Note
This platform examines the historical crisis of contemporary capitalism, the position of the working class, emerging forms of organization, and the communist horizon across four sections. It concludes with a condensed outline of the political positions of the Internationalist Workers’ Organization.
Contents
Preface
Part One
Contemporary Capitalism and Its Historical Crisis
1.1 Capitalism as a Historical System: From Mercantilism to Decline
1.2 Structural Crisis: From World Wars to Neoliberalism
1.3 The Transformation of the Organization of Production: From Industrial Capitalism to Digital Capitalism
1.4 Digitalization, the Expansion of Data Capital, and the Central Role of Artificial Intelligence
1.5 The Crisis of the Total Reproduction of Capital, the State, and Proxy Wars
1.6 The Crisis of Social Reproduction: Women, Migration, and Migrant Labour
1.7 Eurocentrism, Racism, and the Global Hierarchy of Labour Powers
Part Two
The Working Class, Class Struggle, and New Forms of Organization
2.1 The Working Class, Class Consciousness, and Revolutionary Experience
2.2 Class Independence and Internationalist Politics
2.3 The Organization of Production and the Transformation of Working-Class Organization
2.4 Class Struggle, Parliamentarism, and the Relation Between Production and Social Reproduction.
2.5 Informal Forms of Organization and Their Development
Part Three
Political Organization, the Party, and Organic Centralization
3.1 The Party and the Organic Centralization of the Workers’ Political Movement
3.2 The Left of Capital, Political Brokerage, and False Forms of Emancipation
3.3 The Defeat of the Internationals and the Reconstruction of Internationalist Politics
Part Four
The Communist Horizon, Revolution, and the Political Tasks of the Present
4.1 Revolution and the Critique of Substitutionism
4.2 Socialism and the Internationalist Horizon of the Proletariat
4.3 The Platform, Internationalist Intervention, and Political Positions
4.4 Political Positions of the Internationalist Workers’ Organization
4.5 Toward the Reconstruction of Proletarian Internationalism. An Appeal to Fighting Workers, Workers’ Collectives, and Internationalists
Preface
The Internationalist Workers’ Organization emerged out of a historical necessity within the contemporary workers’ movement; a necessity whose roots lie in the experience of the workers’ councils following the 1979 uprising in Iran, the defeat of that movement, and its bloody suppression by the Islamic Republic. Following the destruction of the workers’ mass organizations and the closure of open forms of struggle, the continuation of political activity and the preservation of class ties became possible only through independent and clandestine workers’ circles. These forms were not an alternative to mass struggle, but rather its necessary expression under conditions of repression and dictatorship. The forced migration of activists from this current to Europe did not constitute a break with this path, but rather its continuation under new conditions: connection with workers’ struggles in the host countries, organization among refugee and migrant workers, and the redefinition of previous experiences within a concrete and transnational context. Internationalism is therefore, for us, not an abstract principle but the material product of the real development of class struggle.
In Sweden, this current became known as part of the militant and independent tendency within the workers’ movement and played an active role in criticizing official trade-unionism and promoting independent workers’ organization. At the same time, sustained and systematic theoretical work aimed at criticizing the dominant traditions of the left—from social democracy and Stalinism to sectarianism and academic Marxism—became one of its principal fields of activity. This effort did not develop in an academic vacuum, but in a living connection with the practical experience of class struggle and in critical dialogue with various tendencies of the workers’ movement in Iran and Europe.
This theoretical trajectory arises from a historical necessity: the separation of Marxism from revolutionary practice and its transformation into an academic, interpretive discourse detached from the real struggle of the working class. Following the defeat of the first wave of world revolution, Marxism was gradually integrated into universities, research institutions, and the ideological apparatuses of the state. From being an emancipatory practical science, it was reduced to an object of interpretation, teaching, and theoretical consumption. This transformation was not merely a theoretical deviation; it was a moment in the ideological management of capitalism’s crisis, through which the workers’ movement was deprived of its theoretical weapon and the divide between knowledge and action, intellectuals and class, and science and revolutionary politics was reproduced.
The crisis of contemporary capitalism is not merely the crisis of an economic system or a particular form of social organization. It is a historical crisis in the total reproduction of social life; a crisis encompassing all levels of reproduction, from production and the state to ideology, science, and knowledge. Under such conditions, official bourgeois science, which during the ascendant period of capitalism played an active role in organizing production and social order, has become increasingly incapable of understanding and explaining the changing reality of capitalist relations. This incapacity does not stem from a lack of data, but rather expresses a fundamental incompatibility between the categories of this science and contemporary historical reality. For this reason, the crisis of knowledge and the crisis of science have become inseparable components of the crisis in the total reproduction of capital.
In this context, a return to Marx does not mean a return to an established intellectual tradition or a collection of classical texts. Rather, it is a historical necessity for the reconstruction of Marxism as a scientific critique of bourgeois society and as the theoretical-practical weapon of the working class’s emancipatory movement. This reconstruction can proceed neither through the revival of academic Marxism nor through the reproduction of old ideological forms. It is possible only through a living connection with real class struggle and the conscious self-organization of workers. In this sense, Marxism is neither a discourse, nor an identity, nor an instrument of political justification, but the scientific expression of the historical practice of the working class in its struggle to abolish the system of wage slavery.
The present political platform is the result of this trajectory. It is an attempt to present, in a condensed form, the perspectives, positions, and orientations of a current that defines itself not as a force external to the class, but as a conscious part of the workers’ historical movement for emancipation. This text offers neither promises of salvation, nor ready-made formulas, nor replicas of past failed experiences. Rather, it is a call for conscious, internationalist, and deeply rooted organization under conditions in which global capitalism has entered a historical crisis in its total reproduction.
The theoretical foundations and principal lines of these positions were first formulated in 1996 in the journal Internationalist Courier. Since then, in continuous connection with the concrete experiences of workers’ struggles, the development of global capitalism, and subsequent theoretical advances, they have been constantly reconsidered, criticized, and deepened. The present platform is a reconstruction and further development of that historical orientation on the basis of contemporary material and political conditions. In this process, traditions and tendencies that each claim to be heirs of communism have been examined not as ready-made references, but as moments within a history marked by defeat and therefore requiring radical criticism.
A political platform, however, is not written merely to explain or analyze. It must serve as an instrument of demarcation, a criterion for decision-making, and a compass for practical intervention. For this reason, the principal positions of the Internationalist Workers’ Organization are presented after this text in the form of concise theses. These theses do not replace the analysis developed in the platform; rather, they constitute its concentrated summary and the condensed expression of the perspectives, boundaries, and political orientation that define this platform.
1.1 Capitalism as a Historical System: From Wage Slavery to Historical Decline
Capitalism is not a natural or eternal order, nor the outcome of humanity’s rational progress. It is a historical form of social organization built upon a definite social relation: the separation of the majority of humanity from the means of production and their compulsion to sell their labour-power as a commodity. This relation — what Marx defined as wage slavery — forms the real core of capitalism. Its economic, political, legal, and ideological structures all arise from it.
Capitalism emerged through a long and violent process of dispossession. Producers were torn from the land, stripped of their tools, and separated from the conditions of their own existence. Marx described this process as primitive accumulation. It was not the result of free choice or social contract, but of class legislation, state violence, colonial expansion, the destruction of pre-capitalist relations, and the forced submission of vast populations to the rule of the market. From the outset, capitalism was a global and expansionist system rooted in both economic and political coercion.
At the centre of this system, production is organized not to satisfy human needs, but to expand value and accumulate capital. Commodities, money, and capital are not neutral objects. They are social forms through which human relations appear as relations between things. Capitalist exploitation does not primarily operate through open robbery, but through the apparently equal exchange between labour-power and wages. In this exchange, workers produce more value than they receive back in the form of wages, and this surplus value becomes the basis of profit, accumulation, and capitalist power.
During its historical ascent — especially throughout the nineteenth century — capitalism unleashed an immense expansion of productive forces. Industrialization, concentration of production, and the integration of the world market transformed social life on a global scale. Yet this same process deepened capitalism’s internal contradictions. The concentration of capital, intensified competition, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the growing contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation, and the sharpening conflict between labour and capital turned capitalism into a system structurally driven by crisis. At this stage, crises still appeared primarily in cyclical form and were temporarily displaced through bankruptcies, restructuring, and market reorganization.
With the outbreak of the First World War, capitalism entered a new historical phase — a phase of historical decline. Crisis was no longer a temporary interruption in accumulation, but increasingly revealed the system’s structural inability to reproduce its own economic, social, political, and ideological foundations in a stable way. The growing fusion of state and capital, militarization, imperialist war, and authoritarian forms of rule were all expressions of this transformation.
In its phase of decline, capitalism increasingly preserves itself not through the development of human capacities, but through destruction: war, mass impoverishment, unemployment, ecological devastation, and social repression. Science and technology, which could form the material basis for human liberation, are increasingly subordinated to crisis management, social control, and the reproduction of domination.
To understand capitalism as a historical system in decline is therefore not a theoretical abstraction. It is the necessary starting point for the working class to recognize itself as the material force capable of abolishing this order altogether.
1.2 The Trajectory of Structural Crisis: From World Wars to Neoliberalism
Capitalism’s historical decline revealed itself throughout the twentieth century in increasingly destructive forms. The world wars were not historical accidents or temporary deviations from peaceful development. They were violent attempts to manage the crisis of accumulation through the massive destruction of productive forces, the reorganization of imperialist balances, and the crushing of working-class resistance. Fascism, Stalinism, the New Deal, and various forms of state capitalism were not solutions to capitalism’s contradictions, but different methods of suspending and managing crisis.
After the Second World War, economic reconstruction and the Bretton Woods order opened a period of relative expansion. But this expansion rested on exceptional historical conditions: the destruction caused by war, the restructuring of global production, and a particular imperialist balance of power. By the 1970s, these conditions had begun to unravel. The structural crisis of capital re-emerged with greater intensity: stagflation, falling profitability, mounting debt, financialization, and the organized assault on working-class living standards became defining features of the new period.
Neoliberalism, privatization, deregulation, and globalization did not overcome this crisis. They displaced it onto a deeper and more destructive terrain. The burden of crisis was systematically transferred onto the working class and onto every sphere of social reproduction. Social protections were dismantled, labour made increasingly precarious, and entire regions reorganized according to the shifting requirements of global accumulation.
The contemporary crisis of capitalism is therefore not the crisis of a particular policy, government, or faction of capital. It is the crisis of the capitalist social order itself. No stable return to the old order remains possible. Every attempt to restore equilibrium only postpones the crisis while intensifying its contradictions on a broader scale.
1.3 The Transformation of the Organization of Production: Digitalization, Fragmented Labour, and Artificial Intelligence
The structural crisis of capitalism since the 1970s has been accompanied by profound transformations in the material organization of production and labour. The gradual disintegration of the Fordist–Taylorist model — based on large-scale factory concentration, mass labour, rigid divisions of labour, and the relative stability of the workforce — revealed that the old forms of accumulation and class containment had exhausted their historical limits. What changed was not simply the technical organization of production, but the material foundation upon which the classical forms of workers’ organization had been built.
