1. The strategy of communist liberation
The analysis of the current socioeconomic political landscape must also determine the strategy of the communist movement. The course of capitalist development is a literal "threat to the prospect of humanity", with the threat of war and environmental destruction standing out. For the initiative for a modern communist programme, the strategic response against the preventative counter-revolution unfolding under present Total Capitalism is the dialectically developing "permanent revolution", which begins with the conquest of workers' power, moves forward with the leap of workers' democracy and ends with the victory of communist liberation. It naturally also determines the political goal/tactics of the current phase of the immediate revolutionary struggle.
The decisive leap of the permanent revolution is the communist internationalist liberation, with its two phases: the first, the socialist phase, which still bears traces of capitalist society, and the higher, complete communist phase. We formulate the thesis that communist liberation is a possibility of our time, that can only be realized if people act with programme and organization.
First of all, the objective possibility to live differently is greater and more mature than ever. The wealth produced by humanity as a whole - estimated at $80 trillion worldwide - is more than enough to satisfy the needs of humanity. Yet billions of people live in hell. Moreover, the very rise in labour productivity creates the conditions for a radical reduction in working time, the disappearance of unemployment, the freeing up of time for life, culture and creation, at the same time as the opposite is being imposed.
But also subjectively the working class and the people are not left inactive. Radical movements of struggle are constantly emerging and, despite their contradictions and limitations, they have left a strong imprint on social and political developments. From the people’s uprising in Chile, to the prolonged social unrest in France and the major upheavals in the so-called third world (Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc.) to the radical processes in the USA, the ones at the bottom pf the social hierarchy are clearly showing that they are not prepared to settle for the half-life they are destined to lead.
All the aforementioned processes do not paint the picture of a dystopian landscape of subservient subjects, despite the ups and downs of struggle and movements. These struggles, despite their creativity and heroism, are limited and eventually lose their momentum due to the deafening absence of a comprehensive political proposal and perspective from the point of view of the strategic interests of the working class.
Therefore, the rebirth of a new communist hope for the modern infernos is more than imperative, and in our opinion, not only necessary but also possible.
However, we are not talking about communism in general and vague terms. We critically assess the course of the communist movement. We are inspired by the double experience of the victory and defeat of the communist movement in the 20th century. We consider the October Revolution, the Resistance (against the Nazi Occupation) and the (Communist) Democratic Army in Greece, the revolutions all over the world (Russian, German, China, Cuba, etc.) to be part of us. Despite their outcome, they offered significant positive changes in the lives of millions of people and, above all, brought the possibility of a radically different life and organization of society to the forefront. But we do not close our eyes to the causes that led to their defeat. Our aim is to not repeat the mistakes that led to the gradual degeneration of revolutions, their transformation into authoritarian and exploitative regimes in specific ways, the transformation of the revolutionary parties that inspired and organised the masses into bureaucratic, authoritarian counter-revolutionary mechanisms.
We have often heard that this is all good for a nice "exhibition of ideas". For today’s world they are called either utopian or useless in our present struggle. But to us, communism is not a doctrine, a "teaching", a future narrative, but the "movement that abolishes the existing order"! If we cannot imagine the world otherwise, our struggle will always have capitalism as its final horizon. Bringing the communist political response back into the mainstream is the compass of our perspective.
2. The revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism
Of course, walking on this road will not be easy. It opens only through revolution! And here we hear the criticism that there will be no more revolutions, that they are a figment of imagination. But our political stance is not only based on the fact that our time is full of popular uprisings. It is also based on the fact that history is full of great events and political struggles that could have had different outcomes depending on whether there are forces that set the goal of revolution and workers' power or not, depending on whether they act on the basis of sharpening the struggle and opening the way for revolutionary change or retreat and compromise. The denial of the goal of revolutionary change ultimately leads every great struggle to compromise and defeat. We have experienced this in Greece, where constant stepping down in the name of the lesser of two evils led to the current crushing defeat.
We believe that the revolution in our time must be workers', anti-capitalist, internationalist and communist in content.
*The revolution will be led by workers, with the modern working class at the forefront. The subject of the revolution –according to us- is the working class, but not in a general and abstract way, as if it "by nature" and as a whole possesses a "hereditary mission", nor in a general way with its struggles, but, instead, to the extent that the anti-capitalist, revolutionary and communist tendency acquires overall leadership within it. It is not an automatic or "law-governed" process, but an existing possibility and tendency, which acquires "flesh and blood" through the vanguard intervention of the political revolutionary subject. The revolution will ultimately be made by the political movement of the revolutionary working class, in interaction with the vanguard.
