Archive for March 24th, 2025
The Transitional Program
Chapter 6 of “On the Marxist Progam” ILTT Draft Program (last revised July 2022)
We have laid out the relationship between the vanguard party and program in testing and advancing the program. The fundamental point here is that the Transitional Method is dialectics in action. Transitional demands to meet workers’ needs are designed to raise revolutionary consciousness as each advance by the workers is met by a bourgeois reaction, forcing in turn a new advance by workers until the point of seizure of power is not only necessary but possible. The essence of dialectics then is the active, conscious leadership of the vanguard to lead the working class “over the bridge,” as Trotsky called it, from united fronts for immediate and democratic demands until a class-conscious majority of workers calling for “all power to the soviets!” arises capable of fighting for and winning socialist demands.
(a) Trotsky’s Transitional Method
The Transitional Program was Trotsky’s weapon to arm the proletariat at a time when once again the bourgeoisie was forced to go to war to resolve its worsening crises. Its method was to close the gap
between the objective world situation, summarised as the coming showdown between the two main classes over the future of humanity, and the subjective backwardness of the consciousness of the masses. Either the war would bring a defeat of the revolution and a fall into barbarism, or the proletariat would rise to the situation and make a socialist revolution. But for that to happen the revolutionary party and program was needed to close the gap. It was a desperate last-minute attempt to create a new international party in time to smash the Stalinist, social democratic and centrist mis-leadership of the proletariat and release its potential as the only revolutionary class. For Trotsky this crisis was summed up as the ‘crisis of Marxism’ which in its heart was “the crisis of revolutionary leadership’ that could be resolved only by a new, 4th International. The TP was the summation of the development of the Marxist program from the Communist Manifesto through the first Four Congresses of the Third International. It built on the Left Opposition that took up the work of defending Bolshevik Leninism after the degeneration of the Third International and the rise of Stalin (from 1924).
As we have seen after the final betrayal of the Third International in Germany in 1933, the Left Opposition became the International Communist League (ICL), the embryo of a new, Fourth International committed to the urgent task of ounding a new international to carry forward the task of the socialist revolution. Between 1933 and 1938 Trotsky fought to bring together the various currents that had broken from the Stalinist Comintern, facing resistance from some who thought a new international premature. Those who opposed its foundation, like the Polish section, the Chinese Trotskyist Chen Tu-Hsiu and Isaac Deutscher, based their belief on the period of defeats suffered by the world proletariat that would render the new international impotent. Trotsky’s response was that no matter how weak, a new international had to be founded urgently to raise the Marxist flag to rally the masses to revolution when the world faced war and counter-revolution and humanity was in mortal danger.
“The new parties and the new International must be built upon a new foundation: that is the key with which to solve all other tasks. The tempo and the time of the new revolutionary construction and its consummation depend, obviously, upon the general course of the class struggle, the future victories and defeats of the proletariat. Marxists, however, are not fatalists. They do not unload upon the historical process those very tasks which the historical process has posed before them. The initiative of a conscious minority, a scientific program, bold and ceaseless agitation in the name of clearly formulated aims, merciless criticism of all ambiguity those are some of the most important factors for the victory of the proletariat. Without a fused and steeled revolutionary party, a socialist revolution is inconceivable. The conditions are difficult; the obstacles are great; the tasks are colossal; but there is no reason whatever to become pessimistic or to lose courage. Despite all the defeats of the proletariat, the position of the class enemy remains a hopeless one. Capitalism is doomed. Only in the socialist revolution is there salvation for mankind.”
The Transitional Program was drafted by Trotsky as the basis for the new international. It was presented as a draft and far from complete. It lacked important aspects of a complete program – a deeper theoretical introduction and a revolutionary conclusion.
