INTERNATIONALIST COMMUNISTS - KLASBATALO!

ALL EYES ON LONGVIEW: AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL

2012-01-17T11:18:00.002-05:00

What we are witnessing here is a politically motivated attack against the longshoremen not only by the direct employers, but by their state, mindful of a section of the working class, which has shown its capacity to go beyond the simply economic many times, especially by challenging the warmongering of american capitalism over the past decades. This capacity to go beyond economic demands has become evident particularly with the recent efforts to extend the Oakland occupy movement into a general strike against the american state. What the ruling class fears most is the potential threat of a politically awakened working class.

We know from the past that once proletarian struggle reaches certain level, it will indeed come up against the state, its judges, its police and military. This poses the importance of creating a global communist party which can put forward guidelines for clear policies in the coming struggles. "the battles, revolts, uprisings that punctuate the long road of the workers movement have never been transformed by their own virtue, as seen in many of the assaults by the entire revolutionary proletariat against capitalism as a whole"

Onorato Damen. We won’t build the party by sustaining this paradox

For your information, we publish these text of an American proletariat struggle.

ALL EYES ON LONGVIEW: AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL

Jan. 14, 2012

Dear friend(s) and comrade(s):

We are writing to inform you about a very serious class confrontation developing on the northwest coast of the U.S., in Longview (Washington state).

In that small city, an international grain company, EGT, owned jointly by three firms

(U.S.-based Bunge North America, Japan-based Itochu and Korea-based STX Pan Ocean), spent $200 million constructing a new state- of- the-art grain terminal.

While the construction was underway, EGT indicated that it would continue to employ the 225 members of ILWU Local 21 in Longview, in keeping with the solid unionization of west coast American ports since the 1930’s by the ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union).

Instead, when the construction was completed, EGT turned to a “rogue” union, General Construction and Operating Engineers Local 701, with the intention of displacing the ILWU with a “sweetheart” contract saving the company (according to its estimates) $1 million a year in labor costs.

The breaking of Local 21 will undoubtedly be a prelude to further attacks on the

ILWU up and down the west coast, with automation another battering ram. Clearly, the bosses and the state are out to pit ILWU workers against Occupy militants in order to isolate and weaken both. They recognize and fear the demonstrated power of joint Occupy/ILWU action.

In spite of that threat, the ILWU International called for confining the protest to EGT and Longview and for not shutting down other ports. They will tell the longshoremen to cross Occupy picket lines everywhere except Longview. On Jan. 6, ILWU thugs attacked a meeting of Occupy Seattle that was planning solidarity actions with Longview.

Local 10 oppositionists, including former officers and rank-and-filers, declare that they will shut the Port of Oakland down if the ship attempts to land. In fact, the thugs who attacked the Jan. 6 Occupy Seattle meeting did so just when retired Oakland longshoreman and Local 10 opposition leader, Jack Heyman, told the meeting that the ILWU rank-and-file in Oakland, Portland and Seattle had voted with their feet to honor the Occupy picket lines and close those ports on Dec. 12, Occupy’s West Coast port shutdown, and would do so again when the grain ship docks at Longview. Whether or not this will happen, against the intense pressure being brought by the state and the bosses, with the complicity of the ILWU International and several Local presidents, remains to be seen.

After months of standoff, on Sept. 7 of last year, riot police escorted a train to the EGT terminal, arresting 19 people. On the morning of Sept. 8, hundreds of longshoremen entered the terminal and destroyed the grain delivery. Later that day, longshoremen in five neighboring ports, including Seattle (Washington) and Portland (Oregon) wildcatted in solidarity with Longview.

Since that confrontation in early September, 220 of the 225 members of Local 21 have been arrested. The local president has been arrested six times and his arm broken by police. Both private thugs and police have created an atmosphere in Longview reminiscent of the 1920’s coalfield wars. The thugs are jumping longshoremen on the street and the police are dragging union members from their homes in the middle of the night.

A new ship is due to arrive in Longview to load a grain shipment some time in the next two weeks. It will be escorted by ships of the U.S. Coast Guard as well as helicopters; further police and private goon forces will be present to militarize the town. Under the new national security law signed by President Obama on New Year’s eve, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) anyone committing a “belligerent act” against the U.S. can be imprisoned indefinitely without charges or trial on the orders of the president. U.S. ports are already semi-militarized by “Homeland Security”, with longshoremen required to show no less than three electronic “smart card” IDs to enter their workplace every day, and are subject to background security checks. It hardly requires a leap of the imagination to envision the possibility of linking militant labor action to “terrorism”.

It is essential that this attack on workers on the west coast of the U.S. receive maximum international attention and active solidarity. While the date of the arrival of the ship is still a secret, Occupy forces in the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle are organizing caravans for a convergence on Longview when the date becomes known. Elsewhere in the U.S., Occupy is planning demonstrations at Coast Guard offices and at the offices of the three corporations which jointly own EGT.

International support, starting with longshore workers in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, is also essential. In 2001, five black longshoremen in Charleston (South Carolina) were facing years of prison on trumped-up charges after police charged their picket line. Once dock workers in Europe announced that they would not handle ships going to or from Charleston, all charges against the “Charleston 5” were dropped.

Something similar, on an even grander scale, is necessary today.

Insurgent Notes urges everyone receiving this to join the struggle, either by preparing to join the convergence in Longview, or participating in the actions closer to them against the U.S. Coast Guard or Bunge, Itochu and STX Pan Ocean.

The Longview confrontation will be the latest, and hardest test to date of the ability of the forces which shut down west coast ports on Nov. 2 and Dec. 12 to continue to mobilize mass support. Key to its success will be a serious, class-wide alliance of rank-and-file dock workers, the much larger numbers of unorganized truckers in the ports, and the casualized mass which forms the radical wing of Occupy. Turn this defensive struggle into an offensive one now!

Insurgent Notes ( www.insurgentnotes.com )

*If you wish to contribute money to the convergence on Longview, go to http://occupyoakland.org/donate/

and go to “Donate specifically to West Coast Port Shutdown”.

There a Real Alternative

2011-12-05T11:02:00.005-05:00

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo havin't any organisational links with the Internationalist Communist Tendency and we still have not so well-defined divergencies with some of their political positions. Nevertheless we've reprinted this very good article because it's important for our class.

There a Real Alternative

There’s one thing about the present crisis: the idea that there must be a better alternative capitalism is gaining ground. Day by day, as daily life becomes more and more gruelling, the need to find that alternative is becoming a practical necessity. Yes, the technological means and infrastructure exist to make another world possible, a world where everybody can make a contribution to society, where no human being is in a position to exploit another and where nobody need go hungry or without a roof over their head. But we should be under no illusion that such momentous — dare we say it, revolutionary, change — can be tolerated, much less introduced by any of the existing political and legal set-ups that comprise even the most ‘democratic’ capitalist state.

In fact, one of the things this crisis is highlighting is that parliamentary democracy has nothing at all to do with giving workers a say in how they live and work. Quite the opposite.

All over the advanced capitalist world parliaments and congresses, upper houses and lower houses, are passing austerity programmes, slashing health care, cutting pensions, reducing social security payments, loosening employment protection laws all of which mean sacrifices for the majority of wage workers for the sake of bailing out a system openly based on making profit. Under capitalism the well-being of the majority of people is incidental to that prime purpose. To any rational observer this is ludicrous.

Our “Democracy” Workers can run things differently.

They carry the seeds of a new society within them every time they decide on collective action. In real independent struggles we organise from the bottom. Mass meetings elect strike committees to coordinate the strike and link up with others in the same boat. The committee is responsible to the mass meeting and can be immediately recalled by it. Committee members can be replaced if necessary.

Compare this to capitalism’s offer of a vote every 5 or so years for one or other party backed by the millions of capitalist money.

Our system would be based on delegates from local level going to regional level and electing delegates to go to higher bodies beyond that.

These are not like MPs who are “representatives”. In fact MPs don’t even represent the voters who elect them but only themselves or their parties. And they cannot be removed for years. A delegate system is entirely different. At every level the delegates can be quickly recalled if they fail to carry out their mandates.

This would be more “democratic” than the current set up. But that is only half the story. You cannot have real “democracy” without economic equality. At the same time as setting up a new political structure we have also got to get rid of the inequalities which capitalism needs to survive. Working people will have to take over the running of their own firms and run them for the community producing for the general good of all.At the same time money as a system of accounting will have to abolished and everything will be freely distributed according to need. This does not mean it would be shared out evenly so that we would have meaningful work for all without drudgery and wage slavery.

Such a world would be organised according to the original motto of Karl Marx “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need.” This is his original vision of communism — a world without classes, nations and states. It has nothing do with the nightmare that emerged in the USSR.

Some will argue that “human nature” will prevent us arriving at such a society.This forgets that human nature is not a static factor. It is fixed by the kind of society you live in. We have had 300 years of capitalist competition, war and greed but it can be shaken off. Revolutions have always altered people’s perceptions. They allow to “get rid of the muck of ages” (Karl Marx). The next one will be no different.

True, our alternative will not come to about overnight. It will have to be fought for politically. This is why we need an international revolutionary organisation which will coordinate our scattered struggles and challenge the capitalist power structure everywhere. This is not a government in waiting (we have no “leaders”) to put yet another set of exploiters in charge but a fighting organisation which leads the onslaught on capital.

We are committed to finding ways to work with other like-minded working class organisations in order to reach the wider working class. If you agree with the principles outlined here help to turn it into reality by joining in the fight. We have a world to win.