As long as workers were concentrated in massive production sites and tied to relatively stable labour relations, trade unions and mass workers’ parties could reproduce themselves as enduring forms of organization. But with the fragmentation of labour, flexible contracts, subcontracting, precarious employment, migration, and the decomposition of workers’ shared lived experience, the material basis that once sustained those forms has increasingly eroded.
This does not mean that unions or workers’ parties have disappeared as institutions. It means their historical function has changed. No longer reproduced through the living movement of concentrated class struggle, they have become increasingly integrated into the regulation and management of capitalist contradictions. Their crisis is therefore not simply organizational. It is rooted in the crisis of the very material conditions that once made them possible as organs of independent working-class struggle.
Yet this transformation cannot be understood as the impossibility of communist organization or the end of independent workers’ struggle. Such conclusions — which have appeared in parts of the communist left as theories of permanent defeat — ultimately justify sectarian withdrawal from real class struggle and the reproduction of ideological existence detached from praxis. On the contrary, the transformation of production expresses the historical necessity of rethinking and reconstructing forms of organization on a new material basis.
From a Marxist standpoint, communist organization cannot be rebuilt through the repetition of past forms or through the external transmission of consciousness. It can only emerge through a living connection with the real and changing forms of workers’ struggle themselves. A return to Marx here means reconstructing the scientific critique of capitalism while identifying the new tendencies of struggle arising within these transformations. Through this process, more advanced forms of solidarity, coordination, and organic concentration can emerge from the lived experience of the working class itself. The crisis of classical organizational forms is therefore not an end, but the historical condition for the emergence of new and conscious forms of proletarian internationalist organization.
The shift toward fragmented, flexible, and globally chained production — through outsourcing, subcontracting, project-based labour, precarious employment, and the atomization of the workforce — does not abolish the contradiction between labour and capital. It transforms the concrete form through which that contradiction appears. The old concentration of workers in massive industrial centres has given way to spatial, contractual, and temporal fragmentation, while capital remains entirely dependent upon social labour and the exploitation of labour-power on a world scale.
1.4 Digitalization, Data Capital, and Artificial Intelligence
Digitalization, the expansion of data-driven capital, and the development of artificial intelligence have emerged on the basis of the historical development of the productive forces and the transformation of production itself. Under late capitalism, however, these technologies are increasingly subordinated to the reorganization of accumulation, the management of the crisis of value, and the intensification of social control.
By accelerating circulation time, reducing labour costs, expanding algorithmic surveillance, and transferring risk onto workers themselves, capital attempts to postpone the crisis of valorization. Digital and data-driven capital do not abolish the law of value. They constitute new forms through which exploitation, domination, and crisis are reorganized under contemporary capitalism.
The growing socialization of production, the expansion of cognitive labour, and the development of communication networks do not automatically weaken capitalist domination or transcend the law of value. Contemporary capitalism has not only absorbed knowledge, communication, cooperation, and collective information production into the mechanisms of accumulation and control; it increasingly uses them to deepen exploitation, commodify consciousness, and reproduce social subordination. Digitalization and data-driven production are therefore not signs of capitalism’s spontaneous collapse, but expressions of a new phase in the reorganization of capitalist domination.
The digitalization of production and the spread of artificial intelligence mark a new stage in the material transformation of capital. These technologies enable capital to fragment labour more deeply, render it permanently flexible, and subject it to continuous surveillance. Through algorithmic management, capital gains unprecedented control over labour intensity, worker behaviour, and labour time itself. At the same time, digital platforms, social media, and data infrastructures transform everyday social activity into raw material for accumulation, increasingly dissolving the boundary between production and social reproduction. Exploitation thus extends beyond the sphere of direct wage labour and penetrates every level of social life.
At the same time, precarious labour, platform work, fragmented employment, and the erosion of classical industrial concentration do not signify the disappearance of the working class. They express a historical transformation in the forms through which the working class is reproduced under late capitalism. Through the fragmentation of labour processes, generalized precarity, and permanent competition within the workforce, capital attempts to weaken the capacity for collective organization and class concentration. Yet these same conditions intensify the global interdependence of social labour and make new forms of internationalist coordination and solidarity increasingly necessary.
Artificial intelligence and data infrastructures also play a growing ideological and informational role. The production, distribution, and circulation of knowledge are increasingly organized through algorithmic systems that shape not only information, but perception, attention, and intellectual horizons themselves. Capitalist domination thus extends beyond the control of labour into the mediation of social consciousness and the ideological reproduction of the existing order. Social cognition itself becomes increasingly subordinated to the logic of value and accumulation.
Yet digital technology and artificial intelligence cannot simply be reduced to instruments of domination. The same infrastructures used for surveillance, war, ideological reproduction, and social control can also become tools for communication, education, transmission of experience, and independent workers’ organization. The significance of these technologies lies not in their technical form alone, but in the social relations and class struggles within which they operate.
The relative weakening of monopolies over the production and circulation of information has expanded access to tools of analysis, communication, and publication. But these possibilities can strengthen class consciousness and organization only when integrated into conscious and internationalist proletarian praxis. Otherwise, the same technologies are easily absorbed into the fragmentation of consciousness, the reproduction of ideology, and the deepening of social subordination.
Under the historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital, even the development of productive forces and technological progress increasingly assume destructive forms. Late capitalism deploys technology not for the free development of human capacities, but for crisis management, intensified exploitation, unemployment, war, social control, and ecological devastation. The decisive question is therefore neither the celebration nor the rejection of technology, but understanding its place within capitalism’s historical crisis and within the contemporary terrain of class struggle.
1.5 Crisis in the Total Reproduction of Capital, the State, and Proxy Wars
The historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital means that not only accumulation itself, but the reproduction of labour-power, social cohesion, political legitimacy, official knowledge, and the ideological reproduction of the existing order have all entered into crisis. States are increasingly incapable of managing these contradictions in a stable way. Political and international institutions — from parliaments to global organizations — steadily lose legitimacy, while capitalism relies more openly on militarization, securitization, and social repression to preserve itself.
Under these conditions, regional wars, proxy conflicts, imperialist rivalries, and the growing polarization of the global order are not deviations from the system, but necessary expressions of a crisis-ridden capitalism struggling to reproduce itself. The present crisis is not the crisis of a particular policy or faction of capital. It is the crisis of the capitalist social order as a whole. No stable return to the previous order remains possible. Every attempt at restoration merely postpones and deepens the crisis.
In this phase, the state no longer appears even formally as an arbiter standing above society. It increasingly reveals itself as the political organ of the ruling class and as an instrument for organizing the reproduction of capital. As crisis deepens, the state loses its capacity to maintain the illusion of neutrality, universal representation, or social mediation. Its direct role in organizing accumulation, disciplining labour, securitizing society, and managing the consequences of crisis becomes increasingly visible.
The rise of new authoritarianisms, neo-fascist tendencies, Trumpism, and various forms of the security state express precisely these historical limits of the capitalist state under conditions of crisis in the total reproduction of capital.
War, authoritarianism, and the collapse of political legitimacy are therefore not separate from economic crisis. They are moments of a single historical crisis unfolding across the entire reproduction of capitalist society. In order to survive, capitalism increasingly transfers the burden of crisis onto the working class and the oppressed through destruction, war, social discipline, repression, and the violent reorganization of the global order itself.
To grasp this connection is to move beyond criticism of individual governments or temporary policies toward a critique of the historical mechanisms of contemporary capitalism as a whole.
1.6 The Crisis of Social Reproduction: Women, Racism, and Migration
The historical crisis of capitalism cannot be understood simply as a crisis of the state, politics, or geopolitics while ignoring its material foundation: the crisis of value and accumulation itself. As capital encounters growing barriers to the stable realization of surplus value, its overall reproduction increasingly depends on shifting the burden of crisis onto spheres outside direct production. This transfer is not accidental. It is a structural mechanism of capitalism in its historical crisis.
Under these conditions, social reproduction — the ensemble of relations, activities, and forms of labour that reproduce labour-power and sustain social life — becomes a central terrain of crisis management. Falling real wages, precarious employment, the dismantling and commodification of social services, the privatization of healthcare and education, and the spread of informal and unstable labour all express a systematic attempt to compensate for the crisis of value through the cheapening and destabilization of the reproduction of labour-power itself.
At the centre of this process lies the unpaid or underpaid domestic and care labour historically imposed upon women. The reproduction of labour-power — the material precondition for capitalist exploitation — depends upon this invisible, naturalized, and feminized labour. Domestic labour, care work, and emotional labour are not secondary to wage labour. They form one of the material foundations for the continued reproduction of wage slavery and capitalist social relations under conditions of crisis.
Patriarchy under capitalism cannot therefore be understood simply as a cultural remnant or a legal inequality. It forms an internal part of capitalism’s mechanisms of social reproduction. The gendered division of labour, the naturalization of social roles, and the structural separation between wage labour and domestic reproduction enable capital to shift the crisis of value into everyday life while lowering the costs of reproducing labour-power. Patriarchal domination thus performs a material function within capitalist society, turning gender oppression into a permanent mechanism for managing crisis.
At the same time, capitalism increasingly reorganizes migration as part of the global management of labour-power. Wars, economic collapse, ecological devastation, and social disintegration uproot millions, while capital simultaneously uses migrant labour as a hyper-exploitable and precarious segment of the global workforce. Borders, residency regimes, deportation systems, and differentiated legal statuses become mechanisms for regulating labour markets, intensifying competition within the working class, and disciplining labour on a global scale.
Migration under capitalism is therefore not an external humanitarian issue or a question of cultural integration. It is bound to the global organization of capitalist accumulation itself. Migrants and refugees are not outside the working class. They are increasingly central to its contemporary reproduction. The capitalist management of migration simultaneously depends upon racism, legal fragmentation, and the permanent production of insecurity in order to maintain a globally stratified labour force.
For this reason, struggles against patriarchy, racism, border regimes, and the destruction of social reproduction cannot be separated from the broader struggle against capitalist social relations. Any politics that isolates these struggles from the totality of capitalist reproduction ultimately leaves intact the very conditions that continually regenerate oppression, exploitation, and social fragmentation.
The reconstruction of proletarian internationalism therefore requires not only resistance at the point of production, but the conscious unification of struggles across the entire terrain of social reproduction itself.
1.7 Eurocentrism, Racism, and the Global Hierarchy of Labour
Global capitalism reproduces itself not only through economic and political domination, but through the hierarchical organization of history, knowledge, and culture. Eurocentrism places Europe and the “West” at the centre of history, rationality, civilization, and progress, dividing the world into the “developed” and the “backward,” the “modern” and the “pre-modern,” the “rational” and the “irrational.” From Orientalism to the colonial geography embedded in terms such as “the Middle East,” from narratives of Europe as the birthplace of democracy to the presentation of capitalist development as the universal path of humanity, Eurocentrism functions as the ideological language of a capitalist world order built upon global inequality and domination.
