following a successful seizure of state power, fascism constitutes itself as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” as the Communist International asserted in 1935.¹²⁵ 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: “Fascism acts in the interests of the extreme imperialists,” Georgi Dimitrov explained, “but it presents itself to the masses in the guise of champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments.”¹²⁶ 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 opposed to the capitalist system of economic organization. Indeed, without exception, fascism asserts 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 as such, but to merely reshuffle or recompose 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 the seizure of state power through insurrectional 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: If the twentieth century teaches us anything about fascism, it is that this scourge upon humanity is not susceptible to rational debate, nor should it be permitted to fester and rot away at the social fabric. Ultimately, it must be destroyed—root and branch—by the people’s movement. Looking at fascism and anti-fascism historically, we see that the Third Reich was ultimately defeated through the combined efforts of the Allies and the 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. In fact, the entry of the Western Allies came quite late, and was largely restricted to a supporting role when compared to anti-fascist partisan 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. Portuguese fascism was ultimately defeated by the Pan-African national liberation movements in the colonies, in concert with the anti-war movement in the Portuguese armed forces 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, Erdoğan in Turkey, and Bukele in El Salvador, to the imperial core and settler-colonial fascisms of Netayanhu in Israel and Trump in the United States. Given the internally contradictory character of these regimes, this historical process 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, for example, we observe 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. What Frantz Fanon once said of Europe is undoubtedly applicable to the imperial core as a whole, for it had given birth to a form of civilization which “lives at such a mad, reckless pace” that it “has shaken off all guidance and all reason,” and is now “running headlong into the abyss.”¹²⁷

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: Uniting 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 grow further 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 1-2 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 the global value chains of capitalist-imperialism, such that coordinated transnational action by such an alliance of labor 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 ensure 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.”¹²⁸

2.10.6: 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.”¹²⁹ 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.

2.10.7: 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 countries, 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.

2.10.8: 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.

At the same time, it must 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.

Return to Platform and Program table of contents.

1 István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010). 53.

2 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 272–273; Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 20.

3 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 926.

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

5 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).

6 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/.

7 Alex Velez-Green and Robert Peters, “The Prioritization Imperative: A Strategy to Defend America’s Interests in a More Dangerous World,” The Heritage Foundation (August 1, 2024), https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/the-prioritization-imperative-strategy-defend-americas-interests-more-dangerous.

8 Minqi Li, “China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?”

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

10 Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 142.

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

12 Amin, “Contemporary Imperialism.”

13 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/.

14 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 313.

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

16 Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 12.

17 Tronti, Workers and Capital, 27.

18 Michael A. Lebowtiz, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2016), 144.

19 Langston Hughes, “Chant for May Day” (1938), in Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (eds.), The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 209–210.

20 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/.

21 V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (1916), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.

22 Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.”

23 V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New Dehli: LeftWord Books, 2000), 40.

24 V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 40.

25 Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.”

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

27 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 267.

28 We should note that whatever lessons can be learned from the history of primitive communism (and there are many), the precise characteristics of these societies are highly varied across time and place. Furthermore, this form of social organization should not be confused with some idyllic utopia, egalitarian “state of nature,” or lost Garden of Eden from which humanity has strayed and to which we are destined to return. Nonetheless, these societies were communistic in a rudimentary sense: they were classless and stateless, lacked private property, integrated social production and reproduction, distributed the social product according to need, and relied upon direct social cooperation and mutual aid in order to survive and thrive.

29 Paul Cockshott, How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1998); Richard Lee, “Primitive Communism and the Origins of Social Inequality,” in Steadman Upham (ed.),The Evolution of Political Systems: Sociopolitics in Small-Scale Sedentary Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225–246, and “Reflections on Primitive Communism,” in Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn (eds.), Hunters and Gatherers, Volume I: History, Evolution, and Social Change (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 252–268; V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2017), andWhat Happened in History (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2016); Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1976); Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020); Lawrence Krader (ed.), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974).

