Since early February, despite being dispersed by the school holidays, university and high-school students have mobilised in most of France’s major cities to express their anger at the government and the bosses’ economic attacks, and against the CPE (Contrat Première Embauche).[1] [1] And this is happening despite the blackout by the media (especially by the television), which have preferred instead to focus their attention on the sinister exploits of the "Barbarian gang".[2] [2]
The educational system (colleges of further education, high-schools, universities...) has become a factory for turning out unemployed workers, to fill a reservoir of cheap labour. It is because they have understood this that mass meetings of students, like the one in Caen, have sent delegations to meet the workers in neighbouring factories and the unemployed youth in the council estates to call them to join the struggle. The CPE is nothing less than organised precarity. But this precarity does not only concern the young. Every generation is affected by unemployment, precarity, and poverty.
This is also why in some universities, like Paris III Censier, the teachers and maintenance workers have also gone on strike in solidarity with the students.
The ruling class and its government restored order in the face of the riots that exploded in the suburbs in November, by imposing the curfew and deporting young immigrants who had failed to show respect for their "new country". Today, our rulers want to continue "power cleanse" the children of the working class and no slogan is too cynical for them: they intend to impose the CPE with its precarity and low wages in the name of... "equality of opportunity". With the CPE, those who are lucky enough to get a job at the end of their studies will find themselves at the mercy of the bosses without any hope of finding a home, of starting a family, or of bringing up their children decently. They will go to work every day with the fear of receiving the recorded delivery letter that pronounces the sinister sentence of REDUNDANCY! This is what wage slavery means! This is what capitalism means!
The only "equality" offered by the CPE is the equality of poverty, of being heaped up in sink estates living from hand to mouth from one temporary job to another, living on unemployment benefit or the RMI.[3] [3] This is the "bright future" that the ruling class and its "democratic" state are offering the children of the working class!
These children’s parents are the ones who mobilised in 2003 against the reform of the pensions system. And it was Prime Minister Villepin’s predecessor Raffarin who had the gall to tell them "It’s not the street that rules!".
After the hammering handed out to the "old" workers and future pensioners, now it is the "youth" and future unemployed who are the target! With the CPE, capitalism is showing its true face: that of a decadent system with nothing to offer the new generations. A system gangrened by an insoluble economic crisis. A system which, ever since World War II, has been spending gigantic sums on the production of ever more sophisticated and deadly weapons. A system which has not stopped spreading blood across the planet ever since the Gulf War of 1991. It is the same bankrupt system, the same desperate capitalist class which here condemns millions to unemployment and poverty, and which is killing in Iraq, in the Middle East, and in the Ivory Coast![4] [4]
Day after day, the capitalist system that rules the world demonstrates that it must be overthrown. And it is because they are beginning to understand just that, that a students’ mass meeting at Paris Tolbiac supported a motion declaring that "It’s time to put an end to capitalism"! This is why, at Paris Censier on 3rd March, the students invited a theatre company to come and sing revolutionary songs. The red flag flew, and several hundred students, teachers, and maintenance workers joined in singing the Internationale. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is being distributed. In the grounds of the university, the word REVOLUTION is heard and repeated. Discussions begin on the class struggle, we hear talk of the Russian revolution of 1917 and of those great figures of the workers’ movement like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered at the hands of killers directed by the socialist party in power.
If they are to confront the "Barbarian gang" in suits that rules over us, then the young generations must remember the experience of their elders. And in particular, they should remember what happened in May 1968.
In the wake of the movements that had swept the universities of most of the developed countries, the United States and Germany in particular, French university students mobilised massively in May 1968. But their mobilisation took on a wholly new dimension when the whole working class joined the struggle with 9 million workers on strike! Then, the most militant and conscious students went beyond their specific demands to proclaim that their struggle was the same as that of the working class. They called on the workers to come to the occupied universities to discuss the situation and its perspectives. Everywhere, revolution and the need to overthrow capitalism was the subject of debate.
May 1968 did not lead to revolution. It could not, for capitalism was still only at the beginning of its crisis. But the bourgeois had the fright of their lives. And if the government managed to get control of the situation, it was only thanks to the unions, which did everything they could to send the strikers back to work; it was thanks to the left-wing parties, the very ones who pretend to defend the workers’ interests, who called for participation in the elections called by De Gaulle.[5] [5]
May 1968 showed that the revolution is not some dusty museum exhibit, an idea belonging to the distant past, but the only possible future for society. Moreover, this huge workers’ movement showed the ruling class that it could no longer enroll society’s exploited behind the banners of nationalism, that it did not have its hands free to unleash a third world war, as it had already done in 1914 and 1939. If the economic crisis did not lead to world wide slaughter, as it had in the 1930s, then this was thanks to the struggles of the working class.
The movement of the youth against the CPE shows that the seeds of a new society are germinating in the bowels of moribund capitalism. The future is in the hands of this new generation. The university and high school students are beginning to realise that, as future unemployed or precarious workers, the vast majority of them belong to the working class. An exploited class that capitalism is more and more excluding from the productive process. A class which will have no choice but to develop its struggle, to defend its living conditions and the future of its children. A class which has no choice but to overthrow capitalism to put an end to exploitation, poverty, unemployment and barbarism. The only class which can build a new world based no longer on competition, exploitation, and the search for profit, but on the satisfaction of all the mankind’s needs.
In 1914 the children of the working class – the vast majority no more than adolescents – were sent to the trenches as cannon-fodder. Wallowing in blood, capitalism mowed down the young generations that Rosa Luxemburg called "the fine flower of the proletariat".
In this 21st century, this "fine flower of the proletariat" will have the responsibility of destroying the decadent capitalism which massacred the children of the working class, sent to the front in 1914 and again in 1939. It will do so by developing its struggle alongside all the generations of the whole working class.
At the university of Vitoria da Conquista in Brazil, the students recently showed their desire to debate the history of the workers’ movement.[6] [6] They had understood that it is by learning from the experience of past generations that they will be able to take up the torch of the struggle waged by their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents. These students wanted to listen to those who could transmit this past to them, a past that they must make their own and on whose foundation the young generations will build the future. They have discovered that the history of the class struggle, living history, is learned not only in books but in the fire of action. They dared to talk, to question, to disagree, and to confront their arguments.
In the universities of France, it is time to open the lecture halls and the mass meetings to all those – workers, unemployed, and revolutionaries – who want to put an end to capitalism.
For several months, across the planet, the world of labour has been shaken by strikes in the state the and private sectors, in Germany, Spain, the United States, India, and Latin America. Against unemployment and redundancies, everywhere the strikers have put forward the need for solidarity between the generations, between the unemployed and those still in jobs.
Students! Your anger over the CPE will be no more than a 9-days wonder if you let yourselves be isolated behind the walls of the universities and schools! You are shut out of the productive process and have no means of putting pressure on the ruling class by paralysing the capitalist economy.
Workers, unemployed, and pensioners! It’s time to mobilise, it is your children who are under attack! You are the ones who have produced and still produce all society’s wealth. You are the driving force of the class struggle against capitalism!
Unemployed youth of the suburbs! You are not the only ones to be "excluded"! Today, the capitalists are calling you "rabble": in 1968, your parents who revolted against capitalist exploitation were called "wreckers".
The only hope for the future lies, not in blind violence and burning cars, but in the united struggle and the solidarity of the whole working class, of every generation! It is in the strikes, the mass meetings, in the discussions in the workplace and the schools and colleges, in street demonstrations that we must UNITE TOGETHER to express our anger against unemployment, insecure jobs, and poverty!
Down with the CPE! Down with capitalism! The working class has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win.
