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History Comment

The Comintern and the Palestinian Question

This article was written three years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the tragic events of October 7, 2023. It was precisely that unprecedented escalation of violence in the Middle East that served as the impetus to turn to the historical roots of the conflict and analyse the Palestinian question from the standpoint of proletarian internationalism. The significance of this work today, three years later, has only grown. The past years of endless bloodshed, destruction, and “geopolitical” games have clearly demonstrated that bourgeois nationalism – both in the form of Zionism and in the form of jihadism – leads the proletarian masses into a dead end. It serves as an excellent tool in the hands of world imperialism, which continues to pit peoples against each other to preserve its dominance in the region. The historical experience of the 1920s debates described in the article reminds us of the main point: the genuine emancipation of wage workers is unattainable within a nationalist paradigm. Only the joint class struggle of the Arab and Jewish proletariat against their oppressors and all kinds of imperialist puppet masters is capable of breaking the vicious circle of hatred. Today, this internationalist appeal of the Comintern sounds not like an archival slogan, but rather as the only possible and vitally necessary strategy for the emancipation of the working class.

History Comment

The October Convulsions of World Capital

Amid the media din of October 2026, bourgeois thought is capable of discerning only chaos. But this chaos is merely an illusion: behind diplomatic manoeuvres, government crises, and police repression lies the same underlying physiology of capitalism’s structural crisis.

Programme

The Anatomy of Decay: From the Mathematics of Crisis to World War. Why Capitalism Has No Future

This article presents a Marxist analysis of the current stage of decay of the global capitalist system. Against the backdrop of the illusory triumph of digital technologies, artificial intelligence and algorithmic logistics, the world economy is plunging into an abyss of debt, stagnation and escalating inter-imperialist conflicts. To lay bare the true roots of this paradox, whereby the unprecedented development of the productive forces gives rise to social catastrophe, it is necessary to set aside the superficial explanations of bourgeois political economy and turn to the fundamental core of Marxism – the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Tracing the development of Marxist thought through the prism of the sharp theoretical debates of the 20th century – from the examination of Lenin and Bukharin’s critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s theories of underconsumption to Henrik Grossman’s mathematics of collapse – the text reveals the objective dialectic of capital. The article demonstrates step by step that total financialisation, platform-based super-exploitation and the current escalation of militarism are not random deviations from the norm, but spasmodic, barbaric mechanisms for saving the system from absolute over-accumulation. Capitalism will not collapse automatically because of a lack of markets, but its internal mathematics confronts humanity with an inevitable historical ultimatum: either the conscious revolutionary destruction of capitalism, or the descent of the world into a global bloodbath.

Programme

Mirror for the Hero

We are bringing back this text, written in March 1999, from the archives not out of nostalgia, but as a crucial milestone in our political maturation. Its core message strikes at the very heart of the matter today: the time has come to “look in the mirror” and assume organisational responsibility ourselves. We remain convinced that it is senseless to wait for the masses to “ripen” on their own, or to justify one’s own inaction by the machinations of opponents and historical circumstances. Our rejection of reactionary alliances with nationalists, our aspiration to unite efforts with internationalists across the globe, and our call to cease using the works of the classics as convenient quotes for every occasion remain our unshakeable foundation. Of course, in the intervening period, capitalism has made a qualitative leap into the digital and platform eras. The proletariat itself has also changed: the rigid division between factory workers and the “theorising intelligentsia” has eroded. Couriers, factory workers, programmers, and teachers are equally alienated from the products of their labour. The complex struggle for attention in an oversaturated information field has been added to leafleting at factory gates, but the essence of our work remains unchanged.

Programme Our translation

The Approach to the Question of the Party

The “Communist Prometheus” group does not consider itself the world communist “party”, or even its sole embryo, and views its activities “as part of the practical movement towards communism, as a struggle to create this party”. On this basis, we consider it important to exchange experiences and engage in discussions with other internationalist communist organisations. In this connection, we publish our translations of documents, articles and materials produced by other communist organisations, which we consider to form part of the theoretical heritage of Marxism and an important element in the formation of the class consciousness of the world proletariat. We took this translation from the English-language page of the leftcom.org website. We have translated our own introduction, the article author’s introduction, and the concluding section “A Concrete Example”.

