Secret societies composed of individuals in positions of power, formed for the purpose of influencing elements of bourgeois society, have existed and grown for centuries. Freemason societies emerged from English trade guilds of aristocrats, the gentry, master craftsmen, artisans, and petty professionals like doctors and lawyers in the early 18th century, forming Grand Lodges as male-only, but otherwise “egalitarian” spaces for discussion and debate over science and philosophy. More importantly, Freemasons sought to use the Lodges to trade skill knowledge and improve their own standings and the reach of their class outside the censorious influence of the British monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. Class rifts between the aristocrats and gentry and the petty-bourgeois elements split the Masons into two different factions in the mid-1700s, namely the “Modernists,” made up of the former, and the “Ancients,” of the latter. The split emerged as a consequence of the British aristocratic class’ fear of the rapid rise of the Ancients, whose lodges were known to be hotbeds for the lower-middle-class early bourgeoisie to promote anti-taxation sentiment and republicanism; desiring to maintain their class positions and marginalize the nascent organizations of the small capitalists, the Hanoverian monarchy began influencing the Freemasons through the Modernist precursors, directly leading to the split.

In modern times, far from the days of such monarchical and religious domination, these societies are deeply integrated and numerous throughout the ranks of the mature bourgeoisie at elite educational and religious institutions, designed to eliminate competition from outside bourgeois elements. Such groups, including Yale University’s Skull and Bones, the University of Virginia’s Seven Society, California’s Bohemian Grove, the Catholic Opus Dei, and many others operate on the same principles; strictly and entirely bourgeois formations whose purpose is no longer to question and subvert kings and aristocrats, but to facilitate, manipulate, and ultimately preserve the vast wealth of capital, with only the veneer of the Freemasons’ philosophical lineage left to provide a cover of the Lodges’ lofty historical bourgeois ideals. It would be a mistake to fetishize the secrecy of the venue itself. Whether the bourgeoisie assemble at private islands or within the corridors of Capitol Hill or corporate boardrooms, the particular setting is of secondary importance to the class function it serves. In the period before the maturation of the capitalist firm and the consolidation of monopoly capital, the Lodge was a necessary instrument by which a rising class could coordinate with its aims beyond the reach of monarchy, church, and public alike.

Thus, we arrive at the present day, and the recent revelations made public by a June 2026 leak of the Dialog organization, founded in 2006 and currently led by two men: Peter Thiel, the chairman of technology-development company Palantir; and Auren Hoffman, former CEO of mobile device location data broker SafeGraph. Both men and their companies are extraordinarily wealthy and heavily invested in the sphere of data aggregation and analysis; while Palantir provides software to integrate and analyze massive data assets, SafeGraph functions as a data-as-a-service (DaaS) company, gathering high-resolution geospatial and location datasets that clients feed into platforms, even including those of Palantir itself. Of these two figures it is Thiel who most fully embodies the fusion of private capital and State power emblematic of every modern capitalist State government. Palantir, seed-funded by the CIA’s venture arm in the years after the 2001 9/11 attacks, has grown from a minor intelligence contractor into a pillar of the American surveillance State; its federal contracts swelled from some $4m in 2009 to over $500m in 2024, and then nearly doubled again to almost $1b in 2025 alone. This ascent has proven utterly indifferent to which faction of the bourgeoisie occupies the White House; under Biden, Palantir CEO Alex Karp trumpeted his loyalty to the Democratic Party even as the firm’s contracts multiplied, and across both Trump administrations, Thiel bankrolled the campaigns of Trump and of his protégé, Vice President J.D. Vance, a former employee of Thiel’s own investment fund, while Palantir burrowed ever deeper into the machinery of the State. Under the current Trump administration it has been enlisted to weld tax, immigration, and medical records together into a searchable apparatus, furnish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with the means to hunt and deport, and keep a strict watch over the US government’s own workforce. Asked directly whether such tools amount to surveillance, Karp answered that the data of the State’s enemies flows into Palantir’s product and that he “completely” supports it. Thiel, repudiating even the democratic illusion of bourgeois liberalism in professing that he no longer believes “freedom and democracy are compatible,” and Karp have built a surveillance machine inlaid with a doctrine of “hard power” in permanent war, the killing of workers abroad and their absolute surveillance worldwide.

