On March 14, 1883, 140 years ago, Karl Marx, a leading revolutionary militant and fighter, died. Often presented by the bourgeoisie as a "philosopher" or an "economist", he was throughout his life hounded and slandered by his detractors and the police, portrayed as the devil incarnate. Despite being transformed either into an icon or an "outdated" thinker, despite all the deformations of his thought by the Stalinists and the leftists, his contribution, and above all the method he developed, that of historical materialism, remains fundamental to arming the proletariat in its struggle to comprehend the capitalist system and prepare its overthrow. His often-unrecognised abilities as a talented organiser, his polemics, the sharpness of his pen, make him one of the greatest revolutionaries of his time. We publish below a series of articles dedicated to him.

A hundred years after the death of Marx, the belongs to marxism [2]

Marx_proved_right [3]

How the proletariat won Marx to communism [4]

What is Marxism? [5]

Karl Marx: A revolutionary militant [6]

"On the film ‘The Young Karl Marx’ [7]".

Enough is enough!" - Britain. "Not a year more, not a euro less" - France. "Indignation runs deep" - Spain. "For all of us" - Germany. All these slogans, chanted during the strikes around the world in recent months, show how much the current workers' struggle expresses the rejection of the general deterioration of our living and working conditions. In France, workers also raised the slogan “You give us 64, we give you May 68” – faced with the increase in years of wage labour from 62 to 64, we are returning to the massive struggles of May 1968.

But we must also go further. The wave of international struggle that began in May 1968 was a reaction to the first signs of the world economic crisis. Today, the situation is much more serious. The disastrous state of capitalism puts the survival of humanity at stake.

The momentum of May '68 was broken by a double lie of the bourgeoisie. When the USSR collapsed in 1990, it claimed that the collapse of Stalinism meant the death of communism and that a new era of peace and prosperity was dawning. Three decades later, we know from experience that instead of peace and prosperity, we got war and misery. We have yet to understand that Stalinism was the antithesis of communism, that it was a barbaric capitalist regime that emerged from the counter-revolution of the 1920s. By falsifying history, by presenting Stalinism as communism, the bourgeoisie succeeded in making the working class believe that its project of revolutionary emancipation could only end in disaster.

But in the struggle, we will gradually develop our collective strength, unity and self-organisation. In the struggle, we will gradually realise that we, the working class, are capable of offering a perspective other than the nightmare promised by a decaying capitalist system.

Come and discuss the lessons of May 68 for the struggles of today!

If you want to take part, write to us at [email protected] [8], and we will send you the details.

This article was first published in April 2023, following a series a massive demonstrations against the proposals of the Netanyahu government to “reform” the Supreme Court, which it sees as an obstacle to its policies, in particular the open annexation of the occupied territories, ditching any form of “two-state” solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Since then, we have seen an escalation of military raids and settler pogroms in the West Bank, and a series of responses by Palestinian terrorist groups or sympathisers inside Israel. In July, in the Israeli parliament, the government coalition pushed through its law on the Supreme Court, and the street demonstrations against the government have resumed with full force. In sum, the Israeli bourgeoisie is facing a full-blown political crisis, confirming the article’s general analysis. And in our view, the main political stance adopted by the article – the rejection both of the Netanyahu regime and the “democratic” nationalist opposition mobilised in the demonstrations – remains valid.

30.7.23

In the terminal phase of its long decline, the ruling class is becoming increasingly mired in corruption and irrationality, less and less able to control its own political machinery, more and more torn apart by factional rivalries.

Political life in the state of Israel expresses all these tendencies in a concentrated form.

The present government is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been overshadowed by charges of bribery and corruption. One of the motivations for his government’s attempt to reduce the authority of the Supreme Court is to ensure that he is spared from criminal charges against him. Like Trump in the USA, he is more than willing to use his office for blatant personal gain.

