Platform
The Materialist Conception of History
We believe in the theory of Historical Materialism — that is that ideas aren’t the driving force of societal change, class conflict is, which have an interactive relationship with material reality, which can be simply described as the relationship between man and man, and the relationship between man and nature. Class conflict is not a result of differing ideas, but of fundamentally opposing material interests between groups that can be scientifically discerned. Thus we hold that if Marx had never lived, or even Lenin, then the October revolution would have still likely happened.The actions of “Great Men” and their ideas are just a reflection of material conditions, so even if you changed details around, the broad strokes of history would have still played out similarly. What makes a revolution a “socialist” revolution, or a “capitalist” revolution has little to do with the personal ideology of its members, but rather the class basis for the revolution. This is not to say that ideas have no effect on the world, but they only have as much effect as material conditions allow it, and these ideas themselves are generated by material forces. Ideology is an imperfect way to perceive reality, it is reality turned upside down. A liberal-democratic state has as much in common with a “Marxist-Leninist” state or a fascist state in that all three ideologies are masks for true material reality that props up these states: the rule of capital and the capitalist class, albeit in different forms.
Class conflict arises out a conflict between the forces and relations of production. The forces of production are the technical development of production (factories, farms, robots, etc..) while the relations of production are the social arrangements between people. As the forces of production develop, they come into conflict with the relations of production. Handicraft was ill-suited for capitalism, so capitalist competition revolutionized it into mechanized industry. Capitalism was born out of this conflict, the conflict between the developing forces of production: industry, which was leading to accumulation of surpluses, and the old relations of production, that is the system of feudalism, based on serf labor. The corresponding class conflict, between the feudal classes such as the nobility and monarchy, and the arising bourgeoisie: the merchants, peasants and artisans, lead to revolutions such as the French revolution, which abolished feudalism and established free trade as the basis for capital to freely develop. The ideology of liberalism grew to match this new state of affairs, to attempt to explain and justify it.
Just as capitalism grew out of the overthrow of the old relations of production and the revolutionizing of the forces of production, the material basis for communism lies in the unification of the species into the global productive apparatus that is the world capitalist economy, the vast material wealth produced by the advanced productive forces of capitalism which is held back by the relations of production, and the class struggle between the classes that correspond to the forces and relations of production: the working class — the class which sells the only thing it owns, its labor-power, and the capitalist class — the class which owns the means of production and buys the workers’ labor-power.
Historical Trajectory of World Capitalism
The conflict between the relations and forces of production under capitalist society is soon approaching its event horizon: automation. Capitalism is based on the accumulation of capital, which requires there to be profit. Profit can only come from labor. This can be explained simply: Assuming market equilibrium, the fluctuation of supply and demand will tend to stabilize the price of a commodity at its cost of production. Why? Well, a capitalist cannot sell his goods at an arbitrary price, since he is in competition. Since capitalists are trying to outsell each other, the price of a good will continue to be lowered, since the cheapest good can be bought by the greatest amount of people. Of course, the price cannot drop below the production cost, since this would be unprofitable and cause the capitalist to go out of business. Thus price will hover around production cost. Then where does profit come from if not selling arbitrarily higher than the cost of production? In order to make a profit, capitalists must somehow produce a commodity which is then sold at a price higher than its cost of production.
This is a paradox: in continually seeking a profit, capital is in a continual struggle against the fundamental law of supply and demand, which continually seeks to adjust the prices of commodities to their cost of production and thus adjust profits to zero. The capitalist must find a way to lower the cost of one of the factors of production. The cost of the machines, raw materials, etc… are out of his control, themselves subject to the fluctuations of the market, however what the capitalist pays his workers is not.
