Czechia: Workers can oppose the attacks of the dominant bourgeois class on their living, working, and struggle conditions only by uniting, relying on their own strength, and reviving the class struggle

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It is only strength that the bosses—and their capitalist state—understand, not chatter; as we wrote in 2023:

“In any case, what the largest trade union in industry, OS KOVO, has failed to achieve in four years of so-called bargaining, the workers have managed to recover (…) by finally going on an indefinite strike”.

The means and methods of struggle — such as the indefinite strike — are the lever to advance workers' interests!

The political elites, acting in the interest of national and international capital, have approved increased precariousness for workers: 1. a longer trial period, up to a maximum of 4 months, which all HR departments will obviously adopt as standard practice; for fixed-term contracts, it can be up to half the duration of the contract (for example, with a 1-year contract, the trial period can be up to 6 months!); 2. fixed-term employment contracts, if used to replace an employee temporarily absent (maternity leave, parental leave...), can now be extended without any limit on repetition (up to a maximum of 9 years); 3. reduction of the notice period (dismissal without justification, due to the election year, was not approved); 4. the option to work part-time during parental leave is a formalization of economic misery; 5. rest periods can be reduced in the event of vaguely defined “other extraordinary events,” which is a step forward for employers wishing to exploit it — for example, in cases of staff shortages, etc.

This is a fundamental law, part of an entire series of anti-worker laws through which the capitalist state defends class rule and the exploitation of workers. But even if this reform were not approved, in essence, nothing would change: the attack on workers' labor conditions would continue and intensify due to the worsening economic crisis and the capitalists’ need to reduce labor costs — with the tacit consent of the current trade union apparatuses, which, out of loyalty to class collaboration, the health of the national economy, and social peace, have repeatedly proven to be an obstacle to struggle, betraying not only the general interests of the proletariat, but also its immediate ones. What truly defines the position of wage workers is the balance of power they establish with the employers through their own organization and mobilization, exclusively in defense of their own interests — imposing their conditions on the bosses through unity, struggle, and class solidarity. Much can be changed between bosses and workers in terms of economic and working conditions if the agreements reached are the result of classist struggle — that is, carried out for strictly proletarian demands using classist means and methods of struggle. Classist means and methods of struggle are such only if they are incompatible with capitalist interests (e.g., indefinite strike without notice, negotiations without suspending the strike, combating scabs through pickets and propaganda among other factories and working-class neighborhoods, etc.).

Classist struggle is the only foundation on which proletarian organizations of immediate defense can be reborn — without them, the proletarians cannot draw lessons from their struggles nor strengthen their ability to resume the fight each time the bosses and their State attempt to take back the concessions they were forced to grant.

THE “SUPER-ALLOWANCE”: A FURTHER IMPOVERISHMENT OF THE POOREST PROLETARIANS

In May, the merger of four social and material assistance benefits (child allowance, housing contribution, subsistence support, and rent supplement) into a single “super-allowance” was approved. The Ministry led by the People’s Party, which designed the “super-allowance,” is now downplaying the results of the indicative benefits calculator from the Centre for Social Issues SPOT, which shows that even the so-called vulnerable group — that is, the low-income segment of the proletariat, such as some single mothers, elderly people living alone, or working-class families with children who pay high rents — will lose thousands of crowns in social support. The ministry representatives “acknowledge” the critical feedback and try to “dispel” concerns that the scenarios already published in January do not reflect reality. But what is this “super-allowance” really hiding?

Social assistance is not an act of altruism by the bourgeoisie, but a political tool used to ease social tensions under the pressure of the workers’ movement — in order to prevent social revolt and to ensure the reproduction of the labor power necessary to keep the country’s entire productive machinery running. This social assistance is paid partly out of surplus value, extracted from wage workers through unpaid daily labor time, and partly through the tax system and social security contributions. It is provided when individual market wages are insufficient for the reproduction of labor power. These subsidies, instead of serving as support for the deteriorating living conditions of the proletariat, express the contradiction between production and reproduction of labor power under capitalism. The attack on social assistance, disguised as a better measure to respond to proletarian impoverishment, is in fact a way to reduce the cost of labor beyond the direct wage — and to push the unemployed and the poor to accept lower-paid jobs, since “benefits” must be treated as a privilege, not a right. This logic is used ideologically to divide the proletariat by stigmatizing benefit recipients. In reality, it is about returning a larger share of the surplus labor–surplus value normally extracted by capital back to the companies (reduced social spending can ease corporate costs and increase state support), in order to enhance business competitiveness and shift part of the cost burden from companies onto individuals and families. This further weakens already fragile collective ties and reinforces obedience to corporate demands by making workers accept low wages for fear of ending up dependent on benefits: poverty must serve as a lesson in obedience!

The working class must recognize that these attacks are to be understood as direct attacks on their living conditions. As the producers of all wealth, they have already been stripped of everything under the capitalist mode of production: the entire product of social labor is systematically taken from them, and through the wage system they have been reduced to mere survival and the simple reproduction of their labor power. The very existence of wage labor — its socio-political framework — must be abolished through revolutionary class struggle.

