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Source in Spanish: https://barbaria.net/2023/03/21/francia-grecia-reino-unido-proletarios-de-todo-el-mundo-quememos-el-capitalismo/
The protests in France against the raising of the retirement age to 64 years have been led, organized and directed by the French trade unions organized in the intersyndical and, therefore, organized in the trade union mode, that is to say as firemen and fire extinguishers of the class struggle: by means of strikes one day a week (avoiding indefinite strikes), through the refusal of workers’ assemblies or roadblocks. The unions are always opposed to self-organization and the generalization of the struggle on the part of the proletarians. It is a lesson that a minority of proletarians are learning in their own flesh, who these days are unleashing strikes in France without union control. Thus last week rage exploded in the streets of the big cities of France: the pension reform, which indispensable for the workers of France to lengthen their direct exploitation, was the detonator of a whole accumulated rage, accumulated by the working class all over the planet. Paris burns, Nantes burns… Fire is not enough to extinguish the flames of the infinite attacks and humiliations that we suffer daily by a system for which we are nothing more than merchandise and cannon fodder. Fire is not enough, we need more. But that fire anticipates what, as proletarians, we still cannot express massively and unitarily in words, assemblies, as a class. Rage is not enough, we need organization, to recover our positions, our program. Because these moments inflamed with virus, of crisis, of war, of misery, are also moments where the communist revolution will appear with more and more strength as the only possible and realistic perspective.
This is the umpteenth attack on the workers in France, not the most serious, certainly not the last. The bourgeoisie, through its State, wants to reduce the cost of pensions by lengthening the retirement age, a retirement which for many workers (precarious, unregistered, domestic…) is, was always, a wishful thinking. It has something symbolic, the increase of the sentence to work (as the supreme totem of exploitation) makes the rage explode, even of those who will never have the “right” to retire.
Too many times the proletariat moves with a clairvoyance that it is not yet able to express rationally, by an impulse, by the same need that materializes in rage. It was not the first attack and it will not be the last, it is not in France, it is not for the French workers, it is all over the world, it is for all proletarians.
We have never stopped fighting, even when the conditions were not propitious, we have never stopped fighting as an exploited class, too often we have no other choice. And yet, we come from a long historical counterrevolution for 100 years. We are living, in recent years, an amphibious situation, a hinge time, in which our class is struggling in defense of its human needs. Struggles that express a tendency to social polarization product of a world, that of capital, which is exhausted and can only attack our living conditions as proletarians: struggles in Chile, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Iran… to remember some of the last ones. To these we must add the series of wildcat strikes in the United Kingdom in the last 9 months, the mobilizations of the youth in Greece[i]. In different ways they all express the rejection of the impositions of the world of the commodity, a world that reaffirms itself in each attack on our living conditions and reaffirms our need to fight against its misery.
The historical and international conditions at this time are terrible: still under the long shadow of Covid, the imperialist war in Ukraine, comes to aggravate the capitalist debacle and its eternal historical crisis, the brutal rise in prices, coupled with a trail of measures that further undermine the living conditions of the poorest. To this is added, problems never solved (profitable problems) such as the migration of hundreds of thousands of workers fleeing misery and war and who run into walls and batons, and more misery in case of overcoming them.
And it is this terrible condition, this international situation, where we find hope. We live in a historical moment in which a spark can begin to ignite the world, because all these revolts and struggles can come to look each other in the eye, as part of the same project, of the same human need to impose themselves on misery and war.
Neither in France, nor in the United Kingdom, nor in Greece is a revolution being expressed today. They are movements, moreover, where the political and trade union presence of the left of capital is very strong. A response is expressed in the face of a constant aggression, a necessary response in the face of those measures of capital that robs us of life. Expressing a basic contradiction: capital can only survive at our expense, and we can only live by destroying capital.
Immediate responses against austerity and crisis measures are automatic and necessary, through immediate struggles we can form ourselves, unite, gain consciousness and confidence and, yes, we can stop certain measures, but we must know that any partial victory is only delaying the inevitable: the imposition of the interests of capital over human needs. To stop all this brutality we must go further, we must question the whole system.
In the recent mobilizations in Greece in protest against the train accident that killed more than fifty proletarians, the demonstrators shouted: “you are murderers, you are hypocrites, the system you have organized takes our lives”, and they were rightly deeply conscious that this system is organized to take our lives and the only salvation is to end it.
The proletariat has a long road to reencounter its historical program, with its revolutionary capacity, it is a road that began since the first human being rose up against power and exploitation. But it is a road that today capitalism is paving for us, creating the conditions that make our struggle inevitable, that does not mean that it makes it easy for us, it means that it cannot do otherwise, its brutal development, it makes it indispensable for us to fight.
And on that road we meet all kinds of police who will try to stop us, to beat us up, to convince us of what is best for us, to reorient us. Uniformed cops, union cops, political cops of any color, psychologist cops, democrat cops… all of them determined to do their job, to save the ass of a system that is taking (excremental) water.
Against all these cops, we must recover our weapons, those that through the historical struggle we have been forging:
Proletarian internationalism, anywhere in the world, when we fight, we do it as the same class, overcoming any national division that only benefits our executioners.
Proletarian autonomy. The leadership of the struggle is of the proletarians themselves, outside and against any organization that tries to frame us. We fight independently, for ourselves.
Self-organization, creating our own organization and spaces for struggle, debate and reflection. Our massive organs of power as a class and our vanguard organization that brings together the revolutionary minorities.
Unity above any separation imposed by the categories of capital: regardless of age, work, being unemployed, being a student or pensioner, man or woman, young or old… we are the same class expressing the same need: to overcome the world of exploitation, to establish a truly humane society.
The extension of the struggle beyond labor sectors, neighborhoods, towns, cities, nations. Extending the struggle under the slogan that all struggles are part of the same struggle and all are necessary to continue fighting, to win. Solidarity is not a nice word, it is a loaded weapon.
With different intensities and still with a long way to go, but France, United Kingdom, Greece… are already burning… and we salute those fires, not because of what they burn but because historically they are a spark among thousands, that sooner than later will overcome their limits and will ignite the world of hope and revolution.
For communism
[i] We take this opportunity to salute the “hooded ones” of Exarchia who kicked Varoufakis, the penultimate leftist wimp of the bourgeoisie, in the face and we encourage that these examples spread.
English translation: https://barbaria.net/2023/04/02/france-greece-united-kingdom-proletarians-of-the-whole-world-lets-burn-capitalism/
