We have read and discussed the programmatic theses recently published by the revolutionary group Barbaria. [1] They are available on its website and translated into various languages. We thought it would be useful to send Barbaria our critical comments. In themselves, they may seem “very” critical. Certainly, we seem to share the main class positions – seem, we say, because the theses do not explicitly affirm them as “class frontiers”, as we do for example in our own platform. But we differ sharply on both the approach and method and on the programmatic and theoretical framework that result from the former. First and foremost, the theses ignore the historical dimension specific to the method of historical materialism, i.e. Marxism. The political and class positions presented are based more on a revolutionary will, or even feeling, than on a materialist understanding of the class struggle. The result is two major weaknesses that we intend to combat: an approach we would describe as “anarchistic”, and a significant underestimation, if not oblivion, of the class struggle and the revolutionary class proletariat, which are not at the heart of the theses.

We know that the origins, if not of the group itself, of some of its members, lie in the influence of the former Internationalist Communist Group (IGC-GCI). [2] We have also noted that, since its foundation, Barbaria has been trying to break away from this movement and reappropriate the acquisition of the Communist Left, particularly the one of Italy. If one takes a look at the group’s website, one will see that this dynamic towards “the left” and this effort to reappropriate it are very clear. It is this effort and this theoretical-political struggle to which we intend to contribute to the best of our ability. We have no doubt that the publication of these theses and our criticisms will be of interest far beyond our two groups and their mutual clarifications. We call on the entire revolutionary camp to take part in this fraternal “debate-combat”. The confrontation of programmatic positions is essential to best prepare the conditions for the formation of the world party of the proletariat. All the more so as time is running out in the face of the historical drama that is about to unfold.

We have chosen to keep the form or presentation of our criticisms as we have issued them for our own internal discussion. We therefore reproduce Barbaria’s theses and include our critical comments, in the form of notes, in brackets and bold. This method has the advantage of facilitating the expression and exposition of each criticism thesis by thesis. It can help the reader find his or her way around. It has the disadvantage of giving partial answers and at the risk of obscuring the general approach of both the programmatic theses themselves and our critique. We hope, however, that readers and militants will be able to benefit from it. It is in this form that we have sent our comments to Barbaria. Given the length of the theses and our comments, we cannot publish all in a single issue of our journal. This first part will therefore be followed by a second in the next issue of Revolution or War #30.

1. Historical Materialism

The desire for revolution is intuitive. It is enough to have experienced the violence of this system in one of its various forms and to have projected, ephemerally or with conscious resolve, the need for a radical transformation of things. On the other hand, acting as revolutionaries is not intuitive. It entails putting our feet on a social reality that appears inverted to us in order to know not only how to put an end to this system, but above all what it means to put an end to it. That is why the method we use to interpret the functioning of society is fundamental.

Historical materialism understands the evolution of human societies through the concept of the mode of production, i.e. the idea that we can only understand a society, its institutions, its cultural, religious and ideological expressions through the way it produces and reproduces its material life: the means it uses and the way in which its members organise themselves to do so. In short, social and historical being determines consciousness.

The mode of production defines the social totality. Its intrinsic contradictions will mark the historical development of society. In capitalism, the inability to overcome these contradictions, synthesised in the clash of the productive forces and the social relations of production, gives rise to the next mode of production, communism, in a catastrophic way, i.e., not gradually or in a curve of ascent and decay. However, it does not appear out of nowhere: the transition to a new mode of production does not take place without its historical foundations, the conditions of its emergence, having been gestated beforehand. Thus capitalism, the most destructive and alienating mode of production our species has ever known, nevertheless prepares the material basis for communism.

[The claim to historical materialism is in itself to be welcomed. This claim is indispensable for any revolutionary group, bearing in mind that the application of historical materialism is also a permanent struggle for all communist organizations always subject to the pressure of bourgeois ideology and metaphysics, at the level of method. [3]

This thesis on historical materialism is at best too vague for a programmatic text. In order to anchor all the theses on the terrain of class struggle, it would have been necessary to start from the point of view of classes, not individuals, as the fundamental basis of society, by affirming that historical materialism is the revolutionary theory of the proletariat.]

2. Capitalism

Capitalism is, among class societies, the ultimate mode of production, existing today all over the planet. It is not merely a system of economic exploitation, which accompanies or intersects with other systems of domination such as race, gender or techno-industrialism. It is the way in which society produces and reproduces its life—in all its aspects—on the basis of commodity production. It is not a trivial matter that the social purpose is the production of commodities and not of goods destined to the satisfaction of needs, since that same imperative induces an automatism where social relations take the form of things and where the movement of the products determines the movement and life of the producers. Reality is inverted: it is commodity fetishism.

