Notes on our historical moment

Traducido por League of Internationalist Communists

1. We are living through a bridge period between two historical epochs. A past epoch, characterized by the counterrevolution that destroyed the revolutionary wave of 1917 to 1927 through the combined action of Stalinism, fascism and (social)-democracy. And a future epoch marked by the increasingly acute contradictions of capitalism, contradictions that make communism the only real movement that can prevent the catastrophic nature of capitalism from leading us to the extinction of the species. Communism or catastrophe: these are times of historical bifurcation.
   
   
2. The counterrevolution saw its peak in the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century. It was a time of socialization of capital where the latter integrated all social spheres into its internal dynamics, having already extended its relations of production to the entire globe. What Fascism, Stalinism and the New Deal have in common is that they are expressions of this general dynamic of capital, which subsumes all aspects of its being to total capital. The intervention of the state in the capitalist economy, the statification of the trade unions, the extension of the state and the commodity to the whole of social life—these are factors deriving from the logic of value which metamorphose into the realm of politics, law, ideology and dominant values, etc.
3. After World War II, this socialization of capital is imposed worldwide. In other words, the post-war democratic powers are no longer the liberal powers of the 19th century. They have subjected to their logic and integrated the workers’ movement and its political (parties), trade union and economic (cooperatives) organizations. The subjugation of the proletariat expresses itself through a form of social democracy that recognizes the rights of unionization, strike and political participation in their constitutions, precisely because they imply the integration of the workers’ movement into the world of capital. At the same time, it is a derivation of the impersonal logic of capital and its tendency to become total by subsuming all other aspects of social life. From then onwards, the bourgeoisie need no longer be afraid of the political or economic participation of the proletariat through its organizations, and these organizations are nothing than the left of capital.
4. One of the key factors of the counterrevolution was Stalinism, because it was a factor of counterrevolution from within the proletarian movement. Unlike other counterrevolutions and defeats of the past (as in June 1848 or the Paris Commune of 1871), it was not the sociological bourgeoisie that was responsible for the defeat and repression of our class, but it was the result of an old sector of the class party that assumed the program, positions and tasks of capital. It became a direct agent of the counterrevolution and of capital, while at the same time affirming the opposite. In this way, all the terms of the class program and its Marxist doctrine were inverted—the counterrevolution was dressed in red. Important sectors of the working class were integrated into this dynamic, becoming appendages of this terrible counterrevolutionary machine.
5. These circumstances silenced important sectors of the proletariat and locked the historical potentiality of its experience in “communist” states and parties which were the practical negation of any authentically revolutionary horizon. Simultaneously, many of those working-class sectors that were moving away from this national “communist” perspective were trapped by their imperialist rival (the United States, democracy, European social democracy…). The revolutionary minorities that resisted in this authentic midnight in the century were completely isolated from the working class in their time. In other words, it was the longest and most profound period of counterrevolution that the proletariat has experienced in its entire history. And, in fact, we are still under the domination of a more generalized counterrevolution which cannot be imputed only to Stalinism.
6. Another important aspect of the post-war counterrevolutionary dynamics was that played by the so-called “national liberation” movements in the capitalist colonies. The Stalinist currents had always wielded enormous influence in this process, although the reality, as the processes of independence in India or Pakistan showed, is not reducible to these alone. In any case, the different flavors of Stalinism played an enormous role in the processes of integration of the world proletariat to the national bourgeoisies, and in the deployment of the proletariat as cannon fodder, as happened in many post-war conflicts. Today, when Stalinism’s influence has waned, it still presents itself as an “anti-imperialist” ideology aligned against the proletariat through the support of bourgeois and counterrevolutionary regimes, parties and ideologies, as is clear from its defense of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’.