“A complete program would should have a theoretical expression of the modern capitalist society in its imperialist stage. The reasons of the crisis, the growth of unemployed, and so on, and in this draft this analysis is briefly summarized only in the first chapter because we have written about these things in articles, books, and so on…Also the end of the program is not complete because we don’t speak here about the social revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society into a dictatorship, the dictatorship of socialist society. This brings the reader only to the doorstep. It is a program for action from today until the beginning of the socialist revolution.”
Trotsky expected that the program would be competed in discussion with comrades in every country so the general lines of the program would be balanced by particular local conditions. This was a clear reference to the need for the new international party to be born both democratic and centralist.
Democratic discussion and critique would complete the program and agreement would be expressed in its adoption by the founding congress and acted upon as a disciplined international. In response to some criticisms from US comrades that “some parts of the program do not conform to the situation” he took it upon himself to ‘elaborate’ on what was missing from the theoretical section and its implications for the missing section on revolution. In discussions with leading US comrades, he said:
“We have repeated many times that the scientific character of our activity consists in the fact that we adapt our program not to political conjunctures or the thought or mood of the masses as this mood is today, but we adapt our program to the objective situation as it is represented by the economic class structure of society. The mentality can be backward; then the political task of the party is to bring the mentality into harmony with the objective facts, to make the workers understand the objective task. But we cannot adapt the program to the backward mentality of the workers, the mentality, the mood is a secondary factor – the prime factor is the objective situation…Everywhere I ask what should we do? Make our program fit the objective situation or the mentality of the workers? And I believe that this question must be put before every comrade who says that this program is not fit for the American situation. This program is a scientific program. It is based on an objective analysis of the objective situation. It cannot be understood by the workers as a whole. It would be very good if the vanguard would understand it in the next period and that they would then turn and say to the workers, “You must save yourselves from fascism.”
However, the criticisms of the incomplete program by US comrades demonstrated not its weakness so much as that of the critics. Trotsky was forced to defend the 4th International against the US petty bourgeois opposition which rejected dialectics for bourgeois empiricism, leading to a capitulation to national chauvinism within the imperialist countries, and a refusal to defend the Soviet Union ‘unconditionally’. The draft program was adopted and it remains for today’s revolutionaries to debate what changes were made in the time since 1938 are consistent with the theory and practice of Marxism as held by Trotsky.
Despite its limitations, as pointed out by Trotsky, the Transitional Program became the revolutionary guide to the proletariat on how to advance its struggle across many class fronts to resolve the crisis of Marxism, to defeat imperialist war and defend unconditionally the Soviet Union. For, while the workers have an instinct for dialectics as they become conscious of the struggle of labour against capital, this is not enough without an international party and program capable of transcending the divide between the objective situation and the subjective consciousness and making the transition to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
(b) Trotsky’s Leadership
Yet it is obvious that the crisis of Marxism put a huge load on Trotsky’s shoulders. Trotsky exiled in Mexico had to contend with the Stalinist trials, the assassination of leading comrades including his son Leon Sedov, the Dewey Commission, and those who opposed the founding of the new international. He also faced the bourgeois slander that the international was a sort of ‘vanity project’ for the sole surviving leader of the Bolshevik revolution. [Deutscher] Trotsky refuted all this in his explanation of the origins of the Transitional Program in common ideas, common understanding and common discipline, the result of common experience:
“One can say that we didn’t have a program until this day. Yet we acted. But this program was formulated under different articles, different motions, etc. In this sense the draft program doesn’t presage a new invention, it is not the writing of one man. It is the summation of collective work up until today. But such a summation is absolutely necessary in order to give to the comrades an idea of the situation, a common understanding. Petty bourgeois anarchists and intellectuals are afraid to subscribe to giving a party, common ideas, a common attitude. In opposition they wish moral programs. But for us this program is the result of common experience. It is not imposed upon anybody for whoever joins the party does so voluntarily …the program for the class cannot fall from heaven. We can arrive only at an understanding of the necessity…The program is the articulation of the necessity, that we learned to understand, and since the necessity is the same for all members of the class, we can reach a common understanding of the tasks and the understanding of this necessity is the program. We can go further and say that the discipline of our party must be very severe because we are a revolutionary party against a tremendous bloc of enemies, conscious of their interests, and now we are attacked not only by the bourgeoisie but by the Stalinists, the most venomous of the bourgeois agents. Absolute discipline is necessary but it must come from common understanding. If it is imposed from without it is a yoke. If it comes from understanding it is an expression of personality, but otherwise it is a yoke. Then discipline is an expression of my free individuality. It is not opposition between personal will and the party because I entered of my free will. The program too is on this basis and this program can be upon a sure political and moral basis only if we understand it very well.”
