It has always been the mark of vulgar, textbook "Marxism" to measure the class nature of a regime by the registry of deeds, who owns the factory? Once it answers "the State", it concludes triumphantly: socialism! Our doctrine has never reasoned this way. Marx founded his critique on capital as a social relation, the subordination of living labor to accumulation, and the persistence of wage dependence regardless of who signs the paycheck.

As we noted in our 2017 article On the Death of Fidel Castro, Capitalism had already been established in Cuba for many decades before Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement took the road to power. The island’s anti-colonial movement, born in opposition to the US economic domination that had steadily imposed itself since Cuba’s formal independence from Spain in 1898, never possessed the character of a struggle against feudal or semi-feudal structures, of the kind that shook large parts of Asia and Africa in the same period. It was, from the outset, a struggle within the bourgeois horizon, waged not to overturn Cuban capitalism but to redistribute the share of the surplus value extracted from the Cuban working class: the young Cuban bourgeoisie, itself a product of decades of capitalist accumulation on the island and raised, generation after generation, in subjection to US capital, had by the 1950s accumulated enough of its own weight, in sugar, in land, in a native professional and commercial class, to find in that very history and in those very forces of accumulation the determination to separate its fate from that of its powerful neighbor. This was a bourgeoisie chafing at its subordinate position under a bigger bourgeois, not a proletariat seeking to abolish class rule as such, and every stage of the movement it produced, from its earliest manifestos to the guerrilla war itself, bears that origin. Leadership of this national anti-colonial movement remained firmly in bourgeois hands throughout, even though it was the Cuban proletariat that fought most courageously against the crumbling regime of Batista, the dictator and guardian of American economic interests. The working class could not contest that leadership for two reasons: the absence of a Communist Party capable of pointing it toward its own historical tasks, and an international context in which the working class of the capitalist metropoles, paralyzed by the hegemony of Stalinism and reformism, could offer no support to colonial and dependent peoples fighting to throw off bourgeois domination.

That proletariat, and the sub-proletariat of the countryside, was nonetheless numerous and central to the events of 1959. Our current wrote, at a meeting in Rome in March 1961, that of a working population of roughly two million, a million and a half were pure wage earners, of whom 800,000 were agricultural workers; 500,000 of these depended on the sugar industry alone, working only four months a year at harvest, with seasonal unemployment during the "tiempo muerto" reaching fifteen to twenty percent. It was this mass of extremely poor and permanently unstable agricultural labor that filled the ranks of Castro’s guerrilla war in the countryside, but the revolution also drew on urban struggle, largely erased from the later Castro-Guevara historiography: sabotage, violent action, and above all the strike, the proletarian weapon par excellence. The Cuban bourgeoisie, absent a revolutionary leadership to contest it, harnessed this working-class commitment entirely for its own project of national affirmation.

Sugar was the spine of that project and of the economy it inherited. By 1957 it accounted for more than three-quarters of Cuban exports, a monoculture entrenched by decades of American ownership; by the mid-1950s most of the island’s cultivated land and two-thirds of its refining capacity belonged to US capital. This dependency was not without its convulsions, sugar prices having once collapsed by more than seventy-five percent in the 1920s, and it extended to nearly every article of daily consumption: Cuba imported almost everything from its northern neighbor, exporting raw sugar only to buy it back as finished goods, running a half-billion-dollar deficit through the whole of Batista’s second dictatorship, a deficit covered by loans from the very creditor extracting the interest. Relative prosperity in some cities, and a literacy rate and per capita income among the highest in Latin America, sat beside the extreme poverty of the sugar workers, alongside the gambling and prostitution economy that grew up to service American tourism across the Straits of Florida.

