09.10.2025

Abundant material wealth for all

What sort of manifesto do communists need? One that maximises appeal, inspires with ambition and yet goes with the arc of history, says Ted Reese. We can, he believes, turn ‘Get rich or die trying’ into a communist slogan

‘Manifesto of X Party’, ‘X country’s road to socialism’, ‘X Party: what we stand for’ - these are typical titles socialist/communist parties give their manifestos. The framing is somewhat insular - it appeals to people who are already aligned to socialist politics, which is presently a small minority.

‘Abundant material wealth for all: the X Party manifesto for the coming socialist revolution’, by contrast, vastly broadens and in fact maximises the appeal of the title, piques the interest of the unconverted, and speaks to the needs and wants of ‘the masses’ - people are, after all, more likely to buy a lottery ticket than a political, let alone revolutionary, pamphlet.

‘Abundance for all’ may seem like a pipe dream, but the arc of history in fact bends towards it - albeit non-unilinearly, since, for one thing, capitalism is, of course, characterised by extreme busts and booms. Major historical transitions are largely underpinned by rising productivity and wealth creation, though. As such, one of the primary rallying cries of our movement should be that socialism is the next and greatest ever gold rush - inspiring adventure, ambition, and aspiration. ‘Get rich or die trying’ should be a communist slogan.

During the development of capitalism since the 1960s, annual productive output has roughly doubled every 25 years, with that compound growth adding up to increasingly exponential growth. In terms of raw numbers - leaving aside for the moment the fact that extractive production is not environmentally or even quantitatively sustainable¹ - the world’s productive capacity is ‘already capable’ of providing extremely plentiful material wealth for all (if not, because of capital’s tendency to centralise wealth, in terms of distribution).

This factor is contributing towards making capitalism historically obsolete, since, the more commodities (use values/goods made and sold for profit) we produce in larger quantities and in quicker time, the more their value withers away. One gigabyte of data storage - now the most vital part of production - fell from $193,000 in 1980 to just $0.03 in 2014, for example; while the purchasing power of the US dollar has fallen by nearly 100% over the past century.

That costs of production tend unsustainably towards zero - until shooting back up when the bust finally comes - makes the necessity of a post-money/capitalist system crystal-clear. What is the true meaning of freedom? Free production - free from the barriers of money and profit; the capacity to produce plenty for all.

Anti-communism

The recognition that our rising productive capacity lays the foundation for a qualitatively higher, commonly owned system of production makes the suggested ‘Abundance’ title the best one for addressing and combating anti-communist sentiment, as the class struggle intensifies and - vitally - shifts in character.

Anti-communism is not only a symptom of ruling class propaganda, state oppression that enforces obedience, and the capitalist state’s education system (which ‘dumbs down’ the masses for ideological purposes, but also because funding good education eats into already thinning profit margins): the material basis for anti-communism is broader and more fundamental than that.

Most workers are not presently communists and most are probably not even very radical social democrats. We seem to act as if this problem is exclusively the fault of ourselves as communists and the broader left and, while that is true to some extent, some powerful historical factors are simply beyond our control. For one, humans regardless of class obviously have a pretty strong track record of ‘going with the flow’ or ‘taking the path of least resistance’, because of the self-preservation instinct and the brain’s obsession with energy conservation.

In our own time, not only the communist left, but the social-democratic left, has withered, as people have adapted to survive their increasingly capitalistic environment. The commodity fetish appears to strengthen as no-one - other than a few capitalist vultures - wants the bust to arrive. With each passing decade, for example, a greater proportion of people have tended to become investors in private property. In 1989, the percentage of US households that owned stocks was 32%, rising to 53% in 2001 and 58% in 2023.² What we have seen then during the post-1970s era of ‘neoliberalism’ is a tendency towards either ‘semi-bourgeoisification’ or ‘semi-proletarianisation’, whereby an increasingly large portion of the working class has been made dependent on supplementing wages by investing in stocks, including via pension schemes, reinforcing and deepening pro-capitalist mindsets (while home ‘ownership’ through mortgage payments - which banks also invest in stocks and debt - has had a similar, compounding effect).

The ‘good news’ that largely will not occur to non-Marxists is that the trend represents the increasing socialisation of economic ownership - another organic move towards a socialist mode of production. Capital’s falling profitability compels it to open up and seek new sources of revenue by leeching off of the public and the consumer. Within capitalist relations of production, the trend, of course, cannot last - it needs to be completed by that change in the mode of production. The pace of the trend has slowed down and, more critically, the time for which stocks are held is plummeting - down to 10 months from five years in 1975.³ The figure is even starker in the UK - down to 0.8 years from 9.7 years in 1980 - a decline of 91.75%.⁴ At the same time, the need for shorter- and shorter-term profit-seeking is approaching the point that such supplemental investments are on the verge of being absolutely disincentivised. Furthermore, the richest 10% of US households own 93% of stock market wealth - up from 82% in 1990; and corporations are making state-backed legal moves to block ‘shareholder democracy/activism’. Capitalism is, in fact, increasingly exclusionary - which must eventually compel the excluded to re-adapt and fight for a new, inclusionary, socialist system.