The task is to take the program based on common experience, and common discipline as free activity of the voluntary members, to the masses.
“The duty of the party is to seize every American worker and shake him ten times so he will understand what the situation is in the United States. This is not a conjunctural crisis but a social crisis. Our party can play a great role.” [Question: Isn’t the ideology of the workers a part of the objective factors?] “For us as a small minority this whole thing is objective including the mood of the workers. But we must analyze and classify those elements of the objective situation which can be changed by our paper and those which cannot be changed. That is why we say that the program is adapted to the fundamental stable elements of the objective situation and the task is to adapt the mentality of the masses to thoseobjective factors. To adapt the mentality is a pedagogical task. We must be patient, etc. The crisis of society is given as the base of our activity. The mentality is the political arena of our activity. We must change it. We must give a scientific explanation of society, and clearly explain it to the masses. That is the difference between Marxism and reformism.”
This was no clearer concrete demonstration of this than the question of an independent Labor Party. In the discussions with the SWP leaders on the program Trotsky found that the SWP were divided over whether there was sufficient ‘sentiment’ to call for an Independent Labor Party. Cannon thought that where was strong sentiment in the CIO. Shachtman thought that sentiment was lacking and if the SWP had to call for their formation they would end up as “appendages” of Roosevelt. Trotsky responded by explaining that the objective of the formation of the CIO demanded an Independent Labor Party to take the struggle forward.
On the question that “there is no evidence to indicate any widespread sentiment for such a party”. Trotsky answers:
“We have no machine to take a referendum. We can measure the mood only by action if the slogan is put on the agenda. But what we can say is that the objective situation is absolutely decisive. The trade unions as trade unions can have only a defensive activity, losing members and becoming more and more weak as the crisis deepens, creating more and more unemployed…I say here what I said about the whole program of transitional demands. The problem is not the mood of the masses buy the objective situation, and our job is to confront the backward material of the masses with the tasks which are determined by objective facts and not by psychology. The same is absolutely correct for this specific question on the labor party. If the class struggle is not to be crushed, replaced by demoralization, then the movement must find a new channel and this channel is political. We claim to have Marxism or scientific socialism. What does “scientific socialism” signify in reality? It signifies that the party which represents this social science, departs, as every science, not from subjective wishes, tendencies, or moods but from objective facts, from the material situation of the different classes and their relationships. Only by this method can we establish demands adequate to the objective situation and only after this can we adapt these demands and slogans to the given mentality of the masses. But to begin with this mentality as the fundamental fact would signify not a scientific but a conjunctural, demagogic, or adventurist policy.”
To those who fear becoming a reformist party, Trotsky responds that the SWP would raise its revolutionary program inside the Labor Party to get it adopted:
“…a concrete program of action and demands in the sense that this transitional program issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism. It is not the reformist minimum program which never included workers’ militia, workers control of production. These demands are transitory because they lead from the capitalist society to the proletarian revolution…we can’t stop only with the day-to-day demands of the proletariat. We must give to the most backward workers come concrete slogan that corresponds to their needs and that leads dialectically to the conquest of power…We propagandize this program in the trade unions, propose it as the basic program for the labor party. For us it is a transitional program; but for them, it is the program. Now it’s a question of workers’ control of production, but you can realise this program only through a workers’ and farmers’ government. We must make this slogan popular.”