In the olden days the capitalist could make his worker work longer for the same amount of daily pay as before, thus part of the time the worker was working uncompensated. Now that the workday is legally fixed, in the modern day the capitalist can either lower the worker’s wage, or alternatively, the capitalist can make the worker work harder, to produce more goods in the same amount of time and introduce technical methods to speed up production, but since pay will not increase proportionally to more goods being made, once again the worker is being paid less than he is producing. Capitalist profit thus arises from systematically setting the price of labor power (i.e. the wages given to the laborer) at an amount lower than the value it adds to the productive process. As long as the price of labor power is at least equal to its own cost of production (i.e. the amount of money a laborer needs in order to survive and show up to work the next day) the capitalist is free to extract from labor a value greater than its price, pocketing the difference as profit. Thus on aggregate, profit can only come from unpaid labor.
Capital is categorized thusly: human labor power with its two different values (the value the laborer derives in the form of wages and the extra surplus value the capitalist derives in the form of profits) is called variable capital, while the other commodities such as machinery that a capitalist must use as means of production are called constant capital. Since capitalists are continually struggling to gain a comparative advantage against each other by selling greater amounts of commodities, they are continually seeking to maximize the productivity of their workers, which means investing more in the constant capital that each worker uses in production. But since profit can only come from variable capital, the greater a proportion of the total capital is invested in constant capital employed by each laborer, the lower a proportion of the total capital can be invested in variable capital, thus the rate of profit, the ratio between profit and total capital invested, (profit/(variable + constant capital) will fall over time.
In other words, over time the capitalist will be forced to invest increasingly larger and larger sums of money to get the same amount of profit as before. This presents a problem: There are limited resources on Earth. As the profit rate drops, competition over resources and markets will intensify, leading to the most intense form of competition: War. After all, if the local market is exhausted, then the capitalist must find a new, less developed market to compete in and extract profit from, until that market has reached the same development as the previous, exhausted market, then the capitalist must once again find a new market. Of course, borders stand in the way of unrestricted access to this, backed by armies. Meanwhile the capitalist will try to beat the falling rate of profit by paying his workers less, making them work harder and harder, replacing them with robots, but this does not work long term. There is a limit to how little the worker can be paid, both the legal limit in the form of minimum wage, and a physical limit, in that if the worker cannot buy the goods needed to sustain themself then they will starve and be unable to work. Humans have a physical limit in how hard they can possibly work, and a psychological limit, which once reached, they will start protesting, such as with strikes or riots. Replacing the workers with robots cannot work long term, since if the workers do not have money then they cannot buy goods, and thus the capitalist cannot sell — this leads to economic crisis. So war is the only option, but war itself is a crisis. War causes economic and social chaos: food shortages, famine, migration crises, destruction of industry, disease, and in the modern nuclear age war is an existential threat to humanity.
If the process of maximizing productivity could be carried to a point where production was totally automated with no need for human labor power at all, then there would be no variable capital, nothing would systematically keep the prices of commodities higher than their cost of production, and the rate of profit would thus stabilize at zero. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall describes the fundamental economic imperatives that drive the capitalist mode of production ever closer to this point, and therefore drive it ever closer to its final crisis. The relations of production: wage-labor and capital accumulation (profit) cannot survive the developing forces of production: widespread automation. It is capitalism’s event horizon.
Of course, the conflict between the relations and forces of production, in the form of class war and economic crises, have occurred since the industrial era, since the mid 1800s. Each time this crisis, caused by the falling rate of profit, was solved through a different manner. During the Great Depression it was solved by concentrating all the small capitals in the form of one large capital: state-ownership (New Deal, Social-Democracy, Stalinism, Fascism), to efficiently, methodically and collectively exploit the national working class, with local, national competition between small capitals giving way to the international competition of national-state capitals: World War II. The difference between state-ownership in the West and East was the difference between fully developed capital needing to exploit in a planned manner to prevent stagnation vs. underdeveloped capital needing to catch up to the West without Western capital flowing into and controlling the nation. Thus the Eastern form was more authoritarian than the Western form since it had to brutally accomplish in a matter of decades the level of industrialization it took the West centuries to accomplish. The widespread destruction of constant capital by the war and the ensuing renewal of markets in Europe as well as Western expansion into the 3rd world created an era of economic prosperity. Of course, the iron law of capitalism could not be beaten.
