For a Second Communist Manifesto – Grandizo Munis

We publish here our English translation of Grandizo Munis’ text ‘For a Second Communist Manifesto’ (1961). Though we have serious disagreements with the approach of the last section, entitled ‘The Tasks of Our Time’, which resembles in some ways the Trotskyist ‘Transitional Programme’, and in specific with the set of demands put forward for workers, we still believe this is a valuable and insightful document, despite its limitations and obvious residues of Trotskyism, of the revolutionary workers’ movement.

League of Internationalist Communists

8 April 2024

For a Second Communist Manifesto

Decadence of Capitalism

“Let the ruling classes tremble at the thought of a communist revolution! The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, they have a whole world to win”.

More than a hundred years later, these words of the Communist Manifesto still ring like a slap in the face of the oppressors. The spectre of communism has not so far been exorcised by the social validity of capitalism, but by the emergence of new reactionary forces acting within the proletariat itself, at the head of which is the state capitalism erected in Russia by the Stalinist counter-revolution. That is why countless rebellions in the world have ended in defeat, the survival of a decadent society, the demoralisation of the proletariat. But for this very reason, the proletariat remains, even more clearly than in the past, the only force capable of putting an end to the slavery nourished for centuries by societies of exploitation and tyranny; however, an ideological revaluation is indispensable for the resumption of revolutionary thought and action.

Capitalist society has already run its course. It is the most complete of all societies based on the exploitation of man by man that the world has ever known. It has developed more than any other the instruments of production, science, culture, general consumption, and even freedom within the limits convenient to the exploiting minority. It has scoured the world for raw materials and markets and has unified it by introducing its economic relations everywhere. It has increased the proletariat numerically and centralised property in an ever-smaller number of persons, or all of it in the state, thus widening, more than in previous societies, the gap between man’s natural capacity for work and the instruments of labour indispensable to the exercise of that capacity. However, its own mechanism has impelled it to create the material and human conditions required to annihilate in it any society of exploitation. In the past, the slaves of Spartacus, the serfs of the glebe or the “Sans-culottes” of the 18th century were not in a position to rise up without being crushed or without giving victory to a new class of oppressors. Today, the proletariat has at hand the possibility to triumph in every nation and on the whole earth and to bring the emancipation of mankind to a climax. For this it must take possession of the instruments of labour of which it has always been deprived, restore the unity between man and nature, the root of all freedom, and annihilate the state. More than ever, the uprising of the proletariat will be the uprising of humanity. If the task fails, the future of mankind will most probably be extermination by atomic weapons, and in any case a new servitude for an indefinite period.

Capitalism disguises its expiration by propagating in the middle classes and in the proletariat itself the illusion of a new boom through its own planning. This deception fails to conceal the truth: the degeneration which has already led it down the road to barbarism is taking capitalist society towards totalitarianism, the expression of the growing concentration of capital in big trusts and in the state. This process is being completed, if it has not already been completed, in the major countries of the West and East, as well as in the backward countries of the so-called Third World. It is accompanied by a relative decline in the standard of living of the working masses, by a vertical decline in their consumption compared to the product of their own labour, by an exhausting acceleration of the pace of work, and by the imposition of piece-rate wages which force workers to demand overtime; politically it is coupled with dictatorship, whether military, clerical, police based, fascist, or of a single neo-reactionary party which claims to be the embodiment of the holy spirit of the masses. In all cases it is the more or less complete suppression of freedoms and the degradation of culture.

Such totalitarianism is based on an accumulation of capital or industrialisation that is all the more reactionary because it plans the non-fulfilment of needs, repression, and systematic “brainwashing”. It can originate in the old bourgeois parties, in which case pseudo-liberalism gives way to undisguised authoritarianism which deprives the working class of its most elementary rights. It can also result from the coupling of the old parties with new reactionary forces, in a single party fused with the state and placing the interests of capitalism as a system above those of the individual bourgeois. Fascism and many regimes in the new countries fall into this category. But the most complete totalitarian form is undoubtedly Stalinism. In it, the state, the sole owner of the instruments of production, is directly constituted by the ex-worker bureaucracy converted into a collective capitalist, which arbitrarily exercises all powers and dictates what everyone should think.

In whatever form it takes, capitalist society can only offer humanity a future of misery, of economic and police coercion, of social and cultural regression, and atomic war to boot. Although the productive forces have reached an unparalleled height, their development is permanently held back by the form of capital (private, international trusts or state) which exists everywhere. The system is irremediably corroded by the contradiction between the actual and potential capacity of the forces of production and the possibilities of absorption by the market, which are increasingly diminished by the wage system. Despite those who speak of a new industrial revolution, an affluent society, the integration of the working class and other technicalities, the capitalist growth of the last decades has been squalid and mainly due to the war economy. It has increased in frightening proportions the number of people engaged in parasitic occupations and squanders astronomical sums on armaments, so that the share of the social product which the workers receive is steadily diminishing. This is the imperative of the system driven to extremes by war production. The result is a generalised economic Malthusianism and a gradual social and even technical disintegration. Thus, with automation in the service of capitalism, unemployment is spreading, both in the United States and in Russia, while physical exhaustion is ravaging the workers employed in it (1). Astronautics itself, the press and the advertising bandwagon of the two great imperialisms, is sponsored by homicidal designs, and for every Gagarin and every Glenn millions of people exude endless hours of work, most of them without even half-satisfying their basic needs.

Let the workers seize the apparatus of production, let them set it in motion for the benefit of humanity as a whole by abolishing capital and wage labour, and then, even in the most backward areas, a cultural and technical flowering, which is today unsuspected, will become possible. In the economic as well as in the cultural aspect, the needs of each individual and of society as a whole are unlimited. To give them free rein is the task which the socialist revolution must set itself from the very moment of its victory, inseparable, moreover, from the disappearance of classes and of the state. The transitional society which will be born of its triumph must be directed towards it from day one, without losing sight for a moment of the close dependence between production and consumption. In today’s society, the profit, which is intercalated between the two, from the first act of production to the last act of consumption, reduces either the one or the other. When consumption falls, capitalist profits and production fall, causing the so-called crises of overproduction; on the contrary, they rise when the demand for commodities exceeds supply. But the consumption of the masses is continually eroded by the waste of armaments, armies and police, bureaucracies and all sorts of parasitic occupations, and is strictly limited by the law of value, which puts a price on labour and the products of labour, including scientific knowledge and culture in general. And the taxation of the price of labour by the state worsens the situation of the worker, leaving him defenceless against capital.

In the transitional society, profit must be outlawed, even in the form of the large salaries it can take. Since the aim of a truly planned economy is to match the needs of consumption with production, only the full satisfaction of those needs, not profit or privilege, not “national defence” or the demands of an industrialisation alien to the daily needs of the masses, must be taken as the guideline of production. The first requirement of such an undertaking can therefore be none other than the disappearance of wage-labour, the deepest foundation of the law of universal value in every capitalist society, however many of them may today claim to be socialist or communist.