History

Lessons of Defeat: Objective Causes of Isolation and Counter-Revolution

This material opens a series of articles constituting a brief and, undoubtedly, incomplete historical overview tracing the concrete course of the class struggle in Russia after the October Revolution. In the first part, we will analyse the material conditions in which the isolated revolution found itself. Within this text, we deliberately refrain from a detailed theoretical analysis of the political platforms and programmatic positions of the sides involved in this confrontation. Such a comprehensive Marxist analysis will be the subject of subsequent publications in our journal. For now, let us limit ourselves to a description of the historical reality, which reflects with unequivocal clarity one harsh fact: the world communist revolution that began in October 1917, having been confined within the national borders of a backward country, was objectively doomed to the most severe crisis and counter-revolution.

International politics

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW: JULY 2026

The world in 2026 teeters on the brink of full-scale catastrophe. While bourgeois analysts, expert centres, and the liberal press dismiss the cascade of regional wars, the collapse of logistical chains, and sovereign defaults as random “geopolitical risks” or the errors of individual governments, the real mechanics of the crisis remain concealed behind the façade of stock-market bulletins. This international review is an attempt to tear away this ideological veil, it is essential for everyone who has grown weary of informational disorientation and wishes to understand not the superficial symptoms, but the fundamental, material causes of the ongoing madness, in which trillion-dollar bubbles of artificial intelligence coexist organically with the ruins of bombed cities. Drawing upon the rigorous categorical apparatus of Marxist political economy, we undertake a merciless dissection of contemporary imperialism. Step by step, this article demonstrates the structural impasse of the system: from the inexorable tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the tightening of the global debt noose, to capital’s desperate attempts to find salvation in the militarisation of space and in total algorithmic dictates, how the objective laws of accumulation and overproduction, described by Marx and Lenin, operate today – in the era of data centres, central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and programmable reality. However, this text is not a fatalistic prophecy of the end of the world, but a political guide to action. Found here is not only a diagnosis of the moribund state-monopoly capitalist system, but also a clear answer to the question “What is to be done?”. In an era when opportunists call upon the working class to choose the “lesser evil” among imperialist predators, this review returns the labour movement to its principal historical task – the necessity of forging the revolutionary party created by the vanguard of the working class, capable of smashing the bourgeois state machine and halting the oncoming barbarism.

Programme

The Anatomy of Global Alienation: Political Economy of the Structural Crisis and the Myth of Post-Industrialism

Modern capitalism has reached a historical threshold, beyond which lies exploitation on an unprecedented scale, disguised as technological progress. In this part of our study, we analyse the political-economic foundations of the global economy. Our aim is to deconstruct bourgeois myths about the “post-industrial society”, the “knowledge economy” and “deindustrialisation”, as well as to examine the mathematical and structural mechanisms through which capital slows the operation of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by means of spatial expansion and the radical deskilling of labour. Without a rigorous understanding of these objective economic shifts, it is impossible to develop a correct strategy for the class struggle.

Programme Extracts from the classics

Excess Capital And Excess Population

In an era when the illusion of neural network dominance proliferates, and financial transactions are executed in fractions of a second, the excerpt from Volume III of Capital published below emerges not as a historical artefact, but as a chillingly accurate anatomical cross-section of the present day. While bourgeois thought writes off crises as “external shocks”, Marx exposes the fundamental paradox of the system: the simultaneous existence of surplus capital and surplus population. He proves that a crisis is not the consequence of a physical overabundance of wealth for humanity, but a mathematical dead end in which gigantic masses of objectified labour lose the ability to yield a sufficient rate of profit, driving the economy into speculative adventures and credit bubbles. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”, reads the axiom of the first Russian Marxist, Plekhanov. If the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is reduced to problems of “unfair distribution”, the answer becomes a dead-end reformism. However, Marx’s objective science leaves no room for illusions: capitalism is capable of restoring its rate of profit only through the barbaric destruction of accumulated values – mass bankruptcies, the devaluation of labour, and imperialist wars. It is necessary to turn to the original source to then observe how Marx’s iron logic forges its path through the technological and social contradictions of the 21st century.

Programme

The Transformation of the Labour Movement after 1968

The text presented here is merely a brief introduction to a series of articles. It is therefore general in character, offering an overview and a theoretical perspective. In writing it, we did not seek to provide a detailed analysis of individual strikes, but rather to sketch out the political-economic map on the basis of which the world proletariat, wandering and making mistakes, has been moving for the past half-century.

