The Persian Gulf: A War for Capital, a War Against Life
The war in the Middle East has entered a new and far more dangerous phase. Following the Twelve-Day War, the Forty-Day War, and a series of fragile ceasefires, repeated U.S. strikes against southern Iran have made the prospect of the conflict spreading across the entire Persian Gulf more real than ever before. Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, the Red Sea, and other countries hosting U.S. military forces have effectively become part of the geography of this war.
The possibility of renewed Israeli participation in joint military operations, together with an increased focus on ports, islands, and critical infrastructure in southern Iran, indicates that the conflict may move beyond reciprocal military strikes toward direct control over strategic energy hubs, maritime routes, and key infrastructure.
Should the war reach this stage, the issue will no longer be limited to the bombing of a handful of military installations. What military commanders and governments describe as “strategic control” means, for millions of people, the destruction of cities, the shutdown of workplaces, mass displacement, and the militarization of the very spaces where people work and live their everyday lives.
Two weeks ago, we argued that the conflict in the Persian Gulf is fundamentally a war over the control of capital circulation, energy routes, and the distribution of global profits among competing powers. Recent developments demonstrate even more clearly how the competition between capitalist powers over capital accumulation and spheres of influence inevitably turns into a war against the conditions of social life itself. Ports, refineries, power stations, railways, transport networks, factories, and service facilities are not merely “strategic targets.” They embody the accumulated labour of successive generations of the working class and constitute the material foundations upon which the production and reproduction of social life depend.
When a refinery or a port where workers earn their livelihood is bombed, workers lose far more than their jobs. The closure of production facilities throws thousands of families into unemployment, deprives them of income, drives up the cost of living, and forces many to abandon their homes. Children are denied education, patients lose access to medical care, and neighbourhoods and cities built through generations of collective labour face evacuation and destruction. The victims of war are not only those buried beneath the rubble. The unemployed worker, the displaced family, and every person deprived of water, electricity, medicine, or shelter are equally victims of the same war.
Yet the targeting of workplaces and living spaces extends beyond the destruction of buildings and machinery. The devastation of factories, ports, and neighbourhoods disperses workers, tears apart the social bonds forged in workplaces and communities, and weakens their collective strength. The warring powers destroy precisely those places where both the reproduction of capital and the capacity of the working class to assemble, communicate, organise, and resist are rooted.
The United States and Israel justify this destruction in the name of “security,” “deterrence,” and “freedom of navigation.” But the security they seek to protect is the security of oil tankers, naval fleets, financial markets, and the uninterrupted circulation of capital—not the security of the people living under bombardment. Human life matters only insofar as it does not obstruct profit or geopolitical dominance. No bombing campaign has ever delivered freedom, justice, or prosperity. Every missile that strikes a port, a power station, a bridge, or a refinery destroys part of the accumulated social labour of our class and sets fire to society’s future.
The Islamic Republic, on the other side of this conflict, is no defender of the people. The same regime that has spent decades diverting society’s resources toward militarisation, repression, and regional power struggles is now attempting once again to shift the costs of war and destruction onto the shoulders of workers. Under the banner of “defending the homeland,” every protest against unemployment, inflation, collapsing public services, or unpaid wages can be suppressed.
External bombardment and internal repression may be carried out by opposing forces, but in the lives of working people they produce the same result: deeper poverty, intensified security discipline, the silencing of independent working-class voices, and the expansion of the machinery of repression and execution.
This war is no longer merely a regional conflict. The Persian Gulf has become one of the principal fault lines in the crisis of the global capitalist order. Washington’s warnings to China and Russia against any form of intervention indicate that a prolonged conflict could draw the rivalry among the major powers into a new and more dangerous phase. The United States seeks to preserve its dominance over global energy routes and international trade. China aims to secure its energy supplies and commercial interests. Russia is determined to prevent any further erosion of its regional influence. Europe, too, cannot escape the economic and security consequences of this crisis. None of these powers has entered the arena to defend the freedom of the peoples of the region. All are fighting to preserve or redefine their share of the global order of capital.