International Communist Current, 6th March 2006
[1] [7] A new form of labour contract for young workers (less than 26 years old) proposed by the Villepin government. The most notable measure included in this contract is the 2-year "trial period" , during which the employer has the right to fire a worker without notice or reason. The same measure is already in application in the "Contrat Nouvelle Embauche" (CNE) for workers of all ages in small businesses (less than 25 employees). In effect, these two new labour contracts, together with the "CDD Séniors" (a limited period contract for older workers) are intended to demolish piecemeal all the existing French labour legislation and the limited rights that this currently affords to workers.
[2] [8] A gang of hoodlums who carried out a particularly horrific kidnapping and murder of a young shop worker in the hope of extorting money from his family.
[3] [9] "Revenue Minimum d’Insertion": minimum income for the unemployed, currently et 433 euros per month for a single person – in other words not even the cost of a month’s rent.
[4] [10] Where the French army is currently "maintaining order".
[5] [11] The president of France at the time.
[6] [12] See our article node/1711
Thursday’s demonstrations throughout France brought some 500,000 students into the streets, and the movement has continued to increase in size; the big question of last week – whether or not the masses of wage workers would join the demonstrations planned for Saturday 18th March – has been answered in concretely: in France as a whole, there were something like 1,000,000 people in the streets.[1] [15] Even towns which have barely seen a demonstration in living memory have been affected: 15,000 demonstrated in Pau; there was even a demonstration in Chalons sur Saône in the heart of rural France.
For those militants and sympathisers of the ICC who have taken part in the movement during the last few weeks, especially since the demonstrations of 7th March, these have been remarkable, exciting days. We don’t intend here to go into a detailed account of events (we don’t have the time!) but rather to highlight what seem to us to be some of the most significant aspects of the movement.
Some might ask why a communist organisation should involve itself so wholeheartedly – as the ICC has done – in a student movement. The students, after all, are not a class as such, nor even, as such, a part of the working class. In fact, there are two reasons:
For those of us of the “old generation” who took part in the struggles sparked off throughout the industrialised world by the events of May 68, one of the most remarkable features of the movement today is the disappearance of the “generation gap” that the media used to talk so much about. The parents of the new generation of the working class which launched the movement in the 1960s-70s had experienced the terrible defeat of the counter-revolution, the suffering of the 1930s, and the horrors of World War II (and all the illusions in the great victory of “democracy” after the war). The youth had grown up in a different world, and were often infected with a deep mistrust of their elders (the most extreme example was certainly Germany, where the slogan “don’t trust anyone over 30” reflected the youth’s disgust with what they saw as the legacy of Nazism in the generation that had been through the war). We have found none of this today. Quite the reverse: the ICC’s older militants, who were first awakened to politics in the movement of 68, have been deeply moved to find youngsters who could be their children (in some cases indeed, who are their children), coming to them for advice, wanting to learn from the history of their struggles. Militants in their 50s or 60s have been able to speak to mass meetings of youngsters, and to find themselves listened to and even applauded (in fact, all the interventions of ICC militants have been applauded, at times with great enthusiasm). In Toulouse, one of our comrades who teaches at the university and is known as a member of our organisation was applauded by a mass meeting of more than 1,000 students, who then asked him to prepare an “alternative course” on the history of the revolutionary movement. In Grenoble, another comrade was welcomed to a mass meeting by several youngsters who declared “we’re counting on you to speak against the union” – which of course he duly did to the best of his ability!
The importance of this unity of the generations, where the elder can contribute what they have learned to the dynamism of the younger, is profoundly significant of a new situation world wide and throughout the working class. Today, two generations of undefeated workers are confronting capital: the older generation is battered by the struggles of the 1980s and the terrible reflux of the 1990s – but it is still unbowed and the memories of its youth are not those of war, but of struggle.
The movement is organised by mass meetings (known as “assemblées générales” or AG) which vote the strike from one meeting to the next. Obviously the degree and coherence of organisation varies considerably from one university to another. In many cases, the AG finds itself being run by a self-proclaimed presidium set up by the students’ union (usually the UNEF), which tends to dominate the proceedings and to discourage the participation of the non-unionised. But elsewhere – and notably at Paris III Censier which is clearly at the forefront of the movement, the degree of organisation and the maturity of the students is truly remarkable. Witness how each meeting begins: with the presentation of the proposed presidium of three, each of whom gives his or her name, year, and course of study, and adds whether or not he is in a union or a political organisation (the non-unionised and non-political generally dominate); the presidium changes every day, and no business is done until it has been accepted by the AG; the day then begins with reports (starting with reports from the various working commissions – “Reflection and Action”, Press, “Exterior Contact”, etc. – then going on to reports from the delegates who have been mandated to attend the national or regional Coordinations (set up to coordinate the different universities). And this is not the only remarkable feature of the AG: everyone can speak – even those from outside the university; speakers are limited to three minutes each (it turns out to be possible to say a remarkable number of things in three minutes!); propositions are made and noted on the blackboard behind the presidium, for all to see. At the end of the meeting, votes are taken on all the proposals that have been put to the meeting; in some cases the presidium calls for someone to speak “for” and “against” a proposal, if it does not seem to have been properly understood.
It should be emphasised that the efficacy of the meeting is not merely down to the presidium, but to the astonishing maturity of all the participants: every speaker is listened to, the speakers themselves respect the time limits they are given. They have even borrowed from the sign-language of the deaf a gesture of silent approval when agreeing with a speaker, in order to avoid interrupting the flow of the meeting with cheers or applause. In Nantes, the presidium brought instant quiet to an enthusiastic assembly with the words: “We’re not on the telly here!”.
It is fair to say that, in their way and in a more limited movement, the French youth of today are the heirs not only of May 1968 but of the Polish workers who faced down the Stalinist state in 1980.
Despite the fact that the AG are often run by a union-dominated presidium, there is nonetheless a general and healthy distrust of any suggestion to remove the power of decision from the AG itself. At Paris III Censier, we witnessed debates on two issues that illustrated this particularly well: on the nature of the mandate given by the AG to its delegates at the regional Coordination of Île de France; and on the proposal to create a “coordination bureau” which would supposedly be a kind of “information distributor” designated by the regional Coordination.
The debate on the mandate initially opposed the supporters of “free” and “imperative” mandates: the former would allow delegates essentially to take their own initiatives at the Coordination, even if this was in contradiction with the mandate from the AG; the latter would bind the delegates to voting solely according to the decisions and discussions of the AG itself. As was quickly pointed out, one of the main drawbacks of the “imperative mandate” is that the delegate can say nothing about any new proposition that has not been previously discussed by the AG. It took no more than ten minutes for the presidium to present clearly and comprehensibly, and to take a vote on a hybrid solution: the semi-imperative mandate, binding when it involves decisions taken by the AG, but leaving room for the delegates’ initiative whenever it is a matter that the AG has not yet discussed.
The proposal to create a “coordination bureau” was rejected out of hand in five minutes flat, on the grounds that no useful purpose was served by introducing yet another level of centralisation independent of the AG.
It comes as no surprise at all, that in both cases the proposals that tended to remove the power of decision from the AG came from the Trotskyists of the LCR (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire): this is a consistent policy of the Trotskyists and unionists – the creation of extra layers of “coordination”, of extra “bureaux” where information and decision-making are concentrated, and where their own militants can get their hands on the levers of information and power. As far as we are concerned – and although, as a general principle, we are opposed to the “imperative mandate” – the AG’s refusal of these measures which would have removed the power of decision from its hands represents a healthy instinct of distrust for the would-be professional bureaucrats and politicians.
One idea that has emerged more or less clearly from the movement is that the demand for the withdrawal of the CPE is not just a student demand, and that the movement must seek the active support of the wage workers. Needless to say, going on strike is a different matter for wage workers and for students: while it is true that for the many students who have to work their way through college, and who cannot afford to miss a year’s studies, the strike is a serious business, this cannot compare with the problem faced by wage workers who have to pay the rent, repay credits, feed their families, and who moreover cannot legally strike unless called out by a trades union. The students generally (despite a few hotheads’ calls for a “general strike” which in today’s situation is a meaningless slogan) have been aware of this: for example, it has been a frequent proposal (embodied in the upcoming demonstration of 18th March) to demonstrate on the weekends so that wage workers can join in. The real question is: how to bring the wage workers into the movement?