In addition, the government led by Netanyahu’s Likud party can only survive because it is supported by ultra-religious groups and the neo-fascist Jewish Power party, who are united behind a drive to openly annex the territories occupied in 1967, justified by appeals to the Torah. The attitudes of these organisations towards the position of women, gays, and the Palestinian Arabs express – very much like their hated Islamist enemies – an accelerating descent into irrationality and obscurantism.

The plan of the Netanyahu government to muzzle the Supreme Court is thus also driven by an explicit abandonment of any “two state” solution for the Israel-Palestine problem and the creation of a purely Jewish state from the Jordan to the Sea – necessarily involving the subjugation and perhaps the massive deportation of the Palestinian population.

However, these proposals have provoked weeks of massive and sustained demonstrations which have obliged Netanyahu to pause the plan, compromising with his even more right-wing supporters in the government by granting Jewish Power a number of positions in the future government. Most controversially this has included the formation of a kind of private militia under the direct control of the Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir. It would be responsible for policing the West Bank - in practice, acting as a cover for the accomplished facts established by armed settlers (a role already being played by the established military and police forces, but no doubt provoking all kinds of dissensions between the different arms of the state in the implementation of this policy).

A conflict within the bourgeoisie

The protest movement has recently included strikes by airport, hospital, municipal and other workers. But this is not a movement of the working class against capitalist exploitation. In most cases the strikes were more like lock-outs, supported by the employers. High-ups in the political, military and intelligence apparatus have strongly supported the demonstrations, which is always festooned with Israeli flags and denounces the government’s assault on the Supreme Court as an attack on democracy, even as “anti-Zionist”. Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, who already have first-hand knowledge of the delights of the existing Israeli democracy, have largely stayed away from the demonstrations. No doubt many of the protestors are giving vent to real fears about their future under the new political regime, but this is a movement entirely dominated by the clash between rival bourgeois forces.

The fact that this is a conflict inside the bourgeoisie is further emphasised by the criticism of the government’s plans by US President Biden and other western leaders. The provocative policies of the Netanyahu government towards the occupied territories do not accord with current US foreign policy, which aims to present itself as a force for peace and reconciliation in the region, and still adheres, verbally at any rate, to the two-state solution. Netanyahu has replied by insisting that the friendship between the US and Israel is unbreakable, but that no foreign power can tell Israel what to do. In sum, he is expressing the general tendency towards every man for himself in international politics. Already the government’s overt support for de facto expansion via the settlers has provoked a fresh round of armed confrontations on the West Bank and fears of a new “intifada”

Illusions in the forces of Israel’s democracy

The left and liberal forces of the ruling class who are backing the demonstrations and demanding a return to Israel’s true democracy have never shied from working hand in hand with the forces of the right when it came to defending the interests of the Zionist state. A well-known example: in the 1948 war, it was the right- wing Irgun commanded by Begin, and the Lehi group or Stern gang, that were most directly involved in the atrocious massacre of Palestinian Arabs at Deir Yassin in April 1948, when scores, even hundreds, of civilians were killed in cold blood. The armed force controlled by “Labour Zionism”, the Haganah, and the newly independent state it established by force of arms, officially condemned the massacre, but this had not prevented cooperation with the Haganah’s elite forces at Deir Yassin. More important, not only were the official forces involved in the destruction of other villages, they did not hesitate to reap advantages from the terror used against the Palestinian Arabs, which drove them to quit Palestine in their hundreds of thousands, thus solving the problem of establishing a “democratic” Jewish majority. These refugees were left to languish in camps for decades and were never allowed back – no less oppressed by the Arab states which used them as a permanent casus bello against Israel. And as for the more radical Zionist left organised in Hashomair Hatzair and the kibbutz movement, far from establishing a socialist enclave in Israel, their collective farms operated as the most efficient military bases in the formation of the new state.

Since the 1970s, if the Zionist right (Begin, Sharon, Netanyahu) etc have increasingly dominated Israeli politics, it’s because they tend to represent the most brutally “honest” solution to the problem of Israel’s relationship to Palestine as a whole: naked force, a permanent military camp, apartheid laws. But this was always the inner logic of Zionism, with its original false promise of “a land without people for a people without land”.

