Contents
• Introduction
• On the current stage, the times and the circumstances
• On the internal unity of the contradictions and the driving forces of anti-imperialism and socialism
• The limits of abstract anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism and the necessity of establishing a positive and assertive prospect
• Conclusion
Introduction
Not many people nowadays question the fact that humanity is either on the brink of, or on the path towards World War III (WWIII). The escalation of this war already includes a few open fronts involving several dozen states and coalitions, while new fronts, theaters of operations and flashpoints are erupting in strategically important regions of the world. After the Ukrainian front, with its turning points being the Nazi coup in Kiev in 2014, the armed rebellion in Donbass and Russia’s special military operation in 2022, we had tensions rising once again in the Balkans (Kosovo) and a new escalation in the Caucasus (Nagorno-Karabakh).
An additional front is re-ignited in Palestine, dramatically integrating a vast area involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which now takes on the characteristics of a religious war (a wider Islam-Jewish war and a ‘war of civilisations: Christian-Jewish civilisation versus the Islamic one’). The artificial formation of the racist theocratic terrorist state of Israel constitutes an imperialist military base and an advanced offensive outpost of the imperialist axis in the greater strategic region of the Near and Middle East. With such a massive concentration of firepower, the danger of immediate generalized outbreak of armed conflict in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole is immense.
At the same time, the imperialist aggression of the US-led axis on the Korean Peninsula-Taiwan front is escalating.
The intensification of this war at all levels and its consequences cannot leave progressive people, those who are concerned about the fate of humanity, indifferent. For us in the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP), it is imperative to develop a conscious attitude towards this war if we are to expect a positive outcome.
As we have shown in previous writings, it is impossible to achieve a scientific understanding of the character and scale of the ongoing WWIII without a clear scientific characterisation of the historical stage of the world capitalist system, of socialism, anti-imperialism and humanity as a whole, without a definition of the historical epoch, its content and context.
On the current stage, the times and the circumstances
Presently, humanity is in the stage of the decay and decline of capitalism, which in turn is in the modern stage of imperialism, the defining characteristic of which is the attempt to subordinate humanity to the interests of the most powerful multinational monopoly groups and the imperialist powers that serve as the main headquarters of these groups.
At the same time, beginning with the victory of the October Revolution and the other early socialist revolutions, the era of humanity’s global historical transition to communism has already begun. The era of the structural crises of the world capitalist system and the wars under imperialism now bear the stigma of the general crisis of the capitalist system, a system which has accomplished its historical mission, and therefore, it does not constitute only a barrier, an obstacle to the further development of humanity, but also the greatest reactionary and regressive force, a threat to the very existence of humanity and all life on planet Earth. This era marks the passage of the socialist perspective from the abstract possibility to actual historical process, to the law governed, necessary and attainable active process of revolutionary transformations.
From the beginning of the 20th century, with the First World War, it became clear that, in the monopoly stage of capitalism, the periodic long-term structural crises of the system do not only incubate fiercly imminent scientific and technological revolutions (only partially and distortedly attainable under capitalism), but also waves of early socialist revolutions. Of the number of armed insurrections and revolutions that erupted in Europe after World War I, the Great October Socialist Revolution, which took place in Russia and its adjacent colonies, was victorious.
Since then, capitalist development cannot be viewed in isolation from the course of early socialism. Similarly, early socialism cannot be viewed as detached from the course of the rest of the world, which is no longer under complete, structurally homogeneous and uninterrupted domination of imperialism.
As a result of the USSR and the world anti-fascist movement (spearheaded by the communists), crushing the axis of the ‘anti-Comintern’ pact, the camp of socialist countries in Eastern Europe in Asia and later in the Americas (Cuba) emerged after World War II.
Alongside the victories of the early socialist revolutions and with their internationalist support, a wave of anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and national independence movements emerged, which led to uprisings and revolutions of national liberation.
Thus, from the 20th century onwards, it became clear that the global development of humanity, pioneered through the global revolutionary process, arises as a result of an extremely contradictory and imbalanced, unified globally and historically significant law governed process.