As automation developed, the rate of profit would continue to fall during the Cold War. Throughout the 1970s-90s the rate of profit had fallen to the point globally where the money to invest in state programs no longer existed: thus in the West there were widespread privatizations and dismantling of state programs, while the same thing occurred in the East, the end of state-socialism, in reality state subsidized capitalism, which meant the end of the Eastern Bloc, and mass privatizations. The opening up of Chinese markets temporarily stalled the fall of the rate of profit as capital migrated from the stagnating West to the industrializing, prospering Far East.
But as previously discussed, there are no more options. What previously worked: state-ownership, is no longer on the agenda. Privatization still works, and so the state consumes itself, chopping more and more of its limbs off and selling them, but it only has so many limbs to sell. Eventually, privatization will reach its limit, all the while causing more and more suffering as welfare, labor laws, national parks, environmental protections, regulatory agencies, etc… are all gutted for the sake of profit. After all, for the decadent state to remain competitive with the global economy all barriers to capital accumulation must be stripped away. Anything that can be sold, must be sold, human need be damned.
Politics and “Democracy” as Management of Capital
Democracy is the best shell for managing capital. Democracy, where each autonomous, “free” individual can pick and choose his representative as easily as he picks what brand of toothpaste he wants! Democracy is compromise — the compromise of different interests, whether this is class interests or inter-class interests. The capitalist class has to allow the working class some degree of representation, or else the working class might revolt! Yet the capitalist class as a whole does not have a united interest beyond preserving capitalism, after all, the capitalist class is in economic competition with itself. The capitalist with shares in Apple vs. the capitalist with shares in Microsoft! The capitalist with shares in Coke, vs. the capitalist with shares in Pepsi! The capitalist with shares in Disney vs. the capitalist with shares in Fox!
This struggle for economic dominance translates into the struggle for political dominance, to leverage the state to pass laws that benefit this or that capitalist. Thus different capitalists back different parties. For example, the capitalists of the solar panel industry back the Democrats while the capitalists of the oil industry back the Republicans. Yet when capitalism is threatened, whether by economic crisis, or revolution, or both, the capitalist class will not hesitate to close ranks, to unite behind a single party, to expel the working class from politics, and suspend democracy, whilst temporarily suspending economic competition through state involvement in the economy. The German Industrialists asked Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to the Chancellorship as easily as the Italian industrialists welcomed Mussolini and his Black Shirts. Yet once Germany surrendered, in the western occupation zone most of the Nazis got off with a slap on the wrist. Only a handful of the worst of the worst were ever tried, while former party members were allowed back in office since they were seen as tough on the USSR. No industrialist who profited off of slave labor ever went to prison, let alone was forced to pay compensation.
Dictatorship and Democracy are both different modes of capital management, both best suited for different economic and political circumstances, and since the economy is beyond the conscious control of the populace, democracy can just as easily turn into dictatorship as dictatorship turns into democracy. Democracy cannot be used to demolish capitalism anymore than choosing from what brand you buy can. A communist party elected to power will be put in the position of having to manage capital, which will mean the destruction of its working class character.
Communism is neither democratic or dictatorial, it is organic. If democracy means the majority deciding and dictatorship means the minority deciding, then organicism means the entirety doing. Following the victorious global conquest of power by the working class, class interests will disappear with class itself, political power and with it the state will wither away. The only interest will be the human interest, and with the abolition of the division of labor the contradiction between the individual and the collective, between liberty and equality will no longer exist. Humanity will no longer be divided into a competition between fundamentally irreconcilable different interests, it will be collaborating through freely associated production to find its way in the universe.