7. The 1960s and 1970s, which saw the rise of generalized class movements, marked the first moment of the erosion of the counterrevolution, starting with Stalinism which began to experience increasingly significant internal disintegrations. The internal unity around Moscow began to disintegrate with the appearance of other flavors of its counterrevolutionary politics (Maoism, Titoism, later “Eurocommunism”), but above all because proletarian minorities began to emerge which tried to link up with the revolutionary past of our class and with its most consistent sectors—the communist lefts. Moreover, we had already experienced the first class movements which, although without adequate political orientation, had questioned the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe: the workers’ revolt of Berlin in 1953, the Hungarian Workers’ Councils of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 and, finally, the enormous wave of mass strikes which would flood Poland throughout the 1970s and which would find its culminating moment in 1980. Revolts, as we say, which, due to the weight of the counterrevolution, and the identification between communist perspective and the capitalist horrors of Stalinism, did not allow the germination of a process to constitute the proletariat as a class and party, and did not even lead to the emergence of significant political minorities of our class. What they did make clear, for huge sectors of the world working class (as well as local), however, was the oppressive reality of these political and social regimes. The distancing that had then begun to take place between the working class and Stalinism would become fundamental in the decades to come.
8. At the same time, the class struggles of the 1960s and 1970s also had to confront the Western democratic states. In numerous countries, there was a considerable degree of proletarian autonomy (for example, we have already spoken of the Polish case), but the processes of class struggle in numerous countries are also important to note: from the Cordobazo in Argentina to the Cordones Industriales in Chile, from the autonomous struggles of the Spanish proletariat to the enormous wave of revolts that shook Italy from 1969 to the end of the 1970s, or Portugal in 1974. The 1960s and 1970s represent a fundamental milestone in the questioning of social peace and the integration of the proletariat into the institutions of capital. There were class struggles that were self-organized in workers’ committees and assemblies, overcoming and confronting the bourgeois institutional regime that aided in integrating workers’ struggles through the parties and unions of the left wing of capital. These were weak struggles from a programmatic standpoint, no doubt, but they could not be otherwise after decades of counterrevolution. In any case, these struggles confirm the continuity of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat and begin already to question the different institutions with which the left of capital in its various stripes and the State had stifled the proletariat.
9. The 1970s were also the decade in which the crisis of over-accumulation of capital, which the bourgeoisie has subsequently rationalized away arguing that it was a mere conjunctural crisis due to the rise in the price of oil, had returned and which, in reality, expressed the return of the problems of the valorization of capital due to the historical tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This crisis represented a first turning point in the entry into a new period, since it signaled the end of the myths about a capitalism without crisis, eternal, and capable of overcoming its own contradictions. Since then, and in spite of the counter-tendencies employed by the world bourgeoisie (lowering of wages, cutbacks, expansion of markets) and the recourse to credit and the enormous development of fictitious capital, capitalism has not only not solved this crisis of over-accumulation, but has aggravated it. Its origin was not cyclical or conjunctural but, as we shall see, structural.
10. In the first place, the political regimes of the weakest imperialist bloc collapsed, that is, the one formed by Stalinist Russia and its Eastern European satellites, which could not keep up with the pace of efficiency and productivity required by capitalist competition and the development of the arms race imposed by the United States. The collapse of these regimes signified, in that historical juncture, an apparent strengthening of capitalism. Its spokesmen, such as Fukuyama, spoke of “the end of history”. But, as communists, it is important to see the complete and dialectical development of the process; to view the film instead of a snapshot.

    The fall of the Soviet bloc also signified a second historical turning point: the historical death of Stalinism. What some leftist currents now evoke as the end of the ‘October Cycle’ or as the ‘defeat of communism’ was not any such thing. In reality, what it meant was the collapse of one of the central elements of the counterrevolution: Stalinism. From this moment on, even if it took a few decades, the class movement would not have to labor under the tall and sinister shadow of Stalinism. The historical experience of the proletariat was reopening to reconnect with its historical program and with the class fractions that had maintained the historical thread of authentic communism. That experience of the proletariat, of revolutionary minorities trying to orient themselves in their perspectives, will not have to face such brutal and massive political and trade union machines. Machines expert in the work of eliminating many of our comrades of the past. The development of capital, with its impersonal and contradictory logic, had done its work and extracted a first great confession from the Stalinist capitalist monster.