Scientific research in the field of Marxist political economy, beginning with Lenin’s work, has shown that the very development of capitalism, the accumulation of capital, leads inexorably to the monopoly, through the processes of concentration and centralisation of production. On this basis, from the beginning of the 20th century, the transition to the new stage of development of capitalism towards imperialism takes place. This transition is not a merely quantitative expansion of the capitalist production infrastructure, but constitutes a qualitative and substantial, extensive and intensive change in the world capitalist system.
The character and manifestation of the very nature of the fundamental contradiction of capital, the contradiction between wage labour and capital, between living and dead labour, is radically transformed. Initially through the displacement of the export of commodities by the export of capital, and later, through processes which jump from the sphere of circulation (of commodities and capital) to the sphere of production itself, an extremely unequal division of labour is established within the world capitalist system.
Imperialism is rooted on increasing inequality, siphoning from it, developing it, manipulating it and consolidating it further, as the foundation of the mechanisms of overexploitation through its globalised relations of production (multiply mediated forms of property, titles, bonds, derivatives, etc.). Inequality, in turn, does not constitute a ‘natural’ state of being for the racist justification of overexploitation, through the ahistorical and static identification of differences as a supposedly insurmountable ‘gap’ between ‘naturally developed and underdeveloped, superior and inferior peoples, between humans and subhumans’. It is the result of unequal global historical development, at different degrees, rates, specificities (including physical, geographical, climatic, environmental, etc.) and levels of engagement or withdrawal from such an engagement of countries and peoples in law governed historical stages. Under imperialism, capitalist relations of production were imposed on various peoples mainly as a colonially imposed superstructure from outside and by force, having as their broader basis a diversity of inherited legacies, not only of pre-capitalist, but even predating class society, communities of clans and tribes. Legacies which dependent colonial-neocolonial development partially transforms, to the extent that it renders them ‘functional’ for the reproduction of the structures and mechanisms of dependency and overexploitation necessary for imperialism.
It is only as a result of these mechanisms that the expansion and intensification of the mechanism of surplus-value extraction from the scale of individual national economies to the scale of the global system occurs. This does not mean that the law of surplus value ceases to apply. It does mean though, that it is radically modified: the extraction of surplus value now takes place on a global scale, with the extraction of surplus value in the form of monopoly super-profits by the most powerful multinational monopoly groups based in a small group of countries, former colonial powers, which to this day function as the main imperialist states, as the centres of the imperialist system. They form subsystems of regional integrations, coalitions, their satellite states and transnational organs of enforcement of their interests with international claims and have global reach.
With the beginning of the widespread crisis of the world capitalist system, with the emergence of the first early socialist countries, another type of development of countries and regions of the world is initiated.
Socialism is established and developed through revolutionary transformations, the working class and its allies holding power being sole condition of their emergence, on the basis of social-state ownership mainly of the strategic means and sectors of the economy, the development of which is achieved mainly through scientific planning. Precisely because of the fact that the era of socialist revolutions begins in the imperialist stage, these revolutions arise from revolutionary situations, which in turn manifest themselves according to dialectical law in the ‘weak links’ of the global imperialist system, in those countries or groups of countries where internal contradictions are intertwined with regional and global ones in a complex volatile node.
Thus, we can see that the revolutionary situation—as a necessary condition for the socialist revolution—erupts in countries where the level of development of the productive forces is not the highest possible within the capitalist system. This is because, due to competition within the world capitalist system at its imperialist stage, this system does not in any way ensure ‘equal conditions of development and prosperity for all’, it does not allow for the equal and homogeneous development of the countries, regions and populations of the world. On the contrary, it is precisely because of the imposition by default of conditions of predatory imperialist overexploitation (in the form of colonialism, neo-colonialism, through many types and levels of economic, financial, fiscal, political, military, cultural, etc. dependency) under imperialism that inequality is exacerbated, as the root of its increasingly parasitic character. In this way, under imperialism, the capitalist system expands and deepens the loop of parasitic hyperaccumulation, using fictitious capital for financial leverage, entering into successive vicious cycles of intensification of its fundamental contradiction (between capital and labour) within every capitalist national economy, every regional integration and at the global level. The basic aim of the financial oligarchy is to impose, consolidate and maintain its sources of parasitism at all costs, in the form of the extraction of monopoly super-profits from countries with an average and below-average level of development.
