Points of Unity
History is driven by the conflict between the relations and forces of production, which are personified in the form of class struggle. In capitalist society, this struggle is between the capitalist class — the class that controls the means of production, and the working class, the class that is excluded from control, and thus must work on the capitalists’ property in exchange for a wage.
Capitalist society is a society based on generalized commodity production, a society where workers sell their ability to labor to a capitalist in exchange for a wage to produce commodities which are exchanged for money. The difference in value produced by the workers and what they are paid is pocketed as profit. Capital is the cycle of money being invested into production to produce more money.
Capitalism can no longer develop the forces of production without coming into conflict with the relations of production: this manifests in the form of continuous wars, periodic crises which throw millions into poverty, ongoing deindustrialization in the global West, and permanently underdeveloped areas throughout the world, among countless other effects.
The role of the state is to defend the present relations of production and by doing so defends the economic dominance of the capitalist class. This makes the capitalist class politically dominant: it is the ruling class, and controls the state. It has control of the state precisely because it is the economically dominant class. The seemingly neutral character of the “democratic” state is nothing more than a disguise for class rule.
Communism is the abolition of capitalism and its aspects: wage labor, commodity production, markets, money and the state. The communist mode of production is based on common ownership of property and the production of goods for use rather than exchange. Due to the globalized nature of capitalism, it can only be abolished globally, thus communism can only exist as a global system.
The economic base of society shapes the superstructure which includes politics, culture, morality and the method of societal reproduction. By abolishing capitalism, a communist revolution would abolish its superstructure, which would mean the abolition of race, religion, the nuclear family, patriarchy, gender, morality as it currently exists, consumerism, individualism, and all currently existing ideologies amongst other things.
The historical “socialist states” of the Cold War in reality were capitalist societies where the state played a central role in the economy. These states did not form from worker movements but instead from coup d’etats, peasant-bureaucratic revolutions or were imposed militarily by the USSR and were the outgrowth of the internal counter-revolution that liquidated the working class revolution in Russia.
The working class cannot peacefully take control of the state and use it for its own gains, the only way it can transform society is by organizing as a class at a global scale and violently smashing the state machinery, imposing its revolutionary dictatorship. This would be done with the aim of putting the means of production under common ownership to eliminate exchange and distribute goods solely for the purpose of use.
The working class can only transform society if it acts exclusively in its interests, and it can only do so if it organizes independently: it must exclude all other classes from its class organizations and strip them of all political power over the course of the revolution. There can be no compromise with the capitalist class and its state, and this extends to other states that have not yet fallen to the workers’ dictatorship.
The indispensable organ of the working class is the World Communist Party, composed of the most revolutionary and dedicated militants, regardless of class. The role of the party is to unify the local economic struggles into a movement of the working class as a whole for the destruction of the capitalist system and the abolition of all classes: the only way the producers can be emancipated.
The World Communist Party plays a leading role in the workers’ revolutionary dictatorship, coordinating the world revolutionary process and ensuring that the revolution maintains its trajectory towards World Communism. It is capable of this because the party embodies the Communist programme. A workers’ revolution against capitalism means the acceptance of the programme and thus the party.
The destruction of class society means the elimination of the necessity of a state apparatus to enforce the rule of a class. A neutral state that represents the people as a whole is impossible. The end of the revolution and the establishment of Communism would thus mean the disappearance of the state and the beginning of the material human community, based on freely associated labor.