War is itself a product of the deepening crisis of the capitalist order, while simultaneously serving as an attempt to manage that crisis. Yet this attempt exhausts not only society but also the states engaged in the conflict. In Iran, divisions within the ruling establishment over negotiations, the continuation of the war, and the management of the crisis have become increasingly visible. In the United States, the war has become part of the struggle over executive authority, the role of Congress, and efforts to contain Donald Trump. In Israel, Netanyahu’s government remains under mounting pressure from its crisis of legitimacy, internal coalition conflicts, and continuing social protests. War was supposed to strengthen and unite these governments. Instead, it has become another force deepening their political crises.
None of the parties to this conflict has achieved its declared objectives. The United States has failed to force the Islamic Republic into submission. The Islamic Republic has failed to consolidate its position. Israel has failed to obtain the security it promised its population. Rather than resolving the crisis, the war has become a mechanism for prolonging and expanding it. This deadlock is not confined to the Middle East. It is one expression of a global order in crisis—an order that increasingly relies on militarisation, destruction, and the redivision of spheres of influence in order to preserve and reorganise the accumulation of capital.
Should the war continue to expand, unemployment, displacement, and destruction will expand with it. Should a temporary ceasefire be imposed, capital will immediately move to seize the opportunities created by reconstruction. What is destroyed today by bombs will tomorrow be rebuilt through privatisation, cheap labour, precarious employment contracts, and even harsher forms of labour discipline. Capital profits from the production of weapons, and it profits once again from rebuilding the devastation those very weapons create.
Yet reconstruction is not merely a new field for capitalist profit. It is also a new terrain of class struggle. Who will bear the costs of reconstruction? Who will decide its priorities? Who will rebuild the infrastructure, under what wages, and under what conditions of employment? The ruling powers will inevitably confront workers’ resistance against dismissals, wage reductions, privatisation, and intensified exploitation.
The working class is not merely the victim of this war. It is the social force upon whose labour this entire order rests, and the only social force capable of transforming it. The fact that, in wartime, the workplaces and living spaces of our class become military targets, while in peacetime the resistance of that same class becomes the principal obstacle to the programmes of capital, demonstrates its central historical role in the present crisis of capitalism.
Britain: The Crisis of the State and the Crisis in Reproducing Capital’s Political Structure
In less than a decade, Britain has seen seven prime ministers. A country once regarded as one of the most stable parliamentary systems of capitalism has now become a clear example of political instability. On 20 July 2026, Andy Burnham succeeded Keir Starmer. A government that had come to power with a large majority only two years earlier collapsed under the pressure of economic crisis, social erosion and internal divisions within the Labour Party before it could consolidate its position (GOV.UK, 2026a; Reuters, 2026a).
This change cannot be explained merely by Starmer’s personal weaknesses, rivalry among Labour leaders or the mistakes of a particular cabinet. The central question runs deeper: why is the political structure of one of the oldest capitalist states no longer capable of reproducing its former stability?
From Relative Stability to the Repeated Fall of Governments
In the decades preceding the global crisis of 2008, British governments generally remained in office for long periods. Margaret Thatcher served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990, John Major from 1990 to 1997 and Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. Gordon Brown remained in power from 2007 to 2010, while David Cameron, despite taking office in the aftermath of the financial crisis and forming a coalition government, served as prime minister from 2010 to 2016 (GOV.UK, 2026b).
Since the Brexit referendum of 2016, however, the pace of political turnover has accelerated markedly. Cameron resigned after losing the referendum; Theresa May stepped down amid the deadlock over negotiations to leave the European Union; Boris Johnson fell under the weight of political crises and scandals surrounding his government; Liz Truss’s premiership lasted only 49 days; Rishi Sunak lost the 2024 election; and Keir Starmer was forced to resign only two years after Labour’s landslide victory. Burnham is now the seventh prime minister Britain has had in ten years (Reuters, 2026a; GOV.UK, 2026b).