2011/11/21

The international Sovereign Depts Crisis

2011-08-23T15:33:00.004-04:00

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo havin't any organisational links with the Internationalist Communist Tendency and don't agree with all its political positions. As well we've reprinted this article because it's important for our class.

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo

2011 August

_____________________________________________________________________

The international Sovereign Depts Crisis

After the sub-prime crisis it is now the turn of sovereign debt. Bourgeois analysts have rushed to condemn the present serious situation as market madness. Actually the real madness is the entire global capitalist system which is agonisingly debating its own incurable contradictions. The so-called markets are nothing but a dozen or so international banks and financial centres. They speculatively “administer” something like 600 thousand billion dollars a year, equal to 12 times global GDP. This is a mass of fictitious capital which moves every day to the four corners of the earth in search of an immediate economic advantage with the aim of generating more capital to reinvest in other speculative activities like a sort of chain letter where you can see the chain. Money in itself cannot produce more money (except fictitious it should be noted) unless it is productively invested through the wage labour-capital relationship. Speculation, whatever form it takes, does not produce new value but represents only the transfer of value that has already been produced.

This phenomenon is not new to capitalism but it has grown exponentially in the last few decades simply because real production is facing a crisis of profitability which makes it difficult for the accumulation mechanism to operate. What has been universally defined as a financial crisis is really an economic crisis whose origins lie in the increasing difficulty of capitalism to survive with an ever lower rate of profit which is less and less remunerative for investment. The profits crisis has prompted an ever- increasing amount of capital to detach itself from production in search of the false prospect of valorisation through speculation, shifting the problem from the productive to the speculative sector. This in turn — after causing a series of burst financial bubbles — has returned to the world of real production, worsening the very precarious condition which launched the perverse speculative mechanism in the first place. This is the context in which the crisis of sovereign debt was born and raised and which, with different levels of intensity, engulfs all the major capitalist states.

Sovereign debt, or rather public debt — in other words the debt that the state contracts with national and foreign subscribers in order to finance it own activities — is so much greater the more the state has to intervene to support the national economy. In the last few decades, besides the normal financing of public affairs, sovereign debt has had to provide for the failures which the progressive decline in the rate of profit has wrought on enterprises in both the private and public sphere. When the crisis then broke out in the financial sphere the public debt had to shoulder the burden of restoring the health of the banks and institutions directly involved in the crisis. It meant a sort of nationalisation of finance way beyond state support for some of the giants of private enterprise like the engineering section of the motor manufacturers.

For the top imperialist countries the costs of war and arms expenditure have done the rest. One example above all the rest is the American situation. For years the crisis of the falling rate of profit has continued within the mechanism of the valorisation of capital. It has favoured the flight to speculation and determined the bursting of the financial bubble which has burned billions and billions of dollars, forcing the state into a hasty and costly intervention which has dried up its financial reserves and brought it to the brink of collapse. Its sovereign debt has reached 14.5 thousand billion dollars equal to 102% of GDP. According to some American analysts the debt is really greater and would be equal to 140% of GDP if it were not for a statistical calculation which does not include the amount of bonds acquired by insurance funds and the individual states. With these sort of numbers the US could never have entered into the parameters of the Maastricht agreement, or if it had already been inside it would have ended up worse than Greece, Portugal or Spain. If we added on the debts of individual states, which amount to 11% of GDP, and included the debts of families and firms the picture we end up with is catastrophic. The state of Minnesota has declared itself bankrupt. It is no longer capable of ensuring social services and cannot pay state employees. It is waiting for the Federal Government to intervene with finance which has not yet arrived. Another forty states are almost in the same condition. The wonder is that the reclassification of US bonds has only happened now and not before and then only by Standard and Poor, whilst Moody’s continue to grant Triple A status. In this regard the protest of the US Treasury over a presumed error of 2000 billion in the calculation appears ridiculous if not embarrassing. Furthermore, the weakness of American bonds quoted in dollars has unleashed a planetary currency war with the Euro at the head that puts the already shaky European economy at risk. China — with $1,250 billion in its monetary reserves — is crying that it is a scandal. It reproves the US Government for living beyond its means, of not doing enough to put things right. It threatens the possibility of diversifying its foreign exchange holdings (which it began to do some years back) and calls for a new international currency as substitute for the dollar, if only in the form of a basket of more trustworthy currencies.

So what are the remedies for getting out of the crisis? The usual ones, with a few differences. In 1929 the financial means existed to set up a mechanism to support demand, but today this is no longer possible. The financial means no longer exist, states are heavily loaded with debt and the only way that capitalism can keep going is by a further degradation of labour power. Let’s give a general example, again from the USA, where the biggest social carnage in modern history is being organised. With a social fabric where real unemployment has already reached 16% (official figures say 9.8% but these are absolutely false because they don’t take into account people who are not signing on and do not include anyone who has worked even a few weeks in a year), where 50 million live in absolute poverty — and 90% of them survive on handouts from charities — the axe is coming down on public spending. The bi-partisan plan proposed, or imposed, by Obama foresees an assault on social care and welfare benefits, a further overhaul of the relation between capital and labour, drastic reductions in public spending, partial tax increases which would only hit income from wages and not from financial returns and rents, and deep cuts to anything associated with state intervention. No more social state, only taxes and cuts which means more unemployment and an increase in both absolute and relative poverty. It also means greater exploitation in the workplace with an accompanying reduction in real wages, first of all in those sectors exposed to international competition and then everywhere else. Getting a job is difficult and there is no guarantee of keeping it when you do. The retirement age has increased and cuts in medical care will follow. The proposals underline how Obama’s plans for reforming the health system — which exist only on paper — are now being aborted whilst huge spending cuts are envisaged for the already inadequate Medicare and Medicaid. More or less the same recipe that has been imposed on Greece in order to receive the subsidies from the ECB and which the other European countries are being obliged to adopt in order to survive this second wave of the international crisis. This is as much as capitalism can concede in its period of historical decline. The paradox is that while the development of the productive forces could easily allow more goods and better services for everyone, within the framework of capitalism this is transformed into a crisis of the rate of profit which not only does not allow social well-being from the wealth produced, but triggers economic crises with their devastating consequences weighing down on the shoulders of those who produce the wealth, the proletariat. This is without taking into account the danger of wars that are no longer limited to strategic areas for raw materials, but more general warfare for the survival of this or that imperialism, never mind the environmental devastation and unlicensed predation of the planet’s resources.

If this is the outlook, it is more than ever the hour of the world revolutionary party, of class revolt against the crisis of capital, against the inevitable politics of tears and blood, for the creation of a society without classes, without capital and without the cursed economic laws linked to the logic of profit. A retro idea? No! This is the only solution to the devastating consequences of an outdated economic and social system which, in order to survive in its own contradictions, is forced to feed off the international proletariat. This is the only practical way out of the whole historical arc of capitalist productive relations.

Internationalist Communist Tendency

In front of the growing working class danger, the bourgeoisie opposes the democratic poison

2011-07-17T10:23:00.003-04:00

Here is a very good text from our comrades of the Fraction of the International Communist Left.

Warning from FICL : the translations into English we do, are made by comrades whose knowledge of this language is very relative. Thus, besides the lack of easiness for the reading, our English texts may present some mistakes and confusions which aren't political but "technical".

It is now obvious for all, workers as well as bourgeois and capitalist governments, that the international proletariat is rising up and revolting massively against the class consequences of the capitalist economical crisis. From the struggles of the last fall in the main Western Europe countries - just to mention these ones -, to the working class movements in the Arab countries, up to the Spanish "Indignous" movement and the massive and persistent rejection of the austerity measures in Greece, the international working class refuses to pay for the crisis and to accept without fighting back the dramatical misery that capitalism attempts to impose everywhere.

Facing this situation, the ruling class leads at the international level a wide offensive against the working class by speeding up its "democratic" mystification campaign. Today, it exerts it permanently and in a more concentrated manner than it did these last years. It develops it in all possible manners and at different levels which correspond to the intensity and the immediate conditions of the classes struggle. In particular, the present campaigns which are essentially based on lie and distortion of reality, aim at make believe that :

-the "democratic revolution" is the only fight to lead (Tunisia, Egypt, Arab countries...) ;

-the present struggles in the "democratic" countries are actually struggles "for more democracy" whether it is at the level of their form as well as their goal and content (the organisation "democracia real ya !" - "real democracy now !" - in the movement of the Spanish "indignados" obviously looks at taking the leadership of the workers fight to derail it towards the bourgeois ground of the "real democracy" - sic ! ).

All the fractions of the bourgeoisie, from the extreme-Left to the extreme-Right, are engaged - each one at its level - and share the tasks in this political offensive against the working class. The fraction of the Left and extreme-Left (stalinists, leftists, anarchists...) have for specific role to poison the working class within its very struggles by attempting to transform these ones into dead-end and mortal traps.

Today, the working class is clearly and increasingly responding to the attacks. It more and more raises the question of challenging the very existence of capitalism and of the social class which benefits of it. That is why the bourgeoisie strives to persuade the workers to direct their anger and readiness to fight towards "democratic reforms", indeed "democratic revolutions".

Democracy today, as long as capitalism does live, as long as the social classes do exist, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, is the most efficient form of its class power. Fighting for this, is fighting to maintain capitalism, is fighting to the benefit of the enemy. On the contrary, the workers must take back the slogan of one banner seen at the June 15^th demonstration in Greece (see Note) : "You got the disease, we got the solution : REVOLUTION".