11. Maoism, the alternative current within Stalinism to Moscow’s “revisionism”, also entered into crisis at the end of the 20th century, with the increasingly strong development of an aggressive internal policy of capitalist modernization, which has also meant that China has become the second world power, and aspires to succeed the United States as the world’s hegemonic power. But it is not only the Chinese wing that followed the official line of Deng Xiao Ping. The alternatives against Chinese “revisionism” were soundly defeated, as in the case of the Shining Path (an example of how the so-called “protracted people’s war” is, in the first place, a weapon against the proletariat) or integrated into the democratic state as in the case of Nepal and its leader Pachandra, who would become prime minister of the Nepalese state. In any case, the existing remnants, as in the Philippines or India, have nothing to offer other than what is already known: attempts to seize power at the national level in order to carry out a policy of localized capital accumulation.
12. The crisis of capital has worsened significantly since the 1970s. The causes of this aggravation are not accidental, and we speak thus of senile capitalism. Its origin lies in the way in which the development of capitalist competition forces companies to increase their productivity. This is what lies behind the inevitable tendency to replace living labor with dead labor, so that the mass of variable capital tends to diminish over time in relation to the rising constant capital (machinery, raw materials, etc.). Increases in productivity have less and less impact on the mass of surplus value and on the rate of profit, simply because the processes of expulsion of living labor mean that there are fewer and fewer productive workers from which to extract surplus value. The development of the technological revolution and the application of new developments such as artificial intelligence will only accelerate what Marx had already anticipated in his Fragment on Machines in the Grundrisse: labor time will become a poor metric by which to measure social wealth, the theft  of surplus labor can no longer be the basis on which the level of social complexity we have reached as a species is articulated. It is past time for communism.
13. Capitalist policies have attempted to overcome these structural obstacles caused by the growing decline in the profit rate through a series of counter-tendencies: the attack on the living conditions of the proletariat in order to increase absolute surplus value by means of lower wages, longer working hours and extensive use of labor; the more efficient extraction, from the capitalist point of view, of raw materials and energy sources with the aim of lowering costs; the expansion of markets to compensate for the decline in value per commodity caused by the rise in productivity; the multiplication of private and public debt; the almost unlimited extension of financial derivatives and fictitious capital which constitute veritable mountains of worthless money, etc., etc. However, all these counter tendencies are impotent in the face of the tendency of value to diminish (starting from its substance, abstract labor) to a minimum that does not find in the market real possibilities of compensatory expansion. Capitalism has bought time, but it walks on a less and less solid ground, full of time bombs that will explode with ever greater potency. Its own development tears up the ground and the base on which it walks, its very categories. The crisis of 2008 was a new turning point that accentuated and accelerated the development of the crisis of capital. We do not know when the next turning point will be, but we do know that it will be sharper.
14. The historical crisis of capital marks this bridge period between the exhaustion of the counterrevolution and the entry into a new historical epoch. In 1859, Marx had already pointed out in his Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that an epoch of social revolution begins when the social relations of production become an obstacle to the development of the material productive forces of society, to the metric of social wealth (value). It is from this premise that we analyze the historical moment between these two epochs. The sources for the development of a revolutionary perspective in the proletariat are not to be found in culture or ideas, but in its action as a class. The proletariat will be forced to struggle more and more because this society is in crisis and can no longer maintain its conditions of social reproduction. This is the source of the class struggle of the last decades, and it will increase even more in the future. If the proletariat wants to live in dignity, it will be forced to fight ever harder, and, to accomplish this, it will have to deny the social bases that bind it as a class to capital (i.e., the bases of its very existence as an exploited class). There are only two historical alternatives: either the proletariat manages to orient itself in its struggle and constitute itself as a world party or capital continues to amplify its logic of catastrophic development until it leads us to extinction as a species. There is no other alternative. Tertium non datur.
