Workers!

The general conditions of life and work have been deteriorating for years, becoming ever more intolerable. Poverty, hunger, wars, destruction, so-called “natural” catastrophes are the only order of the day. While on the one hand we see overproduction of commodities of every description, often more harmful than useful, we are witnessing on the other hand a systemic destruction of the productive forces and nature. Society today has nothing beneficial to offer except to the ruling classes which represent only a tiny minority of the world population.

The economic crisis has savaged millions upon million of proletarians: businesses close, workers lose their jobs by the tens of thousands and are thrown into the bleakest poverty, the purchasing power of wages decreases drastically and generally; with the proletariat being increasingly relegated to the margins of a society which they have enriched by their labor.

With the crisis all the ills of society multiply: crime, prostitution, abuse of alcohol and
drugs, etc..., with the growing crisis comes economic violence and employer harassment of workers, the despotism of the enterprise, police violence and bourgeois repression, deaths at the workplace, in wars; competition between proletarians increases apace, deepens the exploitation of workers still more, and all this to keep alive a system based on wage slavery which regularly plunges into increasingly profound crises after brief periods of “prosperity and economic recovery”.

The crisis obliges all governments to adopt economic measures and social policies deemed urgent to address and overcome the overproduction that has strangled the markets, but the history of capitalism shows that all measures taken by the dominant bourgeois class are unable to resolve the internal contradictions of capitalism: the crises inevitably return, each time with a greater magnitude. Their historic outcome leads to generalized war capable only of large scale destruction of the superfluous productive forces – and this includes workers – in order to provide a new beginning to capitalist accumulation. This can only be countered by the proletarian revolution in which the class party organizes and counterposes revolutionary violence to the violence of the reactionary ruling class and its government in order to wrest power from the bourgeoisie and to direct all class energies towards the eradication of the real cause of the crimes against contemporary society – the capitalist system of production – thus opening the way for a vastly superior society, without classes, exploitation or oppression – communism.

To overcome the crisis and maintain social control, the ruling class simultaneously uses legal, peaceful, democratic means and repression and brutal force (from regular beatings in police stations to so-called “police murder and mayhem” in our neighborhoods, and “anti-terrorist operations” for the smashing of picket lines and factory occupations), it uses not only the various state institutions, but also more diverse social, political, economic, religious, cultural or sporting organizations, as well as the unions and the collaborationist parties to prevent the proletariat from being organized on a class basis to be able to lead a real defense of their living and working conditions..

Comrades!

The proletariat must not be intimidated or misled! Their potential strength lies not only in numbers but in their organization, their unity in the struggle for their class interests, long time residents shoulder-to-shoulder with more recent arrivals, “regularized” or undocumented, young or old, male or female, employed or unemployed, public sector or private, whatever the sector or the industry where they work. The ruling class has only one objective: to maintain and increase capitalist profits in a period when they are threatened by the crisis and the increased competition in the global market which this causes. All those who wish to make us believe that it is possible to use the bourgeois political system (parliamentary elections) and its institutions to defend the interests of workers or make capitalism more “human” are in fact auxiliaries of the ruling class: these institutions and the system, aided by constant and multidimensional propaganda, have been built up and refined over time with the sole purpose of defending capitalism against the dangers of social revolution. All those who promote dialogue and collaboration between “social partners”, those who claim to ensure the existence of common interests between workers and bosses, exploiters and exploited, between proletariat and bourgeoisie, are really defenders of the status quo, the established order, in a word, capitalism. Whenever discontent is too widespread, whenever serious and tough strikes occur or whenever the capitalist are planning an attack of any magnitude against the workers, the collaborationist union apparatus arrives at the scene: as real social firemen, they are responsible for preventing or sterilizing the proletarian struggle, either by keeping struggles carefully isolated, or by organizing large campaigns to demobilize the workers (like the famous, one-day, one-city “General Strikes”): which, unfortunately, they’ve gotten away with so far.

Workers of the World!

The proletarians have behind them a rich history of struggle and revolution, of fighting against the armies, police forces, the legal and illegal forces of bourgeois rule, during which they twice succeeded in seizing power: in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. It is also a history of defeats, but Marxism has been able to learn many lessons from these also – the most important of which is the necessity of the class party to lead the class combat according to the revolutionary communist program and by defending the invariance of Marxism, which is to say by the invariance of the final goal – communism – and how to achieve it – the class struggle, revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat.

For decades, and since the end of World War Two especially, unions and false “communist” or “socialist” collaborationist parties have been the essential guardians of capitalist development. Based on the crumbs from exploitation that capitalism could concede to the workers as social shock absorbers, the collaborationist forces have crippled the proletariat and have chained them to class collaboration, causing them to forget the memory and traditions of the class struggle, they've been reduced to being mere extensions of the productive forces, veritable robots in the service of capital, replaceable or removable just like any other tool.

But the ever more suffocating pressure of capitalism makes increasingly urgent the need for an end to this paralysis, to break with the collaborationist forces and to return to the path of the real struggle. While courageous battles are fought or continue to be waged in isolation, the union leaders are either busy stirring up jingo resentment against the latest job loses, or preparing to sell away the future of “their” workers for “attrition” and pension schemes which, if they do anything, only secure these fat-cats their six or seven or eight figure salaries – ample reward for fending off any serious reaction from workers.

Workers, comrades!

Workers are doomed to failure when they abandon the terrain of class struggle, when they rely on collaborationist, pacifist, legalistic, democratic methods of self-defense. By glaring contrast, their strength is huge when they enter into battle in defense of the immediate and historical objectives of their own class, the one that produces all the wealth of society although it is the class that possesses none. The proletarians must regain confidence in their own strength, their ability to respond to all the attacks, all the hardships, all the humiliations, all the oppression imposed upon them by capitalism: it is possible if we begin to self-organize independently around objectives, methods and classist means, for the exclusive defence of our immediate class interests, the only means of preparing the qualitative leap towards the future revolutionary political struggle for emancipation from the yoke of capitalism.

The First of May will once again become the International Day of proletarian class struggle when the proletariat, whatever their race or nationality and wherever they are located on this earth, recognize themselves as class brothers and sisters ready to fight for the final defeat of the exploitation of man by man, for the victory of communism!

Workers of all countries, unite! will no longer be a consoling phrase, but the battle cry of the world revolution!

Wage increase for all! Higher for the lowest paid categories! Full salary to the unemployed and job seekers! Drastic reduction of the working day for all! Big increase in all social minimums! No to increasing the retirement age and lowering pensions! No to evictions and arrests of undocumented workers, immediate regularization of all! No One is Illegal! No to repression of workers’ struggles!

These are some of the most immediate proletarian demands which need to be implemented:

the renaissance of organizations of struggle independent of class collaborationist apparatuses and practices, the refusal of any class collaboration in the name of defending the national economy or the company, the return to class methods;
and are part of the struggle against the imperialist policy of the bourgeoisie and for the international solidarity of workers!

International Communist Party, 1 May 2010

www.pcint.org