Trotsky’s assassination deprived the 4th International of his leadership and it succumbed to a failure of dialectics as he feared. The international was weakened by a leadership too influenced by the economism/opportunism of the petty bourgeois/labour aristocracy to operate as an effective international vanguard. It that did not grasp the essentials of dialectics, rather succumbing to national chauvinism in the interests of adapting to the mood of the ‘backward’ masses. Despite Trotsky’s efforts to raise a program based on the objective situation to raise demands that would close the gap between objective reality and subjective consciousness, the TP became reduced to a new mini-max program. The leadership rejected dialectics as the contradictory unity of objective and subjective reality, and resorted to the impressionism of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia which substitutes itself for the agency of class-conscious workers.
(c) A Transitional Program for Today
To conclude this discussion of the Transitional Program we need to work out how to make a Transitional Program for today based on the method of Trotsky’s program of 1938 ‘The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International.’ Trotsky referred to it as ‘unfinished’, and that should adopt it together with all other programmatic documents of the new International such as the Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War. In this way we use the method to arrive at a program for today’s conditions that takes the objective situation as it presents itself and raises the demands that are capable of developing workers’ class consciousness for the tasks of socialist revolution.
First, what is the objective situation? Trotsky in talking about the TP explained the objective and subjective factors in history from 1848 up to 1940. We would sum up that history as ‘permanent revolution’ in the sense of Marx when he first used the term in 1850; the bourgeoisie was no longer the revolutionary class and had to be replaced by the new revolutionary class, the proletariat, to make the permanent revolution. “The expression “permanent revolution” is an expression of Marx which he applied to the revolution of 1848. In Marxian, naturally not in revisionist but in revolutionary Marxist literature, this term has always had citizenship rights. Franz Mehring employed it for the revolution of 1905-1907. The permanent revolution, in an exact translation, is the continuous revolution, the uninterrupted revolution. What is the political idea embraced in this expression?
“It is, for us communists, that the revolution does not come to an end after this or that political conquest, after obtaining this or that social reform, but that it continues to develop further and its only boundary is the socialist society. Thus, once begun, the revolution (insofar as we participate in it and particularly when we lead it) is in no case interrupted by us at any formal stage whatever. On the contrary, we continually and constantly advance it in conformity, of course, with the situation, so long as the revolution has not exhausted all the possibilities and all the resources of the movement. This applies to the conquests of the revolution inside of a country as well as to its extension over the international arena.”
The objective situation is summarised as the balance of class forces between permanent revolution and permanent counter-revolution. It is not an abstraction, but the practical theory/program for the ongoing class struggle between the two antagonistic classes. We assess the objective situation today in relation to the imperialist epoch as one of capitalist decay and the destruction of the forces of production. This poses the question of which class shall rule – the proletariat or the ruling class. Our program is therefore one that makes the demands necessary to mobilise workers to fight for their immediate needs all the way to the seizure of power and the subjective transformation of the existing objective situation into the new objective situation of world socialist revolution.
Terminal Crisis
Chapter 9 of “On the Marxist Program” ILTT Draft Program (last revised July 2022)
Starting with Marx, crisis is a crisis of reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production. Capitalism can survive so long as it has not exhausted its capacity to impose and restore those conditions. It can do so unless the proletariat intervenes and takes power. Thus, the crucial factor in resolving capitalist crises is: which class has power. The current crisis marks terminal decline of
capitalism, as the looming environmental catastrophe means capital can no longer reproduce its
conditions for existence.
As we have seen capitalism for the whole imperialist epoch has been over-ripe for its replacement by
critical factor for the ability of the proletariat to take power is the existence of an internationalist
revolutionary party. Without that party, capitalist crises become more and more destructive of the
conditions for capitalism’s reproduction, including the destruction of accumulated wealth (dead labor)
and the labor power or living labour. The future of humanity therefore is a race between living labor
(the proletariat) and dead labor (accumulated capital). Either capitalism dies or humanity dies.