The hypocrisy of the “anti-Zionist” left

 It’s therefore not hard for “anti-Zionist” bourgeois factions, such as the Trotskyists and supporters of the “Palestinian national struggle”, to prove that the Zionist project could only succeed as a form of colonialism -  backed, moreover, by one or other of the great imperialist powers – initially the British with their duplicitous divide and rule policies in Palestine[1], then the USA with its efforts to dislodge the British from the region, and even the Stalinist USSR at the time of the 1948 war.

But the leftists who supported first the Palestinian liberation groups (PLO, PFLP, PDFLP, etc) then the Islamists of Hamas and Hezbollah don’t tell us the other side of the story: that like all nationalisms in the epoch of capitalist decadence, Palestinian nationalism too was always dependent on imperialism, from the links established by the Mufti of Jerusalem with German and Italian imperialism in the 30s to the backing of the PLO by the regional Arab regimes as well as Russia and China,  and the support for the Islamist gangs by Iran, Qatar and others. And with their support for the “oppressed nations”, they act as apologists for the fact that nationalist opposition to Zionism has always taken the form of anti-Jewish pogroms and terrorist outrages, from the first reactions to the Balfour Declaration in the early 20s and the 1936 “general strike” against Jewish immigration into Palestine, to the violent assaults against Jewish civilians (whether by knife, gun, or missile) still being perpetrated by agents or supporters of Hamas and other Islamist groups.

Mouthpieces of the ruling class who spread illusions in peace in the Middle East often denounce the “spiral of violence” which endlessly pits Jew against Arab in the region. But this spiral of hatred and revenge is an integral part of all national conflicts, when the “enemy” is defined as an entire population. There is only one path leading out of this deadly trap: the path pointed out by the Italian communist left in the 1930s: “For real revolutionaries, naturally, there is no ‘Palestinian’ question, but solely the struggle of all the exploited of the Near-East, Arabs and Jews included, which is part of a more general struggle of all the exploited of the entire world for the communist revolution”.

But nearly a century later, the never-ending wars and massacres in the region have shown the immense obstacles in the way of developing a class unity between Jewish and Arab proletarians, fighting in defence of their living conditions, and opening the perspective of struggling for a new society where exploitation and the state no longer exist. More than ever, such a perspective can only be developed in the central countries of capitalism, where the working class has a far greater potential for overcoming the divisions imposed on it by capital, and thus for raising the banner of revolution for the workers of the entire world.

Amos, April 22, 2023

 

A new series which develops our critique of the so-called “communisation” tendency and its claims to have gone beyond marxism and the communist left.

Part One: Introduction to the series on “Communisers” [10]

Part Two: From leftism to modernism: the misadventures of the ‘Bérard tendency’ [11]

Annex to part 2: Why the proletariat is the revolutionary class: Critical notes on the article 'Leçons de la lutte des ouvriers anglais' in Révolution Internationale no 9 [12]

Part 3.1: Jacques Camatte - from Bordigism to the negation of the proletariat [13]

Part 3.2: Jacques Camatte - from Bordigism to the negation of the proletariat  [14]

At the beginning of the war in Ukraine the International Communist Current proposed a joint internationalist statement [15] on the conflict to the other groups of the Communist Left. Of these groups three affirmed their willingness to participate and a statement was discussed, agreed, and published by these different groups. The principle behind the joint statement was that on the fundamental question of imperialist war and the internationalist perspective against it, the different Communist Left groups were agreed and could unite on this question to provide, with greater force, a clear political alternative to capitalist barbarism for the working class in different countries.

The other side of the joint statement was that on other questions, particularly on the analysis of the present imperialist war, its origins and prospects, there were differences among the constituent groups which should be discussed and clarified. Consequently the groups have decided to produce brief statements on these questions and publish them in a bulletin

The first English edition of this bulletin can now be accessed here [16] in PDF form by double-clicking on the illustration. Other editions will follow in Farsi, Italian, Korean and further languages.