The obvious answer, is to ask the unions. And indeed there have been repeated proposals in this respect, whether it be to go to the unions at the local or at the national level. The problem is that the unions themselves have shown no desire whatever to have the wage workers join the movement. There was absolutely no publicity on the unions’ part, for example, for the demonstration on Thursday 16th March, and it was only on Friday 17th that they started publicising the demonstration on the morrow, the first to be called on a Saturday with the explicit intention, on the students’ part, of opening it up to the wage workers. If we did not know the unions for what they are – the bosses’ best friends, when push comes to shove – then we would call this scandalous, downright shameful in fact.
What is to be done then? If the students cannot trust the unions to call out the wage workers – which they clearly cannot – then they will have to do it themselves, by distributing leaflets at major concentrations of workers (in Paris, this principally means in the suburban railway stations where tens of thousands of people pass every day on their way to and from work). Militants of the ICC have strongly supported – and been enthusiastically cheered for doing so – motions presented and adopted at the AG in this sense.
One of the most striking features of the movement is the way in which it has been reported in the media both in France and abroad, and especially by the TV which is of course the main source of information for most workers. Until very recently – essentially and with a very few exceptions until the demonstration Thursday (17th March) – the media in France has concentrated on one thing: the occupation of the Sorbonne and the violent confrontations between bands of young hotheads (who come from nobody knows where), and the CRS (riot police).
Until very recently, there has been not a sign on the TV of the mass meetings, the debates, or even the demonstrations: instead there have been a lot of interviews with students opposed to the movement, confrontations between students, and the attacks on the CRS.
Outside France, the blackout of the students’ movement has been almost total – with the exception of a few pieces on the violence.
All this is in marked contrast to the huge blanket coverage of the riots in the French suburbs last autumn, which were so vastly blown out of proportion that we received declarations of support for the “revolution” taking place in France, from comrades in the ex-USSR!
We know very well that the media – and above all the TV media – are to all intents and purposes controlled by the state, and even where they are not, their “self-control” is impressive: there’s even an old English rhyme that goes like this, and is valid for the media everywhere – “No-one can corrupt or twist, thank God, the British journalist. Given what the man will do unbribed, there is no reason to”.
So what the students need to ask is: what interest does the state have in displaying such images – almost to the exclusion of all else? The answer is obviously, that it contributes to the discrediting of the movement within the mass of the working class, who are certainly not ready today to undertake a violent confrontation with the state. Not only does the violence tend to discredit the movement with the rest of the class, but it also puts into question the sovereignty of the AG since it takes place completely outside the latter’s control. In fact this last question – the question of control – is one of the most critical ones: the violence of the working class has nothing to do with the blind violence of the young hotheads at the Sorbonne or – it must be said – of many anarchist groups, above all because it is exercised and controlled collectively, by the class as a group. The student movement has used physical force (for example to barricade the university buildings and block entry to them): the difference between this and the confrontations at the Sorbonne is that the former actions are decided collectively and voted by the AG, and the “blockers” have a mandate for their action from their comrades. The latter, precisely because they are uncontrolled by the movement, are of course the perfect terrain for the action of the lumpen and the agent provocateur, and given the way in which this violence has been used by the media there is every reason to suppose that the provocateur has been present and stirring it up.
Faced with this situation, the students’ reaction has in general been exemplary. When it became clear that the government was setting up the Sorbonne in effect as a “trap” for the demonstrations, and as a means of permanent provocation, the reaction at the AG in Paris III Censier was essentially this: “The Sorbonne is a symbol, it’s true. Well, if they want it, let them keep their symbol – the CRS are there, so much the better, let them stay there. And let us invite our comrades of the Sorbonne to come to Censier for their AG”. The same invitation was extended by the AG at Jussieu.
In addition – and despite some belated manoeuvring by the Trotskyists who tried to overturn the vote – the Censier AG passed a motion “in support of the injured students, against any damage done to the building, and in sympathy for the injured CRS”. The important point about this motion is that it was absolutely not a support for the repression by the police, but recognised:
It is important also to note the difference between the way in which the media have reported the 18th March demonstration in France and abroad:
From this, we can draw one clear conclusion. The French media who have tried to discredit the movement in the eyes of the working class, have now understood that they risk discrediting only themselves in the eyes of the population which knows what is really happening, and especially in the eyes of workers who are demonstrating themselves, or whose children are demonstrating, by lying too openly.
ICC, 19th March 2006
[1] [17] We generally take the mid point between the estimates provided by the unions (too optimistic) and the police (ridiculously low).
[2] [18] In reality, selection to the "grandes écoles" is not directly based on money, since costs are low (with the exception of the business and management schools). This makes it possible for the particularly gifted children of workers, or even peasants, to gain entry. But selection to entry is based on an élitist competitive system which favours students from social categories with an appropriate "cultural level" (or who can afford to support their children during their studies so that they don’t have to work).
The text that follows introduced the ICC public meeting of 11th March in Paris, at which students and militants involved in the recent events debated their experience and the best means for spreading the movement.
As you will have heard from the media, yesterday afternoon several hundred students from the universities in the Paris region went to the Sorbonne, occupied for several days by about 50 students from this college in the heart of Paris. At the college of Censier, the general assembly of students decided to send a massive delegation to bring food to their comrades shut in the Sorbonne by a ring of cops.
Severl hundred students forced their way into the Sorbone, getting in through the windows. But the movement of solidarity with their comrades taken hostage in the trap of occupying the Sorbonne was very heterogeneous. Some students, notably those from censier, tried to discuss with the police riot squads. Some raise the slogan “CRS, join us”,[1] [20] while others shouted “Put Sarkozy on the RMI”.[2] [21] The cops didn’t charge, even if the most excitable ones engaged in some pushing and shoving and some discreet truncheon blows. Despite these skirmishes, to our knowledge there were no arrests at this point. The “forces of order” had obviously received the order not to charge, which enabled the students to get into the Sobonne. Several hundred students had thus fallen into a trap.
The situation shifted last night when there were violent confrontations between the students and the police. At 4:00 am, the CRS succeeded in evacuating the Sorbonne, using truncheons and tear gas. Several dozen students were arrested.
The children of the working class had thus gone through the same tragedy as Monsieur Seguin’s goat.[3] [22] They held out till morning and then the wolf ate them.
Faced with this repression, with the arrests and the policing of the universities, now filled with informers and special branch, the ICC denounces loud and clear the attacks launched by the “democratic” state against the children of the working class. The ICC declares its solidarity with the children of the working class, attacked by the CPE,[4] [23] beaten and arrested by the police.
Today “order reigns” at the Sorbonne. The children of the working class have lost a battle, but the proletariat has not lost the class war.
The best solidarity that the working class can give to the younger generation faced with the attacks of capitalism is for all sectors to engage now in the struggle against the CPE, against all the attacks of the bourgeoisie and against repression. The working class must demand the liberation of its children who have been carted off by the police.
To do that, we have to everywhere hold mass meetings, areas for debate and discussion. We must demonstrate massively in the streets.
But before mobilising, we must reflect, discuss together, the perspective and methods of the struggle. Because the end does not justify all means. The clearest, most conscious elements of the working class, the most conscious elements of student youth must play the role of a vanguard so that the response to the CPE does not become an adventure with no perspective. What happened at the Sorbonne last night was only an episode in a much wider movement, a movement which will, sooner or later, spread like wildfire across national frontiers.
We will now go rapidly over the events of the last few weeks.