Any so-called planned economy which does not take into account the vital needs of the masses is by that very fact oriented towards the satisfaction of the needs of an exploitative and dominant minority, which imposes the most draconian capitalist rules on society and embodies a police form of the state. It is in such a case a managed capitalism and whatever its industrial successes it will only contribute to plunging humanity into reaction and decadence. The imbeciles who admire factory chimneys and production rates are imbued with the basic principle of the expanded reproduction of capital. Scientific socialism as Marx and Engels conceived it and humanity requires it, knows no other index than the individual worker, his concrete satisfaction, his freedom, the full elation of his faculties. Those who “place society above the individual” (Marx) must be abhorred like the plague.

Stalinism versus Socialism

The historical function of the proletariat does not consist in the transformation of individual property into state property. Nor does the mere disappearance of the bourgeoisie as the class which owns the instruments of production validate the orientation of the economy towards socialism and the disalienation of man, for “abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical”, as Marx asserted. Indeed, the socialisation of the economy and the abolition of the wage-earning system, which the proletarian revolution must bring about, are not two different or successive tasks, but two aspects of a single transformation, which must therefore go hand in hand. What must disappear before we can speak of socialism is property as a means of subjecting man to wage-labour. This must begin with the organisation of production by and for the producers. Either the instruments of labour will be vested in society as a whole, or else the property-owning state, far from languishing and dying out, will, on the contrary, widen the gulf between the capitalist form of the economy and the need for communism, and at the same time monstrously develop its dictatorial characteristics.

In this respect, the Russian Revolution is a warning, and the Stalinist counter-revolution that replaced it a decisive lesson for the world proletariat. The degeneration of the Russian Revolution was facilitated by the nationalisation in 1917 of the means of production which a workers’ revolution must socialise. Only the extinction of the state, as Marxism conceived it, would have made it possible to transform the expropriation of the bourgeoisie into socialisation. Statification became the buttress of the counter-revolution.

This error on the part of the Bolsheviks can be explained above all by the characteristics of the October Revolution itself. It was not, contrary to what distorted opinions claim, a socialist revolution, but a permanent one, according to the conceptions expounded by Trotsky in the books 1905 and The Permanent Revolution, and by Lenin in the April Theses. That is to say, the seizure of political power by the proletariat, the overthrow of the semi-feudal, even tribal, tsarist society, the implementation by the proletariat of the measures of the ineffectual bourgeois revolution, and the uninterrupted assembly of socialist measures. Moreover, the triumph of the socialist revolution in more economically and culturally developed European countries was indispensable for the Russian permanent revolution to be able to successfully tackle the stage of transition to communism. The Bolsheviks tried, in reality, to surpass their own initial project by introducing non-capitalist relations in the distribution of products and, by implication, in production. This was “war communism”, so called because of the smallness of the products to be distributed rather than because of the civil war. Trotsky himself says in From Red October to my Exile that war communism obeyed wider economic designs than military demands against the reactionaries. The failure of this attempt, due to the vertical fall in production (down to 3% of that of 1913), provoked a return to the mercantile system which was called N.E.P.: New Economic Policy.

The state of mind of the peasants who had become landowners as a result of the revolution was partly responsible for the collapse of production, to which the civil war also contributed. But the main responsibility must be sought in the bourgeois mentality of the middle social strata, whose functions were indispensable to economic activity: petty bourgeoisie, technicians, bureaucrats installed in the trade unions, administrative bodies of all kinds, in the soviets and in the Bolshevik party itself. By legally unleashing capitalist commerce, the N.E.P. definitively welded the alliance of the bourgeois social strata which had sabotaged the revolution, with the bureaucrats and the ex-revolutionaries who represented it as a wedge. From their fusion in the state would emerge the ruling caste which pompously calls itself “the intelligentsia”.

Lenin, who could only have a fragmentary notion of the bureaucratic threat, nevertheless defined the still soviet state as “a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie”. In his conception, the N.E.P. and the state capitalism it would establish were nothing more than a momentary concoction, a precautionary step backwards, awaiting the resumption of the process of world revolution. The only remaining guarantee of a future socialisation of the economy was the permanence of the effective power of the soviets (2). This project of state capitalism politically dominated by the proletariat was, in reality, impracticable, even without taking into account the correlation of forces in post-revolutionary society. “The tendency of the petty bourgeoisie to transform the delegates to the soviets into parliamentarians or bureaucrats”, denounced by Lenin since 1918 (3), was more than fulfilled at the time of the N.E.P. In all the administrative and political bodies, the old intermediary social strata and the new bureaucracy overwhelmed the revolutionaries and the proletariat. The state, as defined by Lenin, was soon to find “its bourgeoisie”. A powerful bureaucratic caste was in the making which would organise state capitalism and counter-revolution to its advantage.

Thus the N.E.P. was the culmination of the permanent revolution, which, despite the attempt at war communism, never went beyond the stage of the exercise of political power by the proletariat and workers’ control of production, a bourgeois-democratic measure which, according to the Bolshevik conception, was to precede the workers’ management of production and consumption, characteristic of the social revolution. Instead of the uninterrupted revolutionary progression, a Thermidorian backward march began, which suppressed one by one the workers’ gains, the very appearance of soviets and culminated in counter-revolution.

A conduit of chumminess and alliance between the bourgeois layers of the population and the new bureaucracy ensconced in the once revolutionary organisations was the freedom of capitalist trade. An assemblage of individuals as well as interests. This hodgepodge, master of power and wealth, set out to use and abuse one or the other on a whim. Such was the origin of Stalinism, an open street in the severe food shortage which hindered the political activity of the proletariat and the revolutionaries. It also used as a pretext for its retreat the defeat of various insurrectionary attempts in Europe, a defeat which in reality suited it. But what gave impetus and structure to its tremendous counter-revolutionary work in Russia and in the world—still unfinished—was jointly the statified property and the single party, without internal factions and monolithic according to the new reactionary terminology. Stalinism went from commercial freedom to the centralisation of trade and capital investments, which still form the basis of its economic plans.

The revolutionary conception of economic planning has as its starting point the disappearance of wage labour, which is both the condition and the proof of the abolition of capital. Production and industrialisation projects must have no other aim than to satisfy the social needs of consumption by raising the standard of living of the classes exploited under capitalism, the poorest strata in the first place. In that case alone, the unpaid surplus labour, which constitutes surplus value, will be returned to society as a whole, exploitation will disappear, communism and the disalienation of man will be achieved.

The working class itself must determine, through democratically appointed committees, the amount of social labour to be allocated to new instruments of production (today’s constant capital), and the amount to be allocated to the immediate expansion of consumption (today’s variable capital, wage rationing). Socialist planning is a complete overhaul of economic functioning. The people, who in the Russian bloc, as in the American bloc, are subject to the production of constant capital or machinery, must submit to their complete service and produce nothing outside it. So much so that if, perchance, legitimately elected workers’ committees were to place industrialisation above the daily consumer demands of their own class, they would only be administering capitalism and perpetuating exploitation.