After a media spike early last autumn, the theme of "super-profits taxation" has crept into the speeches of many politicians, in the press and even in the mouths of media economists.
The indecent rise in profits is a reality. The dividends of CAC-40 shareholders in France, the profits of TotalEnergies, LVMH, Engie, Arcelor Mittal, those of the major energy distributors in Germany, Italy or Great Britain, such as Shell, BP, British Gas... all are setting records. For example, TotalEnergie doubled its net profit in the second quarter of 2022. In the United Kingdom, the Shell Group has made a profit of 40 billion dollars. Germany's top 100 companies are reporting record revenues of 1,800 billion euros compared to the same period last year. The global freight giant CMA CGM has increased its revenue for the first quarter of 2022 by $7.2 billion, an increase of almost 243%!
This situation, which accentuates social gaps and inequalities, is accompanied by a disgusting exhibition of certain incomes while workers' salaries stagnate, if not regress. Precariousness has become the norm and inflation is plunging a growing mass of workers into poverty[1].

The bourgeoisie verbally condemns super-profits the better to defend capitalism
In the face of this constantly deteriorating situation, the "taxation of super-profits" is presented as a possible solution or as one of the means to respond to the crisis. The Bundestag and other parliamentary chambers in Europe have been led to plan such a tax, mainly on profits related to the energy sector. In his speeches, President Macron, preferring to banish any reference to the lexicon of leftism, mentioned for example the possibility of taxing the "undue profits" of the large energy companies. The aim was probably to make the forced use of their cars less unbearable for workers, especially the most precarious, and to respond ideologically to what is experienced as a real injustice: "the rich are gorging themselves while we are struggling more and more to fill our petrol tanks". Such propaganda, in the mouths of other European leaders of the same ilk, in the midst of an economic crisis and in a context of strong inflationary pressures, is a sign of the bourgeoisie's concern about an increasingly tense social situation.

Faced with increasing misery, proletarians began to raise their voices in the struggles in Britain, France and many countries of the world: "enough is enough" or « maintenant, ça suffit!».Because of the upsurge of struggles around the world, the bourgeoisie is forced to hand out a few crumbs. But what it lets go with one hand, it will immediately and inevitably take back with the other.

Beyond these concerns, the danger for the working class lies in an apparently more radical mystification put forward by the left, the unions and above all by the leftists, as is the case particularly in France with the Trotskyists.

At the end of August, LFI-NUPES[2] was already organising a petition entitled: "Let's tax super-profits"! In many of their speeches, LFI MPs, from Manuel Bompart to François Ruffin, stressed the need for taxation as a response to the social crisis. But this same idea was the almost exclusive ideological niche of leftists, just a few years ago. Like those of LO (Lutte Ouvrière), whose demagogic slogan often boiled down to "make the rich pay", a sort of variant of the Stalinist speeches of the past, which presented themselves as the "enemies of the trusts", exploiting in passing the old myth of the "200 families".[3] This old idea of "taking from the rich" was also conveyed by other propagandists, such as those of Attac, who still advocate the application of the Tobin Tax[4]. (3)

In reality, the slogan "let's tax profits" has always expressed the will to whitewash capitalism, to hide from the exploited the historical bankruptcy of the system and the causes of its crisis. What the leftists' idea of "expropriation" hides, by polarising attention on the "profiteers" who thus play the role of lightning rod (as during the 2008 crisis attributed to the bankers), is to make us believe that the roots of the world crisis come from the "excesses" of the big firms, from the egoistic behaviour of the "greedy" managers and shareholders or of this or that boss. In short, despite the contradictions of capitalism, it would be possible to "relieve the workers’ lot" through a "fair redistribution of wealth".