Eurocentrism is not simply a cultural prejudice. It is the epistemological form of a world system that universalizes the historical experience of European capitalism while marginalizing or subordinating the histories of colonized peoples, revolutions, defeats, and class struggles outside the imperial centres. The history of capitalism is presented as the history of civilization itself, while the violence of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and uneven development is treated as secondary, accidental, or external to modernity.
Racism forms one of the material mechanisms through which this global hierarchy is reproduced within the organization of labour itself. Contemporary capitalism racializes sections of the global proletariat through migration regimes, border systems, legal fragmentation, cultural hierarchies, and the unequal organization of labour markets. Entire sectors of the working class are rendered cheaper, more precarious, and more disposable through systematic forms of exclusion and differentiation.
Under late capitalism, racism increasingly operates not primarily through crude biological theories of superiority, but through cultural management, border control, securitization, integration policies, and the hierarchical regulation of labour mobility. Through these mechanisms, capital deepens divisions within the working class while undermining solidarity and collective organization.
Migrants and refugees are therefore not external to the proletariat, nor separate social categories standing outside class relations. They are part of the global working class itself — displaced by war, crisis, social collapse, ecological devastation, and the violent restructuring of the world labour market. Capital simultaneously depends upon and disciplines these massive movements of labour-power, using them to reproduce a fragmented and hyper-exploitable workforce on a global scale.
At the same time, capitalism continually attempts to displace the contradictions generated by crisis onto ethnic, cultural, religious, or national antagonisms. Social disintegration produced by capital is reinterpreted as a problem of migration, identity, or cultural incompatibility. In this way, racism becomes a mechanism for obscuring the class character of capitalist crisis while redirecting anger and insecurity toward the most vulnerable sections of the proletariat itself.
For this reason, the struggle against racism and Eurocentrism cannot be reduced to moral condemnation, representation politics, or liberal anti-discrimination discourse. It forms part of the broader struggle against the global mechanisms through which capitalism reproduces exploitation, hierarchy, and division within the working class.
Proletarian internationalism requires the destruction of every political, ideological, and institutional form that fragments the global working class into national, racial, legal, or cultural hierarchies. Only through the conscious reconstruction of class unity across these imposed divisions can the working class emerge as an independent historical force against global capital.
1.8 The Epistemological Crisis of Bourgeois Science and the Ideologization of Official Knowledge
The historical crisis of capitalism extends beyond the sphere of value production and material reproduction. It also penetrates the terrain of social knowledge, scientific production, and the theoretical organization of reality itself. As capitalism enters a crisis in its total reproduction, the historical and class limits of bourgeois science become increasingly visible.
This crisis does not mean that scientific knowledge becomes impossible, nor does it imply a rejection of science as such. It means that bourgeois science, bound to the reproduction of capitalist social relations, becomes increasingly incapable of grasping capitalism as a contradictory historical totality.
Modern bourgeois science emerged during capitalism’s historical ascent and, despite its class limitations, played a real role in the development of productive forces, scientific knowledge, and the critique of feudal society. As Marx demonstrated in his critique of political economy, classical political economy retained a scientific dimension so long as the bourgeoisie still represented a historically progressive force in the development of production and in the struggle against the old order.
But as class antagonisms deepened and the bourgeoisie transformed from a revolutionary class into a defender of the existing order, science itself increasingly assumed ideological functions. Political economy, which once sought to uncover the real sources of value and wealth, gradually gave way to forms of apologetics, crisis management, and theoretical mystification aimed at concealing the contradictions of capitalism.
Under late capitalism, this process has reached a far deeper level. Universities, research institutions, and large sections of the official social sciences increasingly function not as organs of critical knowledge, but as institutions for the regulation, administration, and ideological reproduction of the existing order. Just as scholastic and religious institutions once defended the ideological foundations of feudal society, much of today’s institutional knowledge apparatus serves the reproduction of capitalist domination.
The fragmentation of knowledge, extreme specialization, and the separation of different fields of inquiry weaken the possibility of grasping the internal relation between economy, state, war, ideology, and class struggle. Science is increasingly reduced from a critique of social totality into a technical instrument for administration and crisis management.
This epistemological crisis is inseparable from Eurocentrism. The historical experience of capitalism in the Western metropoles is presented as the universal model of human development, while the histories of revolution, colonialism, defeat, social collapse, and class struggle in the capitalist periphery are either erased or reduced to raw material for pre-existing theoretical frameworks. The global history of class struggle is thus displaced by an official history of capitalist progress.
At the same time, the crisis of social knowledge under late capitalism has generated new forms of fragmentation. Positivism and technocratic scientism reduced knowledge to empirical data, technical specialization, and administrative expertise. Later, large sections of postmodern and post-structuralist theory rejected the very possibility of historical totality and objective social truth altogether, dissolving capitalism into fragmented discourses, identities, and linguistic constructions.
In both cases, the result was the same: the weakening of historical consciousness and the theoretical disarming of class struggle.
Against this, the defence of science and scientific methodology becomes a revolutionary necessity. The question is not the rejection of modern science, but the critique of its historical and class limitations and the reconstruction of scientific knowledge in relation to social praxis.
Marxism, from its origins, was never a rejection of science. It was an attempt to overcome its bourgeois limits historically — to reconnect social knowledge to the real movement of history, class struggle, and revolutionary transformation. From this standpoint, the reconstruction of revolutionary science becomes possible only through the re-establishment of a living relation between theory and the practical movement of the working class itself.
1.9 The Rupture Between Theory and Praxis and the Rise of Specialized Marx-isms
Marx and Engels transformed communism from a collection of moral ideals and egalitarian aspirations into the historical science of class struggle by grounding theory in the real movement of the working class itself. In this sense, Marxism was never an academic system or a body of abstract principles detached from history. It emerged as an attempt to understand the real movement of capitalist society and to consciously organize the struggle for its revolutionary overthrow.
Revolutionary theory did not stand outside the workers’ movement. It developed through a living relation to workers’ experience, organization, and struggle. For Marx, the science of social revolution was not a specialized body of knowledge separated from praxis, but a historical form of consciousness produced within the movement of class struggle itself.
Yet this historical unity gradually broke apart. With the rise of positivism, the growing authority of bourgeois empirical science, and the expansion of academic and philosophical institutions in the late nineteenth century, tendencies emerged within the socialist movement that attempted to reconstruct the science of revolution according to the specialized and positivist model of official bourgeois knowledge.
Through this process, Marxism was increasingly transformed from a historical and practical critique of capitalism into a specialized, ideological, and institutionalized doctrine separated from the living experience of the working class. The first forms of specialized Marx-ism emerged precisely within this terrain and later became consolidated within the orthodox Marxism of the Second International.
Within this framework, the working class ceased to appear as the historical subject of consciousness and increasingly became the object of political education and ideological leadership. The theory of “consciousness from outside” — classically formulated by Kautsky and later reproduced within sections of the Leninist tradition — represented the clearest expression of this rupture. The living relation between theory and praxis was replaced by a division between specialists of revolutionary knowledge and the working class itself.
The science of social revolution was thus increasingly transformed into a party doctrine, an ideological apparatus, and a specialized form of political management standing above the real movement of the proletariat.
This rupture did not remain confined to official social democracy. Even many currents that later opposed Stalinism, parliamentarism, or reformism failed to fully escape the framework of specialized Marx-isms. Sections of the communist left increasingly retreated into the preservation of abstract programs, ideological identities, or formal organizational continuity detached from the real movement of the class, while other tendencies drifted toward spontaneism and the rejection of the necessity of revolutionary organization altogether. In both cases, the crisis in the relation between theory and praxis continued to reproduce itself.
The defeat of the October Revolution and of the first wave of world revolution pushed this process onto an historical scale. As the Third International degenerated and large parts of the workers’ movement were gradually integrated into the capitalist order, existing Marx-isms were increasingly absorbed into state structures, universities, party bureaucracies, and ideological institutions.
From social democracy and Stalinism to academic Marxism and even sections of the communist left, different forms of separation between theory and revolutionary praxis continued to develop. Marxism increasingly survived either as institutional ideology, academic specialization, sectarian identity, or historical commentary detached from the real movement of class struggle.
At the same time, the broader crisis of social knowledge under late capitalism deepened this rupture further. If earlier specialized Marx-isms reduced social revolution to a technical or managerial science, postmodern and post-structuralist tendencies increasingly denied the possibility of historical totality and objective social truth altogether. In different but interconnected forms, both contributed to the disintegration of revolutionary consciousness and to the fragmentation of critique itself.
The central question today is therefore not a so-called “crisis of Marxism,” but the historical crisis of the Marx-isms that emerged after Marx — a crisis rooted in the separation of theory from revolutionary class praxis.
To return to Marx does not mean returning to sacred texts or repeating old formulas. It means reconstructing Marxism as the historical science of class struggle: a science capable of grasping the real movement of contemporary capitalism, the present forms of class conflict, and the material conditions for rebuilding proletarian internationalism.
From this standpoint, revolutionary theory is neither an academic activity nor the abstract production of concepts. It forms part of the historical praxis of the working class itself. Any theory incapable of explaining the real mechanisms of contemporary capitalism, the actual level of class struggle, and the material conditions for advancing that struggle risks degenerating into ideology, textual interpretation, or sectarian existence.
Against this, the task of the internationalist workers’ movement is to reclaim the production of revolutionary theory from official institutions and reconnect it to the living terrain of class struggle itself — the same path opened by Marx and Engels through the unity of science, critique, and revolutionary praxis.
The return to Marx and to the tradition of proletarian internationalism therefore cannot proceed through the repetition of the Marx-isms that followed Marx. It can emerge only through their historical critique and through the reconstruction of the relation between theory and praxis within the real movement of class struggle itself.
Only on this basis can the internationalist politics of the working class be rebuilt as a real, conscious, and revolutionary force.
Part Two
The Working Class, Class Struggle, and New Forms of Organization
2.1 Class Consciousness, the Science of Social Revolution, and the Critique of Substitutionist Marx-isms
Within capitalism, the working class is not merely a social category or an economic position. It is a historical force whose existence is bound to the negation of the capitalist order itself. By separating producers from the means of production, transforming labour-power into a commodity, and organizing labour on a global scale, capitalism creates the material conditions for the emergence of a class that can liberate society only through abolishing itself as a class.
The proletariat therefore carries no moral mission and no transhistorical destiny. It is the product of capitalism’s own contradictions, and its horizon of emancipation lies in the abolition of the very relations that continuously reproduce it as a subordinated class.
Class consciousness is neither a doctrine injected into the working class from outside nor the automatic result of everyday experience under exploitation. It emerges historically through the relation between real struggle, collective organization, the accumulated memory of the workers’ movement, and the development of the scientific critique of capitalist society.
The earliest communist theories often took the form of moral critique, egalitarian aspiration, or visions of justice. Through the intervention of Marx and Engels and through the historical movement of the proletariat itself, communism increasingly became the historical science of class struggle.