The Russian production plans and those of all their imitators are antithetical to the revolutionary conception. They are inspired by a well-studied accumulation of capital, modelled on Karl Marx’s analyses of capitalist society, and determined in detail by the highest possible rate of return for each category of worker, with the minimum wage that can be made to work. The super-exploitation that these plans entail would be impracticable without the total centralisation of capital in the state, exclusive employer, legislator of the price of labour-power, the human commodity which does not even have the freedom to bargain its own sale to capital. This is how and why the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in 1917, instead of opening the way to socialism, gave way to the most brutal form of the exploitation of man by man: state capitalism.

To organise its capitalism around the state, the Stalinist counter-revolution exploited the material and mental misery of old Russia, aggravated by eight years of military operations. Politically, however, it had to exterminate, in the most vile manner imaginable, a whole generation of revolutionaries before solidly asserting its domination. The great Moscow trials of 1936-38, the slitting of the throats or the deportation to Siberia of all those who remained faithful to Red October, have no equivalent in the annals of counterrevolutions, not even in Hitler’s or Franco’s. They reveal a reactionary conscience and a reactionary consciousness. They reveal a reactionary consciousness and a ferocity which constitute one of the most fearsome dangers for the international proletariat. Since then, if not before, the foreign policy of the Russian power, apart from and complementary to its imperialist competition with the Western countries, has been aimed either at preventing any social revolution in the world, or at crushing it through its national parties by imposing state capitalism in the name of socialism. Evidence of this abounds, from the Spanish revolution to the triumph of Mao Tse-tung and the entry of Russian tanks into Budapest in revolt, not to mention the rapid reactionary crystallisation of Castro’s power.

In short, the Stalinist counter-revolution is the most important negative event of our century. Thanks to it and the action of its vassal parties, the proletariat has suffered defeat after defeat and lives today in a morass, at the mercy of any force that can throw itself at it. Those who support it, for whatever reason they invoke it, represent the class enemy, those who regard it only as a political distortion of revolutionary aims play, with regard to it, the role of the old reformism in the face of expanding capitalism. Consequently, and with a view to the creation of the workers’ organisation of the world revolution, a prior break with Stalinism must be demanded of all groups and people on the following bases:

1. A product of Stalinist counter-revolution, the Russian economy is an imperialist state capitalism just like its American rival;
2. It cannot be oriented in a proletarian sense by any measure, not even by an exclusively political revolution, but abolished by social revolution, after the destruction of all present institutions, including the dictatorial party and the state property system;
3. Stalinism can nowhere be considered an opportunist or reformist workers’ movement, but a counter-revolutionary one, a carrier of state capitalism and a destroyer of the workers’ freedoms indispensable to the organisation of socialism;
4. Its policy of “national union” reveals its true nature. Socially identical to that long practised by the bourgeoisie, but politically more perfidious, it postulates for itself the supreme economic and political leadership of capital in each country. The Moscow declaration “of the 81 parties” hardly conceals this.

Revolutionaries must therefore see Stalinism as a class enemy and regard any collusion or alliance with it as an abandonment of the proletarian cause, if not a betrayal.

The “destalinisation” of Khruschev, Stalin’s accomplice in the assassination of the Bolsheviks of 1917, aims at best to consolidate Stalinism by perfecting it as a system. The “Soviet” legality of which Stalin’s continuator speaks is that of his capitalist bureaucracy. The proletariat has nothing to do with it but to disrupt it and set about creating its own legality. Even the freedoms of speech, organisation, printing, etc., and the rehabilitation of Trotsky and other slandered and executed revolutionaries, which the bureaucracy might find it necessary to grant, would not alter state capitalism, the essential work of the Stalinist counter-revolution.

In short, between Western capitalism and the Stalinist counter-revolution, a political understanding, either tacit or expressed, has existed since the first beginnings of the latter. The mutual services they have rendered each other are innumerable. Western capitalism owes its life and prosperity to Stalinist counter-revolution, and Stalinist capitalism owes its consolidation and extension to Stalinist counter-revolution (4).

Imperialism and National Independence

The imperialism-colonies relationship constitutes the ever more tightly woven fabric of world mercantilism and is as insurmountable for it as the fundamental capital-exploitation of wage-labour-capital-aggrandisement relationship. For a long time now, the two have only changed by their own exacerbation, making the dissociation between the world system as a whole and human needs more and more harrowing.

Since the end of the last war, many colonies have been granted independence; local wars have been organised to gain independence in others; everywhere there is talk of “decolonisation”, “industrialisation of underdeveloped countries”, “national revolution” and so on. At the same time, Russia has seized nine countries in Europe (5), half of Korea and Indochina in Asia, and the vast China sees its national sovereignty more restricted than in the times of the foreign Concessions; in most of the rest of the world, even the oldest and strongest nations are under the tutelage of the United States. In all cases it is a single and identical process of readjustment of the Planet to the imperialist forces as reshaped by the war of 1939-45.

Whether consented to by the colonising power or acquired by force of arms, national independence in no way implies a break with imperialism; on the contrary, it highlights it by bringing it to light in its purest form, that of economic ownership. Indeed, it has reached the point where the labour and knowledge of many generations, after much military and mercantile plundering, is centralised in gigantic instruments of production, mainly dominated by the United States and Russia. Since these instruments have a capitalist character in both countries, the rotation of the economy in the whole world is necessarily geared around their respective centres. Reversed, the argument has the value of a demonstration: it is enough that the economic rotation of one country has another country as its axis to prove the capitalist nature of the axis and of the satellite. The fact is that nations, as much as individuals, cannot escape the imperatives of capital accumulation without suppressing capital.

The more important and profitable the technical discoveries are (automation, cybernetics, industrial and agricultural chemistry, nuclear energy, etc.), the more overwhelming the weight of the US and Russia becomes over the rest of the world, friends or adversaries, but above all over “friendly” countries. The military antagonism of the two blocs is juxtaposed with economic and technical factors, consolidating imperialist dominance and extending it to territories that would seem to have been forgotten without this intensive military preparation. In short, because of their sheer size and the extreme scientific specialisation of their industrial facilities, American or Russian capital cannot seriously assist a national economy without overwhelming it. The military and administrative occupation typical of the colonial regime is a sign of economic weakness on the part of a metropolis. Just as on a national scale capitalism bases its domination on the monopoly of the instruments of labour, which puts the labouring classes at its mercy and transforms the petty bourgeoisie into commission agents, so on an international scale its full imperialist function is achieved only by draining surplus value towards the strongest capitals. Here, capital is to be understood in the broad sense of industrial and technical capacity rather than in the purely financial sense. The subjection of the weak economies to the strong ones thus takes place by “natural” means, the main coercion being an inseparable part of the system, the increase of the capital invested in each cycle of production.