(a) Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on Crises
The experience of the economic crises of the 20th and 21st centuries vindicate Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin developed Marx’s theory of the anarchic self-expansion of capital to explain the rise of imperialism and the inevitability of the First Inter-Imperialist War. That war failed to solve the problems of restoring profits as the Bolshevik Revolution opened a new period in which the world’s workers threatened to take power. Imperialism used social democracy and its state forces to suppress the revolution, ultimately resorting to fascist movements to suppress the still-powerful proletariat. Trotsky as the main surviving Bolshevik leader saw the rise of fascism as the mortal enemy of the working class and its program of Permanent Revolution, and expected that if global revolution did not result from the 2nd inter-Imperialist War, then Marxism itself as a revolutionary theory/program would be found wanting.
Had Trotsky survived the war he would have quickly drawn up a balance sheet. He would have recognised that the 4th International in the Second inter-Imperialist war betrayed the international working class by adapting to the Stalinist 3rd International with terrible consequences as in Vietnam. The Stalinists succeeded in destroying the best Trotskyist cadres during and after the war, sucking workers in the “democratic” imperialist countries into popular fronts with their own capitalist ruling classes against the fascist powers. This divided the international working class and led, as we have seen above, to the abandonment of the Bolsheviks’ program on imperialist war in the majority of the Fourth International (FI).
Trotsky would have concluded that while imperialism survived the war, this was only a temporary respite. The crisis of Marxism was not the same as its bankruptcy. The crisis of Marxism was now the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International. The Post-war boom was the result of unprecedented destruction of the forces of production in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Yet it did not resolve capitalism’s tendency to crises. Despite Stalinism’s betrayals, workers’ property survived the war in Russia, and in the semi-colonies, imperialism was forced to go through a formal ‘de-colonisation’. In some countries this struggle for independence would lead to the formation of bureaucratic workers states. The FI, reneging on the most important part of the program on war, would have to be rebuilt to prepare for the inevitable onset of a new, bigger crisis. The 1946 and 1948 international meetings would have drawn up honest balance sheets and repudiated the social imperialist deviation of the European and US sections. This correction did not take place.
The first major test of a rebuilt international would have been drawing these lessons to vindicate the
Transitional Program for the post-war boom. Like the end of the First inter-imperialist war, workers, despite their historic defeat, were after the Second inter-Imperialist war, able to organise and demand
some concessions in a period of new capital accumulation and prepare for the inevitable new, bigger
crisis. The new crisis came in the ‘60s with the end of the ‘post-war boom’. In the absence of Trotsky
and a healthy International, the response to the crisis revealed the bankruptcy of theory and program
of the official Fourth International. We can see this clearly in the debate between Ernest Mandel and
David Yaffe over the onset of a new crisis of falling profits.
(b) Debates over the post-war ‘structural’ crisis from 1970s to today
Mandel, the chief theoretician of the Pabloist USEC had an empiricist multi-cause theory of crisis,
(contingency was all the rage) which when boiled down was left with underconsumption, i.e., a distributional theory of crisis not unlike David Harvey’s theory today. Yaffe accused Mandel of capitulating to a state-centred Keynesian economics consistent with the FI’s capitulation to Stalinism. In fact, the post-war boom had disoriented most Marxists, worsening the crisis of Marxism. The defence of ‘democracy’ against fascism and the defence of the Soviet Union got conflated into the defence of Stalinism as a petty bourgeois fraction of the working class embedded in the capitalist state alongside classical Social Democracy (as for example ‘Eurocommunism’). The ‘boom’ was explained as the result of ‘democratic’ capitalism managed by Social Democracy, and its end resulted from, not from inflation as a symptom of the LTRPF, but the revival of neo-classical economics and neo-liberal regimes.
