Status Updates From The Council Communist Reader

The reality is that no, capitalism will not simply 'collapse by itself'. No, we cannot simply wait passively for capitalism to kill itself for us to simply pick up the pieces and build socialism with no struggle. Capitalism will continue to expand and grow and trample over the entirety of planet Earth and beyond if we simply lie down and wait for a magical 'collapse' that won't happen.
Workers of the world, unite!

The theories of Grossman gain popularity because they sound similar enough to what the communists say while also being something many workers want to hear, but all while being fundamentally wrong and based on misquotations of Marx.

Grossman continues in his misquoting, miscalculations of Marx to justify his 'final collapse' nonsense.

Some believe the proletariat need not do anything to bring about the collapse of capitalism because it will naturally self-collapse and implode by running out of steam, but this is clearly nonsense as all these calculations assume either a closed system, or simply ignore many factors.

By virtue of its backwardness, the revolution in Russia cannot progress beyond the not-so 'transnational' stage, but once the revolution breaks out or spreads to an advanced industrial nation, then it will advance - it must advance - further and break out of the ossifying transitional stage onto communism.

Afterword

Soviet Russia is forced - by the destruction of its industrial base at the hands of the reactionary whites - to seek a modus vivendi with the Western imperialist powers and to trade with them for the machinery the nascent soviet state needs
This also means it seeks to support only those western European communists that advance this agenda and nothing less or more, and so it supports only collaborationists.

The Great Russian Revolution can be understood as the first of many Asian rebellions against their domination and enslavement by European imperialist capital, and we hope China and India follow suit in a continuous wave of revolt that will consume the entire world including the heart of imperialist capital, London and Washington.

A revolution cannot remain stagnant, it must reform and reorganize itself again and again to overcome and defeat the reactionary bourgeoisie and the opportunistic imperialists.

Like the Ebert regime in Germany, also in the UK any would-be Labourite government would be a bourgeois government with a proletarian language done to confuse the proletarian masses and so slow, halt, and reverse any revolutionary and communist agitation.

Revolution cannot be done in any stagnant or central organisation, the proletariat needs a dynamic and organic organisation that adapts and responds to the ever-changing environment of revolution.

This is the Trade Union becoming ossified in rules and positions where the leaders aren't beholden to the working class - as they should be - but are instead rulers over the working class and adopt a bourgeois position.

The Trade Union is an organisation by the workers, of the workers, and for the workers. Yet it often works in collaboration with the State, in collaboration with capitalists, and it often works against the workers with these having to rebel against the union to get what they want almost as though the union was a second State.

The proletariat must fight through different stages to arrive at socialism, but many 'socialist' parties purposefully hold the proletarian masses back to keep themselves in power - in collaboration with the bourgeoisie - and to amass riches.

Revolution in Western Europe is much more difficult than in the East, not because of their strength in capital or numbers, but because of their ideological strength over the proletariat. In 1919 the German bourgeoisie was defeated and the German proletariat brought them back from the dead to install them in government once again.

The Russian example was a great morale boost for the international proletariat, but it was not enough to get them to rise up themselves, only material conditions can do that.
Caught in dire material conditions after 4 years of war, and still mired in social-democratic propaganda the German proletariat was unorganised and misguided when the imperialist State collapsed in November 1918.

Lenin may condemn us (and himself) but the proletarian revolution will not occur on his terms and his party dictatorship, but on the course of history, which is made by the mass of the people and material conditions.

Lenin seeks the world's socialist parties become military dictatorships, and the Third International become the police to keep them all in check.
Lenin seeks the German proletariat join parliament 'in a revolutionary and communist manner', yet 40 years of experience shows that parliamentarianism only leads to collaboration and reaction.

The Third International sought to bring the entirety of the world proletariat and all their parties into complete and total subjugation of the Russian Bolsheviks. It sought to impose their thinking, tactics, weapons, and even naming on the world, and called anyone who disagreed childish.

The Great Russian Revolution has already set up the template for the successful Proletarian World Revolution. Unity of the working class, organisation of the working class, alliance with other groups, International organisation, the workers' councils (soviets), and the coordination of revolution.

Notes

In Russia the small proletariat won over the support of the revolutionary peasant masses with promises of land, peace & bread. In industrialised western Europe, the proletarian masses have no peasantry to fall back on, instead they have to fall on other workers like small shopkeepers & farm owners. Therefore, the western proletariat must put forth different policies to win them over w/o falling into State Capitalism.

First in Russia, as unlikely as it may have seemed to us beforehand, and now spreading across the world, the socialistic revolution must spread to survive and it must be run by the workers' councils themselves if it is to be socialistic.
Russia giving up vast swathes of valuable land to hold on to the Russian hinterland to make socialism survive is an honourable example of proletarian internationalism.

13. Abolition of all tolls and tariffs
14. Present military systems to be abolished and the proletariat to be armed

The upper class bourgeois and the middle class peasants of Russia first rose up joined by workers and poor peasants to overthrow the autocracy of the Tsar, then the poor peasants and proletarians rose against the bourgeois republic. We have learnt these demands to be necessary to allow for this.

4. Control & regulation of all production & distribution by the proletariat
5. Work obligatory to all
6. Repudiation of National Debts
7. Confiscation of war profits
8. Taxes to be levied only on capital and income: that on the former to be increased till it becomes expropriation
9. Confiscation of banks
10 Confiscation of large businesses
11 Confiscation of the land
12 Judicial power to be wielded by the proletariat

The proletariat in the west must be sufficiently educated, radicalized, and united if it is to succeed. Once it succeeds it must put into place a programme to ensure its ultimate victory.
1. Political powers in the hands of the proletariat
2. Legislation by the proletariat
3. A minimum standard of living conditions for all workers. All workers to be equal.

In a sufficiently big crisis, capitalism would have no other choice but to exploit the workers harder than they ever have, and would use the state as the stick to force them. This would leave nothing else but revolution of the working class.
State ownership, state capitalism, is nothing but a factory nation where the workers serve, not themselves, but their rulers.

If even in the most reactionary regimes as was Tsarist Russia, the mass of workers and peasants could rise up and end this autocracy, what's stopping us from rising up in more industrialised societies? The more developed capitalism is in a nation, the more organised it is and with it the more difficult it is to end it, but if conditions worsen enough during an imperialist war it would be possible.

Proletarians of the world, remember! Imperialism seeks to dominate the world, it makes no difference if they're democratic or autocratic internally, they are all autocratic externally. Any war between capitalist powers is a fight for world imperial domination.

The national capitalist would never join into an international capitalism so long as his interests and capital are chiefly national, and they will also never unite with other national capitalists if they believe they can simply crush them with military might and so take over the world themselves. Even if crushing the workers would be easier, their competition is too fierce to overcome so easily.

The debate over which imperialism is 'better' or worse is moot. British, American, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc, imperialism would all rather ally with the most backward, reactionary, authoritarian of forces or other imperialisms to do what they believe necessary to crush socialism and the organised, mobilised proletariat.

Even if one day the entire world is dominated by one imperialism, say the Anglo-American, having already crushed and broken the rest of the world, it will not be long before Germany, Russia, France, China, Japan, India get back on their feet and starting making their first challenges to the world empire. On top of that the workers around the world may join together in a league and rise up.