But today, these old discourses of the extreme left, recycled in response to the reflection going on among more conscious and combative working-class minorities, are no longer sufficient. While the classical left perpetuates its ideology of "redistribution" and "regulation" by the state, the leftists now force themselves to talk about the "need to overturn the system". For LO, this taxation now becomes a "deception". [5](4) A group like Révolution Permanente (RP), a split from the NPA, also criticises this slogan which "does not allow us to attack capitalist private property".[6] Without abandoning the old "reformist" platitudes such as "indexing wages to inflation [...] to unite our class" – proof that this new leftist boutique does not aim to question wage exploitation in any way.

Behind the apparent radicalism of its speeches lies the staunch defence of state capitalism under the guise of "expropriations" which would make it possible to build a so-called "workers' state". The leftist organisations do not at all distance themselves from the conceptions conveyed by the classical left, consisting in maintaining the illusion of the possibility of constituting a state "above classes", capable of "regulating the economy in the service of the workers". Consequently, far from being at the service of workers' emancipation, the left and the far left will always remain in the bourgeois camp at the service of the conservation of capitalism.

Is there any money in the pockets of the bosses?

The capitalist world is inexorably sinking into an acute economic war, against a background of massive indebtedness. All companies and all nations are fighting each other to maintain their competitiveness in the face of fierce rivalry. To survive in this jungle, there are no easy ways: you have to accumulate as much capital as possible by squeezing workers to lower production costs. Contrary to persistent myths, such as that of the "thirty glorious years", capitalism has never and will never be able to "redistribute wealth fairly", as this would mean dooming itself to ruin. With the generalised crisis of the system, it is not even conceivable to grant the slightest reform in favour of the workers. The only perspective that capitalism can propose to the proletariat is a permanent degradation of its living and working conditions.

This is what the propaganda about the "taxation of profits" seeks to conceal! As sophisticated as it may be in the mouths of "left" economists, this lie has for the sole function of filling the skulls of the workers with illusions about a way out of the crisis. Capitalism has no philanthropic vocation; it can only act in conformity with its nature: to accumulate capital and make profit through the sweat of the workers.

Can the state share the wealth better?
The idea hammered out in the past by leftists, especially Trotskyites, of "taxing the rich" to invest "sleeping money" and pretend to invest in schools, health care, etc. for a better world under the leadership of a state democratically controlled by the workers, is a pure lie. Contrary to what they want us to believe, capitalism can in no way overcome its insoluble contradictions which generate a permanent crisis of overproduction and an abysmal debt. The fantasy model of "redistribution", or of state control fraudulently assimilated to "communism", remains in reality that of Stalinist state capitalism! A "model" of capitalist management that all far-left politicians are still nostalgic for.

Contrary to the belief in the possibility of creating a more "social" state, the reality is that the state represents the spearhead of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie likes to portray states as subservient to the big transnational corporations. But the balance of power between the "private" bourgeoisie and the state is strictly the opposite: without the tight state control of production and trade at all levels, without the sophisticated regulatory apparatus (favouring tax breaks), without the army of civil servants to train or care for the workers, without the imperialist influence of the states, the companies, small ones or run by billionaires, would be nothing. To be convinced of this, you only have to look at how a megalomaniac like Elon Musk is entirely dependent on the orders and goodwill of the US state.
The bourgeois state is not a neutral place of power to be conquered, it is the main instrument of exploitation and domination by the bourgeoisie over society. As such, it is the main enemy that the working class has to defeat. The myth of the "protective" state has a long life. As the spearhead of all the attacks, it is in its name that the "reforms" that degrade our living conditions are carried out. In reality, the state's only function is to guarantee the order that allows the best exploitation of labour power: any idea of "regulation", "redistribution" or "workers' control" under capitalism is a delusion.
Proletarians have no choice: they must wage the most united and broadest possible struggle. To do this, they must start by remaining deaf to the media noise, but also and above all to those of false friends such as the leftists and the unions who claim that it is possible to reform or control the state in favour of the workers. The most dangerous enemies are those who, behind the mask of justice, or even revolution, remain the last bastions of the bourgeois state.