15. To do this, it will have to combat the different political currents that sought to recuperate and integrate the proletarian struggle. The counterrevolution, as we said before, is not reducible only to historical Stalinism. Although its historical defeat is undoubtedly an enormous advantage to reopen the historical experience of the proletariat,which will no longer find itself confronted with such a deadly obstacle as Stalinism was in the past. The collapse of historical Stalinism in 1989-1991 was undoubtedly an important moment in this epochal transition (between a capitalism in crisis and an increasingly necessary communism that presents itself in this historical bifurcation). Democracy and the efforts to integrate the proletariat into the State are today the great obstacle that the proletariat must overcome. Engels already said that the democratic republic would be the last barrier that the proletariat would have to eliminate to achieve its emancipation. However, the crisis of democracy and of the institutional parties is of growing importance. And it is not accidental. The traditional elements of integration fall to the extent that the efficiency of capitalist production and reproduction decreases. And, in this sense, the structural and qualitative weakening of the unions in relation to a few decades ago is not accidental either. Their crisis, as elements of mediation between capital and wage labor, facilitating workers’ integration into the capitalist state, is one of the aspects in which the erosion of the counterrevolution is most evident. The reason for this is the difficulty they have in continuing to act as mechanisms of integration in the face of the increasingly evident crisis of capital. At the same time, at the political level, populisms are on the rise, in a pendulum fashion, first on the left (Chávez, Morales, Correa, Corbyn, Podemos, Sanders, SYRIZA) and now on the right (Vox, Meloni, Le Pen, Milei, Alvise, and among them all Trump). These are fictitious alternatives and tend to run out of steam faster than those they replace. And the problem with these populisms, including those of the right, is the exhaustion of the foundation on which they walk: value as the social substance of capitalism. In this sense, and contrary to the anti-fascist whining, fascism is not a current historical alternative, precisely because it was an element of capitalist modernization, together with other bourgeois ideologies that had a material impact on the States of the 1930s, in that qualitative leap that was the capital’s socialization. What is in crisis now, irreversibly, are all the capitalist alternatives.
16. The other alternatives on offer to the deepening crisis of capital are those of a communitarian bent. In the midst of alienation and social dislocation, people seek out community, and even religious alternatives. We often think, here, of the development of evangelist sects in Latin America or political Islamism since the 70s, which found, via its triumph in Iran, a critical opportunity to present itself as an “anti-imperialist” alternative. But obviously, these are also fictitious communities of a capitalist sort. Political Islamism is nothing but a bourgeois fraction in competition with others. Wherever they govern, as in Iran, they have shown their real bourgeois and oppressive face from the outset (destroying and brutally repressing the proletariat). Their roots are nourished by the general crisis of capitalism, and they try to present themselves as a false alternative that, as communists, we must fight relentlessly. Moreover, the tendency towards the development of imperialist wars, as we shall explore in more detail in another point, makes of these bourgeois tendencies a privileged terrain for the local capitalist class fractions to enlist the proletariat as cannon fodder for their interests. And, for this reason, they must be fought with intransigence just like all the supposed national liberation movements (in reality, they have always been an affirmation of the national bourgeoisies against the proletariat). Another important aspect, which is becoming more and more acute in our time, is the development of illegal mafias based on drug trafficking, and which have a very harmful impact on their territory and on the life of the proletariat. This phenomenon is very evident in some Latin American cities, but its impact is worldwide. It is enough to recall that in the year 2022, more than 100,000 people died in the United States from drug overdoses.
17. Our era is characterized by a life devoid of meaning. It is an era that exponentially amplifies the development of imbalances, disorders, and mental illnesses. The root lies in the very foundations of an increasingly catastrophic capitalist development. The universal and social nature of the species rebels against an increasingly atomized, estranging and alienating world, which is dysfunctional for human life. It is one more expression of how capitalist social relations are incapable of reproducing human life, because even the parameters by which they did so in the past are in crisis. A life without meaning also implies that capitalism no longer has that aura of progress, of future, that it had in the past. The no future mentality that pervades life under contemporary capitalismis often identified with a world in which there is no way out, with a humanity that is spiraling inescapably towards the abyss. But this is not a battle of ideas. It will be from the class struggle and the development of the proletariat into a party that the historical alternative will emerge and from which humanity will recover the collective meaning of its life. Because, as Marx affirmed in his youth, the true human essence is the Gemeinwesen (the human community) liberated from money, commodity, and the State.