The political vanguard organizations of the working class, particularly the ones of the Communist Left, have the great responsibility of warning their class, of preventing it against the danger and to divert it from this trap of an illusory quest for a "real" and "pure" democracy in capitalism. This illusion is mortal and it is consciously put forwards by the ruling class. These political vanguard organizations must, today as never, push the proletarian fight towards the only goal which has any sense : capitalism's destruction and the setting up of a society without exploitation and without classes.

The Fraction of the International Communist Left , June 19th, 2011.

"… shouting in defense of “democracy in general” is actually defense of the bourgeoisie and their privileges as exploiters.

(…) Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the “purer" democracy is, the more naked, acute and merciless the class struggle becomes, and the “purer” the capitalist oppression and bourgeois dictatorship"". (Thesison Bourgeois Democracy and Dictatorship of Proletariat – 1st Congress of the International Communist – March 1919)

Note

It matters to note that the stubborn and increasing refusal of the proletariat in Greece to suffer the brutal and dramatical austerity measures set up by Papandreou's socialist government, has compelled this one to a cabinet reshuffle in some emergency the very day of the June 15th demonstration. In particular, significant is the replacement of the Minister of economy. The international praises about his economical management were unanimous. The substitute, on the contrary, would have more “political” qualities. Besides the need for the Greek bourgeoisie to get a government team more united and a larger support from within the State apparatus and from the whole ruling class, while dissensions begun to appear in its ranks, this episode reveals that the true turmoil which has affected the international bourgeoisie, governments, politicians, medias, financial circles, etc. was not so much due to the financial risks – Greece's insolvency and the no-repayment of its debt -, thus of economical level in itself, but well to a political risk : the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, to make accept by the proletariat austerity and thus the perspective of an aggravation of the classes confrontation.

Spain - The "indignados" on the streets, for now lacking real proletarian anger

2011-06-13T20:18:00.001-04:00

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo

June 2011

_________________________________________________________________

The movement of young Spaniards, the “indignados” (1), emerged suddenly, but not unexpectedly from the seemingly flat calm of European society. From the day it burst on the scene (15 May, hence the name “15-M”), its ranks have quickly swelled, attracting thousands and thousands of people onto the streets, and even going beyond national borders. (2) Despite the important and heavy presence of minority political forces of the institutional left, the mobilisation has been largely spontaneous and built through word of mouth and social networking pages rather than through party manifestos.

According to the manifesto of the movement “Real Democracy, Now!” the prime mover of these events, the young people in the streets seem, largely, to want greater democracy and social equality (3). To many there is an obvious similarity between the Spanish 15-M movement and the Italian “grillini”.(4) It is obvious even to its boss Beppe. He wasn’t slow to arrive in the square in Barcelona, pointing out the similarities of their demands — against the party oligarchies, for the exclusion of those accused of corruption from the electoral list and for a participatory democracy — with his. On this level it should also be noted that the main beneficiary of the movement may be the Izquierda Unida, (5) which is severely handicapped by the current electoral system.

But it is very doubtful that such a description of the movement explains everything. If amongst the various banners in the Puerta del Sol a large black one, stood out proclaiming “The crisis is capitalism”, none of the various postings on the net spoke of it. And few people have correctly understood the social pressures that have led so many young people to take to the streets (or rather squares) across the country. Looking at the most recent figures, we find that in Spain the number of unemployed in March grew by 34,406 compared to February, reaching 4.3 million people (according to the sanitised figures of the Ministry of Labour). In the services sector alone nearly 15,000 jobs have been lost in a month, and in February, the Spanish unemployment rate was already 20.5%, the highest figure in the European Union. If you look at youth unemployment, this affects 44.6% of young people under 25 years. The Spanish government hopes to keep the state debt below 74.3% of the current figure in 2012, provided, however, they are able to drastically reduce government spending and the budget deficit, which is currently 11.4%. Whoever is elected in local elections these days, in particular, will have to deal with budgets already deep in the red. Municipalities and regions account for about half of total public expenditure. In all, there 5200 local and regional entities whose debt is around €26 billion, to which we should add about €4 billion advanced to drug companies supplying state hospitals.

The movement, in fact, appears a lot more varied than the descriptions usually given. It is marked by a deep social malaise with its roots in the particular characteristics of the Spanish production system and more generally in the rampant crisis of global capitalism, that has hit the Spanish economy so hard. The real growing evil is capitalism itself, as the young Spaniards in Madrid correctly wrote. This evil growth, parasitic on the overwhelmingly proletarian of the population, certainly cannot be cured through injections of democratic illusions and equal opportunities. The deeper social aspirations that young people are trying to bring to the streets are basically legitimate, and we must support them by participating actively in the demonstrations and encouraging the expansion of the protests. Communists, however, should make it clear that the hope for social equality and a real participation in “democracy” cannot be obtained “Ya!” [“Now!”],without a radical and complete overthrow of the current social system. It is obvious that the rich banker or industrialist will never really on be the same level as a worker or an unemployed youngster whilst the former control of the means of production and the latter can at most hope to find a job where they will be exploited according to “market” conditions.

In any case, we proletarians don’t care about the fate of the system that nourishes itself on our exploitation. Instead we want to throw acid on the roots of this evil growth, we want to strike at it in the very heart of its productive system, looking in every area for solidarity between the workers who work and the many that have lost jobs or have never found them. In Spain and elsewhere, the aim should be to expand and radicalise this social conflict on class lines, to revolutionise the whole of society from the bottom up and build a new one that meets human needs and not those of profit. In Spain and elsewhere, the aim should be to build a revolutionary vanguard, which can unify and give political guidance in this deep social malaise. Otherwise, the plaza (square) has served only as an outlet to contain “popular” indignation, without being able to put forward a class perspective, without leaving a new and more widespread awareness of the conflicting interests in play, without outlining any prospect of broader aims to finally get rid of this system of production which is behind all the current social instability.

Battaglia Comunista #6, June 2011

Internationalist Communist Tendency

http://www.leftcom.org/en

(1)Indignados = “angry ones”

(2)At midnight on May 21, 25,000 people gathered in the Puerta del Sol square in Madrid, at the heart of the protest were young Spaniards, breaking the ban on demonstrations before the impending elections. At the same time, some 10,000 people demonstrated in Barcelona’s Plaza de Catalunya, and thousands more crowded into the streets of all major cities in Spain.

(3) In short, there are many proposals for more democratic reforms: the abolition of several laws that are held to be unfair; including the electoral law, a referendum to confirm all the most important laws, abolition of the monarchy, complete separation between the State and the Church, removal of state funding for religious institutions, separation and no interference between politics and the judiciary; measures against corruption and the excessive power of the ruling “caste”, which includes opening of the electoral rolls, exclusion of those accused of corruption from public office, reform of the financing of political parties, cutting pensions annuities, administrative decentralization, with more involvement of regions, provinces, and municipalities in the management of budgets, more direct democracy through the web and telecommunication networks. The other driving force is the struggle against social inequality: tax reform in favour of lower income, taxation of financial income, nationalisation of banks bailed out with state funding, the limits on job insecurity, the minimum wage. Finally, environmental and pacifist demands: immediate closure of all nuclear power plants and support for alternative energy, increased public transport and a decrease in private car use, cycle lanes and free tickets for the unemployed, and no reduction in military spending to intervene in any war scenario.

(4)Beppe Grillo is an Italian alternative comedian who, on the premise that the Italian political establishment was already beyond a joke has started up his one political movement known as “Five Stars” (Cinque Stelle). He is the patron (boss) referred to in the next sentence.

(5)The United Left (Izquierda Unida, IU) is a political coalition that was organized in 1986 as several political organisations opposed Spain joining NATO. It was formed by a number groups of leftists, greens, left-wing socialists and republicans, but was dominated by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). It replaced the latter in the polls and got 9% at its height but has since declined.

Canadian elections: Down with the Electoral Circus Long Live the Struggle of the Proletariat

2011-04-26T11:15:00.003-04:00

On May 2 the Canadian parliamentary circus will stage its umpteenth performance for the election of a new federal government.

The various parties of the bourgeoisie are falling over each other to participate in this charade once more and to convince workers that in voting for them they will improve their lot!

Meanwhile the living conditions of the proletarian class continue to deteriorate including job cuts, as with the announced closure in 2012 of the Electrolux appliance factory located in the town of L'Assomption, Quebec. The attacks against the social gains (Note 1 of ICK)won through hard struggles of workers, continue across Canada, as in the last budget of the Quebec finance minister Raymond Bachand . The tuition fees for this province's universities, which are historically the lowest in North America will increase $ 325 per year from 2012 onwards in order to reach the Canadian average, from $ 2,168 (current levels) to $ 3,793 per annum! Contributions to the Quebec Pension Plan were also increased, thereby increasing the pressure on proletarian incomes, and an increased penalty from 0.5% to 0.6% for those retiring before age 65 was introduced.

In Toronto, the largest Canadian city, the mayor newly elected in 2010, Rob Ford, wants to privatize much of the waste collection, the Toronto Housing Corporation and “anything that is not written in stone”, ie much of the city's public works. The goal is to reduce the working conditions of the proletariat who work in the public services as much as possible.

The Conservative government's latest budget in March of this year introduced a planned increase in contributions to employment insurance, a cut in taxes for large companies, a freeze in operating expenses of Crown corporations like the CBC and Canada Post to prevent any wage increase for employees, etc...

This is just a foretaste of what awaits the Canadian working class, because the effects of the capitalist crisis which continues to intensify, requiring the bourgeoisie to increase its exploitation by attacking its conditions of life and work, including slashing gains previously granted to maintain social peace. The proletariat can only answer back with struggle – not through elections.