Marx did not derive revolutionary theory either from outside the workers’ movement or simply from immediate workers’ experience. He developed it through a living relation between the critique of philosophy, the critique of political economy, and the historical experience of class struggle itself. From the critique of Hegelian philosophy to the analysis of class struggles in France, from the lessons of the Paris Commune to the critique of the commodity form in Capital, Marx’s theory developed in constant relation to the real movement of capitalist society and the struggles unfolding within it.
But revolutionary theory was never merely a reflection of immediate experience. It was a scientific effort to uncover the laws, tendencies, and concealed mechanisms of capitalist society — mechanisms that cannot be grasped through everyday experience alone.
Class consciousness therefore emerges neither through pure spontaneity nor through external instruction. It develops through the dialectical unity of revolutionary science and revolutionary praxis.
Yet this unity was progressively broken apart. With the rise of positivism, the authority of bourgeois empirical science, and the growth of academic institutions, sections of post-Marx Marxism increasingly detached the science of revolution from the living movement of the working class.
Orthodox Marxism within the Second International transformed Marxism into a specialized and positivist doctrine, reducing the working class from the subject of consciousness into an object of education, leadership, and political administration. The theory of “consciousness from outside” represented the clearest formulation of this rupture.
Later reactions against this tradition often failed to escape the same problem. Certain historicist tendencies — from Lukács to later forms of experiential Marxism — risked dissolving class consciousness into historical experience and workers’ culture alone. Structuralist and academic Marxisms, from Althusser onward, detached theory from living proletarian praxis and once again transformed revolutionary knowledge into a specialized apparatus standing above class struggle itself. Humanist Marxism, where it reduced capitalist contradictions to alienation or the realization of human essence, frequently lost sight of capitalism as a concrete historical relation of domination rooted in material social relations.
The tragedy of this crisis became visible in the German Revolution and in the defeat of the first revolutionary wave after October. The conflicts between spontaneists, council communists, defenders of party centralism, and currents later crystallized in Bordigism revealed that even the revolutionary wing of the communist movement had not fully resolved the relation between revolutionary science, organization, and proletarian historical agency.
Councilism, by absolutizing spontaneity and immediate forms of struggle, risked dissolving the necessity of revolutionary organization and theoretical continuity. Bordigism, by reducing revolutionary continuity to the preservation of programmatic purity and formal party existence, risked separating communist organization from the real movement of the class itself.
Both contained moments of historical truth. Yet in both, the Marxian unity of revolutionary theory and proletarian praxis remained fractured.
The defeats of the Paris Commune and the October Revolution did not demonstrate the impossibility of proletarian emancipation. They revealed the historical limits, organizational weaknesses, and material conditions that shaped those revolutionary attempts. These defeats showed that revolution is never the automatic product of crisis. It emerges only through the conscious relation between organization, class consciousness, and collective struggle on an international scale.
They also demonstrated that every lasting separation between theory and praxis, party and class, organization and movement ultimately reproduces new forms of domination within the revolutionary process itself.
From these experiences emerges a decisive lesson for the workers’ movement today: emancipation cannot arise through the repetition of old forms or through the mythologization of past defeats. It requires the conscious reconstruction of the relation between the science of social revolution, everyday struggle, independent proletarian organization, and the internationalist horizon of class struggle.
The working class can act as an historical force only when it consciously organizes itself and refuses every substitute standing above it — whether party, state, intellectual elite, nation, or ideological apparatus.
The reconstruction of class consciousness and of the historical continuity of revolutionary science is therefore inseparable from the reconstruction of proletarian internationalist politics itself.
2.2 Class Independence and the Reconstruction of Internationalist Politics
Class independence is the starting point of every proletarian politics of emancipation. The working class can become a historical force capable of transforming society only when it organizes its interests, political horizon, and forms of struggle independently of every faction of capital, every state apparatus, every official institution, and every bourgeois ideology.
Whenever the workers’ movement dissolves itself into national projects, democratic alliances, reformist programs, or so-called “anti-imperialist” fronts within the framework of capitalism, it ceases to act as an independent class force and becomes an auxiliary instrument within the internal conflicts of capital itself.
Historical experience has repeatedly shown that the absence of political and organizational independence ultimately drives even the most radical movements toward the reproduction of new forms of capitalist domination. From social democracy and Stalinism to contemporary left and right populisms, from ideological sectarianism to currents that dissolve proletarian agency into the state, the nation, “the people,” or abstract citizenship, all rest upon the suspension or denial of class independence.
Against this, proletarian internationalist politics is grounded neither in alliances with the “lesser evil” factions of capital nor in mediation through non-proletarian forces, progressive governments, or national liberation projects. It rests upon the independent, self-organized, and conscious organization of the working class on an international scale.
Internationalism, in this sense, is not a moral principle, an abstract ideology, or an academic discourse about solidarity between nations. It is the material and necessary form of class struggle under global capitalism itself.
In a world where production, supply chains, labour migration, crises, wars, and social disintegration have become internationalized, the working class can defend its historical interests only through an internationalist horizon. Every politics that subordinates workers’ struggles to national interests, patriotism, state-building, or geopolitical rivalry ultimately reproduces the very relations that generate exploitation, war, and domination.
For this reason, we reject the politics of the national question in both its classical and contemporary forms. Nationalist movements, ethnic mobilizations, and projects centered on self-determination — even when articulated through the language of oppression — remain trapped within the logic of state formation, territorial competition, and capitalist reproduction.
Historical experience has shown repeatedly that such movements do not abolish exploitation. They reproduce new forms of domination, social fragmentation, and military conflict while mobilizing workers behind the flags of “their own” ruling classes.
But the reconstruction of internationalist politics requires more than the rejection of nationalism. It also demands a critique of the failed traditions reproduced within the communist and workers’ movements themselves after the defeat of the first revolutionary wave.
Proletarian internationalism cannot be rebuilt through the repetition of specialized Marx-isms, ideological sectarianism, the mythologization of past forms, or the continued separation of theory from praxis. The collapse of the Second and Third Internationals demonstrated that whenever revolutionary politics becomes detached from the real movement of the working class, internationalism degenerates into rhetoric, identity, diplomatic maneuvering, or ideological formalism.
Internationalism cannot emerge through intellectual networks, purely theoretical circles, or diplomatic alliances between political groups alone. It can be rebuilt only through the real organization of advanced sections of the working class in workplaces, neighbourhoods, and everyday struggles.
Without the development of nuclei, circles, networks, and durable forms of coordination among workers across local, regional, and international levels, talk of proletarian internationalism remains empty abstraction.
Internationalism becomes a material force only when rooted in the living praxis of class struggle itself — in the transmission of experience, practical solidarity, collective organization, and the real connection between different sections of the global proletariat.
The reconstruction of internationalist politics is therefore not a propagandistic project. It forms part of the historical reconstruction of the workers’ movement itself.
The working class can overcome fragmentation, defeat, and historical subordination only by recognizing itself once again not as a collection of national, ethnic, legal, or professional categories, but as a global class with common historical interests.
From this standpoint, internationalism is not something external to class struggle. It is the developed form of proletarian consciousness and organization under the historical crisis of capitalism.
2.3 The Organization of Production and the Transformation of Working-Class Organization
The transformation of production under late capitalism is not simply a technical or managerial shift. It expresses a deeper transformation in the material reproduction of capital itself under conditions of historical crisis. Faced with mounting pressure on profitability, intensified global competition, and the crisis of value, capital has increasingly reorganized labour through flexible, fragmented, and precarious forms of production.
Digitalization, outsourcing, subcontracting, platform labour, global supply chains, temporary employment, and the expansion of informal labour all form part of this restructuring. Their purpose is not merely economic efficiency. They function to cheapen labour-power, shift the burden of crisis onto workers, and undermine the conditions for durable class concentration and collective organization.
Under these conditions, many of the classical forms of workers’ organization — forms historically rooted in stable labour relations, concentrated workplaces, and institutional mediation — have undergone profound transformation. Yet this does not mean the disappearance of the working class, nor the end of class struggle, as claimed by theorists of the “post-industrial” society or by those who deny the historical agency of the proletariat.
On the contrary, the working class is increasingly driven toward new forms of connection, resistance, and organization precisely in response to these conditions.
Informal circles, workplace nuclei, networks of solidarity, temporary coordinations, migrant worker connections, and flexible forms of collective action increasingly emerge from everyday relations, shared experiences of exploitation, and practical struggles within fragmented conditions of labour itself. These forms often begin through personal trust, daily cooperation, and direct experience in workplaces and living environments before developing into channels for resistance, communication, and organization.
At the same time, capital has developed increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for controlling labour. Contemporary management no longer depends solely upon direct factory discipline. It increasingly operates through organizational psychology, controlled participation, team management, permanent evaluation, internal competition, algorithmic monitoring, and the internalization of capitalist objectives within workers themselves.
Through the individualization of labour relations, the transfer of competitive pressure into the working class itself, and the destruction of collective memory and solidarity, capital seeks to weaken the possibility of durable class organization. Domination increasingly shifts from external coercion toward the management of behaviour, perception, communication, and social relations themselves.
Yet this process simultaneously generates new contradictions.
The same mechanisms that fragment labour also deepen the global interdependence of workers and widen the material connections between struggles across borders. The same communication systems and organizational techniques developed for capitalist management can also facilitate the rapid transmission of experience, the emergence of informal resistance networks, and the reconstruction of new forms of proletarian solidarity.
In attempting to flexibilize labour completely, capital itself creates conditions for the emergence of new forms of collective organization.
The conflict between the reorganization of capital and the efforts of workers to rebuild their own collective capacities has therefore become one of the central terrains of class struggle under contemporary capitalism.
The reconstruction of revolutionary working-class politics cannot emerge through nostalgic returns to old organizational forms. Nor can it arise through the uncritical celebration of fluidity, spontaneity, or informality as ends in themselves.
The decisive task is to grasp the material transformations in the organization of production and to rebuild new forms of coordination, concentration, communication, and conscious organization capable of transforming fragmented resistance into durable, independent, and internationalist forms of proletarian struggle.
2.4 Class Struggle, Parliamentarism, and the Relation Between Production and Social Reproduction
Under late capitalism, class struggle is not an exceptional event unfolding at the margins of society. It is the concrete expression of the historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital itself.
As this crisis deepens, the contradiction between labour and capital increasingly extends beyond the classical sphere of industrial production and penetrates every dimension of social life: labour, housing, healthcare, education, migration, social reproduction, ecological destruction, culture, and even the production of knowledge itself.
In its attempt to preserve profitability and maintain accumulation, capitalism increasingly transforms all spheres of life into terrains of commodification, extraction, and social control. Class struggle therefore cannot remain confined within the traditional limits of the factory or workplace. The whole terrain of social reproduction increasingly becomes a battlefield.
Under these conditions, parliaments, elections, and bourgeois representative institutions no longer function even ideologically as expressions of a “general will.” They increasingly operate as mechanisms for managing crisis, containing social unrest, and reproducing the legitimacy of the existing order.
Capital seeks to displace class struggle away from direct confrontation and collective organization into the sphere of representation, electoral competition, legal mediation, and political management — a sphere in which workers appear not as a collective historical force, but as isolated individuals, voters, legal subjects, or statistical categories.