18. A third turning point of this historical period is the development of the ecological catastrophe, a catastrophe that is immanent to the very logic of capitalism due to its predatory and productivist essence. Moreover, the attempt to solve the crisis of valorization leads it to further develop the very dynamics of the environmental catastrophe, since it needs to increase the production of commodities to reduce the fall in the rate of profit, to reduce the life span of goods through planned obsolescence, all of which entails using more and more energy and raw materials. Capitalism’s requirement for endless growth is at odds with the limits of the planet, of nature, of the human being. This capitalist logic is also expressed in the development of a global climate change that makes catastrophic events in the environment increasingly common, as we have seen most recently from Valencia to Mayotte (inseparable also from a capitalist urbanism that concentrates populations in places that prepare their death). It is the same logic that, in its hunger to colonize the whole planet mercantilistically, causes pandemics typical of capital such as COVID, at the same time as it prepares with certainty other future ones. In short, the ecological crisis is one of the constituent elements of the structural and global crisis of capitalism, which has come to define our historical period—where the economic, environmental, political, military and social crises— feed each other in a reciprocal and inseparable way. It suffices to think how the melting of the Arctic ice is leading to an inter-imperialist competition to get hold of the natural resources that will come to light and to organize new and faster trade routes. For example, Donald Trump has just proposed to Denmark to buy Greenland and even threatened military intervention if there is no agreement (his re-election is a new “accelerator” of the contradictions and tensions of international capital). What is in crisis is the capitalist totality defined by its mercantile essence. We are contributing to a phase transition from one mode of production (capitalism) to another (communism) within which it is possible that, in this historical dichotomy, the outcome will be a deepening of the catastrophe and the extinction of our species.
19. We know that we still live in times of counterrevolution, but all the elements described above assure that we will live in a historical period where the class struggle will be more and more extensive and radical. The world proletariat is and will be increasingly obliged to fight in defense of its living conditions. And these conditions also clash with the very essence of the social relations of capital. There is an irresolvable antagonism between the needs of capital’s valorization, and the reproduction needs of the proletariat as an international class. In fact, since the beginning of the 21st century we have witnessed different waves of class struggle at the world level that were integrated by different capitalist ideologies. That datum does not surprise us. The proletariat needs to live and play a leading role in its historical experience so that it can make a qualitative leap, a decisive turning point that involves the rest of the factors and constitute itself as a world class and party. One does not pass, in a single frame, from the class struggle under the most absolute counterrevolution to the clarity of the tasks of our historical program. The revolution is a dialectical process that matures in a subterranean (the old mole of which our old comrade spoke to us) and molecular way. It matures until it presents two antagonistic political polarizations, one against the other, two modes of production that present themselves and clash as historical alternatives (capitalism vs. communism). And yet, we live in a moment in which the historical experience of the proletariat has been reopened by the erosion of the counterrevolution.