It was against this domination, more than against Batista’s person, that elements of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, having exhausted their hopes for peaceful democratic change, turned the opposition to violence. The armed assault on the Moncada Barracks on the 26th of July, 1953, marked the definitive rupture, though even this did not yet place Castro’s movement in open conflict with Washington. Sectors of the US administration initially welcomed the opposition to an increasingly unstable Batista and even weighed supporting its turn to armed struggle. The absence of any proletarian revolutionary content in this struggle is confirmed by the "Moncada Program" itself, read out only after Castro’s initial capture and trial: restoration of the 1940 constitution, land redistribution to small peasants through compensated State expropriation, a thirty percent profit-share for workers in large enterprises, fifty-five percent of sugarcane revenues for the colonists who grew it, and confiscation of embezzled State assets. Fidel himself insisted, in his own defense, that none of this exceeded the bounds of the existing constitution, invoking two of its articles that outlawed large landed estates and obliged the State to employ all means at its disposal to provide work for the unemployed; he summarized his own programme, in that same defense, as directed toward six points, "the land problem, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education, and the problem of the people’s health", alongside "the achievement of public freedoms and political democracy". Not one of these six points touches the wage relation, the profit driven firm or market exchange relations as such; every one of them is the ordinary content of a bourgeois reform programme, the kind any liberal constitutionalist of the period could have signed without embarrassment, and it was on this ground, not on any socialist ground, that the movement first built its legitimacy, years before Washington’s hostility pushed it toward Moscow.

Three and a half years of guerrilla war followed the Granma’s landing in December 1956, opening the road to power. The programme did not change on the way to Havana or in the early days after January 1, 1959: the new regime’s initial measures nationalized ninety percent of Cuba’s weak industrial sector and some seventy percent of its land, expropriations aimed at holdings above 405 hectares that struck overwhelmingly at US companies and citizens. This, not any prior social antagonism, is what produced the rupture with Washington through 1960, and with it the American economic blockade that would stunt Cuban capitalist accumulation for the next half-century. It was this enmity between two national capitals, not a conflict between opposing classes, that pushed Havana into alliance with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw bloc, and with it the adoption of a "socialist" facade that changed nothing in the underlying relation of production. Cuba’s place in the international division of labor remained what it had been: the Soviet bloc bought sugar above market price in exchange for oil, and by 1978, nearly thirty years after Castro took power, sugar had climbed to eighty-seven percent of total exports, agrarian diversification having failed under this external imposition as thoroughly as it had failed under the Americans.

The Soviet Union’s relationship with Cuba and other anti-colonial movements reflected a broader process in which the overthrow of colonial rule produced national capitalist States aligned with one or the other blocs of finance capital rather than proletarian revolutions. In Cuba, Russian subsidies, cheap oil, concessional credit, weapons, and industrial investment helped sustain the new State, while Havana became a key intermediary for extending Russian influence abroad through the training, coordination, and export of militants, military advisers, and intelligence-linked cadres to Soviet-aligned insurgent movements across Latin America and Africa. Cuban military missions and training programs, often materially supported by Soviet financing, equipment, and logistics, helped sustain allied governments and insurgencies in places such as Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua, thereby extending Soviet geopolitical reach and reinforcing financial and strategic dependencies on the broader Soviet bloc. This unfolded within a wider Cold War context in which the United States also actively shaped post-colonial outcomes, supporting decolonization when it aligned with its interests while opposing movements that threatened Western strategic or economic positions, often through rival factions, coups, military aid, and integration into Western markets. As a result, many post-colonial States were formed not only through internal class dynamics but also under competing external pressures from both superpowers, each structuring the emerging order to expand its own influence. In these cases, the colonial bourgeoisie was displaced, but the working class did not take control of production; instead, a new national political and bureaucratic stratum administered the economy and controlled the distribution of surplus. Russian aid and Western engagement alike created forms of dependency, whether through trade, credit, energy, military assistance, or financial integration, that differed in mechanism but similarly tied national development to external power blocs. Thus, political independence often changed who controlled the State without transforming the underlying capitalist relations of production: foreign colonial domination was replaced by national State control, while wage labor, capital accumulation, and class divisions persisted under the structural influence of both the Soviet and American systems.

