The ruling class are the small number of people worldwide who hold private ownership and powers of management of the means of production and circulation of commodities. These commodities include everything from gasoline, to food, to media, to money itself. This is not restricted to goods and services produced by the private sector. Even government work is done within the framework of an economic system predicated on the production and circulation of commodities.

Capitalism is the economic system, or mode of production, predicated on the production and circulation of commodities for the purpose of transforming these commodities into money in an amount exceeding that which was spent in its combined production and circulation. The amount of money in excess of this combined cost of goods is called profit, which is distributed within the ruling class among constituent members such as producers, wholesale merchants, retailers, bankers, and landlords.

You are forced to work a certain number of hours per day so that you can pay for food, shelter, transportation, various insurances and utilities, and certain branded consumer goods that you are told are luxuries in the same breath that you are told you are inadequate if you don’t purchase them. This is only part of the overall value you create with your work. The rest is given, without compensation, to the ruling class that owns and holds management powers over the means of your employment.

Capitalism is an inherently broken system. Because it is necessary to produce as cheaply and sell as dearly as possible to turn a profit, companies are forced to produce goods in massive quantities to maximize their profits. Failure to do so competitively with other companies in the same industry means they can’t accumulate more capital with which to produce more goods, more cheaply, to turn a greater profit. The goods they produce can’t be sold profitably because their competitors continue to decrease the cost of production of each commodity and produce the commodities in greater quantity.

The result that makes continuation of the capitalist economic system unacceptable for the welfare of the human species is the following: Once these companies are forced to reduce operation or end it entirely, the laborers who work for them are the first to suffer. They are laid off from work, which means they can no longer afford basic living costs. Their need for the articles of consumption necessary for life no longer qualifies as consumer demand. This is in conjunction with the increased supply as a result of the capital expansion of the dominant company. These contradictory forces resolve in an abundance of cheap, necessary commodities that cannot be consumed because the masses can no longer afford them. This is called overproduction, the fatal flaw of capitalism. The ruling class has concocted a vast infrastructure of lies and deceit they use to obfuscate and justify this tragic blight on humanity. The result is nothing but poverty and waste on a massive, international scale.

The ruling class has promoted racist, sexist, classist, and religious beliefs through the media and institutions of scholastic and religious nature to keep the working class in a constant state of division and competition against itself. This has resulted in working class people committing heinous crimes against humanity of every imaginable sort in the mistaken belief that those acts were necessary for the survival and prosperity of their nation, their family, or people who share their particular identity.

By way of righteous class struggle, the problems of sexism, racism, and religious bigotry have been reduced in western society, but these belief systems are still widely held and expressed to this day in ways as insidious and absurd as they have been since the days of chattel slavery, witch hunting, and state sanctioned marital rape.

Effectively, the opposite of false consciousness is class consciousness. It is the practical understanding that all human history is the history of class struggle, and so long as there is a ruling class to lord over the masses, there is no distinguishing factor existent in the human species that supersedes the class distinction. The fraternity of capitalist owners and executives may often find themselves at odds with each other for reasons that involve personal power and self-interest, but when they are confronted by the great laboring masses in arms against them and their oppressive power structure, they always unite to exert their dominance over the working class.

Marxism-Leninism, typically called communism, is the theoretical and practical doctrine which holds the removal of all class distinctions as the only path to an equitable, peaceful society. It is founded on the understanding that the ruling class will not willingly give up their power on humanitarian grounds, and that in order for their oppression to end, the working class must organize themselves in defiance against them and dismantle their power structure by forcible means.

Necessarily, this involves establishing a center of leadership and theoretical development whose purpose is to facilitate and guide this organization in order to defeat the ruling class. This center of leadership is called the “revolutionary vanguard”. They are called the vanguard because they lead from the front, by example, as the representative governing body of the working class emancipation movement.

These are the founding fathers of the working class emancipation movement.

Karl Marx, with the help of his close friend Friedrich Engels, formulated the basis of the Marxist-Leninist belief system. It was Karl Marx who built the three pillars of Marxist theory: the labor theory of value, the the socialist construction of humanity, and the dialectical materialist philosophical structure which can be applied to any natural scientific phenomenon, from black holes, to electrical currents, to machine learning software, to gravity and the bending space-time fabric.

Friedrich Engels elaborated on Marx’s theories and helped disseminate his ideas to working people and competent intellectuals throughout the world. He contributed significantly to Karl Marx’s definitive analysis of the capitalist economic system, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, and preserved Marx’s legacy long enough for it to one day shock the world.

Vladimir Lenin was the founder of the Bolshevik Party, the precursor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the first political unit to put Marxist theory into practice in the real world on an immense scale. It was by Lenin’s genius that the idea of the revolutionary vanguard gave the working class emancipation movement the means to organize in the intelligent, orderly fashion necessary to direct the collective discipline and power of the working class in force, and drive the ruling class out of their position of power in order to begin the establishment of a free, democratic social order throughout the world.

It means nothing of the sort. Since the year 1953, the mantle of revolutionary vanguard has been held by the Chinese Communist Party, a highly competent governing body which has led the People’s Republic of China to international prominence, outstanding wealth, and immense political power on the world stage against which the central power of capitalist oppression, the United States of America, is decreasingly able to resist at an accelerating rate.

If you’re living in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, or anywhere else in the western world, there isn’t much you can do to physically remove the capitalist class from power. As a result of worldwide capitalist exploitation of labor and resources outside their borders, the actual living conditions which exist in these countries are not conductive to violent revolutionary activity.

You can do your part by disseminating information to potentially interested individuals. Seek out left-wing political activist movements, trade unions, and protest groups, and disseminate Marxist-Leninist theory. These organizations are made up of people who are amenable to Marxist thought, and have demonstrated an aptitude for political activism.

You, of course, can only do this if you, yourself, are familiar. You can find a massive archive of educational material, including recommended reading lists, on marxists.org.

You should ideally start right now. Marxist theory can get quite esoteric and complicated when you get deep into the literature, but it’s not essentially difficult to understand. This very web page contains the bare basic knowledge you need to understand Marxism-Leninism. Read the literature as-needed to equip yourself against the typical objections people have to the doctrine.

Do not wait for a better time. Do not wait for a perfect opportunity. It will never happen. The more often you speak out, the more experience you’ll have to make the most of the opportunities you take to fight the ruling class. I’m not saying you should be reckless and shout from the rooftops that you’re an enemy of the state and you want Donald Trump to fall face-first in a pile of dog crap (nor am I saying you shouldn’t), but I am saying that when you encounter someone who is feeling the jackboot of the ruling class crushing their spirit, go out of your way to reach out and offer them an alternative solution to self-directed anger and shame.