The National Assembly: A Circus of Lies and Hypocrisy

Elections are the best means available for businessmen and their political valets to divert the working class from its historical task - the emancipation of all humanity. An artificial terrain where your X legitimizes capitalist power, be it Charest, Marois, David, Dumont, whoever...

The diversion of the working class towards bourgeois democracy for the last 100 years has led to its passivity and defeat. The "citizens" - as politicians and unionists like to call them, in order play down theexistence of the working class - are locked in a Kafkaesque choice between political parties which offer no choice at all when it comes to ideas - obsessed only with grabbing governmental power.

All of this at a time when the crisis exposes the reality of capitalism to a degree greater than ever before: environmental problems, the impossibility of sustainable development in the unbridled race for profit, which only represents the capitalist system's apex; unemployment and growing pauperization; the use of "terrorism" to stifle any critical opposition to the economic and political order, and nationalist polarizations towards world conflict.

To abstain is to refuse bourgeois power, to deny its legitimacy; it's the refusal of the daily extortion of surplus-value from the working class.

Workers, we must realize that elections do not change anything.

Blackmail in the form of closures like Olymel will continue. Unions, which cry out that we need "to act together for Quebec", prod us continually to vote for various clones. The true decision-makers are not the deputies; they are the businessmen and businesswomen, the companies of the state's senior officials - basically all the owners
of the means production who are in charge of enterprises such as Bombardier, Québecor, Olymel, Hydro-Québec, or a possible Eole Inc. Their goal is the pursuit of profits for their stockholders and leaders. Among them, we count the official managers of state enterprises, those same state enterprises that operate symbiotically with their private sector sisters. For example, the supply of electricity at reasonable costs to the SME or other monopolies, be it Hydro-Québec or a possible Eole inc., is one of close collaboration between Québec's state capitalism and private capital. From the CSN sidestepping Quebec Solidaire for the Greens, this political "rearguard" wants nothing more than to improve "the economy of Quebec" to benefit the corporations, and to create increasingly precarious jobs…This gang of social-climbers will never admit that in the capitalist economy, employment is only temporary and that wage-cuts are increasingly permanent. Faced with the disillusionment that Capital creates, their solution isn't to bring it down but to prolong its existence, its so-called democracy, its extortion of our class'slabour. Their aim is to get us to vote in the belief that capitalismis eternal, and that we must make do with it!

To abstain will not suffice.

The increase in abstention during elections reveals the growing indifference of workers to the electoral process. However, this alone will never be sufficient. Let us stop begging at the altar of the bourgeois state with petitions, votes, or on marches of the "Francoise David" variety. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie must be destroyed and replaced by the dictatorship of workers councils. It's the prospect of the class war against our exploiters that must motivate us. Workers, we must unite to construct an internationalist proletarian party, an anti-Stalinist party!

Some internationalist communists, Montreal

Capitalism is dying! Workers of the word, Unite to put it down!

With the resounding bankruptcies of the big banks, collapsing stock markets, scarcity of credit for firms and private individuals, the emergency nationalizations of banks and insurance companies is underway in an all-out effort to avert a collapse of the entire international financial system. And now the global recession, having firmly taken root, will deepen, creating genuine panic amongst governments and capitalists worldwide. Serious anxiety will grip the population as a whole, particularly the proletariat. Every worker or salaried employee knows full well that it is he who will foot the bill. The cost of nationalizating the great US, European, and other financial companies, for starters…

The bankruptcy of capitalism is irreversible

Governments, politicians, the media and other hucksters of the bourgeoisie would have us believe that this crisis is due to the irresponsibility of bad traders who played with fire at the stockmarkets. Nonsense! Immorality of predatory financiers… Lies! Madness in the real-estate sector with its "sub-primes"… Nothing but lies! Deregulation of the market… They just can’t stop! It would suffice, they say, to ‘moralize’ finance capitalism and to impose stricter rules to avoid this catastrophe. Every time, at each new crisis, they spout the same hot air: ‘capitalism isn't responsible, only its excesses’.

But nobody explains why capital prefers to invest in speculation rather than the sectors of production. It’s simple, however: the profits from investment in productive sectors are too low. And they are too low because the world market cannot absorb all the goods that the productive forces can create. Capitalism has long developed through the exploitation of the working class in every country, a capacity of productive forces such that it can't find the commercial outlets for all the goods produced. This is the historical contradiction in capitalism: a surplus of goods while billions of human beings live in poverty, unable to afford the immense mass of goods produced. This reveals the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, and the present terrible crisis is only its expression.