WH, 17 March 2023

 

 

“Enough is enough!” - Britain. “Not a year more, not a euro less” - France. “Indignation runs deep” - Spain. “For all of us” - Germany. All these slogans, chanted round the world during strikes in recent months, show how much the current workers' struggles express the rejection of the general deterioration of our living and working conditions. In Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Mexico, China... the same strikes against the same increasingly unbearable exploitation. “The real hardship: not being able to heat, eat, look after yourself, drive!”

But our struggles are also much more than that. In demonstrations, we began to see on some placards the rejection of the war in Ukraine, the refusal to produce more and more weapons and bombs, to have to tighten our belts in the name of the development of the war economy: "No money for the war, no money for weapons, money for wages, money for pensions" we could hear during demonstrations in France. They also express the refusal to see the planet destroyed in the name of profit.

Our struggles are the only thing standing against this self-destructive dynamic, the only thing standing against the death that capitalism promises all humanity. Because, left to its own logic, this decadent system will drag ever greater parts of humanity into war and misery, it will destroy the planet with greenhouse gases, devastated forests, and bombs.

Capitalism is leading humanity to disaster!

The class that rules world society, the bourgeoisie, is partly aware of this reality, of the barbaric future that its dying system promises us. You only have to read the studies and predictions of its own experts to see this.

According to the "Global Risks Report" presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2023: “The first years of this decade have heralded a particularly disruptive period in human history. The return to a ‘new normal’ following the COVID-19 pandemic was quickly disrupted by the outbreak of war in Ukraine, ushering in a fresh series of crises in food and energy [...]. As 2023, begins the world faces a series of risks [...]: inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars [...], geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare [...], unsustainable levels of debt [...], a decline in human development [...], the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions [...]. Together, these are converging to shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come.”

In reality, the coming decade is not so "uncertain" as the same Report says: “The next decade will be characterised by environmental and societal crises [...], the 'cost of living crisis' [...], biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse [...], geo-economic confrontation [...], large-scale involuntary migration [...], global economic fragmentation, geopolitical tensions [...]. Economic warfare is becoming the norm, with increasing confrontation between world powers [...]. The recent uptick in military expenditure [...] could lead to a global arms race [...], with the targeted deployment of new-tech weaponry on a potentially more destructive scale than seen in recent decades.”

Faced with this overwhelming prospect, the bourgeoisie is powerless. It and its system are not the solution, they are the cause of the problem. If, in the mainstream media, it tries to make us believe that it is doing everything possible to fight global warming, that a “green” and “sustainable” capitalism is possible, it knows the extent of its lies. For, as the 'Global Risks Report' points out: “Today, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have all reached record highs. Emission trajectories make it very unlikely that global ambitions to limit warming to 1.5°C will be achieved. Recent events have exposed a divergence between what is scientifically necessary and what is politically expedient.”

In reality, this “divergence” is not limited to the climate issue. It expresses the fundamental contradiction of an economic system based not on the satisfaction of human needs but on profit and competition, on the predation of natural resources and the ferocious exploitation of the class that produces most of the social wealth: the proletariat, the wage workers of all countries.

Is another future possible?

Capitalism and the bourgeoisie are one of the two poles of society, one that leads humanity towards poverty and war, towards barbarism and destruction. The other pole is the proletariat and its struggle. For a year now, in the social movements that have been developing in France, Britain, and Spain, workers, pensioners, the unemployed and students have been sticking together. This active solidarity, this collective combativity, are witnesses to the profound nature of the workers' struggle: a struggle for a radically different world, a world without exploitation or social classes, without competition, without borders or nations. “Workers stick together”, shout strikers in the UK. “Either we fight together or we'll end up sleeping in the street”, confirmed the demonstrators in France. The banner “For all of us” under which the strike against attacks on living standards took place in Germany on 27 March shows clearly the general feeling that is growing in the working class: we are all in the same boat and we are all fighting for each other. The strikes in Germany, the UK and France are inspired by each other. In France, workers explicitly went on strike in solidarity with their class brothers and sisters fighting in Britain: “We are in solidarity with the British workers, who have been on strike for weeks for higher wages”. This reflex of international solidarity is the exact opposite of the capitalist world divided into competing nations, up to and including war. It recalls the rallying cry of our class since 1848: “The proletariat has no country! Workers of the world, unite!”

