5) What is the social force that can bring about revolution?

The only solution to the infernal spiral of ecological and military destruction is to overthrow capitalism and move towards communism. But the bourgeoisie will never accept the end of its system, the end of its privileges, the end of its existence as a dominant and exploiting class. It will try to maintain its obsolete system at all costs. Only a world revolution can put an end to this agony. For all those who are concerned about the state of the planet and the fate of humanity, the essential question is: what social force is capable of bringing about revolution?

What is the revolutionary class in capitalist society?

“The history of all societies up to the present day is the history of class struggles”. These are the opening words of the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In this fundamental document, which retains its value to this day, we see how the class struggle has unfolded in all historical societies, how it was in fact at the heart of the radical transformation of these societies. Ancient slavery was replaced by feudalism, feudalism by capitalism. Each time, a revolutionary process was led by a new class born from the womb of existing society:

- Faced with the slave-masters of decadent Rome, for centuries there were revolts by slaves and gladiators – most famously the Spartacus revolt of 73-71 BCE. But despite their courage, they were powerless to overturn slave society. It was the feudalists who represented the revolutionary class of the time, the class capable of replacing slavery, which had entered its epoch of decadence, with a new social organisation of production capable of overcoming the insoluble contradictions of the old society and thus installing a new form class exploitation, based on serfdom.

- Faced with the decadent feudal lords, there were many rebellions by the peasants against exploitation, such the ‘Jacqueries’ in France or the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381. But they too were powerless to change society. It was the bourgeoisie who represented the revolutionary class of the time, the class capable of overthrowing decadent feudalism and ushering in a new social organisation of production, this time based on the wage system.

In capitalism, this revolutionary role falls to the proletariat – the first exploited class capable of transforming society from top to bottom. In the past, the contradictions assailing societies in their period of decadence could not be overcome by abolishing exploitation but only by bringing in a new mode of production itself based on exploitation. But the contradictions that provoke the historic crisis of capitalism, the result of the very laws of this system – of production being based not on based not on human need but for the market and profit, on competition between enterprises and states - are rooted in the exploitation of the class which produces the essential of social wealth, the proletariat. Because, under capitalism, labour power has become a commodity which is sold to the owners of the means of production, the capitalists; because the producers are exploited, because competition on the market forces the capitalists (whatever their ‘good intentions’) to increase exploitation more and more, the abolition of the contradictions assailing capitalism necessarily entails the abolition of exploitation. This is why, under capitalism, the revolutionary class can no longer be a new exploiting class, as in the past, but has to be the main exploited class under this system, the proletariat.

Faced with the decadent bourgeoisie, there are a thousand reasons to revolt. All humanity suffers, all strata, all the exploited are tortured. But the only social force capable of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, its states and its forces of repression, and of proposing another perspective, is the working class. The proletariat is fundamentally different from the producing and exploited classes that preceded it. In slave and feudal societies, the instruments of labour were individual or, at best, communal. The basis of production was therefore isolated, fragmented, locally limited, individual labour. The major upheaval brought about by capital stems precisely from the replacement, as the predominant basis of production, of individual labour by collective labour. In place of isolated individual labour, the manufacture of goods has developed through the associated labour of thousands of human beings, carried out on the scale of the globe (for example, a modern automobile is made up of parts produced in countless factories and countries). In this way, capital has created, in place of the scattered exploited classes, isolated from each other, a class which is united by its collective labour (and this on a world scale) and which can only live and work thanks to this unity. In this way, capitalism has produced, with the modern proletariat, its own gravedigger. And as an exploited class, it has no interest in creating a new form of domination and exploitation. It can only free itself by freeing the whole of humanity from all forms of exploitation and oppression. It is in the struggle that workers forge the unity that is their strength. On a daily basis, capitalism divides them by pitting them against each other, between colleagues, between teams, between units, between factories, between companies, between sectors, between nations. But when they start to stand up for their working conditions, solidarity binds them together. And then “sometimes the workers triumph, but it's a fleeting triumph. The real result of their struggles is not so much immediate success as the growing unity of the workers” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848). Karl Marx described the whole process as follows: “Large-scale industry brings together in one place a crowd of people unknown to each other. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest they have against their master, unites them in a single thought of resistance - coalition. Thus the coalition always has a double aim, that of putting an end to competition between them, in order to be able to compete generally with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was only the maintenance of wages, as the capitalists in their turn unite in a thought of repression, the coalitions, at first isolated, form into groups, and in the face of capital always united, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary for them than that of wages. (...) Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. Thus this mass is already a class in relation to capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have only mentioned a few phases, this mass comes together and constitutes a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle”. (Marx, Poverty of Philosophy)

This is what lies behind every strike: a potential process of unification, organisation and politicisation of the entire working class, the formation of a social power capable of standing up to capitalism. Because by fighting together for their living and working conditions, workers are attacking the very heart of capitalism: exploitation, profit, commodification and competition. That's why Lenin said that “behind every strike lies the hydra of revolution”.