The international nature of capitalism is expressed in terms of competing nations competing with each other for the world market and the political-military predominance that come with that. In other words: it expresses itself in national bourgeoisies competing with each other for a larger share of the surplus value exploited from the world proletariat. Like any struggle, there are stronger and weaker nations. The international dimension of capitalism is fragmented and hierarchical, but this does not mean that there are oppressed nations and oppressor nations; there are only nations that perform better than others within global competition. This configuration makes nationalism and racism a structural feature of capitalism. It also makes every state imperialist and war between states a necessary and permanent product of the system.

Capitalism is the last class society: it presents continuities and discontinuities with the previous ones. The emergence of private property and social classes demanded a patriarchal structure of reproduction, whose basic cell is in the family and where control of women’s bodies is key. Capitalism, as a class society, continues to have a patriarchal structure, but it reproduces it according to its mercantile and abstract logic, which separates production and reproduction, public and private space, and makes the biological an obstacle to the unlimited production of value or, at best, a cost to be borne.

Therefore, a mode of production that has turned human beings into a commodity cannot be any less destructive for the natural environment. The more capitalism develops, the more it boosts its productive capacity, the more labour it expels and the more raw materials and energy it requires in its production: in short, the development of capitalism is accompanied by an increase in social misery (surplus population) and the rapid destruction of the natural world, thus undermining the very foundations of our existence as a species.

At the basis of this is the exhaustion of value. The high degree of socialisation and development of productive capacity that this system has reached renders historically obsolete not only the specific categories of capitalism (value, commodity, wage labour), but also those that have been the backbone of the class modes of production (private property, family, state). However, this exhaustion does not imply a slow decline towards a new mode of production, but rather increases the catastrophic consequences of persevering with it: since the productive forces cannot stop growing, their contradiction with the relations of production—that is, the contradiction between an increasingly social production and a private appropriation of the product—becomes more and more violent. Capitalism is an automatic machine that dies by killing, and it will not stop unless we revolutionarily subvert the existing social relations.

[This second thesis on “capitalism” actually tackles several questions, in a somewhat scattered fashion. But above all, it suffers from the approach of the previous one, which does not place class antagonism at the heart of the document and method. This results in concessions to leftist ideology and some of its political positions, particularly with regard to feminism.

But what does “exhaustion of value” mean?]

3. Communism

This next mode of production, communism, has nothing to do with the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Castro and Guevara’s Cuba. What the counter-revolution has presented as communism is the direct negation of the revolutionary programme that had begun to develop from the League of Communists and the IWA out of the struggle of the proletariat, especially with the great historical experience of the Paris Commune, and which Marx and Engels synthesised theoretically. There has been nothing worse for our revolutionary movement than for the counter-revolution to present itself in the garb of revolution and to invert, point by point, the terminology of communism. We claim for ourselves those comrades who made a physical and programmatic fight against opportunism in the Second and Third Internationals and against the Stalinist counter-revolution, and who drew from the midnight of the century the indispensable lessons for the next revolutionary assault of our class: we speak especially of the Italian communist left, but also of the earlier contributions of the Bolsheviks and Lenin, of Rosa Luxemburg and the German-Dutch left, as well as the positions of the internationalists who broke with the Fourth International during World War II, such as G. Munis, who later founded the FOR, Agis Stinas and Ngo Van Xuyet.

[There are two very important political positions, which have become principles, which are put forward here and which we share: the capitalist character of the so-called socialist countries, from the USSR to Cuba through China; and the claiming of the struggle of the left fractions within the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. This claiming is fundamental for laying the programmatic foundations of the communist program and for a revolutionary group to participate in its elaboration, as well as in the struggle for the party and for the political “leadership” of class struggles.

That is why, for our part, we “claim the battles” of the League of Communists, the 1st International, the 2nd International, the 3rd International and all the left-wing currents and fractions that have assumed the historical continuity of the communist program by fighting opportunism within them. Claiming the struggles? In other words, to “claim” not the positions taken per se, but the moment and circumstances in which they were taken; that is, to be on the same side as the Marxist Left on the different barricades or successive struggles on the political, theoretical, organizational, etc., to which it participated. And, in this sense, we can also “refer” to the most eminent militants, starting with Marx and Engels, of course to establish our historical claim and our arguments.]