1968

All over the world, the mood in society is changing. After decades of passivity and holding back, the working class is beginning to find its way back to struggle and self-respect. This was shown by the ‘Summer of Anger’ and the return of strikes in the UK, almost forty years after the miners' defeat by Thatcher in 1985.

But we all feel the difficulties and the current limits of our struggles. Faced with the steamroller of the economic crisis, inflation, and the government attacks that they call “reforms”, we are not yet able to establish a balance of forces in our favour. Often isolated in separate strikes, or frustrated by demonstrations reduced to mere processions, without meetings or discussion, without general assemblies or collective organisations, we all aspire to a wider, stronger, united movement. In demonstrations in France, the call for a new May 68 is constantly being heard. Faced with the "reform" that delays retirement age to 64, the most popular slogan on the placards was: “You give us 64, we give you May 68”.

In 1968, the proletariat in France united by taking the struggle into its own hands. Following the huge demonstrations of 13 May protesting against police repression handed out to students, the walkouts and general assemblies spread like wildfire in the factories and all the workplaces to end up, with 9 million strikers, in the biggest strike in the history of the international workers' movement. Faced with this dynamic of extension and unity of the workers' struggle, the government and the unions rushed to sign an agreement for a general wage increase in order to stop the movement. At the same time as this reawakening of the workers' struggle was taking place, there was a strong return to the idea of revolution, which was discussed by many workers in struggle.

An event on this scale was evidence of a fundamental change in the life of society: it was the end of the terrible counter-revolution which had engulfed the working class since the end of the 1920s with the failure of the world revolution following its first victory in October 1917 in Russia. A counter-revolution that had taken on the hideous face of Stalinism and Fascism, that had opened the door to the Second World War with its 60 million dead and then continued for two decades more. But the resurgence of struggle that began in France in 1968 was rapidly confirmed in all parts of the world by a series of struggles on a scale unknown for decades:

- The Italian hot autumn of 1969, also known as 'rampant May', which saw massive struggles in the main industrial centres and an explicit challenge to the trade union leadership.

- The workers’ uprising in Córdoba, Argentina, in the same year.

- The massive strikes of workers on the Baltic in Poland in the winter of 1970-71.

- Numerous other struggles in the following years in virtually all European countries, particularly the UK.

- In 1980, in Poland, faced with rising food prices, the strikers carried this international wave even further by taking their struggles into their own hands, gathering in huge general assemblies, deciding for themselves what demands to make and what actions to take, and, above all, constantly striving to extend the struggle. Faced with this display of strength by the workers, it was not just the Polish bourgeoisie that trembled, but the ruling class in all countries.

In two decades, from 1968 to 1989, a whole generation of workers acquired experience in the struggle. Its many defeats, and sometimes victories, allowed this generation to confront the many traps set by the bourgeoisie to sabotage, divide and demoralise. Its struggles must allow us to draw vital lessons for our current and future struggles: only gathering in open and massive general assemblies, autonomously, really deciding on the direction of the movement, outside and even against union control, can we lay the basis for a united and growing struggle, undertaken with solidarity between all sectors, all generations. Mass meetings in which we feel united and confident in our collective strength. Mass meetings in which we can adopt increasingly unifying demands together. Mass meetings in which we gather and from which we can go in massive delegations to meet our class brothers and sisters, workers in factories, hospitals, schools, shopping centres, offices... those that are closest to us.

The new generation of workers, who are now taking up the torch, must get together, debate, in order to reacquire the great lessons of past struggles. The older generation must tell the younger generation about their struggles, so that the accumulated experience is passed on and can become a weapon in the struggles to come.