The vassalage of the underdeveloped countries will always be proportional to the aid they receive from the great powers, which widens the economic gap between the two. And national independence accelerates the movement by the voluntary association of the local exploiters, who, taking advantage of the traditional patriotic dirty tricks, become the fiefdoms of big imperialist capital. The latter’s arrogance at the present time has little to fear even from the nationalisation of its property by the “sovereign” countries. The much-trumpeted “expropriation of the imperialists” continues to pay its due to the imperialists, through the interplay of trade and investment in all branches of world production, while the chaining of the weak to the strong continues to be tightened. It is not impossible for a country to pass from one imperialist iron fetter to another, but the iron law of capitalist economy can only be annulled by the suppression of the commodity, beginning with its origin, wage-labour, which makes a shrunken being of people the whole world over, a continual spoil of national and international demagogues.

Events have validated the thesis of Rosa Luxemburg, who, contrary to Lenin, denied the possibility, under capitalism, of a “right of peoples to dispose of themselves”. And the arguments that Lukacs opposes to the former (6) are impregnated with reformist dirigisme. Lenin’s arguments were above all of a tactical character, which has been largely superseded today. In so far as this right has acquired the force of law, it has meant, exclusively, the right of the local exploiters to choose their own imperialism in order to better crush the workers as they please.

The “national revolution”, the “industrialisation of the underdeveloped countries”, the “progressive role of the Third World”, etc. are all so much reactionary bullshit. They can only be useful to each imperialist camp against its adversary. Without social revolution it is only possible to go from Washington’s orbit to Moscow’s orbit, and vice versa, as the cases of Cuba under Castro and Yugoslavia incontrovertibly show. Even a war like the one in Algeria, on the occasion of which the entire French left, incapable of taking the side of the social revolution in Algeria and France, parroted the line of Moscow, if not Cairo, is the work of the cold war. Without it, the F.L.N.’s thugs would not have abandoned their status as pupils of French imperialism to play the role of nationalist heroes. Once in power, they will not be able to behave in any other way than as limited partners of Western or Eastern capital. They will replace the “pieds-noirs” (7).

All the deadlines have come to an end, all the economic and political developments of the present world have reached their ebb. Thus industrialisation and technical discoveries will find, under capitalist form, in colonies and metropolises alike, only a very restricted and reactionary application; thus culture and freedom will retreat in the face of the stultifying propaganda and police demands of a rotten system; thus, organisations which continue to call themselves communist out of odious imposture are in reality ultra-capitalist and are animated by the most evil counter-revolutionary consciousness; thus, the masses of the backward countries are duped into preparing for war, when they could constitute a factor of critical importance in the overthrow of American-Russian imperialism.

Let us proclaim it: every national struggle is reactionary; colonies or metropolis, Russia or the United States, the exploited must have as their immediate universal objective the struggle for the seizure of power, the expropriation of private or state capital, the international socialisation of production and consumption.

Revolution or Imperialist War

Since 1914 the forces of production, human potential and culture had reached the level indispensable for the realisation of the socialist revolution. A choice presented itself to humanity, and in particular to the proletariat: revolution or continuous wars, suppression of capitalism, or decadence and a relapse into barbarism. Two wars have exterminated tens of millions of people, with no other object than to impose on the world the domination of one of the slave-owning blocs. Twice in less than 30 years, the governments of the belligerent countries have called upon their respective populations to slaughter those of the “enemy” countries, in the name of freedom, civilisation, law and future well-being, promising for tomorrow what they refuse to give today, in the manner of religions. In order to establish a new world balance, yesterday’s allies are once again ready to unleash carnage, which this time could end in the annihilation of the human species.

For the working masses war represents the most tremendous of calamities. Distracted from their class aims, they are led into combat for the defence of the privileged in each belligerent country. For contrary to what bourgeois and social-democratic propaganda, as well as fascist or Stalinist reaction, would have us believe, there is never a collective national interest, but only class interests, and those of the proletariat are the only ones which are confused with those of humanity.

War, or sometimes the mere threat of war, accentuating the misery of the workers and military supremacy, provokes a general social regression conducive to any reactionary enterprise. But war cannot be avoided by the governments of East and West, which carry it within themselves as the mechanics of their system, nor by purely pacifist movements, which are always impotent. Its causes must be uprooted from world society, i.e., from capitalism. Let us remember that if the proletariat of the two warring camps of 1914 had attacked their respective governments, instead of killing each other, humanity would have been spared 50 years of suffering and conflict. But the workers’ leaders, joining with the exploiters, induced war on both sides, thus imposing on the working class the reactionary dilemma of destroying one group of countries for the benefit of another. The proletariat thus suffered a serious setback and an immense ideological setback. The internationalist action of Lenin, Trotsky and part of the Bolsheviks, by consenting to the victory of the Russian Revolution, restated in its true terms the dilemma of humanity, calling upon the peoples to seize economic and political power.

Certainly, the betrayal of the leaders of the Socialist International would have been of only limited scope if the Russian Revolution itself had not been betrayed a few years after its triumph. In reality, long before 1939 the Kremlin government and its Third International had also rejected the dilemma of historical evolution and appropriated the dilemma of reaction. The Popular Front had not yet officially appeared, when their policy, intentionally directed towards war, had no more studied aim than to paralyse the revolutionary action of the proletariat. And thanks to the “communist” parties linked to Moscow, a chauvinist and reactionary orientation was once again imposed on the masses. Together with the Axis powers against “American plutocracy” (German-Russian Pact and suspension of the German-speaking Stalinist press) or together with the latter “against fascism” (participation in the war together with the “democracies” and national resistances), the Kremlin and its parties changed only their imperialist camp. The catastrophe thus inflicted on the masses all over the world is unparalleled. It is the main cause of the present demoralisation of the proletariat, which makes it easy prey for the Stalinist, clerical or military organic apparatuses.

This policy has enabled the Russian counter-revolution to become the second imperialist power on the globe, but not without material and moral support from the first. The division of the planet into two zones of influence, the fallacious propaganda of “peaceful coexistence” which practically translates into the “cold war” and the permanent balance of terror have been of benefit to humanity. The first two are, in reality, the obverse and the reverse of a single flexible strategy, capable of venturing into local hostilities, of being content for a certain time with a delimitation of zones of undisputed domination, or of launching into a supreme military decision, according to the imperatives of expansion, internal political urgencies, plus the confidences of the espionage services. In any case, and despite the restraint imposed on the two giants by thermo-nuclear weapons, the balance of terror will be followed by the disintegration of half of humanity or more, if the masses do not act in time.

As the apex of the exploitation of man by man—a permanent and legal class war— capitalism reveals militarily, in the most conclusive and terrifying manner, its total decay as a system, its incompatibility with immediate needs and human aspirations. In the instruments of war, whose lethal capacity reaches beyond the totality of man and primates to rudimentary organic life, the capitalist form of the instruments of production is a hypostasis, which, permeating social relations in general, gradually suffocates humanity, even supposing that peace lasts indefinitely. The dilemma is a global and urgent one: to end the present system or regress to barbarism.