What we are likely to experience then with future major financial/economic crashes is a critical shift in the balance of class forces, as portions of the capitalist class (via bankruptcies) and maybe close to the entirety of the semi-proletariat are fully proletarianised, re-proletarianised or even lumpenised (made destitute).

As exchange value - the value held within commodities, including the money-commodity - withers away, so does the capitalist class. A process is therefore underway in which the change in the class character of the masses will eventually objectively tip the balance of forces in the class struggle in favour of socialism.

Capitalists and semi-proletarians, though, do not, of course, instantly acquire a Marxist outlook, the moment they are demoted into the ranks of the proletariat. Their ‘petty/semi bourgeois’ and anti-communist consciousness is likely retained and perhaps exacerbated by the traumatising experience they are thrown into, mixed with their neurologically ingrained ideology and intensifying exposure to rightwing propaganda (which blames economic crises on public spending, central bank money printing, etc). As capital becomes more dependent on state contracts, workers become more dependent on repressive roles in state employment.

Easy solutions

Easier solutions than revolution are instinctively yearned for. The concern about ‘overpopulation/migration’ seems to be very widespread - not only among white people - and is logically quite instinctive, because the immediate problem appears to be falling resources per capita, rather than the inherent crisis-prone nature of capitalism. (The capitalist class, of course, tends to accelerate the importation of labour, in order to offset falling profitability by expanding and cheapening the labour base - which also creates opportunities to leach off the taxpayer by creating state contracts in border control and ‘warehousing’. We must defend migrants’ rights, but we could also do a better job of voicing our opposition to imperialist plunder in terms of brain drains that leave poorer and oppressed nations with huge skills and labour shortages. We should not be frightened to explain that socialism will lessen the compulsion to migrate or that we will need borders in the early stages of socialism in order to control capital.)

To help workers and ‘the downwardly mobile middle classes’ overcome anti-communist instincts and attitudes, we have to appeal to their immediate as well as long-term needs and wants. They want back what they had. They want the things they were planning and aiming to achieve and build. They want to protect what they still have. We must convince them that their interests therefore lay with communism - not simply because communism is and always has been better; but because capitalism is reaching its own historical limits, since the automation revolution is making money worthless and waged labour redundant. Robots cannot be exploited for profit and cannot buy goods or rent services. We have to point loudly at this reality at every turn - pulling heads out of the sand if needs be. This must be our most prominent argument. We must attack the root at least as much as the symptoms.

A communist manifesto then must appeal to immediate needs and long-term wants and aspirations. This is critical from a neuroscientific point of view as much as anything. If, as is increasingly accepted, ‘addictions’ are learned behaviours (rather than diseases) that can be unlearned and supplanted by developing different habits, then class consciousness and ideology should be treated as learned habits.

How do we change habits? They are changing all the time - we all change a little bit everyday, of course. But, to make changes lasting and with intention, a few principles can help. A modern neuroscientific approach recommends: (1) starting with a small target; (2) increasing the target incrementally; (3) breaking the new habit down into chunks; (4) aiming for consistency, not perfection; (5) focusing on systems instead of goals.

A start

If you want, say, to learn to inhibit stress and aim to do so by meditating for 20 minutes a day, you could start with:

(1) One minute per day.

(2) Once comfortable with that, after say a week or two, move on to two minutes, and so on. As you get towards 10 minutes, you could:

(3) Break this into two chunks to make that stretch of time less daunting.

(4) You could plan to take one or two days off a week, so that when you need a break you do not end up missing three days in a row, which could make you feel like a failure.

(5) Instead of focusing on the goal of 20 minutes, focus on embracing the process of becoming someone who is mastering self-control through meditation.

If you need to cut refined sugar out of your daily consumption to reverse the build-up of disease/chronic inflammation in your body, trying to do so immediately is likely to result in a sugar and dopamine crash, reinforcing the cravings and chronic sugar-dopamine, rush-crash cycle. It is much more viable for the body to adapt biochemically and neurochemically if you reduce your refined sugar intake by, say, 10% every two to four weeks - while also slowly introducing complex sugars from wholewheat carbs and fibrous fruits in small doses that gradually increase. As the new habit forms, the old habit withers away. You stop thinking about what you used to eat and now get a much more consistent drip-feed of sugar, energy and dopamine.