Communism as the Movement of the Global Working Class
Just as capitalism was the movement of capital, of capitalists, before it was solidified through the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism, Communism is the movement of capital’s antithesis: labor, and the corresponding class, the working class. Labor is the antithesis of capital because it stands in opposition to capital, which parasitically feeds off labor. The opposition is seen in the difference between surplus and necessary labor. The necessary labor is the labor necessary for the worker to produce the value he needs to survive, and the surplus labor is what is required to make a profit. The worker desires to minimize surplus labor, while the capitalist is compelled to seek the opposite. Or in other words, workers want their wages to be as high as possible while capitalists want wages to be as low as possible. This contradiction is where class struggle comes from, and thus is the basis for Communism.
The conflict starts small: the worker becomes lazy, uncooperative, unwilling to allow himself to be dictated by capital. He distracts himself at work, uses every avenue to avoid it. But as exploitation increases, the rate of profit drops, the worker becomes more and more subordinated to the machine, he begins to protest more and more. He seeks out fellow workers at his place of employment, they band together, unionizing. If they do not get what they want, they strike. Yet they can only get so many demands. They might be satisfied for the time being, but eventually economic crisis will hit. Strikes turn into riots and workplace occupations.
To exercise their strength, The workers organize, not by trade, but by municipality. Councils of delegates, elected by workers from their workplaces, coordinate strikes and occupations. Yet they receive push-back. The state sends in the police to defend the capitalists’ property and break up organized labor. The councils have no choice, to protect themselves they must be armed. The workers form militias to defend their class organizations: the unions and councils. The crisis, as all economic crises, is international. All workers everywhere are affected, and the local councils realize they can increase their leverage if they unite. The councils elect delegates to higher councils, which elect their own delegates, until there is a national council coordinating the national working class.
Yet the class is still acting defensively, not offensively. This is not enough, for capital and labor cannot coexist: one feeds off the other and so to liberate labor, capital must be smashed. Most workers will not recognize this at first, but a few will: the revolutionaries, who will read and understand the revolutionary theory, who will organize into a party and will agitate within the workers’ organizations to raise the question of the seizure of political power. Once the majority of the working class has become united around the programme of the seizure of power and the abolition of capital, once the class is organized under the leadership of a genuinely international and internationalist communist party, then the class will go on the offensive, directing the armed workers to smash the old state and replace it with a new, working class state based on the grassroots organizations of workers’ councils, and this new state will then seize control of all the means of production. The councils, previously only strike committees, are now organs of the political and economic domination of the working class, the overwhelming majority of humanity.
This is still not enough. Capital cannot be abolished within a single country since capital demands continuous expansion and thus the state would be forced to close its borders to prevent capital from the rest of the world from flowing in. This would not be sustainable, however, as all countries need resources from other countries, they must trade and participate in the world economy, yet this means producing for exchange rather than producing for use. Capital would still exist. Thus communism is impossible within a single country. The best the workers’ revolutionary state can do is seize control of all national capital, subject it to strict workers’ control and thus restrain its ability to exploit living labor, to self-expand, at least until the revolution has won internationally. To prevent capital from self-expanding, surplus value production must be eliminated, thus the working day must be shortened and wages must be increased, and production must be consciously planned to meet human needs rather than to maximize profit for the sake of a few exploiters.
In the meantime the revolution must be coordinated internationally. The party must be international, and work tirelessly to unite all workers into the global system of armed councils. The revolutionary state can only suppress capital for so long, before it is forced to compete, to trade with the outside world, before capital once again takes control, and thus must do everything possible to expand. The revolution must spread like wildfire, and once the powerful nations have fallen to their workers, military force must be used to assist the working class of the smaller nations. Borders dissolve into the worldwide association of workers.
As soon as all production globally is in the hands of the organized workers and their councils, then capital can finally be abolished. Production is coordinated globally, all of the means of production acting as one single unit, as a single factory. Exchange ceases, just as much as the different stations and subdivisions of a factory do not sell to each other. With the disappearance of exchange, money is rendered useless. Goods are directly distributed without exchange to fulfill human needs and wants, and over time, as class distinctions disappear and the populace becomes accustomed to the new social order, the state apparatus — the militias of workers, withers away. The global and associated producers themselves are in control of production, rather than being dictated by capital and its parasitic state.