20. What we are witnessing in the meantime is different waves of class struggle where the proletariat fights for its immediate interests and tries to orient itself subjectively in the face of a world that becomes more and more catastrophic to it. We can, briefly, speak of different waves, expressions of a growing social polarization, where the class consciousness of the proletariat matures subterraneously: in the Argentine revolt of 2001 (“¡Que se vayan todos!”/”All of them must go!”) with its “popular” assemblies, which experienced contagions in other Latin American countries from Ecuador to Bolivia and Oaxaca in 2006 and which, finally, were reintegrated by the Latin American populism of the left of capital. The second began in the hunger revolts of 2008 and had its highest points in 2011: in the Arab world from Tunisia to Tahrir Square and Syria, in the 15-M in Spain or in Occupy in the United States. The processes of class struggle in Greece, against the cuts, in Brazil against the World Cup and Turkey, in 2013, with the occupation of Taksim Gezi Park, form part of this wave. The third wave, in which the class violence of social rebellion intensified, broke out with the revolt of the yellow vests and continued with the uprising of October 2019 in Chile, the struggles in Ecuador, in Colombia, and in Lebanon due to the financial crash and the subsequent explosion of the port that generated demonstrations against religious division and in favor of everyone leaving. After the pandemic we have witnessed different waves of class struggle and strikes as in France, United Kingdom, Greece. Also part of this wave are the movements that recently overthrew the governments of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh or the recent struggles in Kenya. At the same time, countries like Iran have seen in recent years one of the most combative proletariats fighting in defense of their living conditions against inflation, against famine, because of the problems of water distribution or against the repression of the Ayatollahs’ regime in the case of the death of the young Mahsa Amini. What do all these struggles indicate to us?

    First of all, they highlight the completely global character of the proletariat today. Many of these revolts and rebellions have fed each other, just think back to 2011. The simultaneous and mimetic character of this social polarization is fundamental. It has already occurred in the great revolutionary waves and will undoubtedly be much stronger in the future revolutionary and communist wave of the world proletariat. And the fact is that capitalism has developed its global character much more today than in 1917. It will not hesitate to turn these weapons against the proletariat, as Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Along with the global character of struggles, we must also point out the tendency towards self-activity and self-organization within these processes, their extension beyond the confines that separate the economy and politics , and the tendency to generalize their demands beyond the motives that prompted the protests (the rise in the price of subway tickets in Chile or the increase in fuel taxes in the case of the yellow vests). We know the limits of these movements, as we said above, but at the same time it is important to recognize their reality and potential, because of how they threatened to go beyond the confines of capitalist social peace, and its ordered, parliamentary and trade union world guided by capitalist legality. They have also produced revolutionary and communist minorities that, in turn, interact with these movements to become a force for communist clarification. The development of class minorities that grow in the heat of these processes is what will enable revolutionary, antiformalist potentialities to execute the assault on the old forms and bring forth the birth of new communist forms. In fact, it is not by chance. As part of this more general process, we can observe the emergence of minorities of young proletarians in many areas of the world, who try to orient and clarify themselves in a revolutionary perspective, and who, in some cases, approach the historical positions and perspectives of the communist left. This dynamic is an expression of the subterranean maturation of class consciousness that also expresses certain important characteristics of our historical period.

21. At the same time, we are witnessing the general decline of the hegemonic power that arose from World War II, the United States, and the rise of China as a viable aspirant that disputes world power. This is the crisis of the global capitalist order that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, and was consolidated in Yalta and Potsdam, and which was already in deep crisis with the disappearance of the USSR in 1991. We also know that, as in the past, no transition of power between a declining and an ascendant world hegemon has ever taken place peacefully (one need only think of the two imperialist world wars of the 20th century). For that reason, the forces of fragmentation tend to prevail more and more in the capitalist world, although they do so without, however, overturning the reasons for unity and cohesion that still persist. The victory of Donald Trump in the last American elections is, without doubt, an expression of the dynamics that tend towards confrontation and competition between the main capitalist powers. With his victory, Trump has already announced that he will raise tariffs on Chinese goods and has threatened to do likewise with the EU. At the same time, China is obliged to ensure that the growing economic influence it has on world production can be leveraged into political and strategic influence. To do so, it must break the stranglehold that the United States and its allies exert on it in the China Sea. That is why Taiwan, which the Chinese state considers part of its territory, becomes central to the drive towards generalized imperialist war between China and the United States and the imperialist blocs that both powers manage to drag behind them.