Contrary to the myth propagated by the ruling class, its media monopoly, bourgeois institutions (schools, churches, etc ...) the reformist parties and trade unions [Note 2 of ICK], elections do not represent any expression of “popular will” . The orientation of public policy is determined by the interests of large capitalist groups for whom the bourgeois state is a servant.

The elections are used only to mystify the proletariat into believing that the ballot may help to “change things”. They perpetuate the democratic illusions that all “citizens” are equal and that the state is a neutral institution politely obeying little pieces of paper deposited in the ballot box; and therefore that there is no need of class struggle. These illusions, which are a major obstacle to the resumption of the class struggle, help to maintain the powerful myth that democratic institutions can be used to advance the interests of the proletariat, whereas in reality they are in the exclusive service of the ruling class and are used to suppress the proletarian struggle.

One aspect of these elections (the fourth in seven years!) is the campaign initiated by the reformist left, which calls for no votes for for the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in power since January 2006, and which would be particularly dangerous and reactionary. Without doubt the party is deeply reactionary and anti-worker, but how is it different from the other bourgeois parties? The Liberal Party of Canada has been the main party of the bourgeoisie since Canadian Confederation in 1867 and has consistently attacked the rights and interests of the proletariat, especially with the War Measures Act in 1970 under the pretext of quelling an apprehended insurrection in Quebec. The Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, has promised he will continue the imperialist intervention in Afghanistan if re-elected! When it he was in power in the 90s, the Liberal Party brutally Unemployment Insurance and diverted funds for this program to offset the federal deficit! The New Democratic Party (still paper members of the reformist Second International) focuses its rhetoric on support to families and improved health care for seniors. The regionalist bourgeois nationalist Bloc Québécois, speaks only of “Quebec's interests”, as if workers and employers in Quebec had similar interests! As for the Green Party of Canada, it simply proposes to humanize the management of the environment within capitalism, when it is precisely capitalism which is responsible for the continuing deterioration of the environment. All this reveals a little more clearly the false alternatives presented to us by the electoral circus and demonstrates the fallacy of the “Anybody But Harper” campaign which fits perfectly in the defense of the capitalist system of exploitation by putting forward a “lesser evil” to the Conservative Party. Like the Conservatives, the promoters of this campaign are class enemies of the proletariat.

All parties represented in the Canadian Parliament voted unanimously in favor of imperialist intervention in Libya on the pretext of “protecting the life of Libyan civilians”! The Green Party is in favor of a “rapid and sustained diplomatic intervention in Libya to prevent the situation from degenerating into civil war.” “We must not lose sight of our priority – to prevent the deaths of countless innocent Libyan civilians,” reported Ellen Michelson, the Green spokesperson for Peace and Security. “Diplomatic efforts must counterbalance the military presence to ensure the maximum to avoid loss of life and structural damage.” All this verbiage is a thinly disguised support for imperialist war against Libya coated in “humanitarian concerns”. The elections divert attention away from the immediate interests of proletarians, but they also divert attention from ongoing imperialist interventions.

The party of the reformist left and the petit-bourgeois in Quebec, Quebec Solidarity participates fully in the campaign against the Conservatives. It denounces the right wing politics vigorously pursued by this party and its obsession with security, common to all bourgeois governments, and insists that the policy of the Harper government would run “counter to widely held values in the Quebec population: social justice, defense of the French language and culture, equality between women and men, development of a green Quebec, human rights, international solidarity, democracy”(1). This typical petty-bourgeois nationalist phraseology makes no mention of the working class and the class struggle and spreads the illusions of a possible “better” world under the yoke of capital!

And as for the Conservatives' obsession with security, it is important to remember the system of security certificates which allows immigrants who are not Canadian citizens to be detained without charge or trial under the pretext of “terrorism.” The call not to vote for the Conservative Party is simply support for a fraction of the ruling class, regarded as more “enlightened”, against another that is more reactionary. The proletariat has absolutely no interest in marching off to enlist in this campaign to keep the class domination of the bourgeoisie intact .

Some far left militants, like the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, launched a campaign to boycott the federal elections of 2011 (2). This is a democratic campaign to boycott elections. Its proponents do not appeal to the workers to boycott the elections to make hasten the rupture with democratic illusions and for the return to class struggle, but because these elections are not democratic enough! They say their boycott campaign will serve to expose the “non-democratic” nature of these elections and to call for a struggle for “popular democracy” and “people's power” ; apparently this struggle consist in... beginning “the discussion on how to create true equality and true democracy”! Since they want to reinforce illusions in democracy, it is natural that they do not talk about the division of “people” into opposing classes and they hide the fact that “real equality” can only come after the revolution, the destruction of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a necessary step to dismantle capitalism and move to a communist society without classes.

For these elections, like all others, the only position that corresponds to the interests of the proletariat is revolutionary abstentionism, position supported by the Communist Left since the early twenties (3).

The strength of the proletariat, whose exploitation gives life to all of bourgeois society, lies solely in its collective action, organized and conducted on a class basis. The electoral arena, by definition interclassist, where each isolated proletarian will separately file his ballot alongside those of individuals of all other classes, is a phony terrain that serves only the ruling class. On the one hand because the bourgeoisie has established and maintains a huge and multifaceted apparatus (media, political parties, various institutions ...) of anti-proletarian propaganda and forming of “public opinion”; and secondly because the parliament and the whole democratic political system are far removed from the real centers of power in capitalist society: their main function is to deflect the discontent into the maze of harmless alternations between bourgeois politicians from the right and the left.

To defend themselves against exploitation and repression, to fight against the bourgeois politics, to express solidarity with the proletariat of other countries, the working class will have to abandon its democratic, legalistic and pacifist illusions, and come in open confrontation with the exploiting class.

The proletarian struggle does not pass through the electoral circus and bourgeois democratic institutions, it fights them! Proletarians have nothing to gain by participating in bourgeois elections where capitalism is always the winner!

The only solution for the proletariat in Canada and around the world is the resumption of the class struggle to defend its exclusive class interests continuing on to the overthrow of the capitalist system under the leadership direction of the political class party.

No to the electoral circus!

Down with capitalism, down with imperialism!

For the return of the class struggle, for the restoration of the international class party, for the international communist revolution!

(1)http://www.quebecsolidaire.net/actualite_nationale/elections_federales_au_quebec_c’est_non_aux_conservateurs

(2) www.boycott2011.ca

(3) http://marxists.org/francais/bordiga/works/1920/06/bordiga_19200627.htm

International Communist Party

April, 15th 2011

www.pcint.org

1- Note of ICK :The supposed "social gains hard-won by the working class"are in fact rather economic and political transformations, that is an international trend in state capitalism, created by agencies totally bourgeois : unions, parties Stalinists and social democrats in order to maintain capitalism, that real gains for the working class.

2-Note of ICK : We view the trade unions as organizations bound by a thousand and one ties to the state by laws, subsidies and dialogue. To change the trade union leadership or to attempt to transform the unions is impossible, inasmuch as their links to the state are organic. This includes the rejection of red or anarchist trade unions.

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo havin't any organisational links with the International Communist Party and don't agree with all its political positions. As well we've reprinted this pamphlet because it's important for our class.

The "Mass Strike" today and tomorrow

2011-04-07T17:00:00.003-04:00

We publish this text from the International Communist Bulletin of February 2011, organ of the Fraction of the International Communist Left.

Internationalist Communists - Klasbatalo

"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. And the law of motion of these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution" (Rosa Luxemburg , The Mass Strike, 1906).

The present world situation illustrates the analisis that Rosa Luxemburg made on the "Mass Strike" in the period of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Obviously, we aren't on the eve of the Revolution. But the proletarian struggles increase almost everywhere around the planet, in capitalism's "central" countries as well as in the "peripherical" ones, and take various forms : isolated strikes or full sector of the economy as well as general strikes which spread in a city or in a whole country ; spontaneous strikes (without unions call) or "wildcat" as well as long strikes that the great unions have more and more difficulties to control ; demonstrations of proletarian young students whose perspectives of future collapse as well as public sector and big industries workers who see their living conditions worsening. In more than an occasion, the "economical" struggle of resistance are transformed in "political" struggles against the government or, at least, against the most representative figures of the capital's interests (even though, of course, these political struggles are still caught, controlled and led by the Left forces of the capital itself)... Furthermore the struggles develop every time more simultaneously ; they carry in themselves a strong tendency to spread, to seek solidarity and thus to become every time more determined and militant (Note). Thus the conditions which have created this struggle climate aren't temporary : the continuation of capitalism's fall in the worse crisis of its history enables us to foresee a long period, of many years, of this tendency to the rise of the proletariat's class struggle, a true international "mass strike".

Of course, in every country, the proletariat's struggles confront more and more fiercely to the different obstacles the capitalist State sets up ; in first the unions. For the moment, the majority of the strikes and the "Days of struggle" in countries like France and Spain are organized by the great unions in order to let off steam the growing discontent of the workers and, at the same time, to confine it in a framework which doesn't really enable to stop the capital's attacks against their living conditions. Nevertheless, these Days still are an expression of the growing discontent and combativity of the proletarians and of the bourgeoisie's need to anticipate on the spontaneous and out of control explosions. Futhermore, the proletariat begins to be conscious of itself as a class, to feel the need to overcome the sector barriers in which the unions enclose it, to seek solidarity and to become aware of the need to take control of its struggle outside the unions.