The revelations of June this year exposed some interesting movements of the tech-dev bourgeoisie that spell an ominous development our Party has forecasted for decades. The leaks provided a list of over 200 registrants, nearly 100 of them first-timers, that spans the world’s most powerful governments, companies, and militaries, including, but certainly not limited to, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Affinity Partners CEO Jared Kushner, Senators Ted Cruz and Cory Booker, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and General Alexus Grynkewich, and many more. 2025 plans for a Dialog campus near Washington, DC were also within the leaked information. Among the topics to be discussed at the organization’s Dublin retreat in August were the typical bourgeois individualist and spiritualist fares, including leadership vanity, “money buying happiness,” political party- and cult-building, and a meeting space for all of these powerful individuals to form relationships with one another, mirroring the Masonic interpersonal mingling spaces with a modern sheen. Of the utmost importance here, however, are sessions titled “Battlefield Technologies,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” and “Navigating World War III,” a few confirmations among many of our Party’s analytical observations of the state and trends of global capitalism and world politics since the end of the Second World War.

It must be emphasized, however, that these sessions reveal the impotence of the ruling class before the movement of its own system. That the most powerful capitalists, statesmen, and generals on Earth can do no more than convene panels to “navigate” a great conflict they are unable to prevent is a confession of their inadequacy. Marxist economics, divorced from all pretenses presuming direct bourgeois control over the particulars of the international movement of capital, notes the presence and heightening of the many contradictions present in every part of capitalist economy, spawned solely from capitalism’s inability to overcome crises of overproduction without some form of conflict. Capital accumulates without limit or plan, and as it does, the mass of dead labor, machinery, plant, fixed capital, grows relative to the living labor that alone produces new value, and the rate of profit tends to fall. The bourgeoisie answers the falling rate by producing yet more, more cheaply, on a still greater scale, until the world market can no longer absorb what has been produced. As such, capitalism enters a crisis with too many commodities, too many factories, and too much capital desperately seeking a profitable outlet. Capitalism cannot resolve this contradiction from within, only destroy the excess and begin again; throughout history, the supreme instrument of that destruction is war. War annihilates commodities, production facilities, and whole cities of accumulated capital, liquidating the surplus population of workers that the shrunken market can no longer employ through horrific violence on a mass scale. Out of the devalorization it accomplishes, it clears the ground for a fresh cycle of accumulation.

In the United States, the global hegemon for eight decades, massive debt growth and the increasingly-obvious erosion of any ability to even maintain interest payments for, let alone pay off, such debt has driven the country into a period of economic redirection toward domestic manufacturing, tariff-led export reduction, and military buildup, which threatens to push the world into a period of warfare between the great powers not seen since 1945. What we are currently witnessing is the buildup to this period, a militarization of the economy: the redirection of large swathes of capitalist society’s productive powers toward guns, bombs, shells, warships, and armed aircraft and drones, presented by the capitalists to the working population as the prosperity of new jobs and security through nationalistic propaganda. For one example, US budgeting for shipbuilding alone has drastically surged by nearly 250% since its 2025, in its 2026 budget, directly related to military ventures in Iran and the coming showdown with China in the Pacific. The declining hegemon, unwilling to concede its position and unable to sustain it by economic means alone, is drawn toward the settlement of accounts by force. The various ongoing proxy conflicts of the decade, from Ukraine, Iran, and Palestine to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Myanmar, provide a grim snapshot of the sheer brutality and abject depravity of the violence to come. As the shadow of war looms ever greater over the globe, the world’s bourgeoisies have played a direct role in reorganizing their nations’ economies in preparation, and Dialog’s sessions, no doubt explicitly addressing the American and European need for powerful and well-funded armed forces, could not more clearly highlight this awareness.

In the face of the coming storm, our Party reaffirms its position, held since the days of the First World War: armed conflict between States cannot be abolished while its cause, capital, remains in command of production. Ceasefires and peace talks are at best tragic illusions, and at worst a mere interval of rearmament between one round of slaughter and the next, a breathing space in which the ruling classes gather their strength; the worker is taught to identify with “their own nation” in peacetime no less than in war. Against the fraternity of the exploiters gathered at Dublin, the proletariat must forge its own weapons, prepared in advance: the revolutionary party that gathers the lessons of the class’s struggles and directs them toward the conquest of power; class unions revitalized as organs of combat and oriented resolutely away from the ruling class and its parties rather than chained to them; and, as the end toward which both are bent, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which alone can break the power of capital at its root. Workers of all countries must refuse the false unity of the nation and recover that of class, across every border the bourgeoisie has drawn. No matter the epoch, the enemy is not the worker in the opposing trench or barracks, but the ruling class in its own country. The proletariat must take their ongoing battles over wages, hours, and conditions into a general struggle against rearmament and militarization, and ultimately for the revolutionary transformation of imperialist war into civil war against the bourgeoisie in every land. Either the bourgeois war for the preservation of capitalism, a system of production that kills workers and destroys their livelihoods as an intrinsic part of its cycles, or the international communist revolution for its abolition; there is no third option. As the capitalist order prepares for war between nations, the proletariat must prepare for war between classes.