From the above it becomes clear that victorious socialist revolutions take place at the monopoly stage. The revolutionary process of transition to socialism concerns primarily those countries and groups of countries which are at or near the intermediate level of development of their productive forces. All the countries of early socialism, historically, have been at such a level.
On the internal unity of the contradictions and the driving forces of anti-imperialism and socialism
The problem of the revolutionary transition to socialism with the prospect of communism is inherently intertwined with the problem of unequal development, of dependence, of the existence of pre-capitalist forms, elements and vestiges, i.e., the failure to solve problems which in ‘pure form’ would be tasks of ‘normal’ capitalist development in these countries. Early socialism itself is de facto organically linked to the resolution of tasks and challenges pertaining to inequality and dependency, to struggles for national independence and people’s sovereignty, to anti-imperialist struggles, to the claims of the right of nations to self-determination.
The triumphant victory of the Bolsheviks at first, and then of all the early socialist revolutions in history, is linked to the examination, realization, and practical solution of these problems on a programmatic basis. On the contrary, compromise, integration into the bourgeois regime, opportunist degeneration and finally the renunciation of the perspective of revolution and socialism, is linked from the time of the October Revolution onwards, to the renunciation of this argumentation of revolutionary theory, of the science of the political economy of imperialism, which is characteristic of the degeneration of the social-democratic parties of Europe, of the bankruptcy of the Second International.
In this way, the system that is known to journalists and commentators as the ‘three worlds system’ has historically emerged:
1. The developed capitalist countries which are the centres of imperialism,
2. The socialist countries &
3. The so-called ‘third world countries’.
Of course, revolutionary theory in no way accepts ideologies and practices of static and metaphysical fetishisation of this classification in various versions of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois narratives, from the middle of the 20th century onwards. Such ideologies and practices often lead to the entrapment of people and movements in versions of so-called ‘Third Worldism’, to the denial of the role of the working class vanguard in the revolutionary movement, to anti-Sovietism/anti-communism, rejection—hostility towards the USSR and/or towards all early socialist revolutions, to ‘equal distances’ and hostility towards the respective ‘two superpowers-poles’, towards the imperialist centres and the socialist camp, which—on the basis of similar ideological constructions—are presented as supposedly equally capitalist and imperialist…
Scientific research proves that we are not referring to three enclosed and isolated worlds. In fact, it constitutes a unified global system in transition. The interaction of its parts is contradictory and operates on many levels.
First of all, there is no system of developed centres of imperialism without multiple connections and relations of surplus-value extraction in the form of monopoly super-profits on a regional and global scale. It is precisely for this reason that the correlation between the first world and the second and third world is dynamic and is linked to the correlation between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary processes. It is precisely for this reason that the countries of the so-called third world become a dynamic field of the world class struggle, which can ultimately be characterised as a manifestation of the basic contradiction of capitalism, which takes on the characteristics of the conflict between early socialism and capitalism.
In addition, the contradiction between socialism and imperialism permeates the entire world, turning colonies, countries subject to new colonial exploitation, dependent, semi-independent and formally independent countries into a contested field. This contradiction is also organically linked to the major contradiction between imperialist centres/metropoles and the periphery. The struggle for breaking the yoke of imperialist overexploitation, for national and people’s independence and sovereignty of the dependent etc. peoples of the periphery is organically linked to the class struggle against foreign domination and exploitation and the local comprador bourgeoisie, with the working class having a leading and decisive role in it. It is also linked to the prospect of socialism, since independence on a stable foundation is impossible without socialist revolutionary transformations, without internationalist support.
The very law governed prospect of the transition from early to late socialist revolutions, and therefore the prospect of the complete, definitive and irrevocable victory of the forces of socialism on a global-historical scale, is linked to the detachment of the imperialist countries from their sources of overexploitation, from their sources of parasitism.
