Sunday, November 28, 2010

Towards decisive confrontations between the proletariat and the capitalist forces

We publish the editorial of the International Communist Bulletin of November, 2010 organ of the Fraction of the International Communist Left. This text indicates that the bourgeoisie and his State uses everywhere the same tactics to deceive the working class. Both faces of this tactics in Quebec are on one hand the Lucid and their illegitimate offsprings which want some more cuts and on the other hand the social Alliance of labor unions, these botchers of our fights, who want more intervention of the capitalist State and its democracy.

Internationalist Communists - Klasbatalo

Towards decisive confrontations between the proletariat and the capitalist forces

The classes struggle comes back with strength to assert itself as the obvious "motor of history" for everyone despite its "death" has been declared so many times by the bourgeois ideologists and propagandists. All the continents are affected by the proletariat's struggles : the Americas - Brasil, Chile, Mexico, United-States -, Asia - China, Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey -, Africa - South Africa, Egypt -, the former Eastern imperialist bloc countries - Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Baltic countries -, and now simultaneously almost all the Western European countries - Greece, Spain, Portugal, France, Great-Britain, Belgium, Germany, etc... The entire world proletariat, and particularly of its historical core, Western Europe, resumes the path of the class fight. These struggles develop in response to the massive attacks that capitalism in acute crisis is obliged to unleash against the exploited class. The so-called economical recovery is not but an illusion, an additional lie, that the daily reality - and very often too the very datas of the bourgeoisie - comes to refute. It is the same for the false good economical health of the so-called "emerging" countries"1. China - and with it Brasil - which is so often put forwards as an example, experiences an increasing "contradictory" economical situation from the capitalist point of view and a wretched one for the working class. At any moment, this country can explode at the economical as well as social level, and the massive and violent workers struggles are growing on number 2.

This simultaneous development of the workers struggles at the international level raises the question of the perspective for the "internationalization" of these struggles. It signifies that we have entered in the process which leads to generalized and historically crucial classes confrontations.

This process is confronting today to the obstacles that the State apparatus puts on its course. Firstly, the manouvers and the sabotages of the unions which are more and more forced to utilize a false internal division between the leaderships and the more radical "rank and file" [the "bases"]. The first ones organize Day of action, strikes and national street demonstrations, which aim at occupying the ground, at limiting as much as they can the break out of open fights and at supressing any direct self-organization by the workers of these ones and particularly of their spreading and unification against the State. As the growing worker pressure and combative spirit can't be contained by these Days of action, "base" unionism "accompagnies" (when it does not organize them itself) the "overrunnings", the more radical actions, the wildcat strikes - it means those which, rightly, don't respect the bourgeois law which set the so-call "right" of strike - ; the demonstrations which don't want to be harmless unions walks and which take over the streets, the strikes picket lines and blockage of the enterprises, etc. It too "accompagnies" all these social movements by muzzleing the General Assemblies which aim at being independant from the unions with "committees" and other "coordinations" that it controls - the "interprofessional General Assemblies" ["AG interprofesionnelles"] which rose in France lately, sometimes on the workers' initiative themselves, more often on the leftists and base unionists' initiative - to finally seek to derail them from their function and their goal. Despite these obstacles, the combative spirit and the workers struggles keep on searching for their way through various means and in an apparent "disorder" which is not but the very process of the classes struggle, and more particularly the one of the Mass Strike as described by Rosa Luxemburg in her time.

"It flows now like a broad billow over the [Russian] whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena". Even though the social movements are not yet at the level of those of 1905 in Russia, it is still the proces of the Mass Strike which presently develops at the international scale, particularly in Western Europe, and which will arise at its term the questions of the generalization and unification of the workers fights. If this process is today still far for expressing iself through a movement which openly questions capitalism, nevertheless it is true, as said Rosa Luxemburg, that "the mass strike is rather the indication, the rallying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades".