Cuba, an island of eleven million people whose economy, sugar in earlier decades, today an uneasy mix of tourism, nickel, biotechnology, medical-service exports, and remittances, still starved of energy and hard currency, remains as dependent as ever on a world market it cannot set terms with. The State became the collective, national administrator of Cuban capital; the years of Russian subsidy changed the address of its dependence without touching its substance. The collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s tore away that support, and with the persistence of the American blockade the island fell into the "special period": GDP collapsed thirty-six percent between 1990 and 1993, annual meat consumption fell from thirty-nine to twenty-one kilos per person, fish from eighteen to eight, and the fuel shortage crippled sugar production itself even as it forced Havana to give over land to food crops for local survival. Out of that crisis came the 1994 "mercados agropecuarios", legal markets for privately or cooperatively grown produce, the authorization of dollar circulation alongside convertible and non-convertible pesos, an opening to foreign investment and tourism, and self-employment licensed across nearly a hundred and fifty trades; the private sector’s share of workers rose from eight percent in 1981 to twenty-three percent by 2000, figures that say nothing of the black market that has boomed, uninterrupted, since the crisis began. None of this, nor the low-cost Venezuelan oil that followed, brought the Cuban economy any real improvement. The ban on strikes held throughout, Guevara himself ruling out their legality as early as 1961 on the grounds that workers accustoming themselves to collective labor could not withhold it to press economic demands, and in 2008 the regime raised the retirement age, from fifty-five to sixty for women and sixty to sixty-five for men, on pensions already meager and paid in non-convertible currency, one anti-proletarian measure among many, indistinguishable from what any bourgeois government elsewhere in the world was doing at the same moment. The passage of power between brothers changed nothing either, being no more than the impossibility of disturbing the vast network of interests built into the State machine that has kept the regime alive this long, a regime now drifting toward a Vietnamese model of market liberalism under one-party rule.

The arrangement Havana struck with Chávez in 2000, Cuban doctors, teachers, and other services exchanged for subsidized Venezuelan crude, became over the following decade the principal external support of Cuban accumulation. It was subsequently incorporated into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA, Chávez’s attempt to construct a regional economic bloc outside the U.S.-led system of hemispheric integration. ALBA rested on preferential State-to-State exchange, with Venezuela’s oil wealth underwriting trade among governments that sought to build an independent regional imperialist power to break from Washington’s domination. Cuba could therefore continue importing fuel and other necessities without possessing the export earnings or access to credit that would have been required to purchase them at world market prices, while Venezuela received Cuban medical labor and other services in return. The arrangement allowed the Cuban State to remain solvent and reproduce its economy despite its chronic shortage of foreign capital, but it did so by making the island increasingly dependent upon Venezuelan oil and the Venezuelan State’s ability to subsidize the exchange. By 2024, Venezuelan crude and fuel shipments to Cuba had fallen to roughly 32,000 barrels per day, from 56,000 the previous year, as Venezuela’s own production and refining problems worsened. The subsequent collapse of the Venezuelan lifeline has therefore exposed the underlying weakness. Cuba remains a small, capital-poor national economy dependent upon imported fuel, machinery, food, technology, and foreign exchange, and the disappearance of the Venezuelan subsidy has left Havana searching for another external source of credit and productive inputs.

China and the New Industrialization Drive

Rather than following through on the original 1959 Agrarian Reform Law, which sought to break up Cuba’s large estates, impose a 402-hectare land ceiling, redistribute land to small farmers and create a broader domestic agricultural economy, Castroist Cuba increasingly retreated from that model as it became integrated into Soviet imperialism. Since the Spanish colonial period, Cuba’s agriculture had been organized around large export plantations producing staple commodities, above all sugar, for an external market. The revolution abolished the private plantation owner but did not break with the plantation economy. Soviet integration instead modernized it under State management: guaranteed markets, subsidized prices, petroleum, machinery, fertilizer and credit allowed Cuba to maintain large-scale sugar production, with sugar still accounting for roughly 80 percent of export earnings by the 1980s. Soviet oil supplied the energy required to mechanize and consolidate these enterprises, allowing Cuba to postpone the development of an independent agricultural class and the domestic market that an actual agrarian revolution could have produced. By the beginning of the 1990s, genuinely independent farmers controlled only about 9 percent of agricultural land. The collapse of the USSR consequently exposed the dependence of the entire model. Large monocultural farms were particularly vulnerable to the disappearance of imported fuel, fertilizer and machinery, forcing Cuba toward animal traction, organic fertilizers, crop diversification, urban agriculture and smaller-scale production. FAO records the number of oxen teams rising from fewer than 100,000 before the crisis to roughly 300,000 afterward. What the revolution had left unfinished was therefore pushed back onto the agenda by necessity: the development of agriculture capable of reproducing itself without the permanent subsidy of an external imperial power.