22. The outbreak of the war between Russia and Ukraine has undoubtedly been a fourth turning point in the dynamics of this historical period. It presents in a clear way the tendency towards imperialist war and the (still) possible coalescence of imperialist blocs around the two great powers disputing hegemony over world capitalism. This war, which broke out in February 2022 and is still unfinished, cannot be understood as a matter apart from the global dynamics that push states towards war, just as we cannot understand all other conflicts around the world, which are only multiplying with time: between Israel and Palestine, in Syria, in Sudan, in the Congo, so on and so forth. A clear indication of this turning point is the significant growth in the military budgets of the world’s major powers (including Germany and Japan).
23. And, nevertheless, the concretization of a future generalized war, with all the destructive power that will necessarily accompany the many imperialist powers armed with nuclear weapons, will not have the same beneficial effects for capital that the last world war did. We will not witness the same rate of capital accumulation that the system experienced until 1973-1975. And the fact is that the bases on which the accumulation of capital rests are increasingly narrower due to the enormous productivity achieved by technological development. The mass of capital that can be destroyed in the war and rebuilt later will quickly reach the previous organic composition of capital, the prevalence of constant capital over variable capital, and, therefore, will quickly return to fuel the structural problems of capital’s over-accumulation. We are confronted with a senile capitalism which will not be rejuvenated, even if a new power were to replace the previous one in decline.
24. It is the capitalist totality that is transiting between two historical epochs, as we have explained throughout these notes, between the counterrevolution of the past that is increasingly eroding and communism as the only historical alternative. We speak of global and structural crisis of capitalism because it is its concrete totality that is in question. We cannot isolate the different aspects of the ‘polycrisis’ (as some of the intellectuals of the world bourgeoisie allude) because they feed each other in a reciprocal way and, above all, because the essence of the crisis is the same: the mercantile foundations of the capitalist order. They are the fact and the consequences of the fact that value is increasingly a miserable metric by which to measure the social wealth that enables the production and reproduction of life.
25. We have synthesized four turning points that open up this bridge period between revolution and counter-revolution: the crisis of over-accumulation of capital initiated in the 1970s, the historic crisis of Stalinism and its collapse in 1989-1991, the undeniable reality of the environmental catastrophe caused immanently by capitalism, and the tendency to the development of a generalized war on the part of imperialism. Moreover, we should add to these turning points, as we have done, the increasingly evident crisis of bourgeois politics and its traditional parties and the tendency to an ever more extensive and intense development of the class struggle. In the coming period we will experience accentuations, accelerations and new turning points in the indicated direction. That is to say, around the historical bifurcation that characterizes the entry into a new epoch, the dilemma between communism or the irreversible deepening of the capitalist catastrophe.
26. Among the tasks of the internationalist communist minorities, as Rosa Luxemburg already said more than 100 years ago, are to argue clearly to the world proletariat that: “the arrival of such a period is inevitable, explaining to them the internal social conditions that lead to it, as well as its political consequences“. That is, to explain how the tendency towards generalized war, towards the crisis of capital, towards climatic catastrophe, etc., are phenomena intrinsic to the same capitalist dynamic; that all this has political consequences, as we can observe in the crisis of bourgeois political representation; and, simultaneously, for an ever-greater intensification of the revolts and rebellions of our class. The objective of communists today, then, is to assume with seriousness the tasks of the present historical moment, and, furthermore, to do so with doctrinal and programmatic inflexibility, and with a sense of historical responsibility, becoming an active factor in the struggle for the convergence and international centralization of all revolutionary minorities within orbiting distance of the communist program.
27. Contrary to the decadentist ideas about capitalism, the possibility of communism is born out of the very development of capital, where it emerges the only historical alternative to catastrophe. Communism is a historical alternative to the world of capitalism, not because the latter has ceased to develop, but because, in its continuous development, it is increasingly unable to organize the reproduction of human life at the present level of social complexity. Today, only communism can organize and plan the life of the species at the level of the entire planet. To enable communism to deploy the productive forces bound under capitalist social relations is the task of the world proletariat in the development of its struggles, and of the communist minorities that fight alongside it so that it becomes a class. We undertake all this to achieve a reversal of the praxis of history and so that, on the ruins of value and the commodity, a plan of life for the species may flourish.