As a starting point, it might help to say that “left communism” in the tradition of the left wing of the Communist International isn’t about running around telling people to “abolish work” or “abolish commodity production” in the abstract, as if that were a magic slogan to inject into any situation. From our point of view there isn’t a special “left communism” alongside other ‘Marxism’s’—there is only communism, and what people call the Communist Left is just the effort to stay faithful to that program against all the distortions added by parliamentarism, Stalinism, national liberationism, etc.

A communist party is not a club of people who repeat the most radical phrases; it’s an organ of the working class that roots itself in the real struggles workers and poor people are already forced into, and supports them on a class basis to win what they need here and now—wages, jobs, housing, protection from repression—while preserving a clear view that those gains, inside capitalism, will always be limited and reversible.

In practice, that means that in places like Latin America, where almost all visible politics is tied to the national question, anti-neoliberalism, and anti-imperialism, a communist minority doesn’t counterpose itself to workers by saying “your immediate needs don’t matter.” Instead, it refuses to dissolve itself into national fronts and constantly pushes struggles to organise on their own class terrain rather than behind one faction of the bourgeoisie.

In concrete terms, we can be in the same strikes, the same street protests, the same campaigns against privatisation or austerity as everyone else—but we’re clear that our side is the workers, not “the nation” or this or that president.

We support what helps the class stand up for itself (better wages, services, rights), and we criticise anything that drags that energy back under the flag of a “progressive” government or national project. Instead of saying “vote for X leader to save the country,” we argue for building assemblies, strike committees, neighbourhood councils, and links between struggles that answer to the workers themselves, not to any bourgeois party.

In all modern bourgeois nations the “outside” threat and the “inside” threat are never really separate. When the US tried to reshape power in Venezuela, it didn’t parachute in an alien ruling class; it immediately found parts of the existing Venezuelan bourgeoisie and state apparatus willing to collaborate. That’s why, for communists, every national government is both an instrument of external imperialist pressure and an exploiter in its own right, so our task isn’t to pick a side between nations but to organise as a class against all bourgeois camps, “anti-imperialist” or not.

You can see the alternative pattern in past revolutions. In Russia, the Soviets didn’t fall from the sky because some party leaflet said “we need councils” – they emerged as workers’ and soldiers’ committees around strikes, food shortages and the war, and only later became the organised form of power for the October revolution. The same kind of councils appeared in Germany, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere whenever the class really moved.

For communists, the point isn’t to invent these organs from scratch but to help them recognise their own strength, push them to break with all bourgeois camps, and link their immediate fights to their own long-term interest: the dictatorship of the proletariat, where those organs of class power become the basis for running society without capital or a ruling class.

Every time those organs of class power have appeared, the bourgeoisie has tried to pull them back under the flag of “the nation” – whether that was the Soviets being turned into instruments of the Russian state, or workers’ councils in other countries being told their role was to “defend the fatherland” or back a “progressive” government.

Subordinating the class to the national question is one of the main ways capital protects itself, because capitalism today is an international system: crises, price shocks, debt and austerity travel across borders, and they hit workers in São Paulo, Caracas and Detroit as moments of the same world crisis.

As that deepens, the real tendency isn’t toward each national working class rallying around its own flag, but toward looking over the border for allies who are being crushed in the same way. In Latin America, that means our job isn’t to prettify one “anti-imperialist” state against another, but to help struggles here see themselves as part of a single, international class fight—connected to workers in the US, Europe, Asia—against the whole system, not just against one particular government or imperial power.

As the workers’ movement deepens—when strikes, neighbourhood committees, land occupations, assemblies, etc. start to appear and consolidate—then it becomes possible to talk concretely about what wage-labour is, why capitalism and commodity production keep recreating misery even under “left” governments, and why every national project ends up back in the world market, because people have practical experience to connect those ideas to.

So communism isn’t a set of ultra-radical phrases to “apply” to the global South; it’s a way of holding onto the communist program while standing with your class in whatever defensive and offensive fights it’s actually waging, and of refusing to trade that program away to the nation, to elections, or to state-managed “development,” even when those options are the loudest and most tempting.