Communists Must Create Subjective Conditions for a Communist Revolution
June 19— Bolivia is rocked by one of the most serious social upheavals in years. Workers, miners, teachers, transport workers, farmworkers, and indigenous organizations have practically paralyzed the country for over seven weeks with nationwide strikes, protests, and road blockages.
Two capitalist contradictions drive these events. First, the fight between the US and China-Russia for world domination. Bolivia, with its vast lithium deposits, critical minerals, and strategic geographic location, has become a crucial arena in this struggle.
The second contradiction is between the Bolivian working masses and the capitalist-imperialist exploiters, national and international. The Bolivian masses are rebelling against the unbearable living conditions and super-exploitation that this inter-imperialist rivalry imposes on them.
These linked contradictions are playing out worldwide, not only in Bolivia. They may define humanity’s future for generations.
Contradictions among capitalists-imperialists are a direct result of their competition to maximize profits by exploiting workers, the only source of their wealth and power. The capitalists who produce the cheapest make maximum profits and control the world. This, however, is decided on the global battlefields. Thus, their fight for the cheapest workers’ labor power, natural resources, and greater market share inevitably leads to war.
Their problem is that capitalism has a built-in tendency for the rate of profit to decline over time. Capitalists are therefore like a dog constantly chasing its tail. They are always chasing and competing for an illusory, maximum profit. This makes war a permanent feature of capitalism. That is why there are world wars.
When capitalism is left intact, world wars install a new rising hegemon. They temporarily restore the rate of profit to what the capitalists-imperialists consider “healthy” by investing in rebuilding global war’s massive destruction. This is just the calm before capitalism’s next more deadly and destructive storm.
World Wars Create Objective Conditions for Revolution
As the world’s rulers expand their current global war, they must intensify the exploitation of the entire international working class—workers, youth, soldiers, and the unemployed. Every penny they spend on producing weapons and rebuilding their war industries is taken out of our hide.
The massive workers’ rebellions in Bolivia and elsewhere are happening because our class can’t live like before. This is a precondition for revolution. Communists and other activists should see these rebellions as clear calls that our class is ready for revolution.
Whether there will be revolution, and what type, depends on the subjective conditions. That is, what the working masses, including soldiers in the rulers’ armies, are won to fight for.
Subjective Conditions Determine What Happens. Workers Must Fight Directly for Communism
All of today’s mass uprisings against capitalism are plagued with reformism. In Bolivia the masses’ unifying theme is demanding the resignation of President Rodrigo Paz. They and masses elsewhere must learn that capitalism cannot be reformed to meet our needs.
This is the task of communists and others who want change. We, and nobody else, will create subjective conditions that will enable our class to fight directly for communism. Anything else will only perpetuate our wage slavery, the source of the capitalists’ happiness and wealth and our poverty and misery.
Only communism can end wars forever by eliminating capitalist exploiters and their wage slavery. Communism, a classless society, will produce only to meet humanity’s needs. Nothing will be bought or sold. There will be no market and no money. No economic competition.
Collectivity and comradeship will be the basis of communist social relationships that will help us build a world without borders or nations, without racism, sexism, or any poisonous ideology that divides and dehumanizes us.
Capitalism continues to make our lives harder and harder. But there is no time to despair. Communism is, and will be, humanity’s future. Thanks to the millions who preceded us, our class is closer to victory than ever. The objective conditions for revolution are ripe and expanding. We will create subjective conditions to fight for the communist world we need and deserve.
That means spreading communist ideas and actions, distributing Red Flag more widely, and especially building collectives of the International Communist Workers’ Party to lead the fight to victory!
NOTE: What do we mean by objective and subjective conditions?
Usually these terms are used to talk about a mind-set. If you’re objective, you’re looking at the way things actually are. If you’re subjective, you’re letting your own feelings take over. We are correctly urged to fight subjectivity.
Communists also use these terms in a different way.
We say that a revolution requires both objective conditions: crises like the declining rate of profit, mass suffering, imperialist war. The bosses can’t rule in the old way, and workers can’t survive in the old way.
But the objective conditions are not enough. The subjective conditions include communist consciousness and organization. A revolutionary class and its party mobilizing the masses for communism is also crucial.