Despite the black-out of the bourgeois media, especially the TV, despite the dispersal of the holiday period, since the beginning of February, the university[5] [24] and to a lesser extent the high school students have been mobilising in most of the universities in the big towns to protest against the infamous CPE, which has just been adopted at the National Assembly.[6] [25]
As soon as we heard about what was going on in the colleges and notably at Paris 3-Censier, we mobilised our forces right away to find out what was happening, to understand the significance of this movement, and to play out part in it.
Today, we can state clearly that this movement of student youth has nothing to do with an inter-classist agitation. And this is true even if, in the universities, the children of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie are largely hostile to the strike and have all kinds of illusions about the future that capitalism offers them. The struggle of the students against the CPE, whatever its outcome, is not a flash in the pan, a revolt with no future. The ICC salutes this movement which is fully part of the combat of the working class.
Why?
First, because the revolt of the students is a legitimate response to a direct, massive and frontal economic attack on the whole working class. With the CPE, the new generations are faced with even more job insecurity and poverty when they finish their studies.
Next, because the students immediately mobilised on class terrain, as they showed masterfully at the 7th March demonstration. They have been able to leave aside their specific demands (such as the reform of the LMD[7] [26]) to put forward demands which the whole working class can take up.
Finally, for the first time since May 68, we have seen students launching slogans appealing for the unity and solidarity of the whole working class: “Workers, unemployed, high school students, university students, the same combat!”
We have seen them going further than the students of May 68: unlike the May 68 generation which was strongly marked by the spirit of contestation and what was called at the time the “generation gap”, the students have put forward the necessity not only for the unity of all sectors of the working class, but also of unity between the generations, between those being attacked by the CPE and the pensioners and future pensioners who are being subjected to an attack on “final earnings” contracts.
If, in some respects, the new generation is a lot more mature than the one at the end of the 60s, it’s precisely because the objective conditions have also matured : the economic crisis has deepened. Today it is openly revealing the irremediable bankruptcy of the capitalist system.
But a more significant sign of the fact that the students of today have gone further than their predecessors in May 68 is the way they have taken the struggle into their own hands, by appropriating in to an astonishing extent the methods of struggle of the workers’ movement and by making solidarity live in this struggle. And this method has been clearly revealed in the general assemblies held at Censier rather than the occupation of the Sorbonne.
We now want to look at what has happened in recent days at Paris 3-Censier.
Every day the students and wage workers[8] [27] on strike have occupied the lecture halls and held mass general assemblies.
Since we have seen with our own eyes what has been going on in these general assemblies at Censier, we can clearly affirm that they function on the model of the workers’ councils. The richness of the discussion, where everyone can speak and express their point of view, the way the tribune organises the debates, the votes, the creation of different commissions, the nomination of delegates elected and revocable by the general assemblies, this whole dynamic, this method of struggle are those which have arisen in the highest moments of the class struggle: in 1905 and 1917 in Russia, in 1918 in Germany, in Poland during the mass strike of August 1980.
For us it is clear that the lungs of the movment , the epicentre of the earthquake, is not at the Sorbonne where the students were shut up in an occupied faculty and encircled by the CRS. The epicentre is the faculty at Censier. And the bourgeoisie knows it. This is why the media have imposed a total black-out on the general assemblies at Censier.
The students at Censier succeeded in drawing their teachers and the administrative personnel into the strike. They succeeded in building a united movement of solidarity. To the point where it was decied to hold joint general assemblies between the students and the faculty employees.
How come these young people, some of whose leaders are in their first year of studies, have begun to move so quickly, taking such a decision since the March 7th demonstration?
Quite simply, because the rejection they received from Monsieur de Villepin[9] [28] after the March 7th demo pushed the students to open their general assemblies to the wage workers and to ask them to speak. In 1968, it was precisely the shutting up of the workers in their factories, as advocated by the trade unions, which enabled the bourgeoisie to send the working class to defeat.
The majority of the workers could not go and discuss with their comrades in other enterprises or with the students. They allowed themselves to be imprisoned behind their factory gates. This is an experience that the younger generation must know about if it is to avoid the traps and manoeuvres of the saboteurs who want to send them to be crushed in small packets.
To go back to what has happened at Censier since 7th March.
On the day of the demo, a small minority of workers from other sectors, who are also revolutionary militants and parents of students in struggle, went to see what was going on in the faculties. And what we saw and heard at the general assemblies at Censier led us to see this student agitation against the CPE as a struggle which is fully part of the combat of the working class. Once again, we declare that the future of human society is in the hands of the young generation. Once again, the old mole of history, as Marx said, has grubbed well. Once again, marxism, the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, has been verified.
Militants of the ICC intervened in the general assemblies as workers and parents of students in struggle. But what in general guided their interventions was the marxist framework of analysis, which alone offers the general perspective that can prevent the students’ struggle from being isolated.
As soon as we understood what was happening at Censier, the ICC decided to fight against the dirty work of the bourgeois media: this is why our leaflet is in the process of being translated into a number of languages (and is already on our website in English and Spanish), which means that the working class and the universities of Europe and the American continent can be informed about what’s happening in France.
In the general assemblies during the last two days, the university teachers at Censier and the administrative personnel have brought a new breath of air to the movement. They have made several interventions declaring that they are going to participate actively in the extension of the strike to other faculties. They have tried to draw in the students who are most hesitant or hostile to the struggle by reassuring them: they committed themselves to ensuring that striking students are not penalised for missing exams and that they continue to receive their student loans.
We cannot summarise the situation better than did a teacher at Paris 3: “the students of Censier have invented something new, something very powerful which is going to draw other universities behind them. And we saw this very clearly ath the March 7th demonstration”.
What actually happened on 7th March?
More than a thousand students met up at the front of the faculty of Censier to go together to the demonstration called by all the unions and the left parties. As soon as they realised that the union contingents, and notably those led by the CGT, had been put at the head of the demo, the students did a quick turn about. They took the metro to put themselves in front of the union contingents, drawing behind them their comrades from other faculties. This is how the student youth in struggle spontaneously put itself at the head of the demo behind a single banner, with unifying slogans, demanding the complete withdrawal of the CPE, whereas the leaflet distributed by the PCF[10] [29] doesn’t say a single word about withdrawing the CPE (we have the leaflet here and comrades can read it).
Thanks to this crafty trick by the Censier students, the old Stalinist dinosaur found itself tail-ending the “children of the mammoth”[11] [30] of national education. The CGT was obliged to attach its rusty wagons to the locomotive of the younger generation, a generation which Rosa Luxemburg rightly called “the fine flower of the of the proletariat”.
As in may 68, the ruling class and its forces of control within the workers’ ranks (ie the unions) were surprised, overtaken by the situation. And we have to recognise as well that the ICC itself was to some extent surprised by the vitality and creativity of the most avant-garde students.
It’s precisely because he hadn’t foreseen this happening that, after the March 7th demo, the leader of the CGT,[12] [31] Bernard Thibault, in an interview on the LCI TV channel, said to the journalists: “it’s true that in this demonstration, there was an unforeseen aspect”.
It’s also because of this “unforeseen aspect”, because they were outflanked by the situation, that the PCF muscle tried to intimidate us at the demonstration, especially at our table of publications. One of them offered us this insult: “I want to spit on your face. Aren’t you ashamed to distribute your pamphlet [“How the PCF went over to the camp of capital”] when there are no longer any Stalinists in the PCF” (sic).
We will stop there with the anecdotes. Comrades, and notably the students who are in the room, can complete, rectify, or make this presentation more precise during the discussion.
We now want to make a short point on the media black-out.
You remember that, last autumn, when the riots swept through the suburbs, the bourgeoisie set up a huge media barrage about it, not only in France, but all over the planet. In every country, the riots in France were front page news and on all the TV channels.