We pay for capitalism's plunge into massive and generalized debt !

One of the means capitalism has used for ages to overcome the overproduction of goods is to artificially create a market through massive and generalized debt, primarily that of the State. But even if this delays the outbreak of the disease, the remedy can only exacerbate it. The capitalist world today is faced with a mountain of debt that nobody – and above all neither the State nor the ruling class – will ever repay… and that the international proletariat will have to pay with its sweat and blood. Like the nationalizations of bankrupted banks, the burden of the massive injection of "liquidy" to the central banks to avoid the credit crunch - and thus the paralysis of the economy - and the creation of "bail-out packages" to rescue banks will be borne by the working class, demanding sacrifice, misery, further exploitation, unemployment and repression.

But just as with the generalized debt, this won't suffice. Faced with bankruptcy and lack of solvent markets – even if, today, at the end of 2008, the world’s bourgeoisie, in a panic at the prospect of a generalized collapse, temporarily buries its rivalries in order to come up with a global response – the economic and commercial competition, already acute, tomorrow will become even more savage and brutal; beginning with the capitalist States – expressions of each national capital and main defenders of its interests. Besides increased exploitation of the working class everywhere, all of this can only lead to commercialy and economicaly exacerbated rivalries, transforming them into political, military and imperialist rivalries in which the main capitalist powers of the world play the primary roles, one against the other.

We pay for capitalism's rush to a new world war !

Have no illusions! There are no possible reforms, much less any solution in today’s capitalism. There is but one outcome to the economic crisis and to the ultimate global bankruptcy it represents: mass destruction and the vast slaughterhouse of world war. This is precisely what this system has proven twice in the 20^th century. The 1929 crisis – to which all economists and others refer today with horror in describing the extent of the present crisis – led to WWII. This is how it occurred with the economic difficulties – expressed in the 1907 financial crisis – at the turn of the 20^th century which plunged the capitalist world into WWI. Already, the violent international recession currently unfolding, can only further exacerbate imperialist rivalries between the great powers. The local wars multiply on all international fronts, increasingly bringing the main imperialist powers into direct confrontation, as the war between Russia and Georgia has just shown. Far from slowing down, this conflict, which had the Russian and the US navies facing off in the Black Sea, has consequently seen the accelerated installation of military systems all over the world, particularly in Europe. Everyone can see this: preparations for military confrontations between the main imperialist powers of the planet is clearly underway.

Have no illusions! Capitalism must be brought down and a new society without classes must be set up!

Have no illusions! Bankrupted capitalism is preparing for decisive, massive, brutal and bloody confrontations against the international working class in order to impose complete and total submission. For only the international proletariat – the main productive class, the wage class – poses any obstacle to the ruling class in its march towards generalized war. It, alone, can really fight to destroy capitalism, save humanity and to set up a new society without classes, thus without exploitation and without war.

Fighting capitalism? The working class is already engaged through its present struggles and strikes, limited as they are, against capitalist policies of all kinds. The media exerts a genuine censorship on this level, and when it can't deny the reality of these struggles, it misrepresents them. Who today has heard about the general strike in Belgium? Or the general strike in Greece for that matter? And what about the strikes and demonstrations in the car industry in Europe, in Volkswagen, in Renault, etc? Who has heard about the strike of the Boeing workers in the United-States? And how many others on every continent?

These struggles, though often still inadequate to repell the bourgeoisie's immediate attacks, demonstrate the working class refusal to subordinate its interests to those of the exploiting class, indicating that it's not ready to accept new and even more serious and brutal sacrifices: massive unemployment, drastic cuts in wages, social benefits, pensions – all generally intolerable policies that the bourgeoisie, facing recession, has already begun to impose. And, much less, accept the ultimate sacrifice of life in a generalized war.

Destroying capitalism? It is in these current struggles, their development, dissemination and in their unification that the international proletariat develops its determination and confidence in its ability to struggle, to resist. It's in these struggles that it develops above all its experience and its consciousness, and thus its capacity to destroy capitalism and set up another society, exempt from war, hunger and misery, without classes or exploitation. It is also within the capacity of today’s genuine communist groups – weak, dispersed, and isolated as they are – to intervene in these struggles in a decisive and resolute manner, putting forth clear political perspectives, for this working class struggle to be fully realized. And it's in the capacity of these political minorities to unite and constitute a genuine world Communist Party that the international proletariat could truly and effectively appropriate the program of the Revolution, the Communist Program.