What about tomorrow?

But we must also go further. The wave of international struggle that began in May 1968 was a reaction to the slowdown in growth and the reappearance of mass unemployment. Today, the situation is much more serious. The catastrophic state of capitalism puts the very survival of humanity at stake. If we do not succeed in overturning it, barbarism will gradually take over.

The momentum of May '68 was shattered by a double lie from the bourgeoisie: when the Stalinist regimes collapsed in 1989-91, they claimed that the collapse of Stalinism meant the death of communism and that a new era of peace and prosperity was opening up. Three decades later, we know from experience that instead of peace and prosperity, we got war and misery. We still have to understand that Stalinism is the antithesis of communism, that it is a particularly brutal form of state capitalism that emerged from the counter-revolution of the 1920s. By falsifying history, by passing off Stalinism as communism (like yesterday's USSR and today’s China, Cuba, Venezuela or North Korea!), the bourgeoisie managed to make the working class believe that its revolutionary project of liberation could only lead to disaster. Until suspicion and distrust fell on the very word “revolution”.

But in the struggle, we will gradually develop our collective strength, our self-confidence, our solidarity, our unity, our self-organisation. In the struggle, we will gradually realise that we, the working class, are capable of offering another perspective than the nightmare promised by a decaying capitalist system: the communist revolution.

The perspective of the proletarian revolution is growing, in our minds and in our struggles.

The future belongs to the class struggle!

International Communist Current, 22 April 2023

Since the beginning of the movement against pension reform in France, the attitude of the trade unions has been described as exemplary by large parts of the political apparatus, by numerous commentators and journalists. The oldest deputy in the National Assembly, Charles de Courson, has even paid homage to the unions for being able to “hold on to the movement”. So why all these big eulogies from the exploiting class?

By showing themselves to be united in the “Intersyndicale”, inflexible about retirement at 64, the unions are presenting themselves, in the eyes of the majority of workers, as their real representatives and as an indispensable force for making the government take a step back. Of course, given the level of anger, the massive scale of the movement, and its fighting spirit, they can’t go on occupying the terrain by calling for days of action every week.

But at the same time, they have not ceased deploring the ignorance the government has shown towards them, the “social partners” of the state who remain guarantors of “social cohesion” (and thus of capitalist order), a point stressed by the Secretary of the UNSA union on TV recently. For weeks, the unions have not stopped offering Macron and his government a helping hand by trying to calm the situation and find a way out of this “democratic crisis” (Laurent Berger, Secretary of the CFDT union federation).

What’s more, as they say, things wouldn’t have got to this point if there had been a “real dialogue” and “real negotiations” in order to find a “real compromise”. Now, everything seems to depend on the decision of the Constitutional Council, predicted for 14 April, which will give its advice about the pension reform. This body doesn’t have much chance of offering the government a way out by censuring the law. But in any case, if the only “positive outcome” is going to come from the official institutions, the bourgeoisie and its media can sleep more easily after singing the praises of democracy for guaranteeing the will of the “people”.

At the same time, the unions and left parties have another mystification up their sleeve: the “Referendum d’Initiative Partagée”. This new fraud of “direct democracy”, aimed at making it appear that you can win through an alliance of “people’s representatives” and “citizen electors”, is aimed at nothing less than derailing the workers from the terrain of struggle and driving them into the hands of the Republican Institutions and the myth of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”.

It’s the unions’ skill in “holding on to the movement”, in avoiding it escaping their control, in trying to imprison it in the trap of democracy, which the parties of the bourgeoisie are saluting so openly, moved by the concern to put an end to this movement as soon as possible.

If the unions are not able to undermine the movement with their classic tactics (such as exhausting the most militant sectors or dividing the movement through breaks in the union front) they can always turn to other means to play their role of sabotaging struggles and defending bourgeois democracy.

Vincent, 10.4.23.