In such a situation, the “pro-peace” congresses and movements sponsored by the representatives or friends of either bloc are in reality the merchandise of war and paramilitary regimentation of the working class. Revolutionary internationalism calls for attacking the American and Russian blocs indistinctly, not for the sake of peace between them, a reactionary status quo, but against their respective capitalist structures, inseparable from the rivalry for the hegemonic exploitation of the world. And this internationalist task is impracticable without exposing, in the assemblies and the revolutionary press of all countries, in the factories themselves, the supporters of Moscow and Washington, the tools of the respective imperialist armies. Revolutionary defeatism has not expired, as some innovative critters, convinced of progress, claim; on the contrary, its necessity is present in the midst of peace and goes beyond economic domination. The main enemy is still in one’s own country, but the officialdom of the opposing bloc must also be wounded in each country.

In the face of the balance of terror, it is essential to postulate the right of the workers of all countries—an elementary right of human preservation without which all other rights become a mockery—to demand and implement the dismantling of all weapons and industries of war, atomic and classical, to disband armies and erase borders.

The American proletariat could make a decisive contribution to creating a world movement in this direction, breaking through the totalitarianism which stifles the possible action of the Russian, Chinese, etc., workers. But it is necessary for its most conscious part to begin by unequivocally condemning its own imperialism and to take up the task with vigour. Then revolutionaries everywhere would be in a better position to organise fraternisation with the proletariat of the other bloc, forcing if necessary—and it will be necessary—a police response.

Marxist Perspectives

In the old capitalist countries, the state, the police, the laws, the courts, condense and represent the interests of the individual capitalists and the various trusts. In present-day Russia the state is the sole exploiter. In it are centralised capitalist property and surplus value, as well as the police, the army and the complementary courts. The emergence of such a complete totalitarian regime did not enter into the perspectives of Marx and Engels, whose starting point was the development of capitalism, its annihilation and overcoming by internal revolutionary necessities. Their analyses and perspectives, corresponding to the epoch in which capitalism was to reach its apogee, did not allow them to discern the specific features of the decline. Moreover, the considerable development of the workers’ movement during the last years of its existence allowed them to hope that the revolutionary party of the proletariat would destroy capitalist society the moment it ceased to have a positive value for humanity as a whole.

Although Marx and Engels often regarded the socialist revolution as inevitable, they never represented it as an automatic process. However, the assertions concerning the ineluctability of socialism have given many “Marxists” occasion for mechanistic conceptions which are alien to the revolutionary spirit. The crux of them consists in asserting that economic centralisation remains a positive sign of the evolution of capitalism, if not of incipient socialism. Experience shows that the concentration of capital, once a progressive factor in social development, acquires reactionary characteristics beyond a certain limit. But there is no way of fixing this limit in figures, for it is itself co-determined by other factors, such as the cultural and political level, the degree of ideological and economic freedom allowed to the masses, and the general maturity of society, what might be called the age of the system. Once this ceiling of progressiveness has been reached, which has undoubtedly already been left behind, society can only continue to progress by entering the revolution, and this regardless of the degree of development or concentration of each national economy. Conscious human intervention must break the automatism of centralisation, which is already regressive.

To continue to see in this centralisation something positive leads to the conception already criticised, according to which the disappearance of the bourgeoisie as the possessing class and the nationalisation of the economy constitute the material basis of the transitional society, from which communism will arise of its own accord, provided the bourgeoisie does not reappear. The “Marxists” who defend such a theory end up sooner or later, as we have seen, by admitting that Stalinism accomplishes, through nationalisation, the essential task of the proletarian revolution. And that is to desert to the opposing side.

Marx’s views on the development of capitalism have been confirmed in their main lines, but certain new aspects characteristic of the epoch of decadence of capitalist society have appeared. Today, it is possible to attribute a historical significance to state capitalism, the last of the transformations brought about by the centralisation of capital which has been operating on individual property as an inherent law of the system. Whether it comes from Stalinism, Nazism, Western democracies or pan-Arabism, in which one can even perceive resonances of the biblical Philistines, nationalisation concretises and prolongs the general tendency of the capitalist economy described by Marx.

In the first stage of modern capitalism, that of the liberal economy, ownership, strictly individual, corresponded only to the capital invested in each enterprise. Competition put individual capitalists in a struggle for a restricted market, which rarely exceeded the national scale. The need to invest ever larger sums, engendered by the very process of capital accumulation and by the imperatives of industrialism, gave rise to the association of individual capitalists, and then to the appearance of joint-stock companies, in which immense capital from a multitude of individual owners is invested, without their de facto participation in the management.

In the next stage, that of imperialism, the joint-stock companies are grouped into trusts and cartels which regulate prices on a large scale, and at the same time engage in a fierce struggle for the conquest of markets and raw materials. And the state, which in the previous stage ensured the relative balance between capitalists, becomes with imperialism the instrument of trusts and cartels, the most powerful of which seek to take control of it. This is the first sign of the decadence of capitalist society, already characterised by a tremendous extension of the war industry.

The third stage, or state capitalism, is a mechanical consequence of the previous process, accelerated by wars and counterrevolutions. Any backward country can accede to it, but only pushed by backward interests, in the same way that world revolutionary demands allow it, as much as the industrialised countries, to accede to the proletarian revolution. The Russian Revolution is inexplicable without the world’s maturity of ideas and economy to undertake socialism. So too, but in a reactionary sense, Stalinism is linked directly with the highest possible stage of world capitalist centralisation.

In state capitalism, the instruments of production, unable to preserve their structure by the action of the individual owners alone, are placed under the protection of the state, the supreme representative of exploitation, the “ideal collective capitalist” (Engels), in which ownership becomes entirely centralised. It becomes the undivided property of the members of the social stratum or caste which holds political power, to such an extent that it loses—for example in Russia—all connection with the direct investment of capital by the individual possessors. In the old capitalism, which has disappeared almost everywhere, the exercise of political power was a consequence of wealth; in state capitalism, wealth goes hand in hand with the enjoyment of any given share of political power. The circle of dominators tends to close and becomes more despotic than ever. The state, the owner and collector of surplus value, distributes it among its servants, which gives rise to rapacity vis-à-vis the supreme dominant group, which is always restricted. The workers, for their part, live more than ever in bondage to the slavery of a wage imposed at will by the state, the exclusive employer. The economic distance between exploiters and exploited, the arbitrariness of the former, and the enchainment of the latter, are growing to unprecedented proportions. More and more, Marx said, “capital appears as a social power whose functionary is the capitalist”. This is state capitalism, the already degenerative level of present-day society, which the counterfeiters present to the proletariat as socialism.

The bourgeoisie was the class of the development and apogee of capitalism, which has fulfilled an important historical function. It was, and still is, a question of putting an end to capitalism, its state, its classes. Failing that, the decay of the system, which has already begun, will not be the work of a quite different class, but of castes or bureaucracies which, by dominating the state and its terrifying means of repression, decompose society and lead it into barbarism. This is one of the most shocking lessons of recent history.