During earlier historical periods, parliamentarism could partially function as a mechanism for integrating reforms and stabilizing capitalist social relations. Under the historical crisis of capitalism, however, it increasingly serves as an instrument for administering permanent crisis, transferring the costs of collapse onto the working class, and reconstructing state authority under conditions of instability.
The rejection of parliamentarism is therefore not simply a tactical question or a posture of political radicalism. It forms part of proletarian internationalist politics itself.
Participation in parliamentary mechanisms — even when justified through arguments about “using the platform,” “defending democracy,” or “exposing the system from within” — ultimately reproduces the illusion of representation while separating political struggle from workers’ self-organization and collective power.
Working-class politics does not emerge through elections, parliamentary alliances, or legal institutions of the capitalist state. It develops through direct struggle, collective organization, and confrontation with capital and its state apparatus.
At the same time, the forms of struggle themselves have changed. Wildcat strikes, struggles outside union control, occupations, riots, acts of collective refusal, informal networks of resistance, and fluid forms of coordination increasingly emerge outside official organizational structures.
This transformation does not express a decline in consciousness or organizational immaturity. It reflects the material transformations of contemporary capitalism itself: fragmented workplaces, precarious labour, mass migration, informal employment, and the crisis of traditional mediating institutions.
Attempts to force contemporary class struggle back into obsolete political and organizational forms therefore become increasingly disconnected from the real terrain of struggle itself.
The formal separation between “economic struggle” and “political struggle” also functions as a mechanism for disarming the working class. Every struggle that moves beyond isolated demands and begins to generalize itself — connecting workplaces, communities, and different sectors of social life — necessarily acquires a political character because it confronts the mechanisms through which capital reproduces social domination.
Capital constantly attempts either to contain these struggles within manageable economic demands or to absorb them into legalistic, democratic, and representative frameworks.
Under late capitalism, production and social reproduction can no longer be treated as separate spheres. Capital increasingly commodifies housing, education, healthcare, care work, migration, and even social time itself. Exploitation therefore extends far beyond direct wage labour into the entire reproduction of everyday life.
For this reason, struggles over wages, labour conditions, housing, healthcare, migration, education, and privatization are not isolated sectoral issues. They are moments of a broader confrontation with the logic of capitalist accumulation itself.
Any politics that isolates these struggles from the broader horizon of abolishing capitalist social relations ultimately neutralizes their emancipatory potential.
By contrast, the conscious unification of workplace struggles with struggles across the terrain of social reproduction creates the material basis for transforming fragmented resistance into collective, political, and generalized class struggle.
Only on this basis can new forms of proletarian organization and proletarian internationalism be reconstructed under the conditions of capitalism’s historical crisis.
2.5 Informal Forms of Organization and Their Development
As large sections of the official institutions of workers’ representation and organization have become integrated into the mechanisms of the state, the market, and capitalist management, informal forms of organization are no longer temporary, primitive, or marginal phenomena. Under late capitalism, they increasingly constitute one of the principal forms through which class struggle reproduces itself.
These forms emerge directly from lived experience: exploitation, repression, precarious labour, and the inability — or open hostility — of official institutions toward workers’ struggles. They express the effort of the working class to reclaim initiative, rebuild collective ties, and regain control over its own struggles.
Workers’ circles, informal solidarity networks, workplace nuclei, relations built on mutual trust, and fluid forms of coordination and resistance often become the first terrain upon which new organizational forms develop. These structures usually arise through everyday cooperation, shared conditions of labour, and the practical initiative of trusted workers and militants. Gradually, they can evolve into channels for communication, collective memory, resistance, and organized struggle.
The importance of these forms lies not in their informality alone, but in their capacity to reconstruct social and political ties fragmented by contemporary capitalism. In conditions where precarious labour, migration, insecurity, fragmentation, and the destruction of collective experience weaken stable forms of organization, informal networks often become the only material basis upon which workers can begin rebuilding trust, coordination, and collective capacity.
At the same time, these forms carry real limits and contradictions. Informality by itself does not overcome fragmentation. Without continuity, political clarification, transmission of experience, and the development of durable relations between different sectors of workers, informal organization risks remaining local, temporary, defensive, or easily dissolved under pressure.
For this reason, the question is not the romanticization of informality or spontaneity. Nor is it a return to rigid organizational models inherited from earlier historical conditions. The decisive issue is how informal forms of struggle can develop toward broader levels of coordination, continuity, and conscious organization.
This process cannot be imposed externally through ideological schemas, party substitutionism, or organizational formalism detached from the real movement of the class. But neither can it emerge automatically from spontaneity alone.
The development of informal forms into more advanced organizational capacities depends upon the accumulation of struggle, the transmission of historical experience, the emergence of trusted militant layers within the class, and the gradual reconstruction of collective political memory.
In this process, communist organization does not stand outside the class as an external leadership apparatus or ideological authority. Its role is to participate within the real movement of struggle itself: clarifying experiences, strengthening connections, preserving historical continuity, and helping transform dispersed resistance into conscious and organized class force.
Under conditions of historical crisis, the reconstruction of proletarian organization therefore proceeds neither through the simple repetition of old institutional forms nor through the celebration of fragmentation and fluidity. It develops through the contradictory movement by which workers attempt to rebuild collective capacities within the disintegrating social conditions produced by capital itself.
The central task is to transform isolated circles, temporary solidarities, and fragmented struggles into increasingly conscious, coordinated, and internationalist forms of proletarian organization capable of confronting capital on a broader social scale.
Only through such a process can the working class begin to reconstruct itself as an independent historical force under the conditions of contemporary capitalism.
Part Three
Political Organization, the Party, and Organic Centralization
3.1 The Party and the Organic Centralization of the Workers’ Political Movement
The question of political organization has always stood at the centre of the workers’ movement. Yet under the historical crisis of capitalism and after the defeats of the revolutionary wave of the twentieth century, this question can no longer be approached through the inherited formulas of social democracy, Stalinism, or the various substitutionist traditions that emerged from them.
The communist party is neither a state in embryo, nor a sacred ideological apparatus, nor a structure standing above the working class as the exclusive bearer of historical truth. At the same time, revolutionary organization cannot simply dissolve itself into spontaneity, episodic struggle, or fragmented forms of resistance.
The problem of organization emerges from the material necessity of concentrating historical experience, preserving political continuity, and developing the collective capacity of the proletariat to act consciously against capital on an international scale.
The party, in the revolutionary Marxist sense, is not an external force imposed upon the class. It is a historical moment within the development of class struggle itself: the organized concentration of revolutionary experience, political clarification, and internationalist direction arising from within the movement of the proletariat.
But this relation between organization and class is contradictory and historically conditioned. Whenever organization separates itself from the living movement of the class, it begins to transform from an instrument of proletarian struggle into a force standing above it.
The degeneration of the Second and Third Internationals demonstrated this contradiction historically. What began as organs of proletarian organization increasingly became bureaucratic structures integrated into state management, nationalism, reformism, and eventually capitalist reproduction itself.
The Bolshevik Revolution represented the highest historical expression of proletarian revolutionary struggle in the twentieth century. Yet the isolation of the revolution, the defeat of revolutionary movements internationally, civil war, economic collapse, and the growing separation between the soviets, the class, and the party created the conditions for a progressive substitution of proletarian power by party and state apparatuses.
The degeneration of the Russian Revolution was therefore not simply the result of betrayal, moral failure, or incorrect leadership. It expressed a deeper historical contradiction: the danger that revolutionary organization, once separated from the autonomous movement and self-activity of the proletariat, reproduces new forms of domination within the revolutionary process itself.
From social democracy to Stalinism, from nationalist liberation movements to sections of the revolutionary left, the twentieth century repeatedly demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of substitutionism — the replacement of proletarian self-emancipation by party rule, state management, military command, ideological guardianship, or political elites acting in the name of the class.
Against this, proletarian emancipation can only be the conscious act of the working class itself.
This does not mean the rejection of political organization. It means rejecting every conception of organization that transforms itself into a substitute for proletarian historical agency.
The communist organization of the future cannot reproduce the model of the mass national parties of the twentieth century, nor the bureaucratic centralism inherited from the degeneration of the workers’ movement. But neither can revolutionary organization survive as dispersed propaganda circles detached from real class struggle.
What is required is the reconstruction of forms of organization rooted in the actual movement of the class while capable of preserving political continuity, collective memory, theoretical development, and international coordination.
This requires a form of centralization fundamentally different from bureaucratic command structures or parliamentary leadership machines.
Organic centralization does not mean mechanical discipline imposed from above. It refers to the conscious coordination of revolutionary forces through shared political clarity, collective struggle, practical experience, and internationalist orientation emerging from the real movement of the class itself.
Such centralization develops historically through struggle, communication, trust, theoretical clarification, and collective practice. It cannot simply be declared organizationally or imposed administratively.
The reconstruction of proletarian political organization therefore depends upon rebuilding the relation between revolutionary theory, collective experience, and practical struggle under the conditions of contemporary capitalism.
Communist organization can exist only as part of the historical movement of proletarian self-emancipation itself — not above it, not outside it, and never in place of it.
3.2 The Left of Capital, Political Brokerage, and False Forms of Emancipation
Under the historical crisis of capitalism, large sections of what continues to present itself as the “Left” no longer function as forces of proletarian rupture, but increasingly operate as mechanisms for the political management of crisis within capitalism itself.
From social democracy and Stalinism to large sectors of the contemporary radical left, the dominant tendency has been the progressive integration of left politics into the administration of capitalist society. This integration does not always occur through direct participation in government. It increasingly takes the form of mediation, representation, ideological management, activism detached from class organization, and the reproduction of political identities compatible with the continued existence of capitalist social relations.
The historical function of the Left of capital is not to abolish exploitation, but to contain, redirect, fragment, and regulate social antagonism within forms compatible with capitalist reproduction.
In earlier periods, social democracy integrated sections of the workers’ movement into parliamentary and national frameworks through reformism, trade union mediation, and the promise of gradual transition. Stalinism transformed the communist movement into an instrument of state power, national interest, and capitalist modernization under bureaucratic control.
Today, under conditions of fragmentation and historical defeat, these forms increasingly give way to newer modes of political management: activist networks, NGO structures, identity-based mobilizations, media radicalism, left populism, academic radical discourse, and movements organized around representation rather than class organization.
What unites these forms is not a common ideology, but a shared social function. They displace the contradiction between labour and capital into forms that remain manageable within the framework of capitalist society itself.
Class antagonism is increasingly translated into questions of citizenship, morality, identity, culture, democracy, rights, visibility, lifestyle, or representation. Structural critique gives way to political consumption. Collective organization dissolves into individualized activism. Historical transformation is replaced by permanent reaction to crisis.
Under late capitalism, even radicalism itself increasingly becomes commodified. Political discourse, media production, ideological identity, and symbolic opposition are absorbed into the circulation of capital and transformed into specialized fields of cultural and informational production.
The problem is therefore not simply opportunism or ideological deviation. It is rooted in the material transformation of politics itself under conditions of capitalist crisis.