Communism is a society without money, commodities and private property, and therefore without social classes, family and state. The only way to abolish these categories is through the constitution of a world community in which all borders are destroyed, production is planned according to human needs on the basis of the different capacities of its members, and the product of labour is distributed according to these members’ needs. In contrast to capitalism, which is based on production for production’s sake because it aims at a permanent increase in value; communism is anti-productivist, because it is aimed at the human needs of present and future generations. The transition to communism will involve a process of both the reduction and transformation of production and the elimination of the permanent wastefulness of consumption in this system, one of the central elements of which is the separation of town and country.

[We share the undeniably communist conception of communism expressed here, which refers to questions of class principle.]

Communism is not only desirable and possible; it is more relevant than ever today. The very cause of the social and ecological crisis we are increasingly experiencing: the depletion of value, is the confession that human development can no longer maintain the existence of private property and its logical derivations (commodity, money, wage labour, social classes, family, state). There is less and less work, we are surrounded by worthless money, the capitalist class is becoming more and more impersonal, the family is in permanent crisis, the state sees its sovereignty challenged from within by nationalist forces and by the compulsion of international capital from without. Capitalism itself is calling its social categories into question. No mode of production arises out of nothing but is rather built upon the contradictions of the previous one. Communism has been possible for over a century, but today its actuality is manifest and peremptory.

[We think it is a mistake to consider that nationalist forces, we imagine “extreme-right” forces, just like international capital, could “challenge” the sovereignty of states. Imperialism can reduce the sovereignty of even the weakest capitalist states to the benefit of the strongest. But the far right, including American libertarians and others, are involved in strengthening the state, as is international capital, i.e., capital in constant competition, which needs the national state more than ever to defend its interests: is not this the case in countries like China and Russia? And even more so in the “free market” countries of the West, starting with the United States and the role of the state in economic policy, bidenomics for example, or with capitalists like Elon Musk, who have only been able to develop thanks to state support and public orders.

Presenting “nationalist” right-wing forces as challenging the state runs the risk of misunderstanding the political stakes ahead, and in particular the significance of their coming to power when it does.]

4. World Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

It is not possible to transform existing relations from within the bourgeois state, through slow legislative work that expands workers’ power within this system. Nor can they be transformed in parallel to the state, through the slow social work of building cooperatives, ecovillages, squats and similar formulas: self-management is a trap that makes us internalise capitalist exploitation with the idea that if there is no boss, there is no exploitation. The only way to end capitalism is through a violent insurrection in which the proletariat establishes its own organs of power—class assemblies and the communist international—takes up arms and destroys the bourgeois state to establish its class dictatorship.

[We share the class position on parliamentarianism today. But, again, apart from the fact that its character as a class “frontier” is not explicit (as with self-management), it is displayed without historical reference.

On the other hand, the Communist International as an “organ of power” raises a debate within the proletarian camp, particularly on the question of the role of the party in the exercise of power. Whatever the position adopted, can or should the party exercise power or not, how can we imagine that the International, or the international party, is an “organ of power”, assumes power, as an International as long as class dictatorship has not extended to the whole planet? But this question would deserve, and deserves today – demands ? – an in-depth debate, which we have begun within the IGCL, but have not yet been able to bring to a conclusion, and which should be taken up by the proletarian camp as a whole.]

Capitalism has an international nature. As long as the revolution does not spread worldwide, it is not possible to do away with value in any territory: there is no socialism in any one country. For the same reason, the existence of social classes cannot be ended and a class dictatorship is necessary. Within the insurgent territory, this dictatorship must impose itself authoritatively against bourgeois reaction and against the development of mercantile relations, starting from day one with the maximum reduction and distribution of working time, the free provision of the basic means of subsistence, the disinvestment in the production of means of production and their redirection towards consumption. Outwardly, as the only safeguard against the process degenerating, the International must by all means push for the extension of the world revolution and the extension of the class dictatorship without borders to cover the entire capitalist world. To this end, the International cannot be a federation of national parties, but a single world party with a single programme to which its various sections, especially those where the proletarian insurrection has been victorious, are subordinated. Only then, the revolution having triumphed internationally, will it be possible to put an end to value and, consequently, to social classes. And thus, the organ which was born to manage a society fractured into classes, the state, will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

[Here again, the vision of communism and the transition period is clearly set out. In particular, the objectives that the class dictatorship must set itself. In order of priority, in our view: 1) class dictatorship against the bourgeoisie; 2) extension of the revolution; 3) maximum improvement in the living and working conditions of the proletariat - which remains an exploited class as long as the mode of production has not disappeared on a world scale; 4) planning of production in the direction of this improvement in proletarian conditions, in the knowledge that the proletariat in power will face civil war and armed counter-revolution. We know, especially from the Russian experience, that the exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat in more or less isolated countries or groups of countries will be confronted with a contradiction between the necessities of the extension of the revolution and the civil war that the bourgeoisie will impose, and the defense of the living and working conditions of the proletariat, i.e. between producing for workers’ consumption in a situation of scarcity and war, even of massive destruction, for one hand and, for the other the defense of proletarian power and the state of class dictatorship.