Brexit alone did not cause all these crises, but it became the point at which contradictions that had accumulated for years beneath the stable appearance of the parliamentary system erupted. A referendum intended to contain internal divisions within the Conservative Party and settle Britain’s relationship with Europe instead opened a period of political fragmentation, economic uncertainty and erosion of the traditional parties. Brexit should therefore be understood not as the fundamental cause of the crisis, but as one of its most prominent forms of expression.
The Historical Crisis in the Reproduction of Capital as a Whole
To understand this instability, it is necessary to move beyond the level of competition between individuals and parties. The historical crisis in the reproduction of capital as a whole is not confined to recession, falling profit rates, debt or banking crises. At a certain stage, the very possibility of maintaining the totality of capitalist relations—from commodity production and the reproduction of labour-power to the renewal of ideological hegemony, the state, political parties, parliament and the mechanisms of social organisation—enters into crisis.
Under such conditions, the crisis no longer appears solely in the economy; it extends into the reproduction of the political form of capital’s domination. The crisis of 2008 was a clear indication of this transition: it moved beyond the economy and eroded the capacity of political structures to manage social contradictions and reproduce popular consent (Internationalist Workers’ Organization, 2025).
From this standpoint, the succession of British prime ministers is not merely a sign of the incompetence of several politicians. It is a concrete manifestation of the crisis in reproducing capital’s political structure. Capital needs more than factories, banks and markets. The bourgeois state must also reproduce trust in institutions, the legitimacy of parties, acceptance of economic policies and the possibility of compromise between classes.
When no government or party can simultaneously satisfy the requirements of finance capital, the needs of industrial capital, the expectations of the middle strata and the demands of the working masses, cabinets are worn down and leaders are replaced one after another, without the underlying crisis being resolved.
Burnham has promised to break with previous policies through decentralisation, strengthening deprived regions, confronting the housing crisis and reducing the pressure of the cost of living. Yet from the outset, his government also faces the need to maintain the confidence of financial markets and uphold budgetary discipline. The bond market’s reaction to the prospect of increased public spending demonstrates that even the new government is subject to the direct pressure of finance capital before it can implement its social promises (Barron’s, 2026; Reuters, 2026b).
Brexit: Social Protest within a Nationalist Framework
Brexit expressed the real discontent of large sections of British society: industrial closures, the decay of working-class towns, declining public services, employment insecurity and the concentration of wealth in London and the South East. Yet instead of being directed against capitalist relations, privatisation and austerity, this social anger was diverted by the right wing of the bourgeoisie towards hostility against the European Union, migrants and the so-called “global elite”.
The result was not the return of control to workers, but intensified economic uncertainty and political crisis. Brexit did not rebuild destroyed industries, rescue public services or raise wages. Instead, years of negotiations, regulatory change and uncertainty over trade relations placed further pressure on investment decisions, trade and other economic variables in Britain (Gocer, Darby and Ongan, 2025).
The new and neo-fascist right feeds upon this failure. Reform UK and Nigel Farage present the crises of housing, healthcare, wages and public services not as the result of decades of privatisation, austerity and the transfer of wealth to finance capital, but as the consequence of immigration. In this narrative, the migrant worker—rather than the capitalist, the state or the housing market—is held responsible for poverty, housing shortages and the collapse of public services.
This politics is not a solution to the crisis; it is one method of managing it. The far right seeks to set the British worker against the migrant worker so that the class origins of the crisis disappear from view. The erosion of the traditional parties has created an opportunity for these forces to transform the crisis of capital into a culture war, anti-immigrant hostility and nationalism. Even studies of British parliamentary discourse point to the spread of securitised narratives around migration and an increasing focus on “border control” and “illegal immigration” (Ghafouri et al., 2025).
Crisis from Below: The Return of Strikes
The political crisis has not appeared only at the summit of power. The same period in which governments fell one after another also witnessed a renewed wave of workers’ strikes in rail transport, bus services, the postal service, schools, universities, the civil service and healthcare. The strike wave of 2022 and 2023 represented the first period of industrial struggle on such a scale since the late 1980s (Office for National Statistics, 2023; Schnapper, 2026).