Since the intervening period between the wars, the involution or backward movement of capitalist society has manifested itself in various ways. One of the first manifestations in time was the appearance of immense armies of unemployed throughout Europe and the United States. In Russia, the multiplication of forced labour camps was the equivalent of unemployment, doubled by the debasement of the labour force. Even today, despite the millions of people mobilised in both blocs, unemployment has not disappeared. However, the most brutal sign of degeneration is unquestionably the war of 1939-1945, whose reactionary consequences appear more overwhelming every day: division of the world and rivalry between the United States and Russia as leaders, occupation of several nations, disappearance or dismemberment of others, endemic war economies, a thermo-nuclear threat which will not prevent any agreement between the two empires, a degradation of the consciousness of the working masses and of society in general, cultivated by each bloc in its own way. The peace, or rather the armistice we are living through, has seen the introduction of such ferocious methods of exploitation that the fixed wage and the eight-hour day have almost universally disappeared. Piece-rate pay, which the workers’ movement had succeeded in abolishing, has reappeared in many forms: bonuses, incentives, piecework, which rationalisation of work, restraints and timekeeping, or the machines themselves, are responsible for perfecting. Workers are forced to work more and more and to work overtime voluntarily, if not imposed by union contracts.

The results of such scientific procedures of capital development, the initiative of which comes in many cases from the Russian counter-revolution (8) are the exhaustion of the workers and an intellectual dullness very useful to their enemies, in addition to the generalised professional degradation, inseparable from modern technology in the service of exploitation. The majority of the workers are machine labourers, and the specialised ones are so much so that they have no trade.

The rising output of workers and machines has brought about a monstrous centralisation of the instruments of production or capital, which confers on capital an economic and disciplinary tyranny over labour, never before achieved, and highly pernicious. And while the possessors conglomerate in the European market with a view to the intercontinental market, in the other bloc in COMECON (9), the workers remain separated not only by bloc and by nations within them, but also from branch to branch of production, from company to company, from category to category, and in each establishment they are subjected to fissures and barracks regulations which 30 years ago would have been challenged as offensive to their dignity. Such a contrast between the ease of capitalism and the plight of the proletarian is the right consequence of the defeat of the world revolution between 1917 and 1937, made worse by the negative results of the war.

Every swelling of capitalism is rigorously conditioned, decades ago, and in the East as well as in the West, by the revolutionary inaction of the proletariat. Hence the doubly reactionary nature of the present super-concentration of capital. It was superfluous to the communist transformation of society and has placed all the exploited in the necessity of rebuilding their revolutionary organisation stone by stone, besieged by a complex of enemies ranging from big private or state capital to the parties and trade unions which complete the legal structure of expanded reproduction.

In the midst of such an unpleasant situation, the historical task that Marxism assigns to the proletariat, the transformation of exploitative society into communism, takes on the greatest social urgency on a planetary scale. Without it, humanity will, at best, stiffen into a Byzantinism worse than that which prolonged the loss of Greco-Roman civilisation. But the combative recovery, the emergence of a revolutionary situation is not to be expected, as certain Marxists, who are inclined to economic automatism, think, from a future cyclical crisis, i.e., one of the ill-named crises of overproduction. These were shocks that rebalanced the chaotic development of the system, not the effect of its exhaustion. Managed capitalism knows how to attenuate or circumvent them in various ways, and on the other hand, even if one of these crises occurs, it will in no case give rise to a revolutionary movement on its own. Without the intervention of something else, it could, on the contrary, serve the designs of the new reactionaries who are biding their time, with five-year plans in the pipeline and production standards imposed by the lash of a whip.

The general crisis of capitalism is its exhaustion as a system of association. In short, it lies in the fact that the instruments of production as capital and the wage-limited distribution of products are no longer compatible with human needs and even with the maximum possibilities offered by technology for economic development. This crisis is insurmountable for capitalism. Both Western and Russian capitalism are aggravating it day by day.

Hence the recovery of the proletariat must necessarily come from an extensive shake-up of the economic and political conditions imposed on it since before the war by the expanded and directed accumulation of capital. And that is unattainable without a prior break with the traditional schemes of immediate demands and “revolutionary progression”. The immediate thing to be achieved today is the disappearance of bonuses, pay incentives, overtime and other piecework, and also, without any reduction in average pay, a significant reduction in working hours. The general motto must be: Less work, more pay! Secondly, the unbridled and reactionary accumulation of capital must be attacked head-on, demanding: Every increase in production must go to the working class, which carries it out! Politically, the working class must begin by asserting its right to reject all factory rules and work contracts dictated by capital or by capital and the trade unions jointly, its sovereignty to decide all its problems and strikes directly, through elected delegates and assemblies on the necessary scales. Nor should we forget the individual and collective right of the proletariat to political intervention together with the workers of any country. This is the path of European and world revolutionary unity, as opposed to the backward-looking unification of capital around Washington and Moscow. The wage earners of the countries which retain certain bourgeois-democratic freedoms will thus not only be on the road to proletarian democracy, but will contribute to breaking totalitarianism in countries like Spain, Russia, China, Egypt, etc., etc., etc.

The above suffices to understand how dependent the proletariat’s return to the struggle for world revolution is on an ideological revival. A period of mass insurgency can never be the unilateral result, not only of a cyclical crisis, but also of the general crisis of capitalism. Unless the latter is combined with the presence of healthy revolutionary parties, capable of capturing the enthusiasm of the best and symbolising the hopes of the oppressed, any local revolt will fail without giving rise to an international revolutionary movement.

The Revolutionary Organisation

Alongside the material causes which have placed the proletariat at the mercy of its enemies, it is necessary to point out, as an additional political factor, the collapse of those organisations which, having opposed Stalinist reactionary corrosion from the first day, were in a better position to regroup new revolutionary parties. The work of Trotsky and the early movement of the Fourth International has made a very important contribution to the understanding of the Thermidor. But this organisation, which still claims to be Trotskyist, instead of supplementing Trotsky’s analyses and its own programme by taking into account political and social evolution, does no more than recite empty definitions of the nature of the Russian economy. Refusing to admit the capitalist and counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism, they welcomed as liberating the entry of Russian troops into Eastern Europe, when those troops were taking away from the workers the arms and factories which they had seized in more than a few cases. Its later shameful collusion with various bourgeois nationalisms, Algerian in particular, had been prepared by its defection from the Marxist slogan, “against imperialist war, for civil war,” for the sake of national defence, which the noun resistance was not even intended to cover up.

Finally, considering Russian-style state capitalism to be the economic basis of socialism, it ostensibly disavows the very revolutionary task which gave rise to its foundation. The real modern reformism is in reality the Fourth International and its ilk. They play, with regard to state-centralised capitalism, a role similar to that of the old social democracy with regard to private and monopoly capital. Without breaking with it, it is impossible to tread revolutionary ground.