Then come the political parties of capital, particularly the parties and other organizations of the "capital's Left". As we could see in Greece since the beginning of past year, and as we now see in Tunisia and Egypt, the proletariat's anger (and of other exploited classes) can break out at any moment, in any country ; it is enough with an additional pinch of injustice (a youth's murder by police, rising prices of first necessity products...) for coming out onto a situation of spontaneous demonstrations and of generalized revolt which drive to open confrontations with the State repression forces. Then, the true role of "Left" parties of the bourgeoisie, as the "Socialdemocrats", the "Left Democrats" or all kind of stalinists, appear in all its cruelty and all its extent. Through the "change" of leaders, their role is to give back credit to the capitalist State to keep alive amongt the proletarians the harmful illusion that it does exist "solutions to capitalism's crisis" and "solutions to their problems". Nevertheless, if much workers still keep on illusions on the Left parties of capital, the actions of the latters - which appear more and more openly in favor of capital's interests and against the workers – carry in themselves a process of decline of their image, a process of growing consciouness within the working class that they are ennemy forces.

The proletarian struggles are indeed also confronted, more and more directly, with the repression forces of the capitalist State - judicial aparatus, police, army - which are constantly reinforced. In Mexico, the massive lay-off of 40 000 workers of the electric sector in the late 2009, had been preceded by the brutal occupation of the work places by the federal and anti-riot police ; in the "democratic" Spain of Socialist Zapatero, the December 2010 "wildcat" strike of the air controllers has been broken by the airport control by the army. Increasingly, workers demonstrations end up in violent confrontations with the police (Greece, Great-Britain, India, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt...) which, far from what the bourgeois medias hurl at us, are everytime less the product of "direct actions" of "small radical groups" and more and more due to the anti-riot police. In the last, this aspect is a clear sign of the conflict sharpening of the two antagonistic classes of the society : on one part, it is the intensification of the fierce attacks of the capitalist class against the living and working conditions of the proletarians as well as the preparation of this class and of its State to confront the exploited's resistance ; on the other part, it is a clear sign that the working class's attempts to resist and to engage in the struggle against capital are becoming more determined and wider.

Finally, all this climate of increasing classes struggle is methodically and knowingly distorted by the capital's medias, press, radio, TV, without forgetting Internet. Never so many means of information have existed as today... but at the same time never has the ruling class used as today these means to avoid the proletariat to get a clear idea of the present stakes ; to avoid each worker become conscious that, everywhere, his class brothers rise up and fight exactly for the same reasons as the ones he is himself outraged (unemployment, direct and undirect attacks at work, constant worsening of the living conditions for his family, increasing exploitation and oppression) ; to avoid that everyone be aware these struggles are his and that these ones carry on spreading in all continents ; actually to avoid the proletarians recognize themselves as a class with the same interests and the same goals : fighting capitalist exploitation.

At first place, there's the greatest censorship possible - at national scale as well as world wide - on the proletarian struggles. For instance, everybody has been informed, up to nausea, of the assassination attempt against the democrat US congress woman in Phoenix. But, except the readers of the militant press, how many workers have been informed of the strikes in the United-States of the past year in which thousands of proletarians of different sectors participate to ? Then, if they can't completely hide them anymore because their wideness, the bourgeois medias distort in any ways the class struggles by presenting them as essentially "local" or "national", or as "selfish and irresponsible reactions which oppose to the adjustments capitalism judges necessary and profitable to the whole population" ("cuts in the State spendings" or "streamligning of enterprises" which supposedly make indispensable lowering salaries, massive redudancies or pension cuts) ; or by presenting them as "small extremist groups'" actions or as responses to "corrupted" governments that it is enough to change to bring back calm. The height of cynism is the frequent affirmation according to which the workers on struggle are "privileged" who, "selfishly", pretend to keep their living conditions at the expense of the rest of the population !

The conditions are present for the continuation of the classes struggle development

In this situation, the medias try by all means to hide or to minimize the struggles, or even to lose the fact that they obey to the same fundamental causes. Since this makes more difficult workers' growing consciousness that they have common interests and aims, the simultaneous sudden appearance of wide struggle movements in all continents become even mor significant.

Two important historical facts are at the basis of this situation. Firstly, the generalized attacks and every time more brutal and direct against the living and working conditions that the workers and the other exploited classes suffer from the capitalist class because the inexorable collapse of the capitalist system in its worse fall in economical crisis of its history. It is more and more obvious that all the efforts of the bourgeoisie of all countries and of all sectors to "save itself" and to "recover" from the crisis, have their foundation in the exploitation, up to the last drop, of the working force by all undirect and direct means it has at its disposal. For instance, the "funds transfer" from the State - at first rank the first world power – to "save" the great banks and the great industries actually consists in making pay this "rescue" by the workers through the explosion of unemployment, taxes rises and direct and undirect salaries cuts). And this happens in all countries around the world, as well as in the great capitalist powers as in the smallest and weakest. This capital's generalized charge against the proletariat is at the basis of the simultaneous and sudden appearance of a multitude of seats of resistance struggles at the world level.

Moreover, it is increasingly obvious that the supposed "end of the 2010 recession" is clearly appearing for what it is : a lie and, for the least, an illusion. In order to justify this, the bourgeois medias look for make believe that it is because the slown down of the "recovery" in the United-States or because the responsibility of many European countries whose public finances are collapsing. According to the economical area where they belong to, the medias warn against the growing "risks" of a new and next "economical" relapse whose cause would be the "responsibility" of the other one area. Behind this mediatical war, we find the sharpening of the commercial and financial war between the different "blocs" of the national bourgeoisies (at first even though not only, around the United-States and Great-Britain against the Euro-zone).

But, at this Russian roulette to which the world capitalist forces play, there is an additional element for the worsening of the crisis : inflation. We'll see in the next months a period of generalized rise of the prices, firstly of the energy and first necessity products ; it is already the spark which have launched many of the recent revolts (Tunisa, Algeria, Egypt, Chile...).

All in all, the crisis sharpening and, with it, of the material conditions don't but provoke the multiplication of the exploited's resistance struggles which not only tend to maintain themselves but also to become everytime wider and deeper.

There is a second fact also of historical meaning, which manifests itself at international scale and during an extended period, what Rosa Luxemburg called the "masses strike" ; it is what we can perceive today in the proletariat's willingness to defend itself and to struggle ; it means the existence at the same time of "objective" factors and of "subjective" ones which are in favor of the spreading and the deepening of the proletariat's fight against capitalism.

For one part, we can notice a tendency towards "contagion", it means to the appearance of a tendency to the international extension of the struggles. Since the struggles in France, the workers of other European countries (Great-Britain, Spain, Italy, Belgium...) have also embarked on the battle with the consciousness that the capital's attacks are the same everywhere. More recently, the social movement which has inflamed Tunisia during a month, has served as an example and as a detonator to the massive demonstrations which have shaken up the other countries in North Africa for the same reasons : the increase of the first necessity products price. At the same time, and again despite the obstacles that the bourgeoisie sets up - in particular the union control whose one task is to maintain the demands and the workers struggles divided -, we too see in the struggle the beginnings of solidarity expressions between workers of different sectors (even at the international scale), which means that the basis for a future unification of the demands and the goals of the struggles do exist.

What is also striking in the present struggles, it the anger and the combativity which don't stop growing. The action of the police forces of the capitalist State whose aim is to "dissuade", it means to terrorize and to repress the struggles, has become its opposite in various occasions : a stimulus pushing the workers to go out in the street in order to protest massively against the governments. The exceptional situation of the violent and massive revolts in Greece, more than a year ago, tends now to reproduce itself in various countries : Great-Britain, Tunisia, India, Egypt...

We also have to note the existence of tendency towards "politicization" of the struggles in the sense that the demonstrations in front of the worsening of the economical conditions give way every time more to open opposition to the State and to its more distinguished representations. Obviously, the bourgeois parties of "opposition" take over and take advantage of this "politicization". Nevertheless, they express a tendency amongst the proletarians to take consciousness that the response to give to the worsening of their living conditions is not simply at the factory or sector level, it means at the local and "economical" one, but that it has to be more "general", more "global" and thus too "political".

Finally, we must underline the fact that, with the acceleration of these struggle movements, does accelerate too the development of political proletarians vanguard minorities who look to go beyond the immediat struggles, who reflect on the defeats' causes, who seek to gather and organize in order to prepare in the best conditions the struggles of tomorrow, to make them that they'll be no defeated or taken over by the capital's forces and that they go towards the "true change" which is capitalism's destruction ; all in all, minorities who look for a revolutionary alternative and a revolutionary commitment. For instance, the defeat of the French mobilisations against the attack on the pensions system has left a multitude of small workers' "assemblies" where they, with members of various political organizations, discuss on the perspectives of organization and of struggle. A similar mood exists elsewhere. This reflects in the increase of correspondances, of discussions and contacts of the revolutionary groups.

By regrouping their forces, the communists will be able to fully play their role in the class.

This open situation that we define as the "mass strike", makes even more essential and urgent the intervention of the revolutionary minorities within their class, in particular the one of the groups and militants of the Communist Left.

Of course, one aspect of the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie against the proletarians (to which do participate even groups which declare themselves "revolutionaries" as the anarchists for instance), is to sow workers' distrust towards the truly revolutionary and communist political groups in order they see them as "external", "foreign" and even "dangerous" to working class's eyes. It is why we don't stop insisting on the fact that the revolutionary groups, in particular the ones of Communist Left are an entire part of the working class itself, the one which is "the most conscious and the most determined" ; that they simply are - as the Communist Manifesto said in 1847 - the ones who "point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality" ; they are "on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement" ; and their goals are : "formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat".