The Opportunism of Historical So-Called “Socialism”
Since Scientific Socialism, Marxism, was first theorized, it has battled with the “deniers, falsifiers and modernizers”. Those opportunists who claim to be socialists in favor of socialism* yet since they do not possess a scientific socialist understanding of the nature of capitalism, can with all their imaginative schemes only recreate capitalism in a different form.
The first struggles were with the deniers, those who outright rejected scientific socialism: the anarchists. Anarchists want to divide up everything equally, to disperse and decentralize political power. This has taken the form of different proposals: whether it is union control of corporations, making all businesses worker co-operatives, or making municipalities have control over production, with no central authority. These are all schemes for the democratic management of capitalism, where the big bad capitalist in a top hat is replaced with a nice democratically elected capitalist, or where everyone is a small-capitalist. Co-operatives only make the worker his own boss, his own exploiter. He would still have to discipline himself to the socially necessary labor time to remain profitable, and such a society, whether of worker co-ops or trade-unions or city-communes, would still be dominated by capital and all the problems it brings, for example the already discussed tendency of rate of profit to fall.
Over time however as Marxism proved its correctness on the stage of history the deniers would be shown to be demonstrably wrong, and thus opportunism could only come about from those claiming to be Marxists. The modernizers, those who claimed that Marxism was outdated and needed to be modernized, were the Social-Democrats. They claimed that revolution was outdated, since according to them the working class had now become large enough and powerful enough to peacefully establish socialism, all they had to do was get their representatives elected into power to implement socialism. Funny enough, these representatives were the Social-Democrats themselves. Convenient! Of course once elected these modernizers betrayed the working class, not hesitating to deploy the forces of the state against them to preserve capitalism. The case of the German revolution, where the Social-Democratic government massacred the revolutionary workers and drowned the revolution in blood shows the political bankruptcy of Social-Democracy quite clearly.
The October revolution was originally a socialist revolution, in concert with the erupting world revolution which engulfed Europe. The class basis of the revolution were the millions of oppressed Russian workers tired of war, famine and economic chaos. However over the course of the revolution it degenerated into a capitalist revolution, because the conditions that could allow communism to be established ceased to exist. The failure of the October revolution to successfully spread beyond the borders of Russia doomed any attempt to establish communism. Without direction and devastated by the Civil War, the Russian working class gradually lost power to an expanding bureaucracy which conceded to the petty-bourgeois interests of the cooperative peasantry, completing the tasks of the capitalist revolution: dismantling feudalism, and establishing a modern industrial state. It did not matter what the intentions of its leaders were, the USSR had to do what it did to stay competitive on the global economy, which meant engaging in capitalism. The coming to power of the capitalist counter-revolution needed an ideological justification, thus came the Falsifiers who came up with “Marxism-Leninism”, in reality Stalinism. Stalinism as an ideology champions the concepts of “Socialism In One Country” and “National Self-Determination”, which states that socialist revolution can successfully occur on a national level, in which the resulting state builds socialism internally through state-directed industrialization. Yet the producers under Stalinism remained wage-workers, overworked and payed the bare minimum so that profit could be extracted to invest into industries to remain competitive on the world economy. Or in other words, capitalism plain and simple. Socialism in One Country becoming state policy in 1926 spelled the death of the October revolution, and the point when the Soviet state had completely crossed over into the camp of international capitalism.