As the traditional workers’ movement fragmented and revolutionary continuity weakened, large parts of the Left increasingly lost their connection to proletarian self-organization and became integrated into the broader mechanisms of social management, cultural production, academia, media circulation, and institutional politics.
In this process, politics increasingly appears as representation without collective power, critique without organization, radical language without revolutionary rupture.
At the same time, ideological sectarianism often reproduces the opposite side of the same problem. Detached from the real movement of the class, sectarian groups preserve revolutionary rhetoric while existing in practical isolation from proletarian struggle itself. Political identity replaces historical movement. Programmatic formalism substitutes for living praxis.
Both integration and sectarian isolation emerge from the same historical rupture between revolutionary theory and the real movement of the working class.
Against this, proletarian politics cannot be rebuilt through ideological branding, activist performance, electoral coalitions, media visibility, or the endless reproduction of left subcultures.
The reconstruction of revolutionary politics depends upon rebuilding the material relation between communist organization and the actual struggles of the working class itself.
This requires a break not only from bourgeois politics openly defending capital, but also from all forms of political brokerage that mediate, contain, or substitute themselves for proletarian self-activity.
Communist politics is not the management of the working class. It is the conscious movement toward the abolition of capitalist social relations through the self-organization and internationalist struggle of the proletariat itself.
Only on this basis can revolutionary politics recover its material force beyond the exhausted forms of the capitalist Left.
3.3 The Defeat of the Internationals and the Reconstruction of Proletarian Internationalism
The history of the workers’ movement cannot be understood apart from the history of the Internationals. Each International emerged from a concrete stage in the development of capitalism and class struggle, and each ultimately reflected both the possibilities and the limits of its historical moment.
The First International represented the first great attempt to organize the workers’ movement on an international basis. It emerged from the material expansion of capitalism itself and from the growing recognition that the struggle of workers could no longer remain confined within national borders. Marx and Engels understood clearly that the emancipation of the proletariat could only be international or it would not exist at all.
Yet the workers’ movement of that period was still marked by fragmentation, uneven development, and the coexistence of different ideological currents inherited from earlier historical stages. The First International therefore represented not a completed political form, but the beginning of a historical process through which proletarian internationalism gradually emerged.
The Second International developed during the ascendant phase of industrial capitalism and mass workers’ organization. Trade unions, workers’ parties, and mass socialist movements expanded alongside the growth of capitalist production itself. But this expansion also strengthened reformism, parliamentarism, nationalism, and bureaucratic mediation within the workers’ movement.
As capitalist development stabilized sections of the organized working class within national frameworks, increasing layers of the socialist movement became integrated into the management of capitalism itself. The collapse of the Second International during the First World War — when most socialist parties aligned themselves with their own ruling classes and supported imperialist war — revealed the depth of this integration historically.
The Third International emerged from the revolutionary wave opened by October and from the attempt to reconstruct proletarian internationalism on revolutionary foundations. For a brief historical moment, it concentrated the highest expressions of revolutionary struggle internationally.
Yet the isolation of the Russian Revolution, the defeat of revolutionary uprisings in Europe, the devastation of civil war, and the material backwardness inherited from Tsarism progressively transformed the Communist International itself.
As the Soviet state increasingly separated itself from proletarian internationalism and subordinated revolutionary struggle to state survival, the Third International was gradually transformed from an instrument of world revolution into an instrument of Soviet state policy.
Bolshevization, bureaucratization, and the subordination of communist movements to national and geopolitical interests marked the historical defeat of the International as a revolutionary force.
But the collapse of the Internationals cannot be explained simply through betrayal, leadership errors, or moral degeneration. Their defeat expressed deeper contradictions within the workers’ movement itself: the integration of organized labour into capitalist reproduction, the separation of party and class, the persistence of nationalism, the rupture between theory and praxis, and the inability of revolutionary forces to overcome the isolation of proletarian struggle internationally.
After these defeats, proletarian internationalism increasingly survived either as ideological memory, sectarian formalism, or abstract rhetoric detached from the material organization of the working class itself.
At the same time, the historical transformation of capitalism fundamentally altered the terrain upon which internationalism must now be reconstructed. Globalized production, mass migration, digital communication, fragmented labour, platform capitalism, ecological crisis, and permanent geopolitical instability have created forms of interdependence unprecedented in capitalist history.
Yet the working class remains politically fragmented across nations, borders, legal systems, labour hierarchies, and ideological divisions continuously reproduced by capital itself.
The reconstruction of proletarian internationalism today therefore cannot mean rebuilding the Internationals in their previous historical forms. It cannot emerge through diplomatic alliances between organizations, ideological proclamations, or symbolic declarations of unity.
Internationalism can only be reconstructed through the real movement of the global working class itself: through the rebuilding of connections between struggles, the transmission of historical experience, the development of international networks of solidarity and organization, and the emergence of new forms of proletarian coordination rooted in material struggle.
This reconstruction demands a decisive break with nationalism in all its forms — including left nationalism, anti-imperialist nationalism, developmentalism, and every politics that subordinates proletarian struggle to the interests of states, nations, or competing capitalist blocs.
Under contemporary capitalism, no national road to socialism exists. The material organization of capitalism itself has rendered the question of proletarian emancipation fundamentally international.
The future revolutionary movement will therefore not emerge through the restoration of old organizational forms, but through the historical recomposition of proletarian internationalism under the new conditions created by capitalism’s global crisis.
Only through this recomposition can the working class begin once again to act as an independent historical force against capital on a world scale.
Part Four
The Communist Horizon, Revolution, and the Political Tasks of the Present
4.1 Revolution and the Critique of Substitutionism
In Marx’s tradition, the socialist revolution is not merely a transfer of political power, the seizure of the state machine, or the realization of a pre-designed model for the administration of society. Revolution is the historical rupture with the entire order of wage labour and with the social relations through which production, political power, knowledge, and the means of decision-making have been separated from the real life of the producers themselves. Socialism is therefore not simply a change in the legal form of ownership or the transfer of power from one class to another. It is the transformation of the mode of social reproduction itself: the transformation of humanity’s relation to labour, production, knowledge, social time, and power. The central question of the socialist revolution is not merely “who governs,” but how the associated producers consciously and collectively organize the conditions of their own life and production for the first time in history.
In this sense, social ownership does not simply mean the nationalization or state ownership of the means of production. The experience of the twentieth century demonstrated that the transfer of ownership to the state, without a real transformation of the social relations of production and without the direct and conscious participation of the producers themselves in the organization of social life, can reproduce new forms of domination, bureaucracy, and the separation of power from society. Socialism acquires meaning only when social production and reproduction are liberated from the domination of value, wage labour, and separated political command, and when the capacity for the conscious administration of society develops within the real movement of the working class itself. The withering away of the state is therefore not a political decree or the outcome of moral will, but the historical consequence of a process through which the separation between politics and society, leadership and execution, knowledge and labour, and administration and production is progressively overcome.
For this reason, revolution cannot be reduced to the moment of seizing state power. Within class society, the state is not merely a neutral instrument of social administration. It is the historical form of concentrated power founded upon the separation of politics from social life and decision-making from the producers themselves. Yet the critique of the state does not imply the rejection of all forms of social coordination or collective organization. Every complex society requires forms of coordination, planning, decision-making, and collective organization. The decisive question is whether these social capacities become a power separated from and dominating society, or whether they are reproduced within the living practice and direct participation of the associated producers themselves. Socialism is not the negation of social organization, but the negation of the transformation of social organization into an autonomous power standing above society.
The historical experience of the workers’ movement has shown that the greatest danger facing revolution is not only military defeat or external repression, but the reproduction of the very separations upon which class society rests. The substitution of the party for the class, the state for the social self-organization of the producers, and the concentration of knowledge and decision-making within a layer separated from the real life of the workers are different expressions of the same process. These developments were not simply the result of theoretical errors or the subjective will of leaders. The defeat of the world revolution, the isolation of the Russian Revolution, material backwardness, civil war, the collapse of the class’s capacity for self-organization, and the necessity of managing survival under conditions of crisis created material conditions in which the party and the state increasingly became instruments for the concentration of social reproduction. Theories of consciousness from outside, party substitutionism, and the separation of theory from practice were less the ultimate causes of this process than its ideological formulations and legitimizing mechanisms, emerging from the material reality of revolutionary defeat and historical isolation.
For this reason, the critique of substitutionism is not merely an ethical or organizational critique. It is a critique of the reproduction of the social division of labour and of the historical separation between knowledge and practice, leadership and execution, and politics and social life. The central question is not whether “elites” or “the masses” make better decisions, but how class society transforms consciousness, administration, knowledge, and social power into specialized spheres separated from the majority of producers. From ancient Greece to modernity, and from philosophical disputes concerning reason and truth to the controversies of the workers’ movement concerning party and class self-activity, this contradiction has been reproduced in different forms. The opposition between elites and masses is not merely a theoretical problem but a reflection of the material structure of a society founded upon division of labour, domination, and the separation of human beings from the social conditions of their own existence.
The return to Marx and to revolutionary class praxis acquires its meaning precisely at this point. The issue is neither the glorification of spontaneity nor the transfer of consciousness and leadership to an apparatus standing outside the class. Revolution can open an emancipatory horizon only when consciousness, organization, and social power are reintegrated into the real life and direct struggle of the producers themselves. A political party, if it is to play a revolutionary role, cannot be an apparatus bearing truth or a command centre standing above the class. It must be the historical expression of the real development of organization, experience, and consciousness within the workers’ movement itself. In this sense, political concentration does not signify the substitution of the class, but the conscious concentration of historical experience and the collective capacities of social struggle.
The socialist revolution is not the end of organization but its historical transformation. The organizational forms that are necessary in the pre-revolutionary period for linking struggles, concentrating experience, and developing consciousness retain their legitimacy during the revolutionary process only insofar as they contribute to the expansion of the producers’ own capacity for the conscious administration of social life. Whenever an organization, party, or political institution becomes an autonomous power separated from this process, the tendency toward the reproduction of domination and separation re-emerges. The problem of revolution is therefore not the abolition of organization, but the abolition of the conditions under which organization, knowledge, and social power become forces separated from and dominating society.
4.2 Socialism and the Internationalist Horizon of the Proletariat
Socialism is not a national economic model, a form of state management, or a transitional system preserving the foundations of wage labour under new political administration. Nor is it the gradual humanization of capitalism through reforms, redistribution, or democratic regulation.
Socialism signifies the historical movement toward the abolition of capitalist social relations themselves: wage labour, commodity production, value accumulation, class domination, and the separation of producers from collective control over social life.
For this reason, socialism cannot be reduced to state ownership, centralized planning detached from proletarian control, or bureaucratic administration carried out in the name of the working class. The experiences of the twentieth century demonstrated that the abolition of private capital alone does not abolish capitalist social relations when labour remains subordinated to accumulation, hierarchy, state power, and the logic of production separated from collective proletarian control.
The communist horizon therefore does not point toward the construction of a new national economy, but toward the progressive dissolution of capitalist categories themselves.