What is happening today in the media? Up until the March 7th demo, dead silence. Day after day, we heard about bird flu, the sordid affair of the “Barbarians” gang[13] [32] and other smokescreens aimed at amusing the gallery and above all to avoid talking about the essential, ie the mobilisation of the students against the CPE.
Why have the capitalist media kept up their silence about the students’ strike when they made so much noise about the riots in the suburbs? Quite simply because, unlike the desperate riots of the young people in the suburbs, the struggle of the students is not a flash in the pan. It bears with it a perspective for the future.
And today, if the media are lifting the black-out, it’s once again to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. The students are presented as mere rioters. This is the message Mr Tony Blair wants to get across when the British paper the Times carried this headline the day after the demonstration of the 7th March: “RIOTS IN THE FRENCH UNIVERSITIES”.
As for the French media, they are now bringing their own little contribution to sabotaging the class struggle. And not only the right wing papers like Le Figaro or Le Parisien, but also a left wing paper like Libération, edited by the ex-68er Serge July (someone who will never suffer the scourge of unemployment). The 10th March issue of Libération was given out free at the hall of Censier because it had a ridiculous little article on the strike there entitled “An air of May 68”.
The message is, if you will excuse the expression, truly the work of prostitutes. An air of 68, we are told, means that the students have done nothing but sing revolutionary songs by inviting the Jolie Môme theatre group on 3rd March to perform in the faculty. There is not a single word about the dynamic of the general assemblies, on the unity and solidarity of the movement which brought the teachers and admininstrative personel into the strike.
And this silence was certainly not down to the fact that the journalists from “Libé” and from the TV didn’t know what was going on. They occupied the faculty with their cameras and their interviews. The French state should give a medal to its journalists and their highly artistic images.
For the ICC, it is clear that this movement of young people is frightening the ruling class. Monsieur de Villepin and his chums, on the right as well as the left, are afraid quite simply because the creativity of the students of Censier could give bad ideas to the whole of the working class.
The silence of the media, then their falsification of events, their televised interviews mean only one thing: the bourgeoisie is shit-scared. And they are all the more scared because today, the most conscious students are at the forefront of the movement. It is this vanguard that the ruling class, with its cops and special branch, want to reduce to silence.
The children of the working class who have mobilised massively against the CPE are the children of those workers who fought against Prime Minister Raffarin’s “reform” of the pensions system in 2003, only to be told with a rare insolence “The street doesn’t rule”.
The ruling class has only one answer to this protest against insecure jobs and unemployment: repression! The CPE is an illustration of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Today, the repression meted out to the students shows the true face of capitalist “democracy”. The social situation today is demonstrating more and more clearly that those in power can no longer rule as they did, while the exploited can no longer accept to go on living as they have.
This is why the French bourgeoisie is throwing all its forces – left and right – into the balance in order to divide the movement, and to shut the students up in the universities so that it can “power cleanse” them,[14] [33] as it did last night at the Sorbonne.
All the TV channels having been broadcasting the images of the cops at the Sorbonne with assorted commentaries like those of Claire Chazal:[15] [34] “The movement has reached a turning point: the turning point of violence”. Obviously, she’s not talking about the violence of the police, but of the children of the working class who are presented as wreckers, as “rabble”!
Why has Sarkozy, henchman of our fine democratic French police state, once again unleashed the forces of repression?
Because the students refuse the misery of capitalism, because they don’t want to find themselves unemployed at the end of their studies! Because they went to the Sorbonne to bring food and solidarity comrades, shut up without anything to eat. These students were beaten up and arrested simply because they gave the bad example of solidarity in struggle.
But if they are to stay the course of the class struggle, the most conscious battalions of the working class must remember these words of Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848: “the communists (…) have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”. They must never forget that the most powerful weapon of the working class is above all its consciousness, not the blind violence of the young rioters in the suburbs.
We must oppose the violence of Sarkozy’s capitalist militia with the consciousness of the working class in struggle!
And the most conscious elements of the working class must also remember what Marx – and Rosa Luxemburg after him – said: “Unlike the revolutions of the past, the proletarian revolution is the only revolution in history which can achieve victory after a whole series of defeats”. And it is precisely because the proletarian revolution is a struggle in the long term and “draws its poetry from the future”, that revolutionaries can never give in to demoralisation and impatience.
International Communist Current, 11th March 2006
[1] [35] CRS : Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité (riot police)
[2] [36] RMI : Revenue Minimum d’Insertion (minimum revenue social security payments, currently et €433 per month for a single person, ie less than one month’s rent)
[3] [37] A famous French short story in which a goat seeks its freedom in the mountains knowing that it will have to fight the wolf – which it does all night, only to be eaten in the morning.
[4] [38] Contrat Première Embauche : the new labour contract adopted by the government, which allows young workers to be laid off without notice and without justification during the first two years of the contract. The withdrawal of the CPE is the principal demand of the student movement.
[5] [39] Our readers outside France should be aware of the distinction between the universities and the “grandes écoles". Whereas the students of the “grandes écoles” are for the most part from the bourgeoisie and generally have a good chance of getting a job at the end of their studies, the majority of the university students are destined to become skilled workers.
[6] [40] The French parliament.
[7] [41] Licence-Masters-Doctorat, the new European standard diploma.
[8] [42] The teachers, administrative, and maintenance personnel have also joined the strike movement.
[9] [43] French Prime Minister.
[10] [44] Parti Communiste Français – the French stalinists.
[11] [45] The school system is commonly known as “The Mammoth" by government “reformers” both left and right – a reference to its supposedly outdated and immobile nature.
[12] [46] Confédération Générale du Travail – the main stalinist-controlled union.
[13] [47] Responsible for a particularly vile kidnapping and murder.
[14] [48] A reference to Interior Minister Sarkozy’s declaration that he would “power cleanse" the suburbs of their “rabble”.
[15] [49] A well-known TV presenter on prime-time news.
We are publishing here an article from Internacionalismo [50] (the ICC's publication in Venezuela) from October 2005 on the situation in Venezuela. The article shows well the reality of the ‘socialism’ of Chavez, who has been in power for seven years, after years of division of power between the right (Christian democracy) and left (AD, social democratic), years during which the leaders of both parties filled their own pockets so arrogantly and brazenly that they couldn’t help preparing the ground for a demagogue like Chavez, who is himself accused of being a dictator by his adversaries.
In fact the authoritarianism of Chavez is not directed against the old political parties which are corrupt to the core, and which tried to organise a farcical coup d’etat against Chavez. Rather, beyond Chavez’s empty rhetoric against “capitalists”, the entirety of his politics has but a single aim: to control the population, to subdue the working class. Chavez has created around himself a following of protégés, just as corrupt as his predecessors’, by dispensing money from oil sales when the living conditions of the population go from bad to worse. Such is the new hero of the ‘alternative-worldists’ and leftists of all persuasions.
At the beginning of December, elections were held in Venezuela. Abstention reached 80%. This level of abstention cannot be understood solely from the fact that only Chavist candidates were presented; more than anything it shows that the population, and especially the workers, have had their fill of Chavist ‘socialism’; and not only of Chavism but of the whole of the bourgeoisie and all its tricks.
The continual violent confrontation between the Chavist bourgeois factions in power and the bourgeois factions in opposition have hidden a basic reality: there is a division of labour between them faced with the need to attack the living conditions of the proletariat. In other articles in Internacionalismo we have analysed the emergence of Chavism as a necessity for the national capital given the collapse of the bourgeois parties which had been in power until the end of the 90s. In this sense the Chavez government is in perfect continuity with previous bourgeois regimes when it comes to taking measures against the proletariat to face up to the economic crisis and survive on the world market.
This division of labour takes place on two levels, which are interlinked and dependent on each other: the permanent ideological offensive to weaken the consciousness and militancy of the working class; and the unstinting attack on its conditions of existence.