Hence Marxism was increasingly diluted, the left moved right across the world tailing democratic mperialism. In the UK it tailed the retreat of the imperialist Labour Party from Harold Wilson to the Blairite “third way”, and the US Democratic Party from the ‘Great Society’ to Bill Clinton. The Pabloists or all colors who followed Mandel called Yaffe and Co ‘fundamentalists’ when they claimed the ‘neoliberal’ upturns of the ‘80s and ‘90s were largely speculative. Neo-liberal ‘reforms’ destroyed constant and variable capital to raise the rate of profit but this was not sufficient to restore pre-crisis levels of profitability in production. Over-accumulated capital was diverted from production to speculating in existing values. Neither did capitalist restoration in Russia, China in the early 1990s help solve capitalism’s crisis. Russia and China were not super-exploited neo-colonies of the US bloc but became new imperialist powers to rival the declining US. Cuba and Vietnam restored capitalism and became capitalist semi-colonies under the influence of the imperialist Russia/China bloc.
Debates among Marxists about the nature and causes of crisis, continue to reflect the need to attack
Marxism to undermine its revolutionary theory and practice by refuting its ‘laws of motion’ – the laws that explain the drive for capital accumulation. We can see this in the positions taken on the Law of Value (LOV) and the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). Those who defend both laws (fundamentalists) see the current crisis as demanding a socialist revolution while those who reject both laws (empiricists) explain the current crisis as resulting from wrong policies that can be corrected with democratic socialist reforms.
The debate between Michael Roberts and David Harvey is instructive. Roberts argues that Harvey rejects the LOV and therefore the LTRPF. Capitalist crises are therefore not necessary but contingent on powerful elites controlling the distribution of income. This is shared with the radical neo-Ricardian school that says that exploitation occurs at the level of distribution. And therefore, we need a politics of re-distribution! Roberts explains that the capitalists’ power is to make profits, but when the laws of motion necessarily destroy the conditions for this, they are powerless to stop their money losing value without a massive attack on workers to restore those conditions. We argue that the structural crisis of the 1970’s to today demonstrates that capitalism can no longer accumulate sufficient value as capital, so that the crisis is not contingent but necessary; and further, we would argue, terminal.
The “Global Financial Crisis” of 2007/8 proves that the structural crisis that ended the post-war boo is worsening. Since the 1960s the capitalist world economy has failed to destroy sufficient surplus capital to restore the conditions for a new period of capitalist accumulation. Nor can Russia and China as new imperialist powers evade the decline of the capitalist world economy as they are necessarily subject to its laws of motion. This means that in the epoch of imperialism, spanning the period from the turn of the 20th century until today, capitalism has been in inexorable decline. Despite its attempts to restructure and re-divide the global economy and resolve depressions with world wars, each crisis gets deeper and longer. Each world war merely postpones the day of reckoning. The build-up of the explosive contradictions that are just beneath the surface of the neo-liberal veneer, will burst forth to bring its life to an end. The owners of the big chunks of capital are desperately trying to suppress those contradictions by state-backed financial speculation in existing values. But this is now expressed as multi-trillions of ‘fictitious’ capitals resulting in impossibly high levels of debt that can never be exchanged for actual new value expropriated from labor power as profit. We can see this explosion in the making as capitalism’s ability to restore profits now drives it towards the final destruction of the forces of production and with it, nature.
(c) Marx on Ecological Crisis
Once we factor in the many positive feedbacks driving global warming it is obvious that we face the prospect of human extinction. Once the ecosystem which capitalism takes for granted begins to collapse, capitalism itself will collapse. Capitalism only exists as a mode of production by a constant process of exploiting nature to the point of destruction. Marx recognised this early on. There was a limit to the ability of capital to replenish or restore nature when it could deplete and destroy nature for profit. Marx concept of metabolic rift is based on the best science of his day already revealing the depredations of capitalist agriculture. It is a model for understanding the ecological rift between capital and nature.
