Originally published in De Acero No. 1, Stage III, in January 2026.

It has now been almost one hundred and eighty years since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first published The Communist Manifesto, laying the foundations of the modern revolutionary workers’ movement.

More than a century has passed since the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, stormed the heavens and seized power in the Russian Revolution, demonstrating in practice that the organised working class could overthrow the bourgeois order and build a new form of power.

More than seventy years have also passed since the betrayal and subsequent disappearance of socialism in the Soviet Union, and more than forty since the last socialist stronghold in Europe, Albania, likewise succumbed to capitalist restoration.

Since then, the revolutionary workers’ movement has endured a long and painful journey through the wilderness. A period marked by the ideological offensive of capitalism, the dissolution of revolutionary principles, and the gradual replacement of Marxism by postmodern, idealist and profoundly reactionary currents, despite being disguised as progressive.

In this context, the left has systematically betrayed the historical interests of the working class, abandoning the struggle for socialism and renouncing any prospect of a revolutionary break with the system.

For decades, the various communist organisations have gradually weakened, fragmented and, ultimately, disappeared. Some have dissolved into irrelevance; others have degenerated into mere electoral structures devoid of revolutionary content. All have ended up fully integrated into the poisoned illusion of postmodernism, accepting without resistance the ideological, political and cultural frameworks imposed by the international bourgeoisie.

The result has been the near disappearance of organised communism as a genuine revolutionary force.

All have fallen, all have abandoned the path, except one.

Reconstrucción Comunista remains standing as the only communist organisation left in Spain. The only one that has not capitulated, the only one that has neither renounced its principles nor succumbed to the fashions of the moment.

The only organisation that continues to advance with a firm, increasingly solid and determined step, in a context of widespread confusion and ideological defeat. A march that does not stop, built upon discipline, political clarity and militant commitment.

A march in which echoes the legacy of the true revolutionaries, of those who neither surrendered nor betrayed their principles.

THE NEW

Many will label me presumptuous for the claim I have just made, and there will be no shortage of those who react with discomfort or rejection in the face of a truth they find difficult to accept.

Today, no organisation remains in Spain whose cadres have rigorously studied, deeply understood and consciously assimilated the true creative and scientific essence of the Marxist dialectical materialist method.

There is no organisation that has turned that method into a living tool for analysing reality and for revolutionary action, beyond empty slogans or superficial references.

There is no organisation with militants who are truly selfless, politically educated and willing to assume all the consequences of the struggle for the historical interests of our class and our homeland.

Militants who do not conceive of militancy as a space for personal comfort, symbolic identity or aesthetic belonging, but rather as a total, conscious and disciplined commitment. Militants capable of sacrificing time, effort and even their own security in favour of a collective revolutionary project.

Nor is there any organisation that can honestly claim to have succeeded in creating a revolutionary mass front in which workers of all kinds are integrated — coming from different productive sectors and popular strata — rather than merely university circles, intellectualised environments or lumpenised sectors drawn in by a passing political trend.

There is no organisation that has even attempted to fight in a solid and sustained way for an organised working class, becoming a genuine reference point for broad sectors of society.

Likewise, there is no organisation genuinely willing to challenge real power, to confront directly the interests of international capital and its political representatives, rather than adapting to their narratives, adopting their ideological frameworks and embracing their cultural and political fashions.

Most have chosen integration, domestication and the open renunciation of any revolutionary perspective, accepting the limits imposed by the system.

No organisation is willing to go through what Reconstrucción Comunista has gone through, nor through what it will inevitably continue to face. To endure repression, isolation, slander and hostility both from the State and from the false left. To resist without shortcuts, without concessions and without betraying its principles in exchange for recognition or funding.

That is a test that can only be overcome through ideological conviction and political firmness.

For all these reasons, we can state without error that, if anything of communism remains in our beloved Spain, it is to be found within the ranks of Reconstrucción Comunista. There, communism is not a memory, nor a label, nor a pose, but a living and conscious practice.

We are the living because we continue to advance, organise and struggle when others have already capitulated.