The strikes by healthcare workers, teachers, railway workers, postal workers and university staff demonstrated that the issue was not simply cabinet instability. The state is no longer able to regulate the relationship between capital and labour through the same traditional mechanisms of compromise, mediation and containment. Workers resisted falling real wages, labour shortages, the erosion of public services and the transfer of the costs of the crisis onto society.
The government’s response was not a general acceptance of workers’ demands, but an attempt to restrict the right to strike. The Minimum Service Levels legislation allowed the government, in designated sectors, to compel part of the workforce to continue working even during a strike—an indication that the state’s declining capacity to produce consent is being compensated for by strengthening the instruments of coercion (House of Commons Library, 2023).
From above, the crisis appears as the erosion of governments, leaders and parties; from below, it appears in strikes, protests and workers’ refusal to accept the costs of the crisis. These are not separate developments, but two expressions of a single crisis in the reproduction of capital.
An Unstable Government, a Stronger Security Apparatus
The instability of governments does not automatically mean the weakening of the capitalist state itself. On the contrary, the less capable parties and cabinets become of producing consent and legitimacy, the more the ruling structure resorts to restricting strikes, controlling borders, expanding policing and securitising social contradictions. Prime ministers and governments come and go, but the apparatuses of discipline and repression remain and continue to develop.
This contradiction is not confined to Britain. In the United States, Trumpism represents an attempt to reconstruct the power of capital and the hegemony of the state through tariffs, controlled destabilisation, nationalism and authoritarianism. In France and Germany, the traditional parties face the erosion of their social bases and the growth of the far right. In Israel, war has failed to end the crisis of the state and its social divisions. In Iran, the intensification of militarism and repression, together with continuing conflict among ruling factions, is another expression of the political structure’s inability to reproduce its own stability.
Trumpism and the crisis of the state in Britain, despite their important differences, are varied expressions of a single historical crisis: a crisis in which both the economic reproduction of capital and the reproduction of the political form of its domination have become increasingly difficult (Internationalist Workers’ Organization, 2025).
Crisis and Prospects
The repeated replacement of prime ministers is not a sign of the vitality of bourgeois democracy. It is a sign that capital can no longer reproduce its political domination through the same institutions, parties and compromises as before. The faces continue to change, but no new government can eliminate the contradiction between capitalist profitability, the discipline of financial markets, the destruction of public services and the demands of the working class.
The crisis of capital’s political structure places two opposing possibilities before society. On the one hand, the far right seeks to direct social anger against migrants, minorities and other sections of the working class, and to strengthen an authoritarian and nationalist state out of the collapse of public trust. On the other, strikes and social resistance demonstrate that the working class remains a force capable of elevating the crisis beyond the replacement of governments to the question of transforming the entire existing order.
Britain today does not simply have a new prime minister; it confronts a political structure that is no longer capable of reproducing its former stability. The central issue is not how many years Burnham will remain in office. The issue is whether the working class will be able, out of this instability, to transform its fragmented struggles into an independent, political and internationalist force—or whether the crisis of capital will once again be managed under the banners of nationalism, anti-immigrant hostility and the replacement of governing personnel, without transforming the relations that produce the crisis.
References
Barron’s (2026), Why the U.K.’s New Prime Minister Must Keep the Market Happy.
Ghafouri, V. et al. (2025), Framing Migration: A Computational Analysis of UK Parliamentary Discourse.
Gocer, I., Darby, J. and Ongan, S. (2025), Introducing a New Brexit-Related Uncertainty Index: Its Evolution and Economic Consequences.
GOV.UK (2026a), Prime Minister: The Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP.
GOV.UK (2026b), Past Prime Ministers.
House of Commons Library (2023), Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill 2022–23.
Internationalist Workers’ Organization (2025), Trumpism: The Political Expression of the Historical Crisis in the Reproduction of Capital as a Whole. 2 May 2025.