To preserve its utterly decadent social system, the bourgeoisie must breathe fresh air into its ideological apparatus and so prevent the proletariat, the “gravedigger” of capitalism (as Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto), from becoming conscious of the fact that the only way to put an end to the misery and barbarism inherent in the capitalist system is the proletarian revolution.
Even before Chavez’s triumph in 1998, the Chavists and the current opposition were competing over what is the best form of democracy, the first defending ‘participatory democracy’ and the second ‘representative democracy’. Seven years went by in this tango which corresponded to the electoral rhythm of the bourgeoisie: on the one hand, Chavism trying to build a foundation for its ‘Bolivarian revolution’; on the other, his opponents trying to weaken it by calling Chavez a dictator. With the incessant electoral campaigns, the bourgeoisie has managed to create a polarisation, a net in which the working class has become trapped, cultivating divisions in the class which have resulted in a loss of class solidarity and a significant decrease in struggles against both private capitalists and the state.
Moreover, the Chavist bourgeoisie, in order to establish a social basis for its ‘Bolivarian revolution’, has developed a whole network of organs of social control (the Bolivarian circles, commissions, militias, etc), which allows it to dilute the workers in the mass of the ‘people’. The opposition is trying to do the same thing with its ‘citizens’ assemblies’. In this way, the autonomy required by the proletariat is dissolved into the petty bourgeois strata and other oppressed sectors of the population. And among the workers themselves, Chavism has introduced its own version of co-operativism, the various forms of co-management and self-management directly promoted by the parties and organs of the state and aimed at conferring a ‘proletarian’ character on the new government. In fact these co-operatives are a means of ideologically controlling the workers and to subject them to increasingly precarious working conditions.
The biggest ideological attack on the consciousness of the proletariat has been the way that the Chavist bourgeoisie identifies its statist project with ‘socialism’. Of course, this is not the first time that the bourgeoisie has disguised its state capitalist policies with ‘marxist’ and ‘revolutionary’ verbiage: the Stalinist bourgeoisie, following the defeat of the Russian revolution, imposed the most ferocious exploitation on the Russian proletariat for nearly 60 years in the name of ‘Soviet socialism’, as did all the ruling classes of what was called the ‘socialist bloc’; and today the bourgeoisies of Cuba, China and North Korea are doing the same thing against the proletariat of their respective countries. However, this monstrous lie of identifying Stalinist state capitalism with socialism could never have had the ideological impact it had on the world working class without the participation of the bourgeoisies of the opposing American bloc: while the Russian bureaucrats subjected the proletariat to the most savage exploitation and repression in the name of the ‘socialist fatherland’, the western bourgeoisies, with the USA at their head, bombarded the proletariat of their countries with campaigns about the shortages and evils of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, presenting democracy as the best of all possible worlds.
It’s the same division of labour which we are now seeing in Venezuela: while the Chavist bourgeoisie exploits the Venezuelan proletariat in the name of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’, the preamble to the ‘socialism of the 21st century’, the opposition gets on with attacking the ‘Castroite communism’ of the Chavists and lauding the marvels of democracy. In sum, these two bourgeois factions form a pair in order to maintain confusion and weaken class consciousness.
This ideology of the ‘socialism of the 21st century’ is complemented by that of ‘anti-imperialism’, which uses popular hostility to the imperialist intrigues of the US bourgeoisie to line the proletariat up behind the Chavist bourgeoisie, just as numerous other bourgeoisies around the world are trying to profit from all the difficulties of the American bourgeoisie in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East by attempting to make everyone believe that the only imperialism in the world is that of the USA. This allows them all to camouflage their own imperialist appetites. The division of labour between the Chavist and oppositional bourgeois factions also comes into play in this ideology: the Chavists voice a virulent anti-Americanism, using the provision of oil as a weapon of blackmail, while the opposition is pro-American. But in the final analysis, they agree on defending and consolidating the interests of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie in its zones of influence: the Caribbean, Central America and the Andean countries (Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador).
This sinister division of labour has allowed the national bourgeoisie as a whole to increase the attacks on the living conditions of the proletariat without provoking a major response from the latter.
The biggest and most significant attack has been the one directed against the oil workers. Through the coordinated action of the Chavist and oppositional factions, the Chavist government has succeeded not only in reducing the number of workers, but also in passing a law that has long been wanted by the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, namely the elimination of the staff co-operative which, since the time of the multinational oil companies, had allowed workers and their families to obtain foodstuffs at reduced prices. This was done with the argument that “the situation is very hard for everyone” and that the oil workers are privileged, a “workers’ aristocracy”.
After this unprecedented attack on the oil workers, in which all the parties and unions were complicit, those in power as much as those in opposition, the Chavist government has had its hands free to inflict even stronger attacks on the living conditions of the employed workers: freezing of collective agreements, ridiculous increases in the minimum wage that are well below the current price increases in consumer goods. The threat of massive redundancies has been used to intimidate workers who try to strike for their demands. This is what has been done in response to protests by health and education workers throughout the period of the Chavist government, and likewise with workers in the legal sector and state television, that Chavez himself threatened to “crush” as he had done with the oil workers.
The living conditions of the workers, above all in the public sector, have also been attacked by means of the commissions, co-operatives and co- and self-managed enterprises created by the government in order to exert its political and social control. With these organs, the Chavez government has succeeded in making the workforce ‘flexible’, because they are hired only temporarily by these organs, without any social wage and for the most part on wages even lower than the official minimum wage. Thus the Chavist bourgeoisie is doing the same thing as the bourgeoisies of the other governments of the right and the left in the region that are applying the typical measures of “brutal neo-liberalism”: making employment even more precarious and exploitation even more intense. This is the true face of ‘socialism of the 21st century’! These organs, however, are also instruments of blackmail against the conventionally employed workers: the government has progressively covered the public services with commissions and co-operatives, with the explicit aim of weakening and blackmailing the workers who provide these services. If they mobilise to put their demands forward, they are threatened with dismissal and replacement with workers organised in co-operatives. This is how Chavism pits workers against each other.
Behind all these attacks against workers in the public sector you can see an old necessity of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, that of drastically reducing employment in the public sector. During the Caldera government, the left-wing minister for economic planning at that time, Teodoro Petkoff, said that employment in the public sector had to be cut by half a million. The repeated declarations by Chavez and his acolytes against the “bureaucratic counter-revolution” have just one objective: to denigrate workers in the public sector in order to justify the ever stronger attacks on their conditions and the redundancies.
However, the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the proletariat don’t stop there. Chavism, thanks to the coordinated work of the government and the opposition, has succeeded in imposing a series of measures that, in other circumstances, would inevitably have provoked protests among workers and the general population. This concerns the brutal increase in taxes and, above all, of VAT (which adds 14% to the prices of most products and services) thanks to which the state raised more than half of the 2005 budget (more than £9000 billion); taxes on some consumer products reached 30% during 2005. Finally, the laws passed by parliament envisage the creation of further taxes, such as that foreseen for health costs of 4% for all active, unemployed and retired workers and those in the ‘black economy’.
The attacks on wages and decreases in the social wages of workers, supplemented by new state taxes, have led to an economic and fiscal policy that has given rise a level of inflation that is the highest in the region (23% on average for 2003 and 2004), which erodes wages month after month, all of which is in the process of forcing millions of workers and their families into an alarming degree of pauperisation: according to unofficial statistics, 83% of workers (of a total workforce of 12 million) are paid the minimum wage of 405,000 bolivars (about £105) whilst the basic ‘basket’ of foodstuffs, according to the government itself , now costs 380,000 and about 600,000 bolivars according to other authorities. This is without speaking of the levels of malnutrition, epidemics etc which can only increase. The government does everything possible to doctor the figures on poverty in order to be able to be coherent with its lie about the ‘struggle against poverty’, but it is impossible to conceal the evidence.