THE OLD

The old organisations are dead, hollowed out from within and completely taken over by postmodernists who have replaced class struggle with intellectual self-indulgence.

Individuals more concerned with winning drawing-room debates about films that no one but themselves watches than with reaching out to workers, whom they ultimately despise and fear.

They have severed any genuine connection with the working class, which they no longer regard as a revolutionary subject, but rather as an inconvenient obstacle that does not fit within their identity-based and aesthetic frameworks.

No “member” of these self-fulfilment clubs —because I refuse to call them militants— is willing to give up anything in order to build something truly revolutionary.

They do not renounce their comfort, they do not renounce their status, they do not renounce their material or symbolic privileges. Their political participation goes no further than the consumption of safe spaces, harmless assemblies and empty rituals that serve only to reaffirm themselves.

There is no discipline, no sacrifice, no genuine commitment — only a simulation of militancy.

No “little leader” within these organisations is willing to make even the slightest effort to set an example. They do not live as they preach, they do not demand of themselves what they demand of others, and they assume no responsibility.

They are not going to organise anything revolutionary, because their objective is not to transform reality, but to preserve their own small sphere of internal power.

Meanwhile, they devote large sums of money, obtained through more than questionable means, to organising festivals, events and spectacles whose sole purpose is to immerse our youth in drugs, escapism and the most foolish and degrading fashions, all perfectly functional to the system they claim to oppose.

None of these organisations is willing to face outlawing, open criminalisation, or to oppose the hand that feeds them.

They are not willing to take genuine risks or pay the price of a firm political line. At the slightest pressure from the State, the media or capital, they retreat, justify themselves and adapt.

They have turned cowardice into a strategy and surrender into a means of survival.

That is why they represent neither the present nor the future of communism. They are the rotten inheritance of decades of poorly digested defeats, ideological capitulations and successive betrayals.

They are the old, because they no longer have anything to offer.

They are the dead, because they gave up the struggle long ago.

THE NEW AGAINST THE OLD

The control of capital has extended into the furthest corners of social and political life and, through the use of its most agreeable, cosmopolitan and seemingly progressive face, has infiltrated these organisations without resistance.

Organisations which, incapable of surviving on their own and lacking any willingness to confront those impositions, have chosen not only to accept them, but to embrace them enthusiastically.

They have adopted as their own the values, language and priorities of globalist capitalism. They have become compliant structures, fully integrated into the existing order.

Along the way, they have turned our symbols, our history and our revolutionary figures into a caricature.

What once represented sacrifice, struggle and revolution is now reduced to a joke, an empty icon, a consumer object stripped of revolutionary content.

They live off struggles from times in which they had not even been born — struggles that, if they had to confront them under real conditions, would likely make them flee at the mere anxiety produced by the level of commitment and risk such struggles would demand.

They speak constantly of a movement that once had the capacity to threaten the global hegemony of big capital — a movement about which, in reality, they know nothing, neither in theory nor in practice.

And every time they mention it, every time they try to appropriate its legacy, all they achieve is to further damage the image of communism in the eyes of ordinary people.

They thus become collaborators in the criminalisation and ridicule of the workers’ movement, carrying out the dirty work that capital requires without anyone even having to ask them to do so.

They uphold the old because they live off it.

They defend the old because their very existence depends on nothing truly changing.

They work, often unconsciously, in the interests of the big bourgeoisie, acting as a barrier against any possibility of genuine revolutionary organisation.

In the face of this new face of capital, disguised as progress and modernity, we have always remained critical.

We do not seek their approval, we do not ask for permission, and we are not concerned with what they think of us or with the insults and falsehoods they direct at us.

We are absolutely clear about who we are.

For the new always overcomes the old. The new is destined to surpass the old because it still possesses the historical drive to develop, to grow and to prevail.

Dialectics is on our side, and in this permanent struggle between the new and the old, the new inevitably advances and ultimately prevails. That is the objective law of historical development, however much those who have already been left behind may try to deny it.

They will not stop us, nor will they make us doubt or hesitate for a single moment.