Office for National Statistics (2023), The Impact of Strikes in the UK: June 2022 to February 2023.
Reuters (2026a), Britain’s New Prime Minister Andy Burnham Vows to End Years of Instability.
Reuters (2026b), UK’s Burnham Opens ‘No. 10 North’ to Shift Economic Power from London.
Schnapper, P. (2026), The 2022–23 British Strike Spiral in Context
The Independent Organisation of Healthcare Workers in the United States and the Trade Unions’ Role in Containing Workers’ Struggle
Whenever a major strike breaks out somewhere in the world, the media suddenly begin speaking of a “workers’ uprising.” Images of picket lines, banners, speeches by union leaders and negotiations with employers dominate the headlines, creating the impression that the workers’ struggle began on that very day.
Even a large section of media associated with the labour movement and the radical left, consciously or unconsciously, accepts this same point of departure. They report the strike, write about negotiations, criticise the positions of the union or the employer, yet rarely ask how the strike emerged or through what process it was born
If we are to write the real history of workers’ struggles, we must look beyond their media image. A strike is not the beginning of the struggle; it is its most visible moment. Before a union officially calls a strike, months—and sometimes years—have already passed since the real process of resistance began.
During this period, workers, away from television cameras and official headlines, build networks of trust inside the workplace. They transform scattered individual experiences into a collective experience, resist staff shortages, imposed work schedules, mandatory overtime and the intensification of exploitation, organise petitions, connect co-workers with one another and gradually create the first forms of independent organisation. It is precisely during this largely invisible period that the real foundations of a future strike are laid—a period that usually receives little attention not only from the mainstream media but also from much of the left.
The recent mobilisation of healthcare workers in the United States provides a clear example of this process. In July 2026, more than 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, together with around 450 home healthcare workers and clinicians employed by Mass General Brigham Home Care, launched one of the largest healthcare strikes in Massachusetts in recent years. The strike followed months of unsuccessful negotiations, an overwhelming strike vote and a prolonged period of workplace organisation (Massachusetts Nurses Association, 2026; ABC News, 2026). Yet what appeared in the media was only the final link in this chain—not its beginning.
The central issue in this struggle was not simply higher wages. It was a struggle against chronic understaffing, increasing workloads, mandatory overtime, declining quality of patient care and the transformation of healthcare into another field for cutting costs and maximising profits. When healthcare workers demand more staff, they are simultaneously defending their own working conditions and patients’ right to adequate care. In healthcare, the contradiction between capital’s drive for profit and society’s real needs appears in one of its clearest forms. Every worker leaving an exhausting twelve-hour shift and every patient forced to wait for hours for treatment is a direct consequence of this logic of profitability (NYSNA, 2026).
Healthcare, however, cannot be understood solely through the strikes of nurses. The backbone of the sector consists of thousands of nursing assistants, assistant nurses, elderly care workers, home care workers, cleaners, porters, technicians, service staff and many other healthcare workers. These broad layers of the working class bear the greatest burden of labour shortages, constantly changing work schedules, precarious employment and intensifying workloads, yet they rarely appear in media coverage. This is precisely why the real history of struggle in healthcare begins not from official platforms but from inside the workplace itself.
What initially drives the struggle forward is therefore not a union call but this independent workplace organisation. Workers first respond to everyday problems. They discuss working conditions with one another, develop a shared understanding of exploitation, identify those colleagues whom others naturally trust, organise petitions, establish links between different departments and gradually create the first forms of collective coordination. This process usually develops quietly, gradually and outside media attention. Yet it is during precisely this period that mutual trust, solidarity and the capacity for collective action are created.
Following a demonstration by healthcare workers outside the Partille municipal offices, two organisers from the Independent Healthcare Workers’ Network presented a petition signed by a large number of employees from local care facilities to municipal officials. Because of systematic pressure and retaliation in the workplace, they declined to have their photographs published in their interview with Partille Tidning. During recent years, this network has organised a series of workplace protests through the healthcare assistants’ workers’ network. These actions emerged after a prolonged period of cooperation and mutual support among workers from several workplaces and were organised independently of the trade union—indeed, without the union even being informed.