Stress compartmentalises the brain - its different regions stop communicating with each other, generating fear and selfishness (which we could associate with intensifying capitalist competition and fascistic ideology). De-stressing the brain enables it to communicate as a whole (like the coordinated planning of a socialist economy). Developing revolutionaries surely requires developing fearlessness.

How do we apply these principles? Certainly not by aiming for ‘great leaps forward’ - again, human brains are not good at coping with big, immediate changes. People cannot do algebra before addition or triathlons before learning to swim. We have to challenge ourselves and ask: are we potentially re-enforcing reactionary habits or working class divisions by attacking particular perspectives too frequently and vehemently? Do we need to take a different approach? Is this a habit of ours that we need to work on ourselves?

If our manifesto is based on ultimate communist ideals that cannot be realised without decades of socialist development instead of at least incorporating immediate needs, then we are likely to bite off more than we can chew. Take, for the sake of making the point, an exaggerated ‘ultra-left’ manifesto called ‘Full communism now’ with proposals such as:

• Abolish the nation and ban all national emblems
• Abolish border controls
• Abolish the family
• Abolish religion
• Abolish gender
• Abolish race
• Ban cars⁵

n Expropriate all private property without compensation

A communist is likely to think that these policies should be considered desirable by the vast majority of people, but the reality is that most people are not accustomed to such possibilities and presently think of them as ‘extreme’. An advanced Marxist should understand that they are (at best) long-term goals that should manifest during ‘higher communism’, when several generations have adapted culturally and practicably to changes that take place by dint of living in a classless, technologically-advancing society with fully automated, publicly owned production.

Instead, our manifesto should read something along the lines of:

(1) Sovereignty of the people and nation.

(2) Continual progression towards the public ownership of all land, banks, production and services - via compensation for the last capitalists - enabling continually falling prices and rising economic independence for all.

(3) A clean industrial, energy and farming revolution that is actually clean.

(4) Full employment (including ‘earn as you learn’ trainee schemes).

(5) A continually reduced working week and retirement age; revitalising independent creativity and craftsmanship.

(6) Abolish exploitation and economic crises.

(7) Universal education, health, social and child care, free at the point of access; and low-cost, highly accessible public transport.

(8) Cancel all mortgages and personal debt.

(9) Low-rent, high-quality housing for all.

(10) A new democratic constitution - written by the people - enshrining the rights of humanity, in all its diversity.

Obviously this is a draft to be tinkered with and each point would be fleshed out in some detail that we cannot go into here. Production and services will be progressively taken under public ownership, not all in one, impossible fell swoop, starting with the essentials that meet the most pressing needs of the masses: banks, electricity, water, gas, internet, waste services, mail, steel, heavy industry, mining and land, which farmers can lease back from the state. (Homelessness can be relatively quickly abolished by the state buying or seizing unused housing and building new social housing.) This way, we are less likely to bite off more than we can chew.

Outlined in point 2 (and 3, regarding farmers) is the offer to compensate the last capitalists via long-term debt payments - no problem for a system that, unleashed from the fetters of capital, will enormously raise productivity. (The end of previous modes of production have usually involved some form of compensation for the old masters. They will have to be expropriated without compensation if they refuse negotiation or reasonable offers, of course.) They should also be offered fulfilling jobs in social enterprises in the industries they presently work in or similar, in order to motivate them and retain any useful expertise, which is especially important in the case of farmers.

By taking this approach, we are trying to de-stress, as best as possible in extremely challenging circumstances, the minds of people who are presently anti-communist - again, that is most people - by helping them to realise and understand that they have everything to gain from communism.

What works

Appealing to people’s better nature is another important tool. The vast majority of Germans who hid Jewish people in Nazi Germany did not put themselves forward to do so, but responded to being asked for help by desperate people, who made powerful emotional, human connections. Mao inspired the conversion of much of the captured nationalist rank and file by giving them the choice of fighting with the communists or going home.

What works often depends largely on historical material conditions more than ‘doing the right thing’. Slavery abolitionists in Britain made their biggest impact by pointing out the high numbers of white sailors dying on their way to and from the colonies. Attacking the slave trade made slave ownership more difficult, compelling slavers to better treat their slaves, paving the way for the humanisation and liberation of slaves. In the US, Abraham Lincoln eventually agreed to abolish slavery, because it became the only way to retain the union and prevent the loss of crucial agricultural land.