We share the position that the International cannot be formed on the basis of a federation of different national parties, but on that of a single world party with a single program.]

5. Minimum Programme and Maximum Programme

Communism is the minimum that we must realise: since the first world assault of the proletariat which began in 1917, preceded by the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, the communist revolution is materially possible all over the world. Any bourgeois-democratic or reformist demand will work against the revolution, because it will serve to re-establish a system which should already be dead. Consequently, revolutionaries cannot take up these demands as part of their minimum programme, if they do not want it to end up working against their maximum programme: the struggle for communism.

[We share these positions – maximum program, bourgeois or reformist demand versus revolution – today. In so doing, we find ourselves on the same side of the barricade on these questions today. That is, for the epoch of imperialism or decadence of capitalism, and that in broad strokes since the 1st World War in 1914. But the a-historical way in which they are put forward amounts to an “anarchist” rather than a Marxist vision, contrary to historical materialism. Indeed, by equating the revolutionary wave of 1848 in Europe with the revolutionary wave initiated by the Russian Revolution in 1917, Barbaria seems to reject the political positions taken by the League of Communists and Marx: in 1848, the proletariat could and should participate, while remaining autonomous, in “bourgeois democratic” demands in order to favor, not the establishment of this or that national capital per se, but the emergence of the proletariat itself and the development of class struggle. Marx and Engels’ positions on Ireland and Poland at their time are very clear on this point.

As a result, this abstract, a-historical approach, weakens not only the argumentation itself, but above all Barbaria’s future ability to inscribe and orient itself in the class struggle, as an avant-garde, not from an ethical or moral point of view, but according to the shifting reality of the relationship of forces between classes.]

That is why we are oppose support for any national “liberation” movement which, by definition, promotes the constitution of a new bourgeois state and bases its struggle, not on the confrontation between classes, but between races and nations, dividing the proletariat, pushing it to defend the interests of “its” bourgeoisie in its imperialist struggles, and confusing internationalism with “solidarity between peoples”, i.e., with support from abroad for that bourgeoisie.

[Same observation and criticism: we share the position itself, we are on the same side of this barricade today. But this is a position of “historical” value, not eternal.]

The defence of democracy, as the most characteristic form of organisation of the capitalist state, always entails the reinforcement of that same state and is always against the interests of the proletariat: whether this defence is given directly, by promoting parliamentary participation or legislative changes, or indirectly as a “lesser evil” in the face of a military or fascist dictatorship. Historically, anti-fascism was a profound defeat for the proletariat. It implied its union with the liberal bourgeoisie—for the defence of the state which it had itself left in the hands of fascism—the abandonment of internationalism and its use as cannon fodder in a new imperialist war.

[We are on the same side of that barricade, that of anti-fascism as a weapon of counter-revolution.]

Trade unionism is not the same as the struggle of the proletariat in the workplace: it consists in the specialisation of militant activity in labour demands, leading a few workers to build permanent bodies which end up autonomising themselves from the rest and constituting themselves, with greater or lesser success, into negotiating bodies—that is to say, mediating with capital. Whether through trade unions or other more horizontal formulas, trade unionism has always implied a tendency to separate workers’ immediate interests from their historical interests. The trade union is the form which consolidates this separation: since its function consists in negotiating the value of labour power with capital, it will never have an interest in fighting against wage labour, to which it owes its existence. If the trade unions are against the revolution, it is not because of the trade union leaderships, but because of the very activity that generates them again and again.

[No doubt we are also on the same side of the barricade when it comes to trade unions as non-proletarian, counter-revolutionary organs... today. But the theses’ critique of syndicalism is once again a-historical in itself. Their counter-revolutionary function would be linked to their “autonomization” and their function as negotiators of labor power, as mediators... between labor and capital, i.e. between classes. From their inception in the 19th century, trade unions and even syndicalism would have been “antinomic” to proletarian struggle.

As a result, the function of today’s trade unions is not to “negotiate” the value of labor power more or less well, as supposed mediators. On the contrary, their role is to participate in capital’s permanent lowering of the value of labor power, while maintaining a minimum of political – and ideological – credibility and effectiveness, so as to be able to continue to manage the proletariat and, if necessary, sabotage its struggles and prevent any mass strike dynamics. The unions must therefore be understood and denounced as fully-fledged political organs of the capitalist state.]