We must do away with illusions: with capitalism's bankruptcy, the hour of massive frontal confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is upon us. This is a rendez-vous that the latter can not afford to miss. The fate of humanity depends upon it.

The Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current

Internationalist Communists of Montreal

An answer to the leftist action of May First

Capitalism is our misery...

Let’s sow revolutionary confusion!

This past Mayday was dished out to us on a sickening Procrustean bed by the various leftist organizations polluting Quebec’s proletarian political milieu. Indeed, a profusion of libertarian organizations coming from burst horizons (NEFAC, Anarkhia) was linked to the Maoists and other Stalinists (Revolutionary Communist party, Carrefour Quebec-Cuba) around a judicious extremely confused leaflet to represent the anger of the world’s so-called “poor” and “oppressed” – two ambiguous and catch-all terms typically used by the bourgeoisie, which will never represent anything other than social categories of variable geometry; two terms, therefore, utterly alien to Marxists and proletarians…

And so throughout the text, no mention at all of the only class capable of bringing about the revolutionary project – the proletariat! The autonomy of the proletariat in facing the opposing class, the bourgeoisie, is an essential condition for the development of its struggles toward the communist revolutionary project – without a doubt the only historical project focused on putting a final end to the capitalist mode of production. However we must stop and consider that there is no doubt some real revolutionary will on behalf of certain individuals within these groups; perhaps even some of the signatory groups themselves which don’t know the “program” and haven’t yet made an assessment of the struggles and defeats of the working class since the introduction of a state capitalism during the Twenties in Russia.

Keep in mind that the groups having signed this call don’t share the same vision of “anti-capitalism” and class-struggle. Most of these groups are, in fact, openly reformist, crypto-reformists, or haven’t a clue what tap they’re drinking from, while choosing between various forms of capitalism (like the state capitalism of the Stalinist PCR and Carrefour Quebec-Cuba, or the self-managed capitalism of the NEFAC).

We should also get it through our heads that capitalism with a human face does not exist. For the working class, to mend the broken pieces of capitalism through capitalist means is a misleading and impossible idea. Capitalism is a class system based on the surplus produced by our class. It’s not simply a question of human solidarity, as one would have it, since this world is divided into two antagonistic classes which clash daily. Where’s the human solidarity in events like Katrina? You find it mainly amongst the proletariat. How many of these fine bourgeois do we see investing their time, energy, and money in our assistance? Very few. And often, it s the pressure of the circumstances themselves which forces even that assistance. Thus there’s no point in talking about communism, here, since these groups in fact are not. For us, the only social class that can change the world is the working class, and proletarian internationalism is an essential precondition for that change to occur.

Communist ideas, the communist perspective, are disseminated only while working within the ranks of the proletariat, not isolated in leftist groups aligned with capitalism. Alliance with these groups, whose policies clearly oppose the interests of the proletariat, can only lead to one opportunistic dead-end which, in the final analysis, serves only the intentions of the bourgeoisie by sowing confusion within our class.

Indeed, all alliances, common, united, or antifascist fronts, with the left or the right-hand of capital (and ipso facto with fractions of the bourgeoisie), only end up by disarming the proletariat in the face of its adversary, forcing it away from the only ground from which it draws its conscience and its strength – its class terrain! Any political current which attempts to drive the working class from it’s own terrain, while trying to associate it with interests contrary to those of the proletariat, directly serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. For Marxists, it’s never a question of the lesser of two evils. The only real objective is the interpenetration of class struggles towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, initially, and then finally Communism.

Down with the dictatorship of the parties!

Down with frontism and popular fronts!

Long live the global dictatorship of the proletariat!

Factory closures, layoffs and suspensions: this is what the bourgeoisie offers us globally!

May 1st 2008

Today, everywhere in the world, capitalism in crisis manifests plans of economic management resulting in factory closures, through mass layoffs, wage cuts for those who manage to keep their jobs… Primarily, by more misery for our class, the proletariat. This, without mentioning the 2/3 of humanity starved by this system. Today, here, there and everywhere, this very capitalism spreads its barbarism in every conceivable form: escalation of wars and areas of inter-imperialist tensions, the proliferation of numerous terrible acts of terror – and let’s not forget those ecological catastrophes occurring ever more frequently – maiming and killing thousands, each and every day.