Contrary to popular wisdom, Marx was not a fan for environmental destruction. Rather he based his whole theory on the contradiction between nature and society, expressed as between use-value and
exchange-value. Use-value being the natural process of producing for use (though this ‘nature’ is
conditioned by the requirements of capital); exchange value as being the requirement that use-values were commodified as exchange value. Commodities would only be used if they were bought and sold on the market. This contradiction is the seed of capitalist development which accumulates riches at the top and accumulates impoverishment at the bottom. Inevitably capital would destroy nature and itself unless labour as part of nature fought back and restored a harmonious relation between nature and society. (Climate Crisis: From Capital to Commune).
The only unanswered question is how soon this will happen and in what form. Global warming is already destroying the conditions for production as the ‘external’ costs of pollution, degradation, and exhaustion of raw materials impact back on declining profits. The costs of wars to control this declining resource base on human life as part of nature is producing a rise in resistance to this inevitable social collapse. There is no prospect of the capitalist ruling class taking any responsibility for preventing this collapse. It is necessary for the proletariat to take the lead in this task. Marxism holds that under capitalism the class relation between capital and labor generates the motive force for class struggle between the proletariat and capitalist class that, through workers strikes, occupations and insurrections, will end in socialist revolution. As capital exhausts its historic capacity to develop the forces of production, it inevitably destroys nature including the ecological conditions for human existence. The proletariat in fighting to overthrow capital, must take the lead in drawing all other oppressed people into the struggle for survival. These include all forms of labour, producing value or not, unemployed, undocumented, self-employed, skilled or unskilled, white or blue collar etc., plus all those who are outside the formal capital-labour relation but whose labour is appropriated by capital. Its Transitional Program must address itself to bringing all oppressed peoples, and groups behind the banner of socialist revolution, because without them there can be no revolution.
Women as the majority of workers, as members of an historic sex-class, still perform domestic labour for no payment as domestic slaves, and continue to face ongoing gender oppression. As domestic slaves, they do not directly create value but contribute their unpaid labour in reproducing the value of labour power. Contrary to Marx and Engels, who expected the inclusion of women as wage workers alongside men to make them more equal, they remain doubly exploited as domestic slaves and a floating section of the reserve army of wage labour, where their working conditions lag well behind those of men. Colonial and semi-colonial workers, (including self-employed, unemployed and migrant workers) peasants and poor farmers are the big majority of the world’s workers and doubly oppressed as unpaid slaves and wage workers. They are the largest section of the global reserve army, super-exploited since their labour can earn no more than a poverty income. Indigenous peoples who remain colonized in some form, partially embedded in their pre-capitalist social relations, are oppressed by capital, and have their labour and land exploited by capital. There will be no socialist revolution that does not include the representatives of working women, semi-colonial and indigenous workers in the vanguard of the proletariat, and which does not make the liberation of all oppressed from the threat of extinction, and the realization of communism, its goal.
Since Marx, Marxists have maintained that capitalism is a living contradiction between labor and capital, which can be suppressed indefinitely unless transcended by socialist revolution. Today, however, we do not see any prospect of capitalism ‘stabilising’ as it did briefly after the First Imperialist and Second Imperialist wars. Today, the decomposition of capitalism is so advanced that we are justified in using the term “terminal” crisis to mean that capitalism cannot restore profitability because it is destroying its own conditions of existence. Whether this takes the form of fascist attacks on workers and oppressed to resolve the crisis of falling profits, failure of production as the ecosystem collapses, or expansion of many local and regional wars into a Third Imperialist World War, the outcome is the same. The proletariat and other oppressed people facing death and destruction have nothing to lose but their chains. Led by a revolutionary international communist party, they have everything to win; the survival of the human, and other threatened species, in a global socialist, and ultimately, communist world.
Living Marxism 