The experience of the independent healthcare assistants’ network in Partille, Sweden, offers a clear illustration of this process. The protests did not begin with a union call; they emerged from within the workplace itself. Increasing workloads, constantly changing work schedules and the growing exodus of staff compelled healthcare assistants to establish independent networks of coordination. They drafted a petition, selected their own trusted representatives, contacted the local newspaper directly and began preparing a public demonstration—a process that even local union officials later admitted they had neither initiated nor understood while it was developing. This experience demonstrated that independent workplace organisation can become a real force long before the trade union enters the scene.
This experience is by no means unique to Sweden. What we are witnessing today in the United States follows the same underlying logic. Overwhelming strike mandates, months of negotiations, workplace meetings and the gradual establishment of links between different departments all demonstrate that a strike is not the starting point but the outcome of a long process of accumulated resistance and workers’ organisation. If this stage remains invisible, the most important part of the history of workers’ struggle also disappears.
Under such conditions, the trade union generally enters the struggle only when this independent organisation has become too significant to ignore. The broader and stronger these independent workers’ networks become, the greater the challenge they pose to the bureaucratic trade union apparatus. If workers are able to discuss, coordinate and make decisions collectively on their own, the union’s monopoly of representation is inevitably called into question. The union is therefore compelled to recognise the struggle, yet at the same time seeks to channel it into forms that are manageable, negotiable and ultimately capable of being brought to an end.
For this reason, official strikes are often limited in scope, carefully staged and largely predictable. In Massachusetts, despite the broad readiness of healthcare workers to escalate the struggle, the strike was reduced to a limited industrial action of fixed duration, allowing the employer to prepare lockout measures and organise replacement labour accordingly (Massachusetts Nurses Association, 2026). What had previously been a living and expanding movement was now incorporated into the framework of formal negotiations. This is precisely the role that the bureaucratic trade union apparatus performs within capitalist social relations: transforming a living and independent process into one that can be administered, negotiated and concluded.
The end of a strike, however, is not the end of the struggle. On the contrary, it marks the conclusion of one stage and the beginning of another. Workers return to their workplaces, but they are no longer the same workers they were before. They have acquired a shared experience of solidarity, mutual trust, collective action and their own social power. The networks created during the struggle, the trusted representatives who emerged from the workplace itself and the links established between different departments do not disappear. They become part of the working class’s accumulated social strength for the next phase of struggle.
For this reason, the real power of the working class should not be sought only during the days of an official strike. That power is reproduced every day inside the workplace: in conversations among co-workers, in networks of trust, in the selection of trusted representatives, in resistance to managerial pressure and in the development of independent forms of organisation. A strike is merely the moment when this accumulated power becomes visible to society for a brief period.
The future of the workers’ movement therefore depends not on the number of strikes officially declared by trade unions, but on the extent to which this independent organisation continues to develop inside workplaces. Only through this ongoing process can the working class rebuild and expand its own social power independently of capital and independently of its bureaucratic institutions.
Communism Was a Movement Before It Became the Science of Class Struggle
A strike is not the beginning of a workers’ struggle; it is its most visible moment. What appears in the news is only a brief moment in a much longer process. Months, and sometimes years, before workers stand on picket lines in front of television cameras, something far more important is already unfolding in the workplace. Workers find one another, build networks of trust, choose their own trusted representatives, transform isolated experiences into collective experience, and gradually create independent forms of organisation. A strike is the outcome of this process, not its point of departure.
The same reality provides the key to understanding the history of communism. If we see only the moment of the strike, we miss the most important part of the struggle: the very process through which trust, consciousness and organisation are formed. The real history of communism begins precisely here. Workers’ meetings, collective discussion and political education formed the living foundations of early communist organisation. Long before Marxism became the science of class struggle, communism existed as a movement created through workers’ associations, collective learning and practical organisation.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, two fundamentally different responses emerged to the crisis of class society and the expanding capitalist order. One was represented by the utopian socialists—figures such as Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. They envisioned a more egalitarian society, but sought to achieve it through moral reform, model communities and cooperation between classes. Within this tradition, the working class had not yet been recognised as the historical force capable of transforming society.