The groups which abandoned the Fourth International after the 1948 congress or which pretend to continue it on their own, as the Latin American ones have done, are confined to a Trotskyist orthodoxy as negative as any other, and moreover, a deceptive one. They have drunk from the same opportunism and see in any nationalist banner the beginning of a permanent revolution, when in reality it stands in the way of the proletariat. They interpret the Transitional Programme in a right-wing manner, when experience and the needs of the masses demand that it be overcome.

In its turn, the Socialism or Barbarism tendency, also coming from the same Fourth International, has followed in the footsteps of the French left in all the important problems and moments: the Algerian war and the colonial problem, May 13, 1958, and Gaullist power, trade unions and current workers’ struggles, attitude towards Stalinism and dirigisme in general, etc. In this way, and even if they regard the Russian economy as state capitalism, they have only contributed to muddying the minds a little more. By refusing to fight against the tide, by preferring not to tell the working class anything that it is not in a position to understand, it has given itself up to failure. Devoid of nerve, it has fallen into a versatility bordering on existentialist gibberish. Lenin’s saying comes to mind for this tendency and others in the United States:

“Only a few intellectuals imagine that it is enough to talk to the workers about life in the factory and to tell them what they have known for a long time”.

As for the groups and parties which take Peking’s side in the Russian-Chinese quarrel, even with reservations, they are far to the right of what, with much tolerance, can be considered the revolutionary vanguard (10). Peking has merely imitated Russian state capitalism, the Stalinist counter-revolution. That its protector of yesterday does not allow it to be treated as anything other than a semi-colony is an occupational hazard. But that does not give him the slightest right to speak of the proletariat and the revolution. In 1926-27 Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai destroyed the Chinese soviets to the greater glory of the Russian thermidor. Now they reap what they have sown. Having become a great imperialist power, Russia demands dividends on the surplus value of 500 or 600 million Chinese workers, in addition to the subordination it owes in matters of Asian influence. Hence the ideological quarrel contains nothing but the euphemisms and hollowness of capitalist bureaucracy in dire straits.

Following Peking contributes as much to the trampling of the ideology of the proletariat as following Moscow. The mental and psychic indigence, the dregs of 30 years of Stalinism, still allows the mandarins in Peking to talk of a revolution which must also be made in China and against them. The henchmen they manage to collect will help them to establish a compromise with Moscow—the first attempt—and if that fails, with Washington.

The most radical groups of the Stalinist periphery understand by a return to revolutionary politics a return to the Popular Front, which was the imperialist war tactic put into play, under the guise of reformism, when the counter-revolution was marching in Russia with a drum roll, mowing down the heads of all those who were still even partially revolutionary. The fact is that since all these groups are by-products of the crisis which started the Stalinist counter-revolution, they have nothing positive to offer. The workers and young people who by a thousand fortuitous circumstances find themselves in their midst will be lost for all revolutionary work, unless they repudiate with the utmost critical rigour the whole work of Stalinism as capitalist counter-revolution in Russia and in the world. An indispensable prolegomenon to be in a position to contribute theoretically and practically to the rebirth of a world proletarian party.

Never has there been so much talk of victorious revolutions as today; never has there been such a reactionary epoch, from East to West. It would seem that capital is about to reassert its dominion for a thousand years by embedding in the brains of its victims, like a religion, that planned exploitation is socialism and the police dictatorship of a party the government of the proletariat. These are nothing more than deceptive appearances. On both sides of the dividing line between the blocs, formidable revolutionary energies have been building up. They can be set in motion at any moment, anywhere. But their crystallisation into proletarian victory will be impossible without a new revolutionary organisation. The creation of such an organisation, on the contrary, will precipitate an irresistible avalanche of the masses, will strain all their energies towards the supreme goal, a true civilisation will be able to emerge for the first time from among humankind.

The First International united the workers across borders, and before its dissolution it had carried out an immense work of ideological education, which is still today one of the main sources of revolutionary inspiration. The Second International challenged capitalism for workers’ rights and living standards, but refusing to overthrow it, it ended up joining its legality, which is darkness for the exploited. The Third International led the struggle for world revolution for several years and continued the educational work of the First, until the Thermidor began to use it as an external instrument of his conservative policy. Totally debased by the Stalinist counter-revolution, it supported all the crimes of the latter in Russia and contributed decisively to the defeat of the world proletariat. For its part, the Fourth International, which had immense possibilities within its organic meagerness, has been dissipating its theoretical heritage from exegesis to exegesis, until it finally annulled its independence as a movement.

A new revolutionary organisation is indispensable to the world proletariat. But its constitution will be impossible or very defective if it does not incorporate into its thinking the harsh ideological and organisational experiences endured from 1914 to the present. Past defeats must mark the road to victory. Such an organisation must go beyond the traditional conglomeration of national parties and at the same time reject any organic centralism which empowers a handful of leaders to place the rank and file before consummating disciplinary decisions. It must prefigure the future world without borders and without classes. It is for this purpose that we adopt this Manifesto and propose it to all the revolutionary groups and workers of the world. It is necessary to make a decisive break with dead tactics and ideas, to tell the working class the whole truth without reticence, to rectify without mourning everything that hinders the revival of the revolution, whether it comes from Lenin, Trotsky or Marx himself, to adopt a programme of demands in accordance with the maximum possibilities of modern technology and culture placed at the service of humanity.

Tasks of Our Time

Organisation of direct workers’ action, independent of any trade union, is to be carried out under the general slogan detailed below.

A. Less Work and More Pay

1. Abolition of piecework and the basic wage that stimulates it, replacing it with one job and one wage per day, per week, etc.
2. Reduction of the working week to 30 hours (first step), without any reduction in wages, to which bonuses, allowances, overtime, etc., all that constitutes, covers up or encourages piecework, must be added.
3. The abolition of timekeeping and controls which intensify exploitation, harass the worker and debase their personal dignity. Only those concerned in each enterprise or branch of production have the power to determine the pace of work.
4. Any increase in production (its present value), whether due to increased output of the worker or to technical improvements, must be collectively distributed to the workers who produce it, pending the decision of the whole class to share it out. This is the way to put a stop to the ever-crushing accumulation of capital and to really raise the living standards of the exploited.
5. Work for all, unemployed and young workers, with working hours reduced in proportion to the number of workers and to instrumental improvements. This is a class solidarity which has profound consequences, and a right to work which is accompanied by the supreme right to laziness, which does not exist today despite the holidays, a mere physiological relaxation similar to that of sleep.
6. Denunciation of collective agreements not established directly with the company by the workers and approved by the latter.
7. Free distribution to the poorest social strata of the poor of food and consumer goods stored as surplus production, distribution to be carried out either in the same country or in any other country without distinction of blocs.