Stalinist and Social-Democratic states pursued state directed capitalism with heavy welfare policies, the only difference being that Stalinist states were more openly dictatorial owing to the fact that these states arose from agrarian societies that needed to quickly industrialize, thus quickly accumulate capital thus exploit its working class to a much greater degree than an already industrialized state. Stalinism is capitalism. Workers worked for wages in factories to produce goods which were then sold for profit on local markets and the international market, just like in any other capitalist society. The only difference being that the legal owner of the factory was not an individual, or a group of stockholders, but the state. The relationship between an individual factory owner and his employees was identical to the relationship between the Soviet party-state and the Soviet working class, just on a much larger scale. The state played the role of capitalist.
Stalinists, and other falsifiers such as Trotskyists and Maoists claimed that they were following an authentic Marxism, in opposition to the “revisionist” Social-Democrats, yet in practice they were not much different. Societies where anarchists, Stalinists or Social-Democrats have held power, the deniers, falsifiers and modernizers, were still as capitalist as any other capitalist state, despite the protests of the leaders, and still as oppressive to the working class.
Role of the Party
Just as the struggle for economic supremacy translates into the struggle for political supremacy, the vessels for economic struggle, the trade unions, workers’ councils, etc… require a political component. The vehicle for the political struggle of the working class is the class party, composed of the most revolutionary and far sighted members of the working class along with members of other classes who have renounced their class allegiances and perspectives and have adopted the revolutionary working class perspective, united in accordance around the Communist programme. The party, which has “no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole,” undertakes the tasks necessary to achieve the international unity of all workers. The party is the content, while the economic organs such as the workers’ councils are the form. While the cup is important, the purpose of the cup is to fill it with liquid. What the cup is used for determines its purpose. Similarly, the party fills the class organs with content, the revolutionary programme for the seizure of power, giving them direction.
By themselves these class organs, the unions and workers’ councils, are not inherently revolutionary — they can coexist with capital, and be integrated into it. History has proven this to be true — the workers’ councils which seized power in Germany voted in a Social-Democratic party to power and then disbanded themselves in favor of a liberal parliamentary capitalist state, while in Russia the councils, known as soviets, became integrated into the bureaucratic-capitalist state once Stalinism took hold. The seizure of political power in Russia by the working class only took place once the Bolsheviks had won a majority within the soviets, once the majority of the working class was united around the communist programme. The class was a party, not in the sense that they were card carrying Bolsheviks, but in the sense that they shared and were united around the same goals. The party, as the preserver of the communist programme, is absolutely necessary to the struggle of the working class. Without a revolutionary party, revolution is not possible.
Relationship of Internationalist Communists NC to the Future Party
The party only constitutes itself as a world-historical fact during revolutionary periods. During previous eras of revolutionary upheaval, the party existed in the form of the Communist League, then the International Workingmen’s Association, the Socialist International and the Communist International. In between revolutionary periods the world party will either fracture and fall apart, like the Communist League and 1st International, or degenerate into a counter-revolutionary organ and join the ranks of the capitalists, like the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. During these periods, the party does not exist, only disunited, tiny fractions of it do. These fractions constitute the theoretical and organizational bridge between the previous party and the next party.
The International Communists NC is not a fraction, it is a small group seeking to become a fraction, a nucleus of revolutionary communists which seeks the reformation of revolutionary working class politics within North Carolina and the world. When the working class is faced with the possibility of establishing its class rule, it will have to centralize itself, unite behind a single party, and thus all the disunited fractions of genuine revolutionaries must unite into a single international organization. Thus we are seeking to integrate ourselves into the worldwide workers’ struggle by uniting with all the genuine revolutionary groups, and working towards their reunification and the restoration of the world communist party, the indispensable weapon of the working class in its struggle for liberation. North Carolina has historically been a location of tremendous class struggle, being the site of the violent Gastonia strikes of 1929, and one of the sites of the Textile Workers General strike of 1934, which drew worldwide attention. Establishing a genuine revolutionary group in North Carolina would be a step towards the revival of militant class struggle in North Carolina, a precondition for the resurrection of militant class struggle everywhere and the worldwide victory of communism.
*Like Marx, Engels, and other genuine communists, we consider communism and socialism to be synonymous.