Opposed to this stood the communist current that arose from within the workers’ movement itself—a tradition associated with Babeuf, Buonarroti, Cabet, Wilhelm Weitling, and organisations such as the Society of the Seasons and the League of the Just. This current developed not in universities or philosophical salons, but in workshops, working-class neighbourhoods, clandestine associations and the everyday struggles of the proletariat. Its representatives did not yet possess a scientific critique of capitalism, but their experience of work and struggle had already led them to one decisive conclusion: class society would not disappear through appeals or reform. The emancipation of the working class could only be achieved through the organised struggle of the workers themselves.
During the very years in which Marx was breaking with the Young Hegelians and had not yet publicly identified himself as a communist, numerous works and historical documents already demonstrated that communism was no longer merely a philosophical ideal. It had become a social reality within the European workers’ movement. One of the most important of these works was Lorenz von Stein’s Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France (Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs), first published in 1842. In this pioneering study, Stein sought to analyse socialist and communist tendencies not as abstract ideas, but as real, organised movements rooted among French workers.
Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs, second edition (1848). First published in 1842.
Communism existed before Marx as a real historical movement. Although written from a conservative standpoint, Stein’s work became one of the earliest historical studies of socialist and communist tendencies within the European workers’ movement. Years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto, he described these currents not as abstract ideals but as organised social movements rooted in working-class life. Between 1842 and 1843, while Marx was still breaking with the Young Hegelians and had not yet publicly embraced communism, he encountered both works such as Stein’s and, more importantly, the living reality of the European workers’ movement. This historical context demonstrates that communism already existed as a living movement within the working class before Marxism gave it its scientific formulation.
Although Stein wrote from a conservative perspective, his book nevertheless became an important historical document demonstrating that communism possessed a real existence before Marx. Its significance for the history of Marxism lies not only in its content but also in the historical moment in which Marx encountered works of this kind together with the reality of the European workers’ movement itself—a movement that had reached the point where it required a deeper understanding of capitalist society and a clearer revolutionary perspective for its struggle.
The strength of this movement did not lie primarily in its books, but in its associations. Workers’ associations were far more than places for theoretical discussion. They were the first schools of class struggle. Within them workers learned mutual trust, exchanged experiences, recognised their natural representatives, practised collective action and created the first durable networks of solidarity. It was within these associations that the collective memory of struggle was formed: every defeat became a lesson for future struggles, and every experience became the starting point for new forms of organisation.
The movement created its organisations before it created its theory. This is precisely the link ignored by many conventional histories of Marxism. They begin history with ideas, whereas ideas themselves emerged from the real movement of the working class.
The most prominent representative of this tradition in Germany was Wilhelm Weitling. He was neither a university professor nor an isolated philosopher, but a tailor who emerged directly from the life and struggles of the working class. Weitling’s importance lay not simply in the fact that he wrote books on communism. Alongside his theoretical work, he became one of the principal leaders and organisers of the League of the Just, an organisation that linked networks of German migrant workers across France, Switzerland, Britain and other parts of Europe. He sought to transform the practical experience of this movement into a programme for social emancipation and to formulate communism not as a moral aspiration, but as an expression of the real struggle of the working class.
In 1842—the very year in which Lorenz von Stein published his study of socialism and communism in France—Weitling published his most important work, Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit). This book ranks among the major works of pre-Marxist communism and demonstrates that, long before a scientific critique of capitalism had been developed, the workers’ movement was already producing its own independent communist theories.
Wilhelm Weitling, tailor and communist theorist, was one of the foremost leaders of the League of the Just and the most important representative of working-class communism before Marx. Among migrant artisans and workers throughout Europe, he organised clandestine networks of struggle, education and solidarity while seeking to transform the practical experience of the movement into a programme for social emancipation. His Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842) remains one of the major works of pre-Marxist communism.