Communists (and radical leftists in general) are asking a lot of people. We need to spend a bit less time denouncing and lecturing - often reinforcing what we oppose - and a bit more time understanding and contextualising; appealing to people’s better nature and building trust, while convincing people of their personal historical importance. We need to sit down and show people with great clarity why they and their loved ones - including and especially their future grandchildren and great grandchildren - need communism. We need a bold vision - of abundance for all.

I am not deluded or naive. I do not think or claim that this approach can prevent a violent counterrevolution or that we can convert every fascist through ‘love-bombing’. Perhaps most actual fascists can never be converted - but there is a large middle strata that is wavering between the two poles. We have to make ourselves the more compelling draw.

The revolution, of course, will be defended militaristically to some or other extent (and it is also true that the dwindling capitalist class will lose, because capitalism is necessarily using up its ammunition quicker that it can be replenished). But the approach outlined is the best one for shortening the period and brutality of the counterrevolution. We will never know how successful we are with this approach. But to the purists who consider it idealistic, we have to consider the following:

(1) Capitalism has not been overthrown before it has more or less historically exhausted itself (ie, before exchange value has all but withered away, as production has become almost completely fully automated). While it has produced enough value, capitalism has been able to produce and wield enough carrot and stick to sustain sufficient obedience and division among the majority of the working class.

(2) The evidence from history’s revolutions (not just socialist ones) suggests capitalism will not be ‘overthrowable’ until the capitalist state is more or less unable to pay most state workers, including soldiers. It is common for the majority of state workers to continue to work for the new state. We cannot permanently alienate the majority of trained state soldiers. ‘Winning over the majority’ is no good if it does not have the capacity to defeat the minority.

(3) Revolutions of the past have usually made not insignificant concessions ‘to the right’⁶ or the old ruling class in order to dampen the appeal of the counterrevolution. In Marx’s manifesto he predicts that a decisive portion of the capitalist class will at some point side with the new ruling class, the working class, just as a portion of feudal rulers - sensing that the wind was blowing in another direction and realising they could enrich themselves via the new, more productive mode of production - eventually sided with the then-revolutionary and ascending capitalist class. Our approach will foster this process by incentivising splits and defections and disincentivising rebellion.

(4) We also have to take into account the fact that we are trying to slow down and reverse global warming before it is too late and prevent a nuclear world war that is becoming increasingly possible, as capitalist competition intensifies over dwindling sources of profit. Diplomacy and negotiation will be vital tools.

In these circumstances, we have to try to make the world-historical process of transitioning to global communism as smooth and easy as possible. We have to make offers that cannot be refused. We will have to do this in incredibly difficult circumstances, during a period in which history through technological change is accelerating⁷ - but we will have to stick to our guns, stay disciplined and ‘trust the process’ as much as possible throughout.

1. Capitalism depends on fossil fuel, because its non-renewability renews the demand for capital investment, whereas renewable energy reproduces energy ‘infinitely’ and only requires maintenance. Extractive and subtractive production (eg, metal milling) maximise labour intensity/exploitability - so socialism is needed to upscale renewable energy and additive production.↩︎

2. ‘More Americans than ever own stocks’: wsj.com, December 18 2023.↩︎

3. ‘The costs of rising short-termism’: etoro.com, February 9 2023.↩︎

4. ‘Investing statistics: how many people invest in the stock market?’: Finder.com, January 30 2025.↩︎

5. We are never actually going to ‘ban cars’, of course, but make people less and less dependent on them by ensuring that high-quality amenities are as localised as possible and public transport is highly efficient and accessible. We should actually appeal to (usually rightwing) car enthusiasts by explaining that such developments would improve their opportunities to practise independent craftsmanship and drive on regulated race tracks - rather than wasting the lives of their sports cars being stuck in traffic.↩︎

6. We do not propose selling out the rights of any minority or oppressed section of the working class for tactical gain; but nor do we wish to increase the amount of opposition and vitriol they face by drawing the line between ourselves and our enemies too close to our own feet, alienating convertible middle strata. This means that some transitional compromises to deal with incredibly complex issues (while working towards unity through education and struggle) may be necessary. Indeed, defending minority rights can mean defending or accommodating social conservatism. We would not deny Amish communities the right to cultural autonomy, for example. (This whole topic is obviously a minefield and cannot be worked out in this small space or even on paper in general - but in the process of historical evolution. Giving everyone the impression that they will be punished for every transgression, however mild, is certainly going to maximise the difficulty of the task ahead, though.)↩︎

7. After the steam engine was introduced, 61 years passed until productivity rose. That interval shrank to 32 years with electricity and 15 years with computers and the internet. For AI, JPMorgan estimates it will be less than seven years (‘AI will spark “violent task churn” in the economy, but even optimists may be underestimating the productivity boom, JPMorgan says’): Fortune.com, September 15 2025.↩︎

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