In this sense, it is firstly indispensable that, in this period, the revolutionary minorities put forward the common interests of the class which lie in the struggles which appear everywhere. Their task is not only to "spread information", nor to simply call for the struggle, but above all to boost the tendencies towards extension and unification of the struggles beyond any sectorial or national division that bourgeoisie tries to impose. They have to underline their common nature as parts of a movement of the whole working class, of a movement whose cuases and historical goals – the destruction of the Capitalist State and the seizure of power by the proletariat at the international scale - are the same.

At the same time, it is indispensable that the revolutionaries assume their task of passing on the legacy of the experiences of the past struggles which are in their hands as well as the revolutionary theory - marxism - in such a way that the proletarians can benefit for their present fights. Through this, not only revolutionaires contribute to increase the capacity of the whole proletariat to give up the mystificiations and the traps the bourgeoisie opposes to each struggle but above all they contribute decisively to the growing class consciousness of the proletariat for its revolutionary interests and goals and for the need and possibility for realizing them.

Finally, the revolutionaries have also the imperious task of transmitting all the accumulated experience of the class about the organisation and particularly about the one of the revolutionary period of the beginning of Century 20^th ; the experience which led to the triumph of the proletarian revolution in Russia and to the international revolutionary wave which cracked the capitalist edifice and threated to put it down for ever.

Today, and even more tomorrow, the arising of vanguard proletarians looking for revolutionary coherence, for revolutionary militant commitment and for revolutionary organisation, imposes particularly to the present groups and militants of the Communist Left the major responsibility to clear the path which leads to the settting up of the new world communist party. On this way, the present communist forces must firstly overcome their political and organisational dispersion which characterize them and have to engage firmly, from today, in a process of getting closer and of "regroupment". They have to do so if they want to be up to the situation and to assume the responsibility for which the proletariat made them appear.

January 2011

Fraction of the International Communist Left

Note : Long is the list, it begins with the main European countries, of the workers fights which had developed these last two years and their number isn't but increasing in all continents with capitalism's economical dead-end. For a more precise following of the workers struggles around the world, we refer our readers to the international presses of the Internationalist Communist Tendency and of the ICC.

e-mail address : inter1925@yahoo.fr ;

See our web site : http://fractioncommuniste.org

An update on events in Wisconsin

2011-03-14T15:50:00.006-04:00

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo havin't any organisational links with the Internationalist Communist Tendency and don't agree with all its political positions. As well we've reprinted this pamphlet because it's important for our class.

_______________________________________

In an 18-1 vote on the evening of March 9th, the Wisconsin State Senate passed a bill eliminating collective bargaining rights for state sector workers. This was done without the required quorum numbers because the bill ending collective bargaining rights was removed from the larger austerity budget bill. Both bills are now set to pass. Collective bargaining will come to an end by the end of the week when the governor signs the new bill into law. The austerity part of Senate Bill 11 will be passed separately in short order. This is an assault on every worker in the state and is a spearhead in the struggle of employers to drive down labor costs nationwide. This represents a stepping up of the factional fighting between the two factions of the bourgeoisie in power, Democratic and Republican. The destruction of the unions in the public sector will destroy funding for the rival Democratic Party’s election campaigns.

For workers this means nothing less than a huge pay cut, a massive attack on social services and the outright layoff of slightly more than 20,000 workers as their jobs get privatized or eliminated. Already there are 4,000 unfilled positions in the state civil service that will never be filled. Many state workers nearing retirement have started retiring en masse before the austerity measures come into effect.

The root of this crisis is found in the falling tax revenues to the states. The fall in tax revenues is two-fold. First, the Federal government has refused to give aid to the states in favor of maintaining endless war spending. Second, the states tax structures do not allow for increases on taxes for the wealthy and thus rely on payroll taxes from workers paychecks, property taxes on workers homes, lotteries to sucker the poor into buying lottery tickets and punitive sales taxes that affect the poorest first. Thus the crisis hit the state revenues that were primarily based on taxing workers due to the loss of workers property and incomes. The US has a religion based on the “right” to private property, which properly understood means the right of the capitalist class to fleece workers of their wealth and property. Capitalist economic crises are not acts of nature that must be accepted the way one accepts the fact that a tornado has touched down wiping out a small town. There is a cause and the cause is in the fall in profit rates of capitalism worldwide. It is a crisis exacerbated by the drive to generalized imperialist war.

The Teachers’ Union, WEAC, has told teachers to keep going to work and save their picketing for the weekend. The teachers union aim to prevent another wildcat walkout of public school teachers. The student walkout from the High Schools and Colleges was the product of the efforts of the students and contributed greatly to the strikes. The regional union federation, the South Central Labor Federation has unions have formally given the okay to the possibility of a general strike with their 97 member unions, while the union leaders attempt to contain the desire of workers to go on strike with peaceful protests. Tens of thousands of workers have packed the streets for over three weeks now. The first protest started with about 20,000 and the numbers grew until the protests had 50,000 to 100,000 workers protesting. As the bill ending collective bargaining passed workers chanted slogans demanding a general strike. The “cooler” heads attempting to maintain control of the situation have succeeded in deflecting this sentiment. While the backbone of the protests has been teachers and students, there is enormous solidarity from every sector of workers in the state. Huge contingents from private sector unions have come out in support. A protest movement has subsequently spread around the US, ostensibly against collective bargaining of union and state employer, but underlying this is the recognition by workers that they cannot afford any more austerity.

This coming Saturday March 12th, Farmers are driving their tractors in a convoy to the state capitol to protest in solidarity with the unions and against cuts to rural schools and social services. The cuts in the state insurance program, “BadgerCare” will result in huge numbers of the poor losing their access to medical care. This will seriously impact farmers who have to purchase their own insurance, thus it is that they depend heavily on the state subsidized insurance program of BadgerCare which allows people to purchase health insurance out of their own pockets at a rate lower than that offered by the private insurance companies.

State social services will be privatized. Every form or social service could end up being sold off to private companies to “administer”, or properly understood—fleece. All the public school students in the state stand to lose $500 in funding per school year, per pupil. Charter schools will be expanded to further fleece public coffers at the hands of private corporations that are now taking over the public schools nationwide. There is no data suggesting that charter schools perform any differently than public schools so it is not a question of better schooling, rather it is a question of capitalist theft of public revenues in the name of “free enterprise” and “competition”. This represents the downsizing and deskilling of the workforce and a huge attack on wages.

State run electrical power plants stand to be turned over in “no bid” contracts to private companies as a payback to the supporters of the current faction of the bourgeoisie in power. This includes one nuclear power plant and several other coal burning power plants around the state. Funds for wastewater treatment will be cut, and groundwater will not be tested for biological and manmade toxins as in the past.

Despite the assertions of the typical capitalist moron, Governor Walker, that he wouldn’t negotiate, he was conducting negotiations with the state Democratic Party over the extent of the collective bargaining issue as the release of his recent emails to the runaway Democratic caucus show. To give an idea of the stupidity and arrogance of a typical American bourgeois, Walker honestly believes that God himself (you see God in the US is a right-wing hyper-calvinist) is telling him what to do.

The Democrats and their union apparatus were perfectly willing to throw workers under the bus and maintain a shred of collective bargaining, just enough to keep funding their election coffers and keep turning out the vote for them during election campaigns. What has not been debated is the austerity budget that the unions accepted from the beginning of the current struggle, if only they were to be allowed to retain the structure of collective bargaining of labor contracts with state employees. The contracts set the standard for all state sector workers, represented and non-represented, amounting to some 175,000 workers statewide most of whom aren’t represented by unions at all, but are very much impacted by the contract bargaining process.

The unions themselves have accepted “furlough days” in the form of a month of rolling layoffs per employee per year. In itself this was a huge pay cut for state sector workers who saw no defense from the unions or their masters the Democratic Party when they were in power in the state last year. Last fall two Democratic legislators joined with the Republicans to shelve the contract until Walker and the Republicans could take power.

The unions last fall were offering the state a 3% cut in pay, and a $100 million in benefits giveaways. This was not enough for the state who wanted a pay cut of at least 8% and $136 million in benefits giveaways. Some state workers could see a pay cut of up to 20% once the higher contributions to pensions and benefits are included in the pay cuts. This will hit the public school teachers particularly hard. The usual course of action would’ve been for the incoming Republican government to go back to the table with the unions and negotiate a bigger set of cuts and concessions. The governor didn’t do this, but rather went ahead with the aim of destroying collective bargaining and attacking his political rivals and state sector workers in one sweeping bill that was meant initially to be passed in a week long session without any debate or input from the public. Only the protests delayed the bill allowing people to see what was in this 144 page legal document.

Now the mood is one of anger, and talk of a general strike. The union leaders don’t want this, but votes will come up in the union locals and there could be a mass strike anyway. A mass strike is the only response left for workers in the state.

A huge amount of politicization has occurred in the space of a month. Workers who took no notice of things beyond their daily lives now are engaged and trying to shape events the only way they know how. This involves a deep degree of illusions held in the Democratic Party and the unions. It is easy to have illusions in the unions as few workers are in unions or have any idea of how they function even when they are members of a union. The unions themselves can’t mobilize the numbers of workers who have taken to the streets. Public sector employees unions don’t have the numbers or the impact to put 100,000 people in the streets. This was a response from the workers themselves and one that cannot be ignored regardless of union and Democratic Party control. Now that the bill has passed the flagging spirits of the protesting workers and students have been fired up by a sense of anger and betrayal.