Independent action in defence of basic freedoms must be the motto:

B. The Proletariat’s Right to Speak, to Organise and to Strike

These rights are confiscated by the parties and trade union organisations to which they are subjected, now inseparable from decadent capitalism. In the factories, the trade union-employer agreements have suppressed both the individual and collective freedom of the workers, especially the revolutionaries, to such an extent that in many places they can be legally dismissed for speaking about politics, distributing propaganda, or for concerting with each other for any purpose whatsoever. It is therefore essential to demand:

1. Political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to distribute newspapers, leaflets, etc., in the workplaces, and freedom of assembly in the workplaces when required for the self-defence of the workers.
2. Challenging all internal company regulations issued by the employer (bourgeois or state), or by the latter and the trade unions jointly. In every enterprise or trade, the workers themselves, through the delegates elected for this purpose, must have the power, exclusive of all others, to establish internal rules. Approval in general assembly is a precautionary requirement.
3. Unrestricted sovereignty of workers, regardless of government or trade union endorsement, to take economic or political strike action.
4. The right to speak and vote for all interested parties, regardless of trade union or political affiliation, to decide on the demands of each strike, the moment of its declaration and its cessation, as well as on all other problems that concern them.
5. The right to directly elect, without any trade union or judicial requirement, permanent shop, factory, trade, etc. delegates to represent the workers vis-à-vis the management.
6. The right to consult in any event and at any time, through such direct delegates, with workers in other industries or activities, throughout the country and internationally.

In this way, the proletariat will regain and expand its freedom of speech and action, today suppressed in most countries or transformed, in the less dictatorial ones, into a monopoly of parties and trade unions which in reality constitute the legal structure of the exploitation of labour by capital. In countries like Russia, China and imitators, it is necessary to start by fighting against the ignominy of fines, police and judicial punishments for late entry or non-attendance at work, against the infamous labour books, for the right of speech and organisation of the masses against the dictatorial party.

Without a determined struggle for the above-mentioned demands, the proletariat will continue to yield ground to capital and increase the already fantastic oppressive potential of capital.

The immediate or minimum demands listed above can play a very important role in the resumption of proletarian activity throughout the world, in advanced and backward countries alike. But since it cannot in any case be a question of improving or developing the economy of capital and wages, but of doing away with it, it is indispensable to link them without interruption with the supreme measures of the world proletarian revolution, with which it may perhaps be possible to begin in some cases:

C. Down with Capital and Wage Labour

1. Political power to the workers, through democratically appointed and at all times revocable committees.
2. Expropriation of industrial, financial and agricultural capital, not by the state, the trade unions or any other corporation, which would give rise, as in Russia, to even more brutal capitalism, but by the working class as a whole.
3. Workers’ management of the production and distribution of products, which is inseparable from a planning exclusively dictated by the need for the disappearance of classes.
4. Destruction of all instruments of war, atomic and classical, disbanding of armies and police, reconversion of war industries to consumer production.
5. Individual arming of the exploited under capitalism, organised territorially, according to democratic management and distribution committees. This is one of the best guarantees that social transformation can have.
6. The incorporation into useful activities of all sections of the population which are at present engaged in parasitic or even harmful work. This will make it possible, by making maximum use of technology and science and a minimum of human effort, to steadily increase production and reduce the time spent on it. It is also the way to overcome the division, today imposed by exploitation, between manual and intellectual labour.
7. The abolition of wage labour, beginning with the raising of the standard of living of the poorest social strata, up to the free distribution of products according to the needs of each individual. There is and can be no other proof of the transformation of capitalism into socialism and of the disappearance of classes.
8. The abolition of borders and the constitution of a single government and economy in accordance with the victory of the proletariat in the various countries.

Finally, it has become imperative to establish that the transition from capitalism to communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is a Marxist sociological concept, inseparable from the most complete democracy within the working masses, themselves in the process of disappearing as a class. The emancipation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves. Those who identify it with the dictatorship of one party or even of several parties, such as the capitalist dictatorship called parliamentary democracy, turn their backs on it. Only the disappearance of the mercantile law of value, based on wage-labour, will bring about the extinction of the state. Without entering into this from the very beginning of the revolution, the state quickly becomes the organiser of the counter-revolution.

The objective conditions for the realisation of the communism that history was to create are present and ripe on a world scale, but only on the wings of revolutionary subjectivity will mankind succeed in bridging the gap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Proletarians of all countries unite to abolish armies, police, production for war, borders, wage labour!

G. Munis

Milan, 1961.

(1) American workers employed in automated machines call them mankillers.  

(2) See Lenin, State Capitalism and Cash Tax. 

(3) In his speech to the All-Russian Congress of Economic Councils, held in Moscow in May 1918. 

(4) Some remarkable examples among a thousand:
At the 1^st International Conference in Geneva, attended by a delegation from Moscow, when the Stalinist Thermidor was already on the horizon, the British representative, Chamberlain, the future Munich man, exclaimed: “Britain will not deal with the Soviet Union until Trotsky has been shot”.
Trotsky’s expulsion from the C.C. and the Russian Party, as well as his later deportation to Alma Ata, were applauded by the bourgeois press and the Western chancelleries as a sure sign of the reactionary fraction’s victory over the revolutionary fraction.
His Majesty’s lawyer Pit publicly endorsed Moscow’s judicial falsifications in 1936-38, while shortly afterwards, billionaire Eric A. Johnston (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce) welcomed the extermination of the Bolsheviks of 1917. In the same years, Laval obtained from Stalin a full patriotic subordination of the Western Stalinist parties.
The French Party’s motto was: The police are with us.
In 1937-38, the imperialist capitals looked with relief and encouraged the repression of the Spanish revolution by the Negrin government, which Stalin’s henchmen dominated and inspired directly. In 1944, the Greek proletariat, raised and almost victorious, was brutally repressed by a coalition of Stalinists, clerics and English troops. Churchill, after a personal conference on repression with the Greek communist party, bragged in the House of Commons that he had crushed the true communist revolution, the one that is also feared in Moscow.

Finally, Russian tanks could not have machine-gunned the Budapest proletariat in 1956 without the passive complicity of Western imperialism. For them, as for Russia, the assertion of rival power is always preferable to the triumph of a revolution that would set the masses of the whole world in motion.

A complete list of similar facts, still hidden or falsified by the propaganda of the two blocks, would fill a large volume.  

(5) Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, part of Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, not to mention Yugoslavia and Albania. 

(6) In History and Class Struggle, in the penultimate chapter. 

(7) This chapter was written before Algeria’s independence at the beginning of 1961.  

(8) Programme of the Twenty-second Congress of Russian Technocrats (July 1961):
“[E]nsure maximum production and production yield everywhere for each ruble invested (…). Constantly improve the wage and bonus system; control the quantity and quality of work through the ruble; reject the levelling of remuneration“. 

(9) Mutual Economic Assistance Committee. 

(10) Without claiming to appreciate in particular each of these organizations, we can consider the various groups of the Italian Left, in France the Communist Programme, in Japan the Revolutionary Communist League and, almost everywhere in the world, some groups of Trotskyist or independent anarchist origin.