Venezuelan oil temporarily postponed that transformation. Chávez’s subsidized petroleum supplied roughly a third of Cuban oil consumption for years, allowing the State to sustain an energy-intensive agricultural and industrial structure that had become impossible after the Soviet collapse. When that relationship deteriorated, the pressure toward smaller-scale, less petroleum-dependent production intensified. The later usufruct reforms transferred increasing amounts of State land to farmers and cooperatives, and by 2017 the non-State sector was cultivating roughly 83 percent of Cuba’s agricultural land even though the State still formally owned around 79 percent. This contradiction between State ownership and increasingly decentralized commodity production has now become the basis for a wider private sector while the State continues to collect land rents. The newly announced June 2026 reforms allow private, State, mixed and individual legal entities to obtain long-term rights to use agricultural land; permit usufruct holders to employ wage labor; allow cooperatives to conduct direct foreign trade and obtain external financing; permit producers and buyers to negotiate prices without State mediation; and open agricultural input markets to domestic and foreign private firms. The importance is not simply that there are more private farmers. An increasingly complete circuit of commodity production is emerging: farmers require machinery, tools, fuel, irrigation and fertilizer; they produce for a domestic market; private intermediaries distribute those commodities; and the resulting accumulation generates demand for further investment. Non-State businesses accounted for 55 percent of retail sales by value in 2024, up from 44 percent in 2023. Washington is simultaneously attempting to accelerate this development by opening channels for qualifying independent Cuban businesses to obtain U.S. financial services, agricultural equipment and access to the U.S. market, while directing fuel supplies toward private firms and away from State-controlled enterprises. The crisis has therefore transformed what was once a survival mechanism into the beginnings of a more autonomous agricultural bourgeoisie and domestic market.

The energy question connects this delayed agrarian transformation directly to industrialization. Cuba’s historical problem was not simply that it lacked oil; its agriculture and industry were organized around a model in which the means of reproducing production were repeatedly supplied from outside: first through Spanish and later international markets, then through Soviet petroleum and industrial inputs, and finally through Venezuelan oil. External energy allowed the State to preserve a large-scale export economy without developing the full internal chain of agricultural and industrial production that would support a relatively independent capitalism. Cuba is now attempting to reconstruct precisely those missing links. The turn toward solar generation, decentralized irrigation, biological inputs and smaller-scale agriculture is not merely an ecological response to scarcity. Chinese-financed photovoltaic projects, solar-powered irrigation and other renewable-energy equipment offer a means of electrifying production while reducing dependence on imported petroleum. At the same time, Havana is attempting to revive the industrial means of production themselves. The modernization of Antillana de Acero, Cuba’s principal steel complex, includes a new electric arc furnace and related equipment, with initial plans for roughly 62,000 tons of steel billets annually and a rolling mill designed for approximately 226,000 tons of finished products, principally reinforcing bar. The significance extends beyond steel: rebuilding such an industry requires reliable electricity, transportation, imported inputs, credit and financial infrastructure. China has become increasingly important precisely because it now possesses a scale of industrial and financial capital capable of supplying these requirements in a way that neither the Soviet Union nor Venezuela ultimately could. Chinese financing is therefore appearing not only in renewable-energy generation but in the machinery, infrastructure and productive equipment required to reduce Cuba’s dependence on imported fuel and rebuild domestic productive capacity. Havana is simultaneously cautiously opening the economy to larger private firms, foreign investment and private financial institutions, while the United States attempts to direct its own capital toward the emerging private sector and away from GAESA. Cuba’s industrialization is consequently becoming a struggle over which foreign capital will supply the means of production: Chinese capital entering through State-directed infrastructure and industrial partnerships, U.S. capital entering through an expanding private sector, or Cuban State and military capital attempting to retain control over the strategic circuits. The agrarian revolution begun in 1959 but arrested by the consolidation of State agriculture and external dependency is therefore returning as part of a broader capitalist transformation. Cuba is being forced to develop the domestic agricultural production, internal market, energy system and industrial productive capacity that its dependence on Soviet and Venezuelan oil previously allowed it to postpone, leaving the central question of the next stage not whether Cuba will industrialize, but which imperialist capital will finance and structure that industrialization.