The development of revolutionary theory, which became necessary and attainable through the scientific study of the problems, the laws of socialist construction, led Soviet science to the discovery of the Logic of History by V. A. Vaziulin. Through this dialectical development, it became clear that socialism, as a process of formation, maturation of communism, does not constitute a simple, linear and sterile negation of capitalism, but a dialectical development-sublation of the whole history and prehistory of mankind, including the natural preconditions of the emergence of humanity and society. In this theoretical and methodological framework, science provides deeper and more precise means of positively determining the strategy of the revolutionary movement, of mature society, of unified humanity, of communism. Communism itself is now viewed as a different, radically new type of development of humanity, rooted within the whole of human historical development, the attainment of which is linked to the resolution of the fundamental contradiction of early socialism and all socialism: the contradiction between formal and actual socialization.
The resolution of this contradiction constitutes the completion of the first great spiral of the helical development of society and the transition to the next spiral of development. Such development of society now unfolds on its own basis, where the natural preconditions of society are dialectically sublated and transformed into integrated conditions of its own development.
The driving force of the first spiral is the contradiction between human labour effect on nature and labour relations between human beings, which manifests itself as a relation between productive forces and relations of production in those stages of the formation of society where the objective is production (with emphasis on the final product), where production in abundance for the optimal satisfaction of the material needs of all members of society has not yet been achieved. In these stages of competitive modes of production, of socio-economic formations on the basis of the relations of production of the three successive forms of development of private property (’slave ownership’, ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’), the process of removing the natural preconditions and conditions from the social ones is being advanced, but it is not fully completed. Under slave-ownership and feudalism, the basic means of production is nature (land and animals), while humans themselves have not yet been separated from the means of production and remain almost entirely (under slave-ownership) or partially (under feudalism) privately owned means/ tools of production.
In the final substage of the formation of society, under capitalism, nature is transformed into the conditions of production also transformed by labour, and people—as wage labourers—acquire formal freedom (‘equality under law’) with their labour power (ability to work) now marketable. However, the conditions of production dominate over human beings as an extraneous, hostile and destructive force: the dead labour of the past, embedded in the material conditions of production, functions as a force of domination of the relation of ‘capital’ over the living labour of the present. More broadly, things, as commodities, and the universal equivalent of their value (money) as ‘wealth’, dominate over people. But these things are nothing but natural materials transformed by human labour. Thus, under capitalism, a dialectical sublation of the natural from the social, of nature from civilisation, has not been achieved, nor will it be achieved. This applies not only to the things that surround human beings in capitalist society, but also to their own nature, their biology. The very antagonism of classes in capitalist society is but a manifestation of still untransformed animalistic, pack etc. relations that point to a not yet socialized, uncivilized element of ‘natural’ selection…
Under the light of the discoveries of the Logic of History, a higher level of study and discernment of the internal interconnection of the contradictions that characterise the modern stage and the era is achieved.
In the context of capitalism, the fundamental contradiction of the latter—between living and dead labour (material component parts of capital)—manifests itself primarily as a contradiction between productive forces and relations of production that are now distinct in history, that is, as a concrete historical form of the manifestation of the fundamental contradiction of history as a whole: between labour’s effect on nature and labour relations.
The same applies to the modification of this contradiction under imperialism, where the contradiction between imperialist states of the centre (the seats of the most powerful multinational monopoly groups) and the broader base of overexploitation (extracting surplus value in the form of monopoly super-profits) on a regional and global scale emerges. Thus arises the dipole of the contradiction between the forces of imperialism and anti-imperialism, as a manifestation of the fundamental contradiction and as a strategic field of class struggle over monopoly capitalism at the international and global level.
Within the framework of capitalism, as a decisive reduction of the sources of imperialist parasitism and as a concentration of victorious class revolutionary struggles in states and in a delineated camp, on the opposite side of capitalism, as a denial not only of the sources of imperialist parasitism, but also of capitalism itself, class struggle takes the form of the competition between the world capitalist system as a whole (imperialist centre and periphery) and the global system of early socialism.
The limits of abstract anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism and the necessity of establishing a positive and assertive prospect
Socialism is not a mere negation of capitalism; it does not constitute abstract anti-capitalism. Abstract anti-capitalism is a negative definition, it constitutes an opposite definition of the new system, with capitalism as a reference system (albeit a negative one). As such, it cannot constitute a driving force of positive self-identification.