Programme

The Illusion of Socialism and the Reality of Capital in the USSR

The historical myth of a global confrontation between the West’s “free market” and the East’s “socialist plan” served for decades as a convenient ideological smokescreen for the world bourgeoisie. In reality, however, on both sides of the so-called “Iron Curtain”, the inexorable logic of the self-expansion of capital was at work. This text is an introductory article opening a series of materials on the class nature of the USSR. Setting aside legal fetishism, we attempt to analyse the “Soviet” economic model from the standpoint of rigorous Marxist political economy, in order to reveal its true essence as ordinary capitalism. The aim of this work is to outline a basic conceptual framework for a more detailed analysis to follow. Drawing on classical theory and a wealth of empirical material – from testimonies by members of the highest echelons of the nomenklatura and official publications to evidence concerning the shadow “tsekhovik” entrepreneurs – the text demonstrates, step by step, that in the USSR neither the law of value, nor the ruling class in the form of the bourgeoisie, nor wage labour and the alienation of the proletariat were abolished. Despite the legal illusion of a single state monopoly, ordinary capitalism prevailed in the USSR, with all its inherent attributes: money, the law of value, capital and wage labour. The economic basis of the state could not have been otherwise, given its enormous backwardness compared with the advanced capitalist economies of the West and its critically lower level of labour productivity. Moreover, the USSR was never isolated from the world market. On the contrary, it functioned within it, subject to the global laws of competition. The logical outcome of this process was the collapse of the 1990s, when the “Soviet” bourgeoisie simply seized the opportunity to cast off its socialist mask.

Editorial

From the editorial board: A new stage

The publication of the first issue of “Communist Prometheus” is a natural result of nearly thirty years of work done by our group. In conditions of extreme weakness on the part of the contemporary workers’ movement and fragmentation of Marxist forces, we are not trying to start all over. On the contrary, we draw upon accumulated political and theoretical experience. Our praxis has passed through several stages, each one required a refinement of strategy and the consistent application of the Marxist method to changing historical conditions.

History

The Bolsheviks’ last battle

We turn to one of the most tragic, yet politically crucial pages in the history of the world working-class movement: the heroic and consistent struggle of the Group of Democratic Centralism (the “Decists”). While in the late 1920s most party oppositionists harbored fatal illusions regarding the nature of the Soviet state, it was the Decists (T. Sapronov, V. Smirnov, and others) who first drew a rigorous Marxist conclusion: the counter-revolution was complete; the VKP(b) and the state machine had transformed into instruments of capitalist exploitation hostile to the proletariat, which meant that what was needed was not intra-party reform, but a new revolution and the creation of a new, genuinely workers’ party. The special value of this historical material lies in its ruthless dissection of the ideology of Leon Trotsky and his supporters. Using historical documents, we demonstrate how Trotsky’s refusal to recognize the bourgeois nature of the Stalinist regime led him to a disastrous centrism – fruitless hopes for a “left course” by the bureaucracy and the substitution of real class analysis with abstract reflections on the “international situation”.

Programme

About the “Manifesto”

The work on our “Manifesto” marked an important step in the group’s political self-definition and, as we had expected, provoked a lively response among comrades. We have always been convinced that Marxism is not a rigid dogma, but a guide to action, requiring the constant verification of theory through living practice and open, uncompromising discussion among comrades. It is precisely for this reason that we are launching a new column, “Correspondence with a Comrade”, in which we will publish our replies to readers’ questions, criticisms, and comments. In the first instalment of this column, we address the most important theoretical questions raised in the responses to the “Manifesto”: the dialectic of the destruction of the bourgeois state and the withering away of the proletarian semi-state; the falsity of the metaphysical opposition between economic and political struggle; the historical assessment of Stalinism as a consummated bourgeois counter-revolution and of Trotskyism as a tendency that failed to overcome centrism; as well as the material roots of the contemporary proletariat’s passivity in the imperialist metropolises. This polemic is not an academic exercise, but our necessary contribution to the work of preparing the ideological and political foundations of the future world communist party.

Appeal

APPEAL TO THE WORKERS OF RUSSIA

Our group’s history did not start yesterday. Most of our past publications and declarations are not widely known today. That is why we decided to start publishing in our magazine some materials from our archives. One of them is this call to action, published in 1999 in our paper “Komsa”.

International politics

International review: April 2026

Whilst the news speaks of imminent stabilisation, the system is undergoing a profound structural crisis: the markets are saturated with unbacked debt, new technologies are stripping some traditional industries of their former profits while generating new super-profits for others, and states are, as expected, being drawn into wars over resources. It is not enough to diagnose contemporary capitalism; we must understand why the labour movement is currently so weak and fragmented and, above all, where communists must begin their practical work today in order to organise people for the coming social upheavals, rather than confining themselves to passively awaiting spontaneous revolts.