Regarding the amendment to Article 403 of the Criminal Code, which has already been approved by the Chamber of Deputies and awaits approval by the Senate and the president’s signature, on April 22, 2025, several changes were introduced that allow for the punishment of support for and propaganda of the communist movement — including imprisonment from one to five years. A deputy of the governing party emphasized that the introduction of this "symbolic" ban (since repression could already be creatively enforced using the existing formulation of “class hatred” or “hatred towards another group of people”) on communist propaganda as a tool of the legal order is also a future “preventive measure against this terrible communist ideology.” The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR), which contributed to the amendment, is correct on two points: that “at the roots of communist doctrine and at the roots of Marxism there is only one word: violence [and] that there can be no change without the use of violence,” and that the “proposal (...) is not about ideology, but about the protection of the democratic rule of law”. The exact wording of the amended Article 403 of the Criminal Code states: “Anyone who founds, supports, or propagates (...) communist or other movements that demonstrably aim at the suppression of human rights and freedoms, or who proclaims (...) class hatred or hatred towards another group of people, shall be punished by imprisonment from one to five years”.

This is not a measure aimed at “left-wing” democratic politics: one cannot be a communist, one cannot say that the path to the emancipation of the working class culminates in the violent overthrow of bourgeois state power and its replacement with proletarian and communist power.

Every somewhat conscious worker, every proletarian, knows — just as the bourgeoisie did even before Karl Marx — of the existence of social classes, their contradictions, and the struggle between them; they feel and experience this objective truth. Workers, even at the lowest level of economic or workplace conflict, feel that their interests are in opposition to those of the bosses, of capital.

In their struggles and strikes, they experience being attacked by the hostile propaganda of the ruling classes and by the organs of power of the bourgeois state: how protests almost always turn into powerless peaceful marches, while the picket lines of striking workers are dispersed and crushed by the police.

The principles of the class party are the principles of economic determinism (1). The primary causes of historical and social events are economic factors. On this basis, society is divided into classes whose interests are opposed and who struggle against one another: the nature and course of class struggles determine and explain political events. In the current historical epoch, a struggle is underway between the capitalist class — which owns the means of production, production itself, and the means of distribution — and the proletariat. Contrary to what liberal and democratic theories claim, the State is nothing but an organ of struggle in the hands of the capitalist class, which holds power in order to secure its own economic privileges.

Our Marxist study of history and of the formation of capitalist society demonstrates the inevitability of the proletariat’s struggle for its own emancipation, and the outcome of this historical struggle in communism. How will this happen? We recognize that the transformation from an economy based on private property and wage labor to one based on common ownership of the means of production and social labor can only take place gradually. But the scientific character of Marxist doctrine lies in affirming that this economic development cannot begin unless political power passes from the hands of the bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat — and it rejects the idea that this transition can occur through democratic representation. On the contrary, it maintains that it will happen only through a violent confrontation between the proletariat, led by the class party — that is, the revolutionary communist party — and the bourgeois state. The proletariat will then organize itself as the ruling class and will begin a necessarily complex historical phase, in which capitalism — once the bourgeois ruling class is defeated — will give way to the general planning of the economy according to the real needs of the human species and to collective management by the entire society, made possible by the complete transformation of the mode of production and consumption. In this process, the division of society into antagonistic classes and the need for the State as a coercive organ over the dominated classes will definitively disappear.

How did the bourgeois revolution take place in the past? Manufacturers, artisans, merchants, and intellectuals — supported by the uprisings of the peasant masses in the countryside and the proletarian masses in the cities — overthrew, by force, the power of kings, clergy, and nobility under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity, ultimately going so far as to behead the king. The guillotine became the symbol of bourgeois power against any other power. Now, the history of class-divided societies awaits only one final revolution: the proletarian class revolution, which will overthrow the rule of a bourgeoisie that, from being revolutionary centuries ago, has become conservative and reactionary, oppressive and murderous like no other ruling class before it.

Every time a wave of proletarian — or more broadly, social — struggle arises, the bourgeoisie seeks to defend its interests as quickly and as radically as possible, using all means at its disposal. It reinforces the restriction of the rights it had previously granted to the proletariat and increasingly criminalizes the actors involved in these struggles.

The parliamentary and extra-parliamentary left has already begun to rant against this amendment to Article 403 of the Criminal Code, and, as usual, does so with a discourse that ultimately serves to paralyze the resurgence and development of the workers’ struggle and, ultimately, of class struggle.

On the contrary, proletarians must free themselves from the illusion that bourgeois democracy will grant them freedoms, that it is necessary to expand this democracy or call upon it for help. Bourgeois democracy is fundamentally opposed to them and constitutes the political organization of capitalism and the ruling bourgeois classes. Proletarians must not “beg” for “good laws”; such a struggle would be merely symbolic and, in fact, entirely paralyzing. Their goal must instead be to fight to overturn anti-proletarian legislative measures through the means of class struggle.