Collective bargaining agreements with state employees, in Wisconsin, were put in place primarily to avoid strikes and keep the government functioning. The 1971 state law allowing for it was put in place in the wake of the massive nationwide strike of US postal workers in that year. Technically the tradeoff for not being allowed the same right to go on strike as workers in the private sector was a collective bargaining process. These state labor peace treaties have now become an obstacle for the capitalist class in power as they attempt to lower labor costs as much as possible.

Unions have deflected talk of defending workers with rhetoric about an attack on the “middle class”. This middle class democracy talk is a false flag put up for workers to rally around. It is not about a mythical middle class rather it is about attacking the last stronghold of stability in the workforce. For the political party bosses Governor Walker is a sacrificial lamb, a rich buffoon put up to do their dirty work and then to be cast aside when they are done with him. This was the same purpose that Senator Joe McCarthy once unwittingly served. When the bourgeoisie was done with his hysterical anti-communist rhetoric, once he started accusing the army and President Eisenhower of being communist, they censured him and pushed him aside. Governor Walker’s political career is most likely going to end as the result of this. The Republican Party itself sees this as the means to cut out their rivals funding source in the unions so they can secure the White House in the next presidential election. This is why killing collective bargaining took precedence over the budget bill which has not yet been passed and which didn’t actually need to be resolved until the 30th of June, the date that marks the end of the current funding cycle for the state. Thus the budget “crisis” wasn’t in any way as pressing of a crisis as the rulers claimed.

A new period is opening up in the US and revolutionaries have to be prepared to step forward. They cannot dismiss this simply as a Democratic Party sideshow but they must try to be present and make themselves heard at a time when workers are becoming more politically conscious of a need to fight and willing to do so. That the very words “general strike” are now being spoken in the land of labor peace is an extraordinary thing. Ninety-seven union locals in the state will be meeting to decide what their next step is and the leaders will not want to go on strike, rather they would prefer to buckle down with legal challenges and peaceful protests and find a way to make defeat acceptable.

The very fact that this has lasted for over three weeks, where workers marched in nasty, sloppy, freezing weather of late-winter to defend their interests the only way they know how. Defending their interests has of yet, only involved taking over the State Capitol building to protest. The unions and their Democratic Party handlers will lead this to exhaustion and defeat, unless workers can impose their own wills on the situation through a mass strike. There must be a strike and workers must make this a demand in the workplaces, among their co-workers and at local union meetings.

Capitalism has in two hundred years gone from being a progressive force against feudal order to being a class bent on promoting the collective suicide of the entire human race. Even if this leads to a defeat for workers in the present, it will not be the end of struggles against capitalist austerity here in the US but the beginning.

ASm

Internationalist Communist Tendency

http://www.leftcom.org/en

usa@leftcom.org

State Workers Protests Continue in Wisconsin

2011-03-01T13:14:00.003-05:00

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo havin't any organisational links with the Internationalist Communist Tendency and don't agree with all its political positions. As well we've reprinted this pamphlet because it's important for our class.

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In Wisconsin there have been six days of protests numbering in the tens of thousands of workers. The coming week here is likely to bring more sickouts from state workers and teachers. Though the WEAC head, Mary Bell has told the state teachers to go back to work. In return she’s withdrawn her support for charter schools in Milwaukee and cutting up the school district, ending seniority pay and “merit pay”. As with most merit pay schemes everywhere it is another way of saying nobody will get a raise. Walkouts of students in the high schools, and universities have occurred around the state in large numbers against education cuts all around the state.

The AFL-CIO heads came to speak to call for collective bargaining as the sole demand, leaving all the attacks on workers in the bill SB11 intact. This was entirely to be expected. If the unions won collective bargaining, they could declare a “victory” and tell everyone to go home. To keep people in line a parade of bourgeois figures came out to speak, AFL-CIO Pres. Richard Trumka, Jesse Jackson and others.

Now the aspirations of the unions to keep a seat at the bargaining table and the aspirations of workers are quite different. Workers entering into these protests are coming in with obsolete views of unions, maintained largely because few workers have any prolonged contact with unions. They still think the union is on their side. The Democratic Party (DP) here is fighting to keep its political base while the Republican bourgeois want to reward their wealthy associates with tax cuts, creating a budget crisis and attacking the largest segment of the workforce in the state, while also attacking the base of their rival bourgeois party. The entire event has been a blessing for the unions and the DP in that it allows them to posture as defenders of the working class. The unions aren’t in control of everything that is happening in this struggle, including the rolling sickouts of teachers, and students walking out of the public schools.

Workers want to fight but the unions want to sit at the table. Workers look to the unions for protection and hold illusions as to what unions today actually are. So there has not been an independently articulated expression of discontent towards the anti-worker parts of the bill which have gone ignored due to the focus on denial of collective bargaining for the union. The bill is 140 pages and is a good deal larger than that one issue that bothers the union apparatus. It contains reactionary provisions for arbitrary cuts in Medicare and a whole host of attacks aimed at school teachers. Apparently despite the talk to the contrary from the governor, cops and firefighters are not immune from provisions here. There hasn’t been a state sector strike here since 1975 when the Madison Teachers broke state law and went on strike to form a union.

The Governor may even give in on the collective bargaining demand and the unions will get what they want, the capitalist leaders will get what they want and all bourgeois factions could claim victory. State workers would then face the many cuts and get sent home being told they won a victory or sent home knowing they lost. The lessons workers learn from this event will not be learned until it is over.

By Friday, people started coming from neighboring states. Every news agency has had their equipment trucks here, even Al Jazeera. Union marshals in orange vests and portable toilets trucked in. The area left groups were present in a circus sideshow manner with flags and not much in the way of agitational content. There is a big vacuum here that the traditional left groups cannot fill. This is where a core of people committed to putting forward a revolutionary perspective on events with a call to take the struggle outside the unions could really be effective at reaching a large number of workers with a minimal number of comrades. The event cannot simply be dismissed despite the obvious fact that it is an AFL-CIO/Democrat Party managed spectacle. There are real class demands here that are predictably subsumed under the cloak of unionism, “rights” talk and the Democratic Party “progressive” nonsense. The real cost of the cuts is what is motivating people to come out. The austerity measures amount to a sixteen to twenty percent cut in take home pay which workers all know they can’t afford.

It is events like this that will start workers thinking about their own political role. Especially those who haven’t had to worry about their own livelihoods quite so much before are now confronted with something that cannot be ignored. In a place where protests usually involve events outside the US when the protests occur at all, you have workers demonstrating about something affecting themselves, and in the tens of thousands.

ASm

Internationalist Communist Tendency

http://www.leftcom.org/en

usa@leftcom.org

Egypt in flames

2011-02-08T11:55:00.002-05:00

A powerful wave of anger among the poor and unemployed Arab masses shakes the young, voracious and brutal capitalism of the North African and Middle Eastern countries supported by the old and bloody capitalism in Europe and America.

Anticipation of a social wave that can only be resolved in favor of the vast majority of the population by the emergence of the proletarian class.

For 5 days the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and many other Egyptian cities have witnessed a great wave of anger among the masses who can no longer bear to live in unemployment, poverty and hunger: after Tunisia and Algeria now its Egypt's turn.

The media in the opulent western world, which can now no longer hide the brutal police repression, focus all their information on the “lack of reforms” and the absence of “true democracy”! It was not until the masses, defying the crackdown, unleashed their anger by attacking government buildings, burning what they could, hurling rocks, knocking out tanks, groups fighting in a melee against policemen, defying the curfew and the gunfire of the forces of repression, forcing the media to recognize that these hireling regimes, protected and armed by the Western democracies and principally the United States; have maintained order and social control by a systematic and generalized police violence; that they have arrested, tortured and hounded any opposition underground using any and all means in order to have their hands free and in a few odd years to accumulate enormous richesses for their clans – and their foreign godfathers.

The timid requests made by Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy and Co. to the Mubarak regime (and previously with that of Ben Ali) for urgent concessions in order to respond to the most urgent demands of the masses (bread and jobs, essentially) show the extent to which the imperialists were surprised by the wave of riots that spread throughout the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East.

Have the western democracies suddenly begun to concern themselves about the misery which the proletarians and the agricultural toiling masses of these countries have experienced for years?

Not at all! In countries where capitalism is developing in the only way possible, given the ruthless imperialist competition that imposes an economic social and military oppression on all the world's populations – let's not mince words – the most savage and brutal history has known, in countries where the capitalist mode of production claimed to bring welfare and civilization, there is no other prospect for the masses that exploitation, repression, poverty and hunger. These regimes like Egypt or Tunisia which have crushed their people down and who now receive in return a very small fraction of the violence inflicted on the masses have throughout this period been strategic outposts of the imperialist “democratic” powers that dominate the world.

Faced with the overwhelming explosion off anger among the disinherited Arab masses Washington, Berlin, Paris, Rome, London and Brussels, address to Cairo as they did yesterday to Tunis and Algiers the counsel that they should permit freedom of expression, carry out reforms, stop the repression…. Empty words that only serve to make people believe that more “democracy”, less corruption and less brutality by the authorities, would improve the situation of the masses. Western leaders know from experience that the thousand cards in the deck of “democracy” can be played in different scenarios to divert the struggles of the masses towards objectives that do not challenge capitalism, but limit themselves to changes in government. It is no coincidence that in the demonstrations the various opposition parties put forward the demand, “Ben Ali Must Leave!”, “Mubarak Get out!” They just want to take advantage of the riots to replace the Ben Ali and Mubarak clans in the governments of these countries.

What will change fundamentally for the masses? Nothing.