When Marx and Engels entered this movement, they encountered a tradition that had already existed for many years before them. Building upon this accumulated historical experience, they were able to raise the utopian and experiential communism that had developed within the workers’ movement to an entirely new level—a stage at which communist theory was transformed into the science of class struggle, a revolutionary programme and an international political organisation.
The transformation of the League of the Just into the Communist League in 1847 was therefore far more than a change of name. It expressed a profound historical leap. The old slogan, “All Men Are Brothers,” gave way to the historic call, “Workers of All Countries, Unite!” and the Communist Manifesto became the first political programme of this new stage in the development of the movement.
Marx and Engels later criticised many of Weitling’s theoretical limitations, yet they never denied his historical importance. On the contrary, in his 1844 article “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform'”, Marx described Weitling’s work as “the brilliant literary debut of the German workers,” arguing that, despite its shortcomings, it surpassed much of the literature produced by bourgeois socialism.
Four decades later, in On the History of the Communist League (1885), Engels likewise recognised Weitling as one of the first independent theoreticians of the German proletariat and acknowledged his place in the historical development of working-class communism.
Although Marx and Engels subjected many of Weitling’s ideas to sharp theoretical criticism, they consistently recognised his historical role as one of the pioneers of the communist workers’ movement and one of the leading figures in the development of the League of the Just.
These assessments were not simply tributes to an important historical figure. Marx and Engels fully understood that without this movement—without the associations, networks and organisations that had emerged years before their own political engagement—neither the Communist Manifesto nor the science of class struggle could have been grounded in the real historical experience of the working class.
It was this movement that called Marx and Engels into its ranks. They did not enter history from outside, nor did they create communism out of nothing. When they joined the movement, they encountered organisations, traditions, struggles and accumulated experience that had reached the point where a new level of theoretical consciousness had become historically necessary. The question was no longer the search for another ideal society. It had become the problem of transforming the accumulated experience of the workers’ movement into a scientific understanding of capitalist society, a revolutionary programme and an international political organisation.
The historical achievement of Marx and Engels lay precisely here. They did not invent communism. Rather, they concentrated the scattered experiences of the workers’ movement into a scientific critique of capitalism, revealed the general laws of class struggle, and, for the first time, gave a coherent international form to the unity of theory, programme and organisation.
Marxism was therefore not the beginning of communism; it represented a new stage in its historical development. At the same time, the movement itself underwent a profound transformation. At the congresses of 1847, the League of the Just was reorganised as the Communist League. This was far more than a change of name. It signified that the movement itself had entered a new stage of development. The old slogan, “All Men Are Brothers,” gave way to the historic call, “Workers of All Countries, Unite!” A slogan no longer grounded in moral ideals, but in the historical unity of a world class.
The Communist Manifesto was not a philosophical treatise but the political programme of this historical leap—the first attempt to unite the movement, theory and organisation within a single internationalist whole. From this point onward, communism ceased to be merely the dream of a just society. It became the science of class struggle and a programme for the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.
Thus, the unity of theory, movement and organisation became the fundamental principle of communism: Marxism as the science of class struggle; the living and ongoing movement of the working class; and the political organisation as the conscious concentration of the movement’s experience and programme. The historical strength of communism lay precisely in the unity of these three dimensions.
Yet this historical unity did not endure. Alongside the revolutions, achievements and immense experiences of the twentieth-century working class, the history of the century was also marked by the gradual disintegration of this very unity. At times the movement became separated from theory and organisation; at other times theory drifted away from the real movement; and in still other cases organisation developed into an autonomous structure detached from both. Many of the theoretical and practical impasses of contemporary communism are rooted in this historical rupture, rather than simply in the defeat of this or that revolution or the failure of this or that party.
References
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Marx, K. (1844), Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian”.
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Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848), Manifesto of the Communist Party.
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