Class struggle — and even more so, communism — does not pass through a democratic debate on the right to propose “alternatives to capitalism,” because that would only lead to new legislative formulations, perhaps more acceptable to a certain segment of “public opinion,” but no less effective as instruments of social control. It would be a mistake to resort to proclamations, for example by claiming that real socialism, real communism was not the Stalinist regime with its totalitarian rule and its falsely socialist satellites, or by simultaneously presenting them as the pinnacle of popular, modern — even “proletarian,” if you like — democracy, that is, as “full” democracy in substance. For proletarians, the way out of wage slavery, social oppression, and capitalist and imperialist wars lies solely in returning to class struggle for their emancipation from wage labor — an emancipation that has only one name: communism. They will inevitably have to fight using the means and methods of class struggle; only on the basis of the balance of forces created by their struggle can this “preventive ban on communism” be shaken.

The upcoming parliamentary elections will be held on Friday, October 3, and Saturday, October 4, 2025. Leaving aside the governing parties — agents of the current offensive in the form of anti-proletarian laws — the bourgeois left is already making grand promises: more housing, massive wage increases, a functioning healthcare system… Social democracy must think workers are fools if it believes they have forgotten the role it played in managing the capitalist state over the past thirty years. It may have rid itself of its most visibly repugnant elements, but it is still the same bourgeois party: a party for defending the capitalist mode of production and thus the exploitation of wage labor; a party of the EU, of NATO, and an ally of the greatest enforcer of global capital — the United States — an imperialist criminal that supports the genocide of proletarian and poor masses in Palestine. It is a party that represses social struggle and resistance to social oppression (police repression in the period after 2000). Even the extra-parliamentary left will call on workers to vote for social democracy as the only “workers' party,” even if led by reformists and therefore non-⁠revolutionary — a party in which they themselves hope to secure a place. The paradox is that they criticize the Stačilo! (Enough!) movement around the former Stalinist party for its right-wing positions and nationalism, yet forget that the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) has governed countless times and has passed laws against workers! Do they forgive it for now flirting with the populist right just because it calls itself “social” and “democratic”? These flirtations are just a way to get access to millions in exchange for votes and to regain posts where public procurement money or other dirty funds are distributed — as in the current scandal involving billions from a bitcoin wallet, which most likely originate from drug trafficking!

The class communist party, in a distant past, made use of elections to apply the tactic of revolutionary parliamentarism as adopted by the Communist International in 1920 — a tactic that entailed fighting parliamentarism from within. However, it never neglected revolutionary preparation, class struggle outside parliament and its primary role, and it never conceived of this means as a path to reforms! Today, following the development of the capitalist state — which is clearly taking on the form of a dictatorship, as Marxism emphasized from the very beginning — parliamentarism is becoming increasingly irrelevant, electoral contests are mere chatter, and in moments of social crisis the dictatorial form of the state takes shape as the final resort of capitalism. Therefore, under current conditions, our party reaffirms its complete disregard for democratic elections of any kind and does not carry out any activity in this field. Instead, it focuses its efforts on general activities of study, propaganda, agitation, and proselytism within the context of the anti-capitalist struggle — which means also against democracy and its mechanisms of deception and illusion aimed at the proletarian mind — and for the clear class orientation of the proletariat. In contact with the working class and its daily struggle in opposition to capitalism and bourgeois oppression, it supports any proletarian struggle that breaks with social peace and refuses to submit to the politics of class collaboration. It supports all efforts aimed at the reorganization of the proletarian class on the basis of economically class-oriented and independent association, with the perspective of a broad revival of class struggle, proletarian internationalism, and revolutionary anti-capitalist struggle.

• Against the impoverishment of the proletariat — for stronger defense of the poorest and lowest-paid workers!

• Down with capitalist imperialist war — no to a future in which workers are turned into cannon fodder!

(1) In order for this statement not to be misunderstood, it must be clarified that the principles of economic determinism derive directly from historical and dialectical materialism, which form the theoretical foundation of Marxism, and therefore also of the class party. This statement should not be interpreted as meaning that the class party arises directly from the economic factors that underlie every human society, and thus from their “determinism,” but rather in the sense that Marx’s economic determinism is the foundation of the historical phenomena of human society since its earliest class-divided social formations. The progress in the development of society’s economic structure – that is, the development of modes of production and of the corresponding, class-conditioned antagonistic relations of production – reveals that the history of all hitherto existing societies, with the exception of that of primitive communal society, is the history of class struggles (The Communist Manifesto, 1848). In the same Manifesto it is stated: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product”. It also states that “but every class struggle is a political struggle,” concluding that the real fruit of the struggles of the proletariat lie not in the immediate (economic) result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. The organization of the proletariat into a class is, in fact, its organization into a political party – into the class party. However, the aims of the proletarian class struggle – namely, the destruction of bourgeois society and its mode of production, and with it its relations of production and property – cannot be understood without taking into account the economic law of motion of modern society, as developed in Marx’s major work, Capital. Economic determinism explains how class-divided society arose and developed; the political program of the class party defines the way in which the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat will historically overcome all class divisions in society.

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program