Socialism is neither a simple negation of imperialism (a simple demand for independence and negation of imperialist overexploitation), nor does it constitute abstract anti-imperialism. Socialism can have no prospect of victory as long as it is involved in negative definitions, as long as it has its gaze fixed—even negatively —on the past, on historically obsolete capitalism-imperialism. Socialism is inscribed in the becoming of positive socialist construction, as the formation and maturation of the development of society as a whole, of communism. This is realised on the basis of resolving the fundamental contradiction of socialism mentioned above. The latter refers to the fundamental law of the Logic of History, the resolution of its basic contradiction. The transition from formal to actual socialisation, linked to the transition of socialist construction from the extensive to the intensive type of development, leads to the resolution of the contradiction between labour effect and labour relations, between productive forces and relations of production, where one pole is transformed into its opposite, the interpenetration of the poles is sublated into a new whole, in the mature unified humanity at first on a planetary scale, in the communist type of development of humanity. Then labour is transformed into something else: into another type of relationship between people, into a field of mutual cultivation and development of creative abilities of all-round developing personalities and collectives, up until the unification of humanity into a conscious whole. It is precisely this transformation of labour into a universal creative and cultural activity that signifies the sublation of the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production. Under modern revolutionary theory, this is no longer a utopian wish or ideal, but a strictly scientifically substantiated law governed necessity, a one-way street for the salvation of humanity.
This perspective allows us to grasp at a higher level the organic interconnection of phenomena and trends, which appear on the surface as fragmented and unrelated. The global capitalist system is not a solid, unbreakable and eternal pharaonic construct, like the ‘imperialist pyramid’ that some wretched revisionists fantasise about in order to mask their opportunism, their subordination to the financial oligarchy and their resignation from the prospect of revolution. Capitalism cannot constitute the ‘end of history’ as reactionary bourgeois ideological constructions would present it. This system is being torn apart by ever deeper, ever more unresolved contradictions. Its first historical rupture, as a result of the great early socialist revolutions, launched it into major crisis and further decline, shaking in the maelstrom of conflicts between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution. This rupture also brought to the surface the clash between the forces of imperialism and the forces of anti-imperialism.
At the stage of the early Socialist revolutions, the victory of Socialism is not and cannot be final and irrevocable. The belated and ineffective attempts at practical resolution of the fundamental contradiction of socialism leads inexorably to the strengthening of the forces of counter-revolution, to the predominance of the latter and to capitalist restoration. This law governed process was confirmed in history with the USSR and in the European countries of early socialism. The counter-revolution in these countries, despite its strategic gravity and its disruptive effect on the world revolutionary movement, does not in any way indicate the total defeat of socialism and ‘proof’ that the law governed prospect of the global-historical transition of humanity to communism is not valid. Such claims are unscientific and serve the subversive propaganda of imperialism. These counter-revolutions have also led to a series of temporary defeats and retreats by the entire anti-imperialist and socialist forces. However, these forces, particularly in the last two decades, have been rapidly strengthening and developing, in contrast to the weakening, decline and decay of the forces of the traditional imperialist centres.
Conclusion
Three interconnected forces of humanity’s progress, three component parts of the unified revolutionary process, emerge with new momentum on the historical stage:
• the forces of early socialism,
• the forces of anti-imperialism and,
• as a whole, the forces of the workers’ communist movement in the global capitalist system.
The scientific theoretical foundation and the organizational practical development of each of these components of the revolutionary process and their optimal organic interconnection into a victorious front of struggle at the national, regional, and global levels is the primary task of the movement, the main purpose of the WAP.
It is therefore vital for humanity in conditions of WWIII to reconsolidate and coordinate these three components of the unified revolutionary process, to transform them into organic components of a conscious unified frontal socio-political and ideological subject, capable not only of sporadic and fragmentary acts of resistance against the aggressor imperialist axis under the USA, but capable of taking the strategic initiative in all fields, at all levels, on all fronts of this life-or-death confrontation with the axis.
Achieving the optimal organization of these fundamental component parts and their respective driving powers of the global revolutionary process into a united militant front is not a matter of choice. On the contrary, it constitutes the sine qua non for the victory of the progressive forces in WWIII, for the very survival of humanity, for the victorious outcome of the forthcoming great wave of anti-imperialist and socialist uprisings and revolutions.