Luxemburg and Lenin were witnesses to the first great revolutionary struggles of the working class in the 20th century – 1905 in Russia, and 1917-19 in Russia, Germany, and around the world. In those epic battles workers were faced with the growing incorporation of their own organisations (trade unions and parties) into the existing state apparatus. But in response they were able to create new organs of struggle– the soviets or workers’ councils, capable of unifying the class and laying the basis for a new form of political power that could confront and dismantle the bourgeois state and begin the process of “expropriating the expropriators”: the transition to a communist society. These movements were a real confirmation of the revolutionary nature of the working class.

Of course, soviets or workers’ councils can only appear at a very advanced level of the class struggle. They cannot exist permanently inside capitalist society. But the fact that they correspond to the needs of the class movement in this epoch – the need for unity across sectional and national boundaries, the need to raise the struggle to the political level – is shown by the fact in many of the struggles since 1968, workers have come together in mass assemblies and elected, revocable strike committees that are the embryonic form of the future councils. This was demonstrated most clearly by the Inter-Factory Strike Committees produced by the mass strike in Poland in 1980.

And what about the climate?

Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the workers' movement is not just a “bread and butter” question, but also “a great cultural movement”. From the 19th century onwards, workers incorporated into their struggle the fight against all the scourges of capitalism: war, inequality between men and women, between blacks and whites, the mistreatment of the sick... and pollution. The question of nature and the environment belongs entirely to the revolutionary struggle of the working class. In 1845, in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels was already denouncing the effects of polluted air, overcrowding and untreated sewage on the health of the workers; the Manifesto of 1848 already demanded that the separation between town and country had to be overcome; in his later years Marx avidly studied the harmful effects on the soil of capitalism’s “robbery agriculture”.

In other words, it is the revolutionary struggle of the working class against exploitation and for communism that contains, encompasses and carries behind it all the other causes, all the other revolts, including the struggle for the planet. What revolutionaries and all those concerned about the state of the world must defend is therefore the exact opposite of the current theory of ‘inter-sectionality’. This theory puts the workers' struggle, the fight against racism and the fight for the climate on the same level, and claims that all these struggles must ‘converge’, march side by side in the same impetus. In other words, it's a theory for the dilution of the proletarian struggle, of the disappearance of the workers in the midst of an amorphous mass of ‘citizens’. It's a devious tactic to divert the workers from their historic struggle to overthrow the capitalist system. It's a trap!

Does the working class still exist?

The big lie equating Stalinism with communism (see article on page 3) enabled the bourgeoisie to mount a deafening campaign in 1990, at the time of the collapse of the USSR, to proclaim everywhere the death of communism. It hammered home the message that any revolutionary dream could only turn into a nightmare. That capitalism had triumphed once and for all. Worse still, it even managed to make workers believe that the working class no longer existed, that it was a quaint old thing from another century. ‘Employees’, ‘collaborators’, ‘middle class’... the New Speak worthy of George Orwell's 1984 has finished hammering this new ‘reality’ into people's heads.

But facts are stubborn. Not only have workers not disappeared, they have never been so numerous on a global scale. Including in Europe. Because the proletariat is not just made up of blue-collared factory workers. All those who are forced to sell their labour power to make a living are workers. Manual workers or intellectuals, producers or service workers, in the private sector or the public sector, it doesn't matter; they form one and the same class, waging one and the same struggle.

The working class exists! And today it is rediscovering the path of struggle.

It is true that since 1990, the working class has waged very few struggles, stunned by the blow of the campaign on the so-called ‘death of communism’. It’s also true that the ruling class took advantage of the defeats suffered by the working class in the 80s, of its disorientation in the 90s, to break up many traditional centres of working class militancy (such as the coal mines in the UK, steel plants in France, car production in the US). All this combined to undermine the awareness in the working class that it was indeed a class with its own distinct interests. Losing confidence in its revolutionary project, in the future, it had also lost confidence in itself. It was resigned. But today, faced with the worsening of the economic crisis, inflation, the increasingly unbearable wave of impoverishment and precariousness, the proletariat has taken up the path of struggle once again. After years of stagnation in the struggle, the workers are beginning to raise their heads. It was the workers of Great Britain who first announced this comeback during the ‘Summer of Anger’ in 2022. Since then, strikes have multiplied around the world. The challenge for the period ahead is for workers to unite, to overcome the poison of corporatism, to take their struggles into their own hands and to organise themselves. But they will also have to integrate all the crises of capitalism into their struggle: the war crisis, the social crisis and the climate crisis! This is what was lacking in the wave of international struggle that began in May 1968 and spread from country to country until the 1980s: the proletariat at that time had not been able to sufficiently politicise its struggle.

That's why all those who are convinced of the need for revolution, whether in the face of the climate crisis, the economic crisis or war, have a primary responsibility to participate in this politicisation: by coming to debate in demonstrations, assemblies, political discussion circles and struggle groups formed by the most combative workers. Above all, they need to work towards the construction of the revolutionary political organisation, which has the specific role of defending the historical lessons of the class struggle, of maintaining and developing the communist programme. Today such organisations may be small and can’t yet have a direct impact on the course of the class struggle, but they must see themselves as an indispensable bridge towards the future world party of the communist revolution.