GAESA, the Cuban Ruling Apparatus, and the U.S. Pressure Campaign

The internal counterpart to this external struggle is the structure of Cuban State capitalism, organized through the military-owned conglomerate GAESA and ultimately controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces. The distinctive feature of the Cuban State is that the Cuban military-political bourgeoisie, organized through the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), upon its revolution, as always happens, constructed a new State machine in the aftermath of the revolution, an armed camp from the outset, designed to secure and reproduce its own political and economic power. That apparatus was first consolidated as a permanent military-political structure for defending the revolution and was heavily armed, trained, and logistically sustained by the Soviet Union, which supplied Cuba with tanks, aircraft, artillery, and other heavy equipment. It later evolved into an expeditionary force integrated into Soviet-aligned global strategy, with Cuba deploying roughly 300,000 troops abroad over the course of the Cold War, including major interventions such as tens of thousands in Angola and over 15,000 in Ethiopia. The revolutionary movement that defeated the Batista regime and displaced the old foreign-capital order subsequently transformed its military organization into a permanent State apparatus capable of defending the Cuban capital from subordination to Yankee capital, projecting power abroad, and eventually administering economic accumulation and directing the surplus from Cuban worker exploitation back into it’s State apparatus.

This helps explain the later development of GAESA. Emerging as a major economic institution during the crisis of the 1990s, GAESA provided the armed forces with a mechanism for generating and controlling foreign exchange through tourism, retail, logistics, finance, ports, and foreign trade. It is therefore more than a conventional State enterprise: it represents a form in which political command, military organization, and economic management are fused into a single apparatus of accumulation. The Castro leadership did not stand outside this process but organized it. Figures embedded in the ruling family network, most notably Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, Raúl Castro’s former son-in-law and head of GAESA until his death in 2022, embodied the fusion of political authority, military command, and enterprise management.

Seen in this light, the Cuban military-economic apparatus should not necessarily be understood as an obstacle to the further development of Cuban capitalism. Its historical function has been precisely to preserve the autonomy of the Cuban State and create the institutional capacity through which capital can be accumulated without surrendering control of the economy to American finance capital. The recent opening toward private agriculture, private firms, foreign investment, agricultural credit, and more autonomous market activity can therefore be understood not as a retreat from one supposedly "socialist" system, but as the evolution of a developmentalist State capitalism into his more highly developed form.

Lenin, Finance Capital, and the Export of the Means of Production

This is where Lenin’s conception of imperialism becomes useful. Lenin identifies five defining characteristics of imperialism, including the concentration of production and capital into monopolies, the fusion of bank and industrial capital into finance capital, the growing importance of the export of capital, the formation of international monopolist associations, and the division of the world among the major capitalist powers. The point is not merely that China lends money to Cuba, but that accumulated capital seeks profitable outlets beyond its national boundaries and, in doing so, carries with it the machinery, technology, infrastructure, corporations, banks, and contractual relations through which that capital is reproduced. Lenin’s discussion of foreign loans is especially relevant because he emphasizes how the borrowing country receives less than the nominal value of the loan while the banks and industrial firms of the lending country secure commissions, contracts, orders, and control over economic development. The export of capital therefore links finance to the export of commodities and the means of production: a loan can finance a railway, power plant, factory, port, telecommunications network, or electrical grid, while the firms of the creditor country supply the equipment and obtain the contracts necessary to build it. Cuba’s growing dependence upon Chinese finance and Chinese industrial goods fits this pattern, just as Mexico’s integration of manufacturing into North American production reflects another configuration of the same world economy. The rivalry between these forms of external capital is not a rivalry between capitalism and socialism. It is rivalry among capitals organized through different States and financial systems over markets, productive assets, infrastructure, and spheres of influence. The Cuban State can bargain for better terms, diversify its creditors, and use Chinese capital to industrialize; none of this abolishes the relation of capital. It changes the national configuration through which that relation operates. The Venezuelan period was an unusually favorable form of dependence because subsidized oil allowed Havana to reproduce itself without paying full world-market costs. The Chinese period is potentially more transformative because it can involve the direct export of capital and means of production into the Cuban economy. But for the Cuban worker the essential question remains unchanged: whether the factory, power plant, hotel, port, or telecommunications network is financed by Washington, Beijing, Moscow, or Havana, the abolition of exploitation cannot be identified with the replacement of one national capital by another. Lenin’s imperialism describes the struggle among those capitals. The task of the proletariat is to abolish the social relation that makes that struggle necessary.