Editorial

From the Editors: The Tool of Labour and the Cybernetic Trowel

The editorial board openly acknowledges its conscious use of generative AI to create magazine illustrations, drawing on a Marxist understanding of technology. Devoid of purpose and genuine imagination, the machine serves merely as an obedient “cybernetic trowel” – a high-tech extension of the human hand and mind. By strictly directing the algorithms, we use them not to imitate machine “creativity”, but to revive the monumental visual language of the revolutionary proletarian avant-garde of 1917–1921. Although modern neural networks have been developed by corporations for profit through the predatory monopolisation of humanity’s “general intellect”, we turn this contradiction against capital itself. By refusing to sell the magazine, we create no surplus value and produce only use-value – communist propaganda. In this way, we carry out a tactical “reverse expropriation”, compelling the infrastructure of the class enemy to serve the interests of the proletariat and transforming capitalist technologies into intellectual weapons of class struggle.

Programme

From Engel’s Manchester to Global Manchester

For decades, bourgeois ideologues have sought to convince us that Marxism is hopelessly outdated, that the traditional working class has disappeared, and that the brutal exploitation of the past has given way to a humane “post-industrial society” of equal opportunity. We dismantle this myth through rigorous political-economic analysis. We show that capital has not changed its predatory nature in the slightest – it has merely expanded the hellish conditions of nineteenth-century Manchester, described by the young Friedrich Engels, to a planetary scale. Confronted with the inexorable fall in the rate of profit in the 1970s, capitalism unleashed the mechanisms of a global counter-offensive: it shifted material production to the countries of “new” capitalism, condemning billions to hyper-exploitation, while fragmenting and subordinating the working class of the imperialist metropolises through the gig economy, digital Taylorism, debt bondage, and the illusions of fictitious capital. In this article, we dissect the anatomy of the modern fragmented proletariat and demonstrate that, despite spatial and occupational fragmentation, a miner from the Congo, a courier tracked by GPS, and a burnt-out IT specialist remain links in the same chain of surplus-value extraction. To break this global machine for the production of poverty and alienation, the fragmented class of wage labourers must overcome the imposed atomisation and recognise its common class interests. Only a world Marxist party can direct the spontaneous protest of the proletariat into the channel of communist revolution.

International politics

Iran as the Nexus of the Imperialist Crisis

This text presents a Marxist analysis of Iran’s role in the contemporary imperialist crisis and the country’s internal class dynamics. Whilst liberal ideologues speak of a struggle between “reformists” and “conservatives”, we argue that all factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie are united in suppressing the workers’ movement, using it merely as a mass base in their internecine struggles over assets. Against the backdrop of the unfolding US–Israeli intervention, we categorically reject both support for foreign invasion and calls for “national unity” around the Islamic regime. The proletariat’s only possible response would be the tactic of revolutionary defeatism: the Iranian proletariat must break free from bourgeois influence, create its own vanguard party, and use the war to smash the bourgeois state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat through revived workers’ councils.

Critique Extracts from the classics

Digression: (On Productive Labour)

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”. This brings with it augmentation of national wealth, quite apart from the personal enjoyment which — as a competent witness, Professor Roscher, [tells] us (see ... ) — the manuscript of the compendium brings to its originator himself.

Programme Our translation

Introduction and the “Draft Programme” of the Internationalist Communist Party 1944

The “Communist Prometheus” group does not consider itself a “world communist party or even its sole embryo” and views its activity “as part of the practical movement towards communism, as a struggle for the creation of this party”. Based on this premise, we consider it fundamental to exchange experiences and conduct discussions with other internationalist communist organisations. “The Draft Programme of the Internationalist Communist Party” and the accompanying introduction, specifically written by the comrades of Battaglia Comunista, constitute the first in a series of publications of documents, articles, and materials from other communist organisations. We consider the in-depth study of these texts an integral part of the theoretical heritage of Marxism and a crucial element in the formation of the class consciousness of the world proletariat

History

Searching for a Way

This historical-political essay traces the group’s long trajectory of formation and ideological evolution – from its emergence in the late 1990s to its transition to new forms of activity in the present day. It describes the organisation’s first steps on the “scorched earth” of post-Soviet Russia, the spontaneous maximalism of the early years of the newspaper Komsa_, and attempts to reconstruct communist principles of party work from the ground up. Under present conditions of extreme passivity on the part of the working class, the pursuit of quantitative indicators is ruinous: the foremost task of communists today is not the mechanical compilation of the bourgeois press or pretending to be a mass movement, but the uncompromising selection and rigorous theoretical training of a narrow stratum of revolutionary cadres, along with the development of Marxist theory in its application to contemporary conditions