Anti-capitalist, because, since modern Total Capitalism is the root cause of suffering, the issue and question of the revolution can only be the overthrow of bourgeois domination.
Internationalist, because we know that the future of the revolution will also be determined by whether similar processes take place in other countries or not. The revolution manifests itself and wins nationally in principle (or in a group of countries) and is completed on an international scale.
It will possess communist liberating content, since it will activate the process of transition towards communism through a process of class conflicts, with turning points at national and transnational level.
The political victory of the revolution (which also has evolving phases) does not mean its definitive, final victory, nor does it automatically translate to a society of communist liberation. On the contrary, it is a passage to a new period of class struggle, of workers' power-democracy, through which the state of workers' power will be established, a "state" which will be a temporary institution only for the revolutionary transition, not a state in its very sense since its purpose will be to subjugate not the majority but the minority of the population (the exploiters). In the position of the particular power of subjugation, the armed people and the organs of its own power will step up to the forefront. Workers power will smash the bourgeois state apparatus and the mechanisms of power, political hegemony and domination of the bourgeoisie.
The political forms of workers' power in the revolutionary transition basically come from what will emerge from the working experience of the class struggle. Forms possibly also appearing in the phase of dual power, that will incorporate the best elements of the workers' movement tradition in combination with the new, qualitatively superior potentialities and experiences of the working class and the scientific-technical, productive and cultural potentialities of our time.
Workers' power is formed as a workers' democracy of councils which abolishes the bourgeois parliamentary democracy and ensures the universal participation in political life and right to vote, for all those who live and work within the grounds of the revolution, regardless of their racial origin. The Councils are structured from the bottom up in 3 levels: Base Councils (based on work), Local/Regional Councils (cities, towns, communes, regions), Pan-National Council which ensure the expression of the people's will regarding general political issues and choices. All bodies are directly elected based on the principle of universal suffrage. The principles of control by the working majority, irrevocability, pay on a workers' salary, and rotation apply. In such a context, free and unhindered trade union activity, freedom of speech and the free and unhindered operation-activity of other workers' parties (which will objectively exist as an expression of the contradictions of the transitional society and whose activity should be allowed by the workers' power to the extent that they do not constitute an armed threat) are considered inviolable values. It must be clear that workers' power will mean oppression for the remnants of the bourgeoisie, and the most pluralist democracy for everyone else. It will be the most authentic form of democracy that has historically appeared.
The pioneering, decisive action of a strong Communist Liberation Party and the intervention of other workers' parties is not a substitute for the Councils in their revolutionary role. The "party" reinforces and does not degrade or replace the dominant role of the Councils as the sole organs of workers' power and revolutionary self-activity, nor does it transform them into symbolic, largely decorative institutions, into "inferior" public services as it was in the “actually existing socialism” regimes. The party's attitude towards the workers' trade unions must be similar, recognising their relative autonomy, following the essence of Lenin's thesis that "the trade unions should protect the workers' state from their enemies and the workers from their state".
3. What will determine the evolution of the transitional period?
The development of the transitional period will be determined by a combination of conditions which, on one hand, will include the necessary moves to defend the revolutionary process and repulse the actions of its opponents, and on the other hand, it will develop socio-political tendencies and relations of a communist orientation.
This cycle will develop in conditions of hard class struggle, as capitalist relations will not have been completely eliminated at the national level and will still be internationally dominant. The main task of this cycle will be creative: the expansion and maturing of the communist-oriented relations and the completion of workers' democracy as a decisive step towards the self-government of the freely co-operative producers, up to the point where the march towards communism becomes irreversible. Something that also presupposes the victory of the revolution on a sufficiently expanded regional and international basis.
A typical example of this period’s responsibility is the question of the socialisation of the means of production. The initial passage to Workers' Power-Democracy of the means of production is a first qualitative step in the emergence of social relations of a communist orientation towards a course of domination of these relations, but at the same time it does not in itself negate the general conditions for the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism and exploitative relations and classes as long as they exist in the transitional period. It is a first step towards a not yet dominant collective, social property and much more communal property which in the full sense can only occur under communism. From the beginning of the transition, a continuous struggle for the liberation of the productive forces from the shackles of capitalist hegemony is required. Revolutionary change of the possesion and not only of the possessor. Therefore it is necessary that:
-the one-person management in production
-the perpetuation instead of the organisation of the transgression of the division of manual-mental work and conception-execution
-the deification of the plan-norm
-the absolute subordination to the criterion of the rise of productivity and the growth of the economy
-the perpetuation of the separation of the worker from the product of his labour and his alienation from the means of production, etc. should be excluded
The factory, the production, and every place of work cannot be treated as a "technical space" but as a political space where, above all, workers' power and democracy will be established and exercised. Otherwise, the withering away of the political activity of the workers, the depoliticization of the workers' collective and its reduction to an executive role will ensue. All in all, workers' power will be judged by whether or not it can substantially transcend bourgeois parliamentarism, the alienating bourgeois representative institutions and their pseudo-democracy.