The False Socialists, and the Management Capital Will Need for the War to Come

Today, the ruling bourgeois faction brands the Democratic Socialists of America as “communists and radicals”, even as the President met, months earlier, with New York City’s newly elected DSA mayor, Zohran Mamdani, calling him "a very rational person", predicting he would make the city "great again", and declaring he expected to be "helping him, not hurting him". As our current has argued elsewhere, Mamdani is no real threat to capital but rather its agent, ensuring social peace through democratic and reformist illusion. The bourgeois right gleefully paints the bourgeois left as a "great red menace", reviving Cold War hysteria against a Soviet rival that no longer exists, precisely when it needs a domestic enemy to justify the repressive apparatus it is building for a foreign one. The left meanwhile can present itself as the defender of the working class and democracy against fascism and oligarchy to its own base. The two really do help and need each other. This theater is easier to stage because the Democratic Party’s own base has been narrowing to precisely the layers our current has always identified as the classic recruiting ground of petty-bourgeois radicalism: less the labor aristocracy of an earlier period, and more the intelligentsia and a middle class that capital is steadily grinding down. Accumulation evaporates this stratum as surely as it dispossesses the worker, but it does not thereby become useless to capital; in the general interest of capital as a whole, this same middle class, precisely because its own ground is dissolving beneath itself, remains, as history has shown again and again, the most effective material the bourgeoisie has for mobilizing the discontented masses behind a restoration program that never once touches the wage relation.

Nothing in the mayor’s program changed between the meeting and the denunciation; what changed was the electoral calendar, and, with it, capital’s calculation of how much anxious rhetoric was useful ahead of the midterms to discipline and beat down the minds of the proletarian. A social-democratic administration promising rent control, city-owned grocery stores, and free buses disturbs no fundamental interest of capital, because it proposes to redistribute the fruits of exploitation more generously without for one moment touching exploitation itself. Such a program still requires that labor be bought and sold as a commodity, that the enterprise, public or private, cover its costs and reproduce itself through the sale of what it produces. The firm asks only one question of whoever holds office: will the wage relation continue, will production continue to be organized for sale rather than use? To this the social democrat answers yes as readily as the free-market conservative, differing from his rival only on the method of distributing what is extracted.

But a further determination is at work beneath both the cordiality and the denunciation. A capitalism preparing for a protracted contest with a rival bloc does not merely tolerate a competent administrator of urban discontent. It needs one. Affordable rent, subsidized transit, a mayor who can tell a restless population that their government hears them, are a form of social insurance capital purchases cheaply against a working class too embittered to accept the sacrifices open rivalry between blocs will demand: rationed resources, redirected industry, sons and daughters called upon in the name of the nation. Our current has documented this function twice already. In 1914 Europe’s mass workers’ parties answered imperialist war not with class struggle but with the Union Sacrée, war credits, and national unity. They repeated the same betrayal between 1939 and 1945, subordinating the workers’ movement to coalition governments and the national war effort. Reformism never transcended wage labour, and its failure opened not the road to revolution but to reaction, which inherited both the paternal State reformism had built and a working class already disciplined for national sacrifice.

Communists have no reason to defend the capitalist left against the accusation of "communism", an accusation which degrades the name far more than the accused have ever threatened bourgeois society. The bourgeois State now denounces rent control, municipal reforms, and every democratic nostrum with the same vocabulary once reserved for those who opposed imperialist war and for the great proletarian struggles of the past, not because these movements menace the wage relation, but because a bourgeoisie driven by renewed accumulation and recurring crises of overproduction is compelled to sharpen the antagonism between its own fractions. As capital centralizes, the interests of the great bourgeoisie increasingly collide with those of the ruined or declining petty bourgeoisie, each seeking to shift the burdens of crisis onto the other. Yet this contradiction has never stood outside capitalism. On the contrary, it has historically furnished bourgeois politics with its very dynamism, renewing the perpetual alternation between parties and programmes while leaving untouched the foundations of wage labour, commodity production, and the State. No conspiracy is required. It is sufficient that the ruling class, through the ordinary functioning of its political and ideological organs, reproduces the ancient comedy of democracy against oligarchy, by which the American proletariat has for generations been enlisted behind rival bourgeois camps, each promising to save society from the other while jointly preserving the dictatorship of capital. The communist position is therefore one of complete intransigence. We defend neither the democratic faction falsely denounced as communist, nor the repressive apparatus that imagines itself defending civilization from subversion, nor the desperate adventurism that mistakes provocation for revolution. Against every faction we affirm the same invariant programme: the abolition of wage labour, of the enterprise, of commodity production, and of the State that guarantees them, whatever colours it flies, whatever language it speaks, whatever personnel administers it.