The ruling class, abetted by its media, manages to justify all its anti-worker policies by so-called “imperative necessities” of an ideologically planned and manufactured “globalization”, as it sweeps under the rug the daily atrocities generated by its system while offering local assholes (such as Vincent Lacroix, Pierre Karl Péladeau and Conrad Black) as scapegoats or by putting it all down to fate and luck of the draw.

But some workers resist!

At Olymel of Valley-Junction, Friday, April 18, following disciplinary measures aimed at seven of their comrades, workers from the “Cutting” sector went on a massive strike, paralyzing the factory. They didn’t wait for the union, which wanted to take the suspensions to arbitration while sticking to a nauseating 7-year collective agreement.

Then, the boss’s watchdog, the State, came to the rescue, ordered the resumption of work deeming the strike under consideration for Monday to be illegal. Despite this and the union’s disavowal of the strike, that evening the factory’s employees voted 78% in favour of an illegal strike on Monday morning. As a result of their action independent of the trade union, the disciplinary measures against six workers were overturned! The seventh case will be the subject of an accelerated arbitration.

Elsewhere in the world, let us also consider the example of Pomigliano’s FIAT factory in southern Italy that’s paralyzed by a strike. A working committee, formed independently of the union apparatus, organized the mobilization. Until Sunday April 13, the picket lines were supported by 99% of the employees. Monday April 14, the strikers decided to block the flow of commodities to shut the factory down completely. The conflict concerns the fate of 316 skilled workers considered “inconvenient” by the company, which decided to subcontract out their jobs. Trucks will continue to be blocked so long as the 316 workers are not reinstated. Active solidarity and support are essential for strikers manning the picket lines 24 hours a day.

As these two battles clearly show, the working class is not ready to accept the increasing and massive sacrifices that capitalists and their State seek to impose on them.

Careful with fake solutions!

The two battles of Olymel and FIAT are quite different from those of Crocs of Quebec and Golden Brand delicious of Montreal. In Crocs, the State, through its Minister for “Employment and social Solidarity”, Sam Hamad, maintains that its ministry will do everything to accelerate assistance to workers and to facilitate the search for employment while the union spokesman speaks of a revival project. In spite of no mobilization and the complete isolation of the workers, the company chose to close the factory for a few weeks rather than face the prospect of resistance. Some 540 workers will lose the jobs at Golden Brand as a result of outsourcing of its clothing workshop abroad. Silly actions such as the boycott of Moores stores will not change anything. Politicians like Giles Duceppe, leader of the Block, have become political assets on the backs of workers. Their slogan may be “Buy Canada” but what they’re really saying is “Sell everywhere”. Today it’s “Buy Canada” and tomorrow it’s “Defend Canada or Quebec”… And let us kill our enemies, the workers of Vietnam, China, Russia, Romania or elsewhere through a world war of their choosing. Capitalist competition, economic crises are always regulated by wars with workers from opposing imperialist camps, obliged to kill themselves.

Workers, we do not have to support these nationalist slogans; we are the many; it is we who produce the wealth but control nothing.

Our struggles are legitimate, but are they sufficient to drive back the exploiters?

For its fight to be effective, the working class must first shift the balance of forces against the bourgeoisie. To that end it is necessary for it broaden its struggles and extend them, by means of mass delegations to other factories, companies and sectors, to do everything possible to unite them. Even though our struggles are legitimate, are they sufficient to drive back the exploiters?

To undertake this requires workers to take their struggles in hand through sovereign general assemblies and elected strike committees subject to immediate recall, and not turn back to the trade unions which are no longer, nor have been for a long time, organizations for the defense of workers interests. Quite the contrary! Today it’s the only way the proletariat can effectively defend its immediate interests and to push back the repeated attacks of capital.

But this is also that way which will enable workers tomorrow - through the development of their struggle and because they are the revolutionary class - "to storm the heavens" and rid us of this system which can only lead humanity to a new and surely a last word war.

LET’S DEVELOP AND UNIFY OUR STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITALISM, AGAINST ITS RATIONALE OF MISERY AND DEATH

Some internationalist communists, Montréal and Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current

email : cim_icm@yahoo.com

Address : CIM_ICM, C.P.55514, Succursale Maisonneuve, Montréal, (QC) H1W 0A1