All of this is not a theoretical construct. It is the living experience of the people, the conclusions of revolutions, made by the Russian workers, by the peasants in the 1940s in the mountains of free Greece, in free Spain, everywhere where the people attempted the assault on heaven. If they could do it, in these conditions of poverty and cultural backwardness, then much more can be done by the much more educated and experienced modern working class.
This comprehensive "response" requires a programme of workers' politics and power aimed at the march towards socialism/communism.
An answer that will condense all the contemporary revolutionary, theoretical, sociopolitical searches and experiences in the class confrontations of the present and in the upper level of struggle with the opponent class on the basis of the “who-whom” question, with the victory of the revolution in mind.
For this reason, we attempt to formulate a first draft of the programme of workers' power-democracy in the transitional period. In other words, what comes after the revolution? It is the programme that begins with the realisation of the hitherto unfulfilled demands of the anti-capitalist programme of struggle and includes a comprehensive package of measures for all the key social questions, trying to balance between the difficult equation of defending and saving the revolution on the one hand and on the other hand starting those transformations that will bring us to the first phase of communist society.
4. The subject of revolution and revolutionary
Today's battles are of enormous importance since, according to our understanding, revolutionary change and communism is not just a perspective, a vision, for the future. It is at the same time the way and the means to achieve this end. A road of revolutionary, class action, social subversion and not of parliamentary promenade or reformist utopias, which has as its culminating moment the revolutionary leap, but also includes the radical anti-capitalist subversive struggle in dialectical connection at the present, the revolutionary tactics leading to it.
Revolutionary tactics is that set of aims of struggle, and of struggles which links today with tomorrow, linking communists with the needs and interests, the rights and desires of the social majority, contributing to the improvement of the position of consciousness and the concentration of forces.
We know from recent and past history that this path alone can actually change things, unlike proposals for a gradual transition to socialism through reforms, parliamentary procedures and other reformist illusions.
In our time the tactical-strategic relationship is becoming tighter because the worker-people's goals necessary to address the basic-necessary worker and people's needs cannot be met unless capital loses profits, wealth, property and ultimately power. This is why a comprehensive reconstruction of workers' politics is required, which in our opinion must be based on three pillars:
First: the immediate political objective today must "emanate" (without becoming one and the same) from the programme of workers' power-democracy, must be tied to the demands of the most acute aspects of the social question in the present era and must be able to accelerate - rather than passively await – the revolutionary change.
Second: workers' politics must confront bourgeois politics as a whole in independence from the political choices of reformism and any "democratic pole" at home, as well as in independence from any new capitalist centre - not only the Euro-Atlantic one - in the international capitalist complex.
Third: Today, more than ever, workers' needs - even the most basic ones - can only be met with the weapon of "mass blackmail" and subversive struggle. Therefore, the question of the overall political workers' movement is of top importance; its aims and organisation, the decisive escalation of class struggles (especially with an extra-parliamentary character) and the political subversive transformation necessary for the working majority to pose a threat to the bourgeoisie, to force it to make small or big concessions. This subversive workers' tendency can, in the climaxes of the class struggle, be transformed into more complete-comprehensive tools of expression and enforcement of the popular will, independent of and antagonistic to the bourgeois mechanisms, European and state (central and local), and embryos of workers' power.
In today's Greece, the revolutionary tactic aims and seeks:
- To serve the vital interests of the workers, mainly regarding the substantial, material improvement of their living conditions and their struggle against capital, not just the removal or repulsion of certain conditions that worsen their position.
- To intercept, shake and finally impose the anti-capitalist overthrow of the violent anti-labour European memorandum policy of the bourgeois coalition of power and its governments.
- To change significantly the social and political correlations in favour of the working class and its allies, the liberating tendency, the political workers' and people's movement of rupture and the political pole of the anti-capitalist Left, as well as the parties of the modern communist perspective.
- To raise the capacity the working class and its allies possess with regards to the undertaking of mass revolutionary action in order to overthrow of the anti-working class attack, achieve steps of conquest –which will of course be contested- in pre-revolutionary conditions. That is the way of constituting the class into a class for itself.
February 2025
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