Under capitalism, production appears as an autonomous force dominating human life. Social labour confronts workers as an alien power organized through value, competition, profit, and accumulation. Communism signifies the conscious reappropriation of social production by associated producers themselves.
This transformation cannot occur instantly or mechanically. It develops through a contradictory historical process shaped by class struggle, revolutionary organization, material conditions, and international development. Yet its direction remains clear: the abolition of production for value and the reorganization of social life around collective human need.
Under communism, production ceases to function as a process for the expansion of capital and becomes instead a conscious social activity organized collectively by the producers themselves.
This transformation also fundamentally alters the relation between production and social reproduction.
Capitalism continuously reproduces divisions between mental and manual labour, production and reproduction, work and life, politics and everyday existence. Entire spheres of social life — care, education, housing, healthcare, emotional labour, ecological reproduction — are subordinated to the requirements of accumulation.
The communist horizon points toward the overcoming of these separations.
The liberation of humanity from wage slavery requires not merely changes in ownership or political administration, but the transformation of everyday social relations themselves: the reduction of socially necessary labour time, the abolition of exploitative divisions of labour, the collective organization of social reproduction, and the free development of human capacities beyond the domination of value.
This horizon cannot emerge within national isolation.
Capitalism has created an internationally integrated system of production and social reproduction. Supply chains, migration, technological systems, ecological crises, wars, and labour processes operate on a global scale. Any attempt to construct “socialism in one country” inevitably reproduces pressures toward militarization, national competition, state accumulation, and reintegration into capitalist logic.
The communist horizon is therefore inseparable from proletarian internationalism.
Internationalism is not simply solidarity between workers of different countries. It is the material form through which the proletariat constitutes itself as a global historical force against capital.
Only through the international extension of revolutionary struggle can the material foundations of capitalism be dismantled on a world scale.
At the same time, communism cannot be understood as a utopian blueprint imposed upon history. The future society cannot be designed in advance through abstract schemas detached from the real movement of struggle itself.
Communism emerges historically from the contradictions of capitalism and from the collective self-activity of the proletariat in the process of abolishing existing social relations.
For this reason, the communist horizon is not a distant ideal separated from present struggles. It already appears within every movement toward collective organization, every rupture with capitalist competition, every act of proletarian solidarity, and every attempt by workers to regain control over the conditions of their own existence.
The task of revolutionaries is not to administer the future on behalf of the class, but to participate consciously in the historical movement through which the working class abolishes the conditions of its own exploitation and opens the possibility for a classless and stateless human community beyond capital.
4.3 The Platform, Internationalist Intervention, and Political Positions
A political platform is not a theoretical manifesto detached from struggle, nor a neutral statement of principles existing above historical movement. It is an instrument of political orientation, collective clarification, organizational demarcation, and practical intervention within class struggle itself.
For this reason, the present platform does not offer a complete doctrine, a finished ideology, or a closed theoretical system. It attempts instead to formulate the principal historical coordinates through which revolutionary proletarian politics can be reconstructed under the contemporary crisis of capitalism.
The historical crisis of capitalism has simultaneously become a crisis of proletarian political continuity. The fragmentation of labour, the integration of large sections of the Left into capitalist management, the collapse of revolutionary organizations, the commodification of politics, and the rupture between theory and praxis have all weakened the collective memory and organizational capacities of the working class internationally.
Under these conditions, revolutionary intervention cannot simply repeat the forms, languages, or organizational models inherited from earlier historical periods. But neither can it abandon the historical lessons of the workers’ movement in favour of immediacy, activism, or adaptation to the ideological climate of capitalism.
Internationalist intervention today requires the reconstruction of revolutionary continuity within the real movement of class struggle itself.
This reconstruction begins not from abstract ideological identity, but from concrete proletarian conditions: workplaces, migrant labour, precarious employment, fragmented social reproduction, informal organization, and the everyday contradictions generated by capitalist crisis.
The task is not to construct political apparatuses separated from the class, but to contribute consciously to the development of proletarian self-organization, international coordination, collective memory, and revolutionary clarification.
For this reason, communist intervention cannot be reduced to propaganda alone, nor to theoretical production detached from struggle. Revolutionary theory develops historically only through its relation to proletarian praxis itself.
At the same time, immediate struggle alone cannot overcome fragmentation without political clarification, historical continuity, and conscious organizational development.
The reconstruction of proletarian internationalism therefore requires a living relation between theory, organization, and struggle.
Under contemporary capitalism, the separation between political work, theoretical work, and practical organization increasingly reproduces the broader fragmentation imposed by capital itself. The reconstruction of revolutionary politics demands overcoming these separations.
The Internationalist Workers’ Organization understands itself not as a party standing above the class, nor as a self-proclaimed leadership of the proletariat, but as part of the historical effort to reconstruct internationalist working-class politics under the conditions created by capitalism’s global crisis.
Its activity is rooted in several inseparable principles:
the defence of proletarian class independence against every faction of capital;
the rejection of nationalism, parliamentarism, reformism, and substitutionism in all forms;
the reconstruction of proletarian internationalism through real class organization and struggle;
the reunification of revolutionary theory and proletarian praxis;
the development of independent working-class organization in workplaces and across the terrain of social reproduction;
and the struggle for the abolition of wage labour, capitalist social relations, and the state system itself.
The present platform therefore does not represent a final conclusion, but a moment within an ongoing historical process.
The reconstruction of proletarian revolutionary politics will not emerge through theoretical proclamation alone. It can develop only through the real movement of class struggle internationally and through the conscious participation of revolutionary workers within that movement itself.
Under conditions of deepening capitalist crisis, growing militarization, ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and global instability, the necessity of rebuilding proletarian internationalism becomes increasingly urgent.
The alternative posed historically by capitalism itself grows clearer with every passing crisis: either the continued reproduction of war, barbarism, exploitation, and social disintegration, or the conscious internationalist self-organization of the proletariat against capital on a world scale.
The future depends upon the outcome of that struggle.
4.4 Major Positions of the Internationalist Workers’ Organization
The Formation of Marxism, the Historical Rupture, and the Crisis of the Workers’ Movement
1. Marxism emerged through the continuation and development of communist theories arising from within the workers’ movement itself, and through their transformation into the science of class struggle. Through their critique of utopian and sectarian socialism, Marx and Engels elevated communism from abstract idealism into the scientific critique of capitalism and the historical theory of class struggle. The Communist League and the Communist Manifesto constituted the first expression of the internationalist organization and politics of the working class, and the first program of scientific communism within the workers’ movement.
2. With the expansion of capitalism, the consolidation of the bourgeois nation-state, and the rise of positivism, parliamentarism, and trade unionism, a historical rupture emerged between communist theory and revolutionary praxis. Marxism was progressively reduced from the historical critique of the real movement of capitalism into a specialized body of knowledge and an ideology of party and professional politics. The specialized Marx-isms of the Second International developed on the basis of this rupture. The theory of “consciousness from outside” expressed the consolidation of the separation between scientific communism and revolutionary praxis.
3. The defeat of the first wave of world revolution, the defeat of the German Revolution, the isolation of the Russian Revolution, and the Bolshevization of the Third International carried this historical rupture into a new stage. The seizure of power by the party, the consolidation of national parties, the integration of the International into the interests of the Soviet state, and the expansion of party bureaucracy created the historical conditions for Stalinism and different forms of state capitalism. The duality between programmatism separated from the class and spontaneism incapable of concentrating experience — a duality that emerged sharply during the revolutionary upheavals in Germany — became one of the defining characteristics of later Marx-isms and of the enduring crisis of the workers’ movement.
4. The theoretical and political crisis of the workers’ movement has deepened and reproduced itself on a broader scale under late capitalism. The commodification of knowledge, spectacle politics, Marxist academicism, and the media Left have generated new forms of separation between politics and the real life of the working class. The reconstruction of communist politics today means neither a return to the national parties of the twentieth century nor the repetition of frozen forms inherited from the past, but the critique of this historical rupture, the return to Marx, and the reconstruction of the internationalist politics of the working class.
The Historical Crisis of Capitalism and the Total Reproduction of Capital
5. Crisis under capitalism is not an external disruption, but the necessary expression of the internal contradictions of capital accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist social relations. In the process of expanding value, capital simultaneously undermines the foundations of its own valorization and, through crisis, the destruction of capital, and the reorganization of accumulation, reconstructs the conditions for the next cycle of its own reproduction. Crisis is therefore a necessary moment within the movement of capital itself.
6. With capitalism’s entry into the imperialist epoch, cyclical crises developed into the structural crisis of capitalism. The world wars, state intervention, the war economy, and the reconstruction that followed the Second World War temporarily displaced this structural crisis, but from the 1970s onward it re-emerged on a global scale. Financialization, globalization, the expansion of debt, and the digital reorganization of production became new forms for managing and displacing the structural crisis.
7. From the 1990s onward, the structural crisis developed into a historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital. Permanent war, authoritarianism, the crisis of the nation-state, the erosion of political institutions, the crisis of social reproduction, the crisis in the reproduction of the official social sciences, the increasing commodification of knowledge, and ecological destruction are all expressions of a single crisis: a crisis in which capitalism, while becoming ever more dependent upon global social labour, simultaneously erodes the human and social foundations of its own reproduction.
8. The present crisis can be resolved neither through statism, national developmentalism, and welfare policies nor through a return to earlier forms of accumulation, because the nation-state itself, wage labour, and capital accumulation form part of the mechanism of this historical crisis. The communist horizon signifies not the reform of capitalism, but the historical negation of the value-based order and the conscious reconstruction of social reproduction according to human needs.
The Working Class, Consciousness, and New Forms of Organization
9. The working class is not merely an economic position or a social identity, but a historical class that carries within capitalist social relations the possibility of negating those relations and consciously reconstructing society. By socializing production on a global scale, capitalism simultaneously creates the material conditions for liberation from the existing order; yet this possibility can become revolutionary praxis only through struggle, experience, and organization.
10. Class consciousness is neither knowledge transmitted into the class from outside nor the spontaneous product of economic struggle alone. The theory of “consciousness from outside” opened the way for the substitution of the party and political elites for the class itself, while spontaneism ignored the question of concentrating experience, historical memory, and conscious organization. Both tendencies expressed the historical rupture between theory and praxis.
11. Class consciousness is the dialectical product of material conditions, the experience of exploitation, social struggle, historical memory, and the development of revolutionary praxis. Communists are not teachers standing outside the class, but part of the process through which experience is concentrated, struggle generalized, and the historical memory of the workers’ movement reconstructed. Revolutionary organization does not substitute itself for the class, but contributes to the conscious capacity of the proletariat for collective intervention.
12. Late capitalism, through the fragmentation of production, platform labour, mass migration, and chronic instability, has eroded the classical forms of workers’ organization. Yet this situation signifies not the end of the working class, but the necessity for new forms of connection, concentration of experience, and global cooperation among workers. Circles, nuclei, and communication networks constitute the point of departure for rebuilding collective capacity and conscious class praxis under global capitalism.