30 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 54.

31 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 55.

32 Wally Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe (London: Verso, 1992), 16.

33 Cockshott, How the World Works, 40.

34 Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ernest Borneman, Das Patriarchat: Ursprung und Zukunft unseres Gesellschaftssystems (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1975).

35 Cockshott, How the World Works, 46.

36 Cockshott, How the World Works, 46.

37 Cockshott, How the World Works, 47–48.

38 Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money, 45.

39 Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 46.

40 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 100–110.

41 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 66.

42 Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change, 30.

43 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 67.

44 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 2007), 52–53.

45 Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (London: Verso, 2025), 45.

46 Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction, 46.

47 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), 38.

48 Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction, 44.

49 Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction, 50.

50 Alan Sears,Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities (London: Pluto Press, 2025), 15–16.

51 M.E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 21; Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction, 33;.

52 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 176.

53 Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change, 233–236.

54 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 106.

55 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 711.

56 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1972), in Camille Barbagallo (ed.), Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader (Oakland: PM Press, 2019), 14–15.

57 Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction, 21.

58 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 782.

59 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 105.

60 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 105.

61 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 105.

62 Gunnar Heinsohn and Rolf Knieper, Theorie des Familienrechts, Geschlechtsrollenaufhebung, Kindesvernachlässigung, Geburtenrückgang (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).

63 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1972), in Camille Barbagallo (ed.), Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader (Oakland: PM Press, 2019), 21.

64 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 68.

65 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 68.

66 Combahee River Collective Statement, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 20.

67 Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women” (1949), in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.), Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment (Oxfordshire, UK: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011), 76.

68 Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women,” 76.

69 Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 223.

70 Davis, Women, Race and Class, 223–224.

71 Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, 179.

72 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991), 675, original translation.

73 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 35.

74 Amílcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 143.

75 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 43.

76 Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 139–140.

77 Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 143.

78 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 38.

79 Yahya Al Hamarna, My Voice Cannot Be Bombed (Iskra Books, 2025), 30.

80 Audrey Smedley and Brian D. Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), 25–26.

81 Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control(London: Verso, 2021), 235.

82 Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London: Verso, 2021), 177.

83 Smedley and Smedley, Race in North America, 6.

84 Englert, Settler Colonialism, 134.

85 Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 119–166; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 32–44; Smedley and Smedley, Race in North America, 41–71.

86 Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 37.

87 Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 38.

88 Smedley and Smedley, Race in North America, 58.

89 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 40.

90 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 40. Fanon continues his argument by stating that, due to the concomitant development of colonialism and racial oppression, “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.”

91 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 700–701.

92 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 2007).

93 Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 14.

94 Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, 14.

95 Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 137–138.

96 Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, 75.

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

98 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 44.

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

100 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).

101 V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1916), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm.

102 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/.

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

104 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.

105 V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1932 and 1943), 8.

106 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.

107 Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 153.

108 Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 153.

109 V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (London: Verso, 2024), 6.

110 Nikolai Bukharin, “Imperialism and World Economy” (1915 and 1917), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/.

111 Sol Picciotto, “Internationalisation of Capital and the International State System,” in Simon Clarke (ed.), The State Debate (London: Macmillan, 1991), 217.

112 Lenin, The State and Revolution, 110–111.

113 Nikolai Bukharin, “Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State” (1915), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1915/state.htm.

114 Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2019).

115 Fred Hampton, “Power Anywhere Where There’s People” (1969), Hampton Institute, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/power-anywhere-where-theres-people-fred-hampton.

116 Bukharin, “Theory of the Imperialist State.”

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

118 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.

119 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 244

120 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (New York: Verso, 2014).

121 Bukharin, “Theory of the Imperialist State.”

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

123 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.

124 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).

125 Georgi Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Unity of the Working Class (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 4.

126 Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 7.

127 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 312.

128 Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 699.

129 Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 700.