Furthermore, in addition to the alarming level of unemployment, the poverty and misery which weigh on the workers’ districts are causing ever more social decomposition that official propaganda tries to hide, but which is clearly visible everywhere: beggars from the towns and countryside, children living in the street, prostitution of children etc. One of the scourges which has worsened during Chavez administration is that of criminality: each week there are about 100 murders in the country, above all in the poorest districts, where a large percentage of the working class lives. The Chavist government, using its brains in media manipulation, has found a name for its project: the “nice revolution”, but what the working class experiences in its everyday life is the wretchedness of capitalism in decomposition; and that is the only reality that the bourgeoisie, whether of the right or of the left, can offer us.
Despite the blackmail and intimidation, the workers have no choice other than to struggle against the ceaseless deterioration of their living conditions.
The indignation in the workers’ ranks manifests itself ever more frequently: protests of the unemployed seeking work, of pensioners for fulfilment of their demands that have been conceded but not implemented (as has been the case with the pensioners of SIDOR and the CVG in the metallurgical sector). Of doctors, tube workers etc; and threats of struggle among public-sector employees in education, health, the courts etc are constantly present.
Conscious of the fact that the workers’ struggle is the real menace hanging over it, the government is preparing its forces of dissuasion: the reservists and militia of the Territorial Guard, which take orders directly from the presidency of the republic and whose task consists in intervening, in the final instance, to quell “social convulsions”. In the same way, in the hospitals and other public establishments, the state has introduced the so-called “service for social control”, in other words groups paid by the government to police the workers.
However, knowing that it is not always by repression that it can put an end to a class movement, the bourgeoisie as a whole is playing a more effective card against the workers: the renewal of trade unionism and trade unionist dissidence inside Chavism itself. This is what explains the attempts of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), with Froilan Barrios and Alfredo Ramos at its head, to rehabilitate the CTG with a “new model of trade unionism”. Above all there is the rise to prominence of Machuca, Chavist union leader, who presents himself as a ‘workers’ leader’ not only in the industrial zone of Matanzas but on the national level. He promotes workers’ mobilisations even against Chavez, like that which took place last September. In the same way as the CTV controlled by AD (social democracy) kept at the time some ‘distance’ and carried out a certain amount of ‘opposition’ in relation to the AD governments, so today an individual like Machuca does the same thing, knowing very well how to do his work controlling social discontent since, and this is not by chance, he is congratulated both by Chavism in government and by the opposition.
To put an end to the bourgeoisie (Chavist and opposition), the proletariat must channel its indignation to reinforce its class identity, solidarity among proletarians and its consciousness of the fact that it is the only class which can and must lead the struggle of the exploited to put an end to the barbarism to which capital subjects us.
From Internacionalismo 55
Our experience intervening in Argentina has led us to engage with those who are helping organize comedores populares, a version of the soup kitchen, whose missions have three objectives:
- To hand out food to a specific number of people;
- To provide academic and social education to those who need it;
- To create a forum in which neighbors can discuss issues of interest to them; develop solidarity with each other; and reflect on the options available to combat the situations which capitalism puts them in, each harder to bear than the previous ones.
We salute the attempt to build solidarity and to struggle against capitalism, which these efforts clearly suggest. However, we need to ask ourselves if these communal kitchens are really the most appropriate medium through which these aims can be obtained.
In the past ten years, Argentina and other countries have seen the proliferation of grass root organizations: communal kitchens, piqueteros, networks of economic solidarity, networks of self-regulated businesses, etc. The first of these organizations were created by people whose level of poverty meant that they could not always count on a daily meal. To these we must add as co-founders those whose minuscule income allowed them to share with their destitute neighbors what little they had; people who acted out of solidarity and at the same time out of necessity.
A recurring problem many of these workers have been facing—especially workers from small and medium-sized businesses—is that upon returning to work after a weekend’s rest, they find their workplace shut down by the owners. Such situations have forced workers to take over manufacturing plants, and other former workplaces, to try to keep their jobs and incomes.
The piquetero movement has such an origin. From 1996 to 1997, several regions of Argentina saw the use of roadblocks by the unemployed, who were fighting to obtain a means to earn an income. These first instances of Argentine-style picketing were genuine expressions of proletarian discontent. However, as these activities could not be extended to the rest of the working class, and were thus isolated, the piqueteros became demoralized and began to just “look for the means of existence.” A minority of them tried to maintain a primitive-style organization of the piquetes, but were slowly infiltrated by agents of radical syndicates, and by the ultra-leftists (usually, Trotskyists). The result was what we now know as the piquetero movement, a movement that no longer resembles its genuinely proletarian predecessor.
The piquetero movement is now an institution with arms that reach to the pockets of the state, as it now accepts and counts on government-distributed subsidies and food rations. Its beneficiaries are required to attend meetings and approved political activities, or risk losing their benefits. Its leaders collect a portion of the money allocated to benefit the rank and file.
What once was a proletarian organization directly traceable to the working-class struggle, has now become part of the state. In attempting to maintain the use of the piquetes during times when their use was not required, attempting to make them a permanent organization, the piquetes have been absorbed by the state.
This process of co-opting was more or less replicated with the other grass-roots organizations. Communal kitchens, for example, were founded by comrades who sought to find a solution to the problem of obtaining a minimum of food. These workers were reacting to a desperate situation. Quickly, however, they were offered “aid” from political organizations, syndicates, NGOs, and churches, who taught them how to coordinate their activities with the members of other communal kitchens, how to petition the state for assistance and benefits, etc. In Argentina’s Federal Capital alone, there are over 100 of these so-called coordinated communal kitchens, and in the southern area of Greater Buenos Aires there are another 400 or so.
Little by little it has become obvious that in exchange for a few rations, for meager breadcrumbs that barely soothe hunger pains, the control of these communal kitchens has been away from its members. These organizations were thus transformed into entities through which the bourgeois state corners the workers, gets control over them, and uses them for their political aims.
Why are these organizations co-opted by the state and transformed into entities radically different from what was envisioned by their founders?
In the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a time during which capitalism was still a progressive system, the proletariat could still build permanent organizations that retained their class origins: syndicates, trade unions, cooperatives of production and consumption, women’s and youth associations, popular universities, homeless shelters, etc. Although these organizations were many cases lost to reformist deviations, to the routine accounting of misery, globally they still belonged to the working class.
Back then, these organizations could exist under a political platform that did not question the entirety of the capitalist system, because had to focus on their proliferation and their socio-economic development. These were authentically proletarian schools; where workers could meet and develop their class solidarity.
This situation was radically changed with capitalism’s entry into the historical phase of decadence. Globally, capitalism could no longer grow, except in isolated or partial instances; it found itself impotent to act when faced with a worsening of the working class’ (and the oppressed masses, in general) living conditions. At this point, mass movements based on partial struggles against single aspects of exploitation no longer made sense; they lost their dynamic, their content. Notwithstanding the sincere wishes of their founders, the permanent existence of these organizations could only be guaranteed by becoming an extension of the capitalist state.
The clearest example are the trade unions. Throughout the twentieth century there were attempts to build all kinds of class unions; assembly, combative, anarchist, radical, base, unitary etc. ALL OF THESE HAVE FAILED AS ORGANS OF THE WORKING CLASS. If for over 80 years trade unions have sold out and deserted the working class. This is because it is impossible, in decadent capitalism, for permanent organizations to be able to conclusively address this or that partial aspect of exploitation. And, as the state in decadent capitalism tends to be totalitarian—and to hold all groups within society under its heavy weight—it cannot tolerate mass organizing of the exploited and the oppressed. These organizations need to be destroyed, and this can be done in two ways: through repression or through co-option.