The Party, Political Power, and the Critique of Substitutionism
13. The socialist revolution is not a transfer of power within the state, but a historical rupture with the order founded upon wage labour and class domination. Every lasting separation between organization and movement, leaders and masses, or politics and social life carries within itself the tendency to reproduce domination inside the revolution itself.
14. The historical experience of the workers’ movement demonstrated that the substitution of the party for the class, the state for social self-organization, and top-down management for the direct intervention of the producers was not simply the result of betrayal or theoretical deviation. It developed through the defeat of world revolution, the isolation of the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the revolutionary wave in Europe, civil war, and the bureaucratic concentration of social reproduction. The theory of “consciousness from outside” and the separation of the party from the living praxis of the class constituted the political and theoretical expression of this process.
15. The critique of substitutionism does not mean rejecting the necessity of political organization. The experience of the twentieth century demonstrated that the rejection of political concentration and historical memory is just as incapable of confronting the question of revolution as transforming the party into an apparatus bearing truth and a potential state. The internationalist party is not a substitute for the class, but an instrument for concentrating experience, transmitting historical memory, and consciously organizing the workers’ movement.
16. The internationalist party is neither a substitute institution standing in place of the class nor the final form of social emancipation. It is an instrument for concentrating experience, transmitting historical memory, linking struggles, and consciously organizing the workers’ movement. Whenever political organization transforms itself into a force independent of the real movement of the class, the tendencies toward domination, bureaucracy, and substitutionism are strengthened within it. For this reason, the reconstruction of revolutionary politics today can emerge not through the national parties of the twentieth century, but through rebuilding the living connection between theory, organization, and class praxis on an internationalist scale.
17. The state in class society is the historical form through which politics becomes separated from society and power becomes concentrated apart from the producers themselves. Socialism therefore cannot be reduced to seizing the state machine, nationalizing the economy, or expanding state power. The experience of the Paris Commune and the workers’ councils demonstrated that social emancipation is possible only on the basis of direct intervention, collective control, and the real participation of the associated producers.
Socialism, Communism, and the Reconstruction of Social Reproduction
18. Socialism is neither a moral project for a more equitable distribution of wealth nor a more progressive form of the state. It is a historical rupture with the order founded upon wage labour, value, and capital accumulation. Socialism acquires meaning only through the abolition of the separation between labour and life, politics and society, and through the conscious reappropriation of social control over the reproduction of human life.
19. Marx and Engels understood communism not as a moral utopia, but as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Communism is not a predesigned model, but the historical process through which wage labour, commodity production, the state, and value relations are abolished, and the reproduction of human life is consciously reorganized on the basis of the direct control of the associated producers over the conditions of production and social existence.
20. The experience of the twentieth century demonstrated that wherever socialism was reduced to a national, state-centred, or developmentalist project, it led in practice to the reproduction of forms of capitalism. Stalinism, Maoism, and large sections of the Trotskyist tradition, despite their differences, shared the substitution of party and state for the working class and the reduction of socialism to the political management of capital accumulation.
21. Socialism is inseparable from internationalism. Capitalism is a global order, and no national solution, anti-imperialist state, or developmentalist project can transcend its logic. Communism can emerge only through the international extension of class struggle and the reconstruction of proletarian internationalist politics.
22. The communist horizon signifies not the replacement of one ruling class by another, but the abolition of class domination itself, the gradual disappearance of the state, and the reorganization of social reproduction according to human needs. The historical crisis of capitalism has transformed communism from a political ideal into an historical necessity.
Media, the Left of Capital, and the Commodification of Politics
23. Late capitalism has integrated not only material production, but also politics, culture, knowledge, communication, and even forms of protest and radicalism into the logic of valorization and commodification. Mass media, social networks, and the information industry are not merely instruments for transmitting information; they form part of the mechanism through which capitalist order reproduces itself by shaping social perception, political experience, and humanity’s relation to the world. Under such conditions, politics is increasingly reduced to image, content consumption, radical posture, and competition for attention, while even the critique of capitalism “as discourse” can itself become a cultural commodity, symbolic capital, or an intellectual profession.
24. The Left of capital does not consist solely of forces integrated into the state, parliament, or the direct management of capital. It also includes every form of politics that reduces class struggle to media hegemony, the management of public opinion, identity politics, electoral competition, or the marketplace of radicalism. Political journalism, Marxist academicism, and large sections of left media activity have become integrated into the market of content production and discursive competition instead of being rooted in real organization and proletarian praxis.
25. Media, education, political analysis, and theoretical production can possess an emancipatory character only when they serve the transmission of the experience of struggle, the reconstruction of the historical memory of the working class, the concentration of experience, and the strengthening of proletarian internationalist organization. The issue is not the rejection of media or theoretical work as such, but the critique of their capitalist form of reproduction. The reconstruction of communist politics today requires a rupture with professional politics, mediaism, and the commodification of radicalism, and the rebuilding of the living relation between theory, organization, and class praxis.
Internationalism, the Reconstruction of Communist Praxis, and the Horizon of Emancipation
26. From its origins, capitalism has been a global order, transforming the working class into an interconnected and transnational class. Proletarian internationalism is therefore not an ethical idea, but the material expression of the historical position of the working class within global capitalism. The defeat of the Internationals of the twentieth century demonstrated that internationalism cannot be reconstructed on the basis of the state, the nation, or national centres, because every politics subordinated to national interests ultimately reproduces the logic of capitalist order itself.
27. Late capitalism, through the global fragmentation of production, mass migration, platform labour, and chronic instability, has eroded the classical forms of workers’ organization. Yet this situation signifies not the end of the possibility of internationalist organization, but the necessity for new forms of connection, concentration of experience, and global cooperation among workers. The reconstruction of communist praxis requires rebuilding the living relation between theory, organization, and class struggle on an internationalist scale.
28. Revolutionary politics is neither an apparatus separated from the real life of the working class nor a collection of abstract positions. It is a form of intervention within the real movement of class struggle itself. Whenever theory, organization, and social praxis become separated from one another, communist politics is reduced either to intellectual and media activity or to a force standing in place of the class. For this reason, the reconstruction of communist praxis requires rebuilding the living relation between theory, historical memory, organization, and class struggle on an internationalist scale.
29. Contemporary capitalism is no longer merely incapable of resolving its historical contradictions; it has itself become an obstacle to the sustainable reproduction of human life. War, authoritarianism, social disintegration, ecological destruction, and the commodification of life have transformed communism from a political ideal into an historical necessity. Communism is not a predesigned model, but the historical process through which wage labour, class domination, and the fundamental contradictions of capitalist society are abolished.
4.5 Toward the Reconstruction of Proletarian Internationalism
An Appeal to Fighting Workers, Workers’ Collectives, and Internationalists
The historical crisis of capitalism is deepening across every sphere of social life. War, militarization, forced mass migration, social disintegration, authoritarian forms of rule, ecological destruction, and the growing fragmentation of working-class existence are not temporary or passing phenomena. They express a historical system that can no longer reproduce itself except through the expansion of barbarism on a world scale.
Under these conditions, the working class can no longer defend even its most basic human needs within the framework of the existing order. At the same time, the historical defeats of the workers’ movement, the integration of large parts of the Left into the administration of capital, and the rupture between theory and praxis have weakened the independent political and organizational capacity of the proletariat internationally.
This platform did not emerge from academic speculation, ideological nostalgia, or intellectual isolation from the reality of class struggle. It is the result of more than four decades of systematic experience, inquiry, and intervention within the real movement of the working class, in workplaces and in confrontation with the concrete problems faced by the contemporary workers’ movement. Its theoretical development has also been shaped through a critical reworking of the international history of the workers’ movement, the defeats of revolutions, and the contradictions that followed from the historical rupture between Marxism and the living praxis of the proletariat.
This document therefore does not claim to present a closed ideology or a final truth. It is an attempt to return revolutionary theory to the material terrain of class struggle and to contribute to the reconstruction of the internationalist politics of the working class under the historical crisis of late capitalism.
We address ourselves first of all to fighting workers, to informal workers’ collectives, to the networks, nuclei, and groups that, under difficult and fragmented conditions, seek to organize resistance in workplaces and across the different terrains of social reproduction. This platform does not belong to a separate political apparatus standing above the class.
We do not seek to construct another isolated ideological current alongside the fragments left behind by the historical defeats of the revolutionary movement. From the very beginning, our current has insisted on continuing theoretical work and political clarification not outside the class struggle, but within the real experience of workers themselves, within their attempts to organize, and within the living contradictions of social struggle. If our current carries any historical meaning, that meaning lies not in reproducing yet another ideological identity, but in contributing to the reconstruction of the broken relation between revolutionary theory and the living praxis of the proletariat.
If this document carries any historical meaning, that meaning can only be realized if it is taken up, discussed, criticized, and developed within the living movement of the working class itself.
This is a banner that must be raised by you.
Under contemporary capitalism, no revolutionary politics can be rebuilt without the independent organization of the working class. No theory, no organization, and no ideological tradition can substitute itself for the real historical movement of the proletariat. But without the conscious concentration of experience, without historical memory, and without internationalist coordination, every struggle risks once again being isolated, fragmented, and absorbed into the order of capital.
We also turn to the small internationalist groups and revolutionary currents that, throughout the long and dark decades following the defeat of revolutions, continued to defend the internationalist positions of the working class against nationalism, parliamentarism, Stalinism, and the various forms of the Left of capital.
The communist left and other internationalist currents have long suffered from isolation, organizational weakness, fragmentation, and the difficulty of reconnecting with the real movement of the working class. In many cases, they remained trapped in sectarianism, ideological self-reproduction, or political stagnation. But it is also true that, during the dark years of historical defeat and counter-revolution, you refused to abandon the internationalist positions of the proletariat. Under immense pressure, you continued to defend the historical interests of the working class against nationalism, imperialist wars, and integration into the capitalist order.
If this banner is today being raised again by a current that has emerged from the real terrain of the working class, this is not only the result of our own experiences, interventions, and systematic studies over more than four decades. Your existence, and the fragments of internationalist continuity you preserved through decades of defeat and isolation, have also played a historical role. At certain decisive moments, these experiences acted as points of orientation and helped preserve the direction toward proletarian internationalism when large parts of the Left had been fully integrated into the order of capital.
For this reason, we address this appeal to you as well: read, discuss, criticize, and test the positions, analyses, and texts that will be developed and published around this platform. Do not treat them as final doctrines or ideological identities, but as moments in a necessary attempt to reconstruct the relation between revolutionary theory and the real praxis of the working class.
The historical task today is not to preserve small ideological territories or reproduce the organizational forms of the past. The task is to rebuild the internationalist politics of the proletariat on the basis of the real contradictions of contemporary capitalism and the present material conditions of the working class.
The historical crisis of capitalism is driving humanity toward ever deeper barbarism. But precisely for this reason, it also places before us once again the possibility of consciously reconstructing proletarian internationalism.
The future will not be decided by states, party bureaucracies, or rival blocs of capital. It will be decided by the capacity of the working class to reorganize itself as an independent and internationalist historical force.
For the reconstruction of proletarian internationalism.
May 2026
Internationalist Workers’ Organization