But we can already affirm that, rarely in history, we have known a situation such as the one which is approaching today and which gather so many objective and subjective conditions for the development of this process : the inexorable march with no return of the economical crisis (which signs the definitive historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system) is accompanied by an inevitable slide of the world proletariat in the worse misery and by the development of the warlike capitalist barbary which announces and allows the preparation by the ruling class of a new generalized holocaust ; but nevertheless these unbearable conditions ensure the working class everywhere to increasingly affirm its anger and its refusal of the bourgeois policies and it favor the development of its own experiences of struggle and of its class consciouness which have suffered so much since two decades.

Moreover the bourgeoisie does not make mistake on this and does not stop preparing itself at the international level. It voluntarily organise and develop the same strategies everywhere to confront the proletarian danger. It gives itself all the means (more particularly thanks to its unions and its medias) to delay, to disperse, to sabotage the workers ripostes and above all to prevent their conscious generalization and unification beyond the sectors ["corporatist"] divisions and even the national ones ; it means it makes all it can, from today on, to make abort the process which is initiated.

Now, for instance, almost everywhere (above all in Europe and North-América) and through the utilization of exactly the same means, it adapts its political apparatus to the classes contradictions worsening. Thus, through the publicity it makes ot the "extremist oppositions" of the Left and the Right, it specifically arms itself against the working class : with the first "opposition", it aims at covering its social flank, the one of the struggles ; as for the second one, it serves as a scarecrow in order to derail the attention of the workers towards the supposed cause of the "Democracy in danger" and, through this, to chain up them behind the defence of the democratic State. We come back in this bulletin on this phenomenon in our article Partout la bourgeoisie prépare son appareil d'Etat pour contrer le prolétariat en lutte [Everywhere the bourgeoisie prepares its State apparatus to oppose the proletariat in struggle, only in French and Spanish3].

But, in the perspective of the inevitable massive confrontations which already mature, the bourgeoisie can't just impede the development of the workers struggles and of the class consciousness amongst the great workers masses. It also directly attack the political vanguard of the proletariat, it means to the communist forces, at the political and ideological level. These ones are already affected by dispersion and sectarianism which today handicap the workers reaction and the historical relation of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The pressure of the bourgeois ideology within the political proletarian camp is permanent which justifies the permanent fight that has to be led against the various manifestations of political opportunism. The present ICC, in its crazy run on this path, apparently without any brake, presently attempts a true strike ["coup de force"] in order to introduce anarchism as a full component of the revolutionary camp, even indeed as the alter-ego of the Communist Left ! As well as this cannot but precipitate the liquidation, already well begun, of this organization and its definitive lost as a communist organization, the passive acceptance and the silence of the other forces of the proletarian camp about the theoretical and political revisions by the ICC will also represent a considerable handicap for the proletariat in its perspective to massive classes confrontations.

As particular moment of this fight, the reader will find in this bulletin the open letter we are sending to the whole militants of the ICC. And we call all the communist groups and all the sympathizers of the Communist Left, and firstly of the ICC itself, to intervene and to get involved in this struggle 4.

Obviously, even though it is fundamental for us, we don't limit the action of the communist groups to this single dimension. Their intervention is as well important in the development of the workers struggles and in the process of Mass Strike in which we have entered. Up to today, their dispersion and their political hesitancies did not allow that this intervention be at the level, not of the necessity in regards to the class, but of their political and militant forces. Though, from the history and the political positions they do share, they have the means and the possibility to speak with a single voice in the struggles of today and of tomorrow. Their existence has no other significance.

October 31st; 2010.

1. Other example amongts others of an ex-"Asian Tiger" so much vaunted : Singapour GNP has reduced by 19% the last quarter. Source : IILS, 09/2010.

2. Source : yahoofinances, 14/10/2010.

3. See : Por todas partes la burguesía prepara su aparato de Estado para enfrentar al proletariado en lucha

4. We are ready to reproduce on our web site and in our bulletin any contribution or intervention of group or individual.

Fraction of the International Communist Left - International Communist Bulletin 3