The latter is the easiest to implement, as these mass organizations have lost all of the meaning that they had in the past, and can no longer serve the real interests of the workers. On the one hand, the state through its many agents (parliamentary commissions, various institutions, trade unions, churches, political parties, NGOs, etc.), seek to devour and quell all attempts at the independent expression of the masses. On the other hand, all attempts at permanent organisations on a bases that dose not put capitalism into question facilitates this absorption.
What cause the malnutrition that leads to the starvation of so many children in Buenos Aires province, in the various Argentine provinces, in many countries in South America, Africa, Asia, (and now) Europe? Is it an incompetent government? A corrupt society? The unfair distribution of wealth? Injustice? The scarcity of foodstuff? The last question is the key to the answer. We can easily state that there is no scarcity of food. If we just limit our study to Argentina, we can see that there is an abundance of meat, wheat, Soya. We can accurately say that gardens in Tucuman are full of all kinds of vegetables and fruits, while at the same time this is an Argentine province with one the highest numbers of childhood malnutrition.
This is the case all over the world: there is an abundance of foods; grocery store windows are full with product displays, many perishable products that are not sold are thrown into the sea…Here we find a fundamental cause of the hunger and malnutrition that affects such a great part of humanity: overproduction. The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, says that “In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production.” Capitalism is the first society in the history of humanity in which hunger and starvation can be traced not to the underproduction of foodstuffs, but to overproduction. The system is thrown into crisis not because it produces too little, but because it produces too much. Unlike hunger and misery in feudalism, the guilty party is not draught, or poor crops, or plagues of locusts. Guilt lies in the fact that “there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce,” according to the Manifesto, a fact that “brings disorder into the whole of bourgeois society.”
The activity of searching for food in the surpluses of the food manufacturers or distributors, of seeking subsidies from state welfare agencies, traps a handful of comrades in an endless circle that can neither offer a solution to poverty or lessen the effects of these calamities. For, whilst the number of mouths that need to be fed proliferate , the communal kitchens cannot even come close to satiating anyone’s hunger.
It is a question of the management of poverty. Hunger is not eradicated; people just learn to adapt to it. It also means the communal kitchens being turned to auxiliaries of the state, of perpetuating the misery, hunger and desperation of the oppressed and exploited. Millions of human beings are abandoned to their fates by the bourgeois state. The nickels and dimes that the piqueteros distribute among their members, the soup that communal kitchens provide gives the impression that “something is being done” to end hunger; that “democratic” governments never forget the needy; that there is solidarity with the dispossessed…When in reality, all that this is doing is perpetuating and worsening the situation; shutting it up as in a ghetto within shanty towns and poor neighborhoods.
As mentioned earlier, communal kitchens have a secondary
mission: to provide cultural and education to children and adults.
Culture and education are
a necessity for the working class if it is going to build a society free of
exploitation, national borders, or nation-states; a society in which each man
and woman can make personal and communal use of all that the history of
humanity has taught us.
In all countries—from the
most developed, to the most underdeveloped—we can observe on the part of the
state a growing abandoning of services
such as education. School buildings are allowed to decay; teaching—with the
exception of that for the children of the elite— deteriorates or is directly
abandoned in the poorest neighborhoods.
The fact that the poorest
and most forgotten neighborhoods in Argentina try to organize the provision of
education, shows that those same people that have been denigrated as a “rabble” by high society—in the same way
that Sarkozy referred to the rioting youth suburban France as “gangsters”—have
a strong appetite for knowledge and the feelings of dignity that comes with it.
As well intentioned as
these efforts might be, their participants do not question the capitalist
system, nor do they subscribe to a struggle against it. By themselves, then,
these activities are co-opted and rendered impotent by the state; and in fact
end up making it easier for the state to corner and control the masses.
In addition, neither
culture nor knowledge can guarantee a job. Over the years, the working class
has required more and more formal education. However, even with a diploma the
average worker cannot count on full employment. Capitalism has a recurring
problem of out-of-control unemployment, and it often destroys many more jobs
than it creates.
What’s more, even with a
job no-one is guaranteed a living wage, as real income continues to fall to
levels that do not permit even a mediocre life. Let us remember the words of a
worker from Garrahan
Hospital:
“A monthly income no longer allows you to stay alive!”
It is not a lack of
culture or education what causes the unemployment of thousands upon thousands
of young workers. Instead, the cause is the permanent crises of capitalism, a
phenomenon which renders the system incapable of integrating a young workforce
into the productive activity of society, and excludes them from social life.
The legion of human beings who have been alienated from the productive process,
and thus have been condemned to a life of crime and miserable lack of security,
continues to grow dramatically in many countries.
It could be said that at the very least, communal kitchens serve to meet with others, pose questions on social problems and discuss ways to solve them; that they could help win people to the cause of revolution and revolutionary struggle.
Comrades who participate in these organizations explain their participation using that very logic. They say, “Honestly, what we do [at the communal kitchens] makes no difference at all. It is reformism, and makes things easier for the state. But at least in this way we get people together, give them a class conscience, and teach them about solidarity.”
In Argentina today, within the various grass roots organizations (piqueteros, communal kitchens, self-regulated businesses, networks of economic solidarity, etc.) there are thousands of people who are “organized,” who supposedly “meet,” “become class conscious,” “do something,” etc. It would seem that this mass of people represent an impressive force; but in reality they are thousands and thousands of people who are paralyzed, whose are tied hands and feet by capital and its state. This has been demonstrated time and again, the last of which happened when these organizations drowned the workers of Garrahan in a false sense of solidarity.
The one activity that dominates all others in these organizations is the disbursement of [economic] assistance, the maintenance of misery, and its use by the state to perpetuate exploitation. All of this is done against the wishes of their members. It is of no use to discuss ways of combating misery when all activities revolve around perpetuating this very problem. This is why despite meaning well, despite attempts at persuading [the masses], no real discussions of or activities directed at revolutionary struggles can be developed within this context.
If we are to organize ourselves to combat our misery, we need to zoom in on an activity that gets to the root of the problem. It is only the working class struggle that can do this. However, this struggle is still in its infancy, and it will take time to develop a revolutionary force that will allow the proletariat to rise against capitalism. In the meantime, it is necessary to contribute an activity of discussion, interventions in the struggles, the international regroupment of revolutionaries, the creation of discussion circles around communist positions. Such an enterprise might seem “abstract” and out of touch with immediate concerns in our everyday lives. But each time there is a massive struggle by the working class, the usefulness and advantage of having a handful of revolutionaries—who contribute to such a cause with analysis, proposals and orientations—becomes clear. That is how we saw the waves of strikes in Argentina between June and August, when an intervention could have helped take the struggle further, to learn political lessons, to do away with the traps that the bourgeoisie employed.
Just a few days ago in Mar de Plata, Chavez and Maradona began a farce of “anti-imperialist struggle.” At that moment, what was needed was a revolutionary voice to denounce a trick aimed a diverting them towards an impotent activism, and will progressively drown them in confusion and demoralization.
Therefore, those comrades who are the most conscious and combative—who feel the most indignation against misery and hunger—must direct will and thinking towards the clarification of the revolutionary positions of the proletariat, towards intervention within it, towards struggle against the lies and the traps that the capitalist state uses against them
ICC 19-11-05.
[1] [53] According to Wikipedia, “A piquetero is a member of a social movement originally initiated by unemployed workers in Argentina in the mid-1990s, during Carlos Menem's rule, a few years before the peak of the economic crisis that started in 1998 with a recession and erupted in 2001 causing the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa and three of his successors in a matter of weeks.
“The word piquetero is a neologism in the Spanish of Argentina. It comes from piquete (in English, "picketing"), that is, a standing demonstration of protest in a significant spot, in this case usually appearing as a road blockade.”
Links
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[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
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[50] https://es.internationalism.org/internacionalismo/200511/259/chavismo-y-oposicion-unen-sus-fuerzas-para-atacar-a-los-trabajadores
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/venezuela
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[54] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-and-central-america