With only a little more freedom of expression and freer elections, it will be the continuation of the brutal exploitation of the proletarianized masses which capitalism inflicts everywhere on the planet, but with the added aggravation of an imperialist oppression, which fills the strong-boxes of the American and European bourgeoisies and allows them to buy the complicity of the reformist organizations controlling their own proletarians!

The riots which today shake the Arab world prefigure tensions and riots in Europe: the Mediterranean, mare nostrum of the ancient Romans, could be transformed into a lake of fire setting aflame the Old Continent because the economic crisis which shook the Western economies and of which the delayed but inexorable consequences fall upon the countries of the periphery, can be surmounted by the capitalism only by further oppressing the proletarian masses of the world.

By their rioting in recent weeks, the North African, Middle Eastern and Albanian proletarians cry out to the world that capitalism is not able to meet the elementary requirements of the masses and that this intolerable situation must change. The proletarians of Europe and America regard these revolts with surprise, anxious but also pleased with revolts which put to flight these blood-thirsty governments. The proletarians of the richest countries on the planet, who are also experiencing a continuous deterioration of their living and working conditions, do not have the power to revolt in the same way. They have been educated in the respect of “democratic legality”, they have been poisoned for decades by the myth of a democracy which they see every day is impotent to solve their day to day problems, but from which they are not able to free themselves to give expression to the revolt that any slave inevitably feels.

However, the proletarians of the old capitalist countries have a history of class struggles, revolutionary struggles not only against the old feudal regimes, but also against capitalism. It is this history that they can and must reclaim if they are not to remain forever subjugated to their imperialist bourgeoisie, they must rediscover the lessons of the glorious history of class struggles of the past and the real social revolutions that have made all the imperialist powers tremble in fear!

If the proletarians of the Maghreb and the Middle East which have risen up against their regimes, allow themselves to be channeled onto the path of democracy and into the allegedly not faked elections – which is where the opposition parties are directing them – they will not succeed in finding a perspective for their class, they will not succeed in emancipating themselves from the exploitation and oppression which condemns them to poverty today and tomorrow will transform them into cannon fodder, as has already been the case in the numerous wars that have already drenched the region in blood. The nationalisms which various Arab States have cultivated among the masses to defend the interests of castes and bourgeois factions allied with this or that imperialism, are the other side of the coin, which accords perfectly, if the need is felt for any supplementary «social link», with religious fundamentalism, as demonstrated by the Ayatollahs in Iran and Zionism in Israel.

The proletarian masses which today express their anger away and apart from any religious instrumentalisation, will not long be able to remain in this situation. Even when the bourgeois regimes go through a grave political crisis as is the case in Egypt and Tunisia (and tomorrow perhaps in Morocco, in Jordan, in Libya or elsewhere), in the absence of the class party, armed with the revolutionary communist program and determined to prepare the proletarians for the future anticapitalist revolution, the masses can be “neutralized” thanks to the always effective action of democracy, and – if it is necessary – in recourse to an alternative of the Islamic type...

Actually the proletarians are faced with three possibilities: to fall back into silence as before the revolt, with some freedom of expression and organization permitted by a new legality imposed by new bourgeois fractions with the agreement of imperialism; or to be represented by some forms of Islamist parties, which through their denunciation of corruption and immorality, succeed in capturing the disgust of the masses against the current leadership, or to take the path of class organization for the defense without compromise of their immediate interests with a view to overthrowing bourgeois society plunged into the commodification of all existing social and human relations.

This path of class struggle is undoubtedly the most difficult; and it seems most distant because bourgeois society in the competition of one against another drives each individual to only see themself, to think only of their personal needs (or those of their family) over those of their neighbors. But the proletariat is a class based on particular productive and social relations: they are the class which the capitalists must exploit to get their profits and it is the material condition of wage-earning labor power which makes the proletariat a class in which individuals have the same interests and feel the need to unite to defend them; it is this material pressure, this movement of defense that gives birth to solidarity and the consciousness of possessing a force that does not limit itself to outbursts of anger, but can be organized to arrange for a future that is no longer that of eternal exploitation by capitalism!

The European proletarians, for their part, have everything to lose if they just sit and watch passively at what's happening on the other side of the Mediterranean; the revolt of the proletariat and the poor masses of Africa and the Middle East are of the most acute interest to them: it is their class brothers who revolt, driven by hunger and poverty, and if repression triumphs some of them will seek opportunities in Europe that offer more in life than where they come from, as has been happening for decades – new proof that the proletarian condition is the same everywhere. Capitalism can only use these new entrants to increase competition among workers, which is why the revolt of the masses is also directly relevant to European proletarians of the Mediterranean. The workers are the only ones who have nothing to fear from these riots, who have nothing to fear if the fire touches the European metropoles. They are the only ones because they are part of the same class of wage laborers, exploited by capital(s) belonging to networks of interests that bind the bourgeoisies one to the others, and must be fought everywhere.

But to be effective, this struggle must overcome the myths of a “democracy” and a “legalism” that every bourgeois, every capitalist, under pressure from the street, is ready to demand against the other now-hated and discredited bourgeois, then when calm returns and the dust has settled to trample them underfoot without the least scruple!

The revolts which have succeeded one another in the Arab countries give a lesson for proletarian struggle: the way forward for the workers on both shores of the Mediterranean as in all countries of the world, is the path of class struggle, the struggle in which the proletariat rises not in defense of bourgeois democratic lies, but of their own class interests, which also represent the future of human society because they imply the end of the capitalist mode of production and therefore of all the social, political economic and military oppression characteristic of bourgeois society.

International Communist Party

January, 30th 2011

www.pcint.org

Internationalists Communists Klasbatalo havin't any organisational links with the International Communist Party and don't agree with all its political positions.

Critical comments of the ICP ( Proletarian) on our basic positions and our answer

2011-01-15T13:17:00.002-05:00

Internationalist Communists - Klasbatalo

1 - The October Revolution in Russia in 1917 was the first step of an authentic world communist revolution in an international revolutionary wave that ended the imperialist war and continued for several years. The failure of the revolutionary wave, especially in Germany in 1919-23, condemned the revolution in Russia to isolation and rapid degeneration. The Stalinism developed in the 20s and after was only the ideological representation of this degeneration and isolation. It presented itself as the gravedigger of the Russian revolution, introducing a system of centrally planned state capitalism with the doctrine of "socialism in one country" that we reject.

ICP : The Russian revolution was a double revolution: an anti-tsarist, bourgeois revolution, which ripened for a long time in this country and whose main driving force was the peasantry; and an anti-capitalist, socialist revolution, whose driving force was the working class, which was part of an international proletarian revolutionary wave. The power issuing from the revolution was politically proletarian and socialist, but this power could be maintained only on the basis of a compromise with the peasantry.

The failure of the revolution forced the international proletarian power in Russia to try to resist by orienting the unavoidable development of capitalism towards State capitalism and trying to control it. But it is capitalism that ends up controlling the power and the Russian party. Stalinism was not only an "ideological representation" of degeneration of isolation: he represented that political force in Russia which led the anti-proletarian counter-revolution and the realization of the bourgeois revolution. At the international level it became integrated into the global bourgeois counter-revolution of which it was one of the decisive agents by its role within the proletarian movement.

ICK : To put it properly: two revolutions occurred, February and October – each embodying the combined elements of the bourgeois revolution against czarism, and the proletarian revolution against rising capital – domestic and foreign. In both, the working class plays a leading role. The weakness of indigenous Russian capital prevented the local rising bourgeoisie from playing a significant role, leaving the road open for the working class, with close relations to the peasantry, to pursue the process. The “compromise” with the peasantry – imposed by the immediate conditions in war-torn Russia – could only be addressed by the success of the international revolution, both in terms of the preponderance of the proletariat in the developed Capitalist countries, and the availability of modern capitalist means of production. The understanding that ‘if the revolution remains isolated we’re doomed’ understood at the beginning of the revolution was played out with the failure of the German revolution. The confusion that revolutionaries have faced since then is the result of maintaining the illusion that there was some residual proletarian or revolutionary character to the Russian state after the defeats in Germany and elsewhere.

The defeat of the revolutionary wave was a key factor in the degeneration of the proletarian revolution in Russia. It is not true that “ The failure of the revolution forced the international proletarian power in Russia to try to resist by orienting the development of capitalism to State capitalism and trying to control it.” It put the Bolsheviks in the position of completing the tasks of the Bourgeois revolution, exposing both their strengths and weaknesses.

To put it simply, we saw the Bolsheviks’ capacity to lead and unify the proletariat during the period of taking power, on one hand, and then demolishing any sign of workers’ autonomy that might interfere with what, initially, was basic material survival, notably that of the regime, during the civil war. On the other hand, this would later develop into the full-scale subordination of the proletariat to ‘its’ party in the process of completing the tasks of the ‘bourgeois revolution. The tendency toward state capitalism originated with European capitalism’s increased use of the state in the financing of the militarization in the lead up to imperialist rivalries of World War One, with Germany taking the lead. The rationale of the permanent arms or permanent war economy, that plays such a leading role to this day, savagely distorted both the perspectives of the Bolshevik party as well as the aims of the proletarian movement in Russia of 1917 – leaving us the legacy of horror that the proletariat faces today. In many ways, it was both the immaturity of the international vanguard, including the Bolsheviks, as well as the demoralizing effect of the bourgeois state’s integration of the parties of the Second International into its bosom, that ended with support for global war. All of this, in addition to the civil war’s grinding devastation, was a major factor in the isolation and defeat of the Russian revolutionary bastion.

2 - Since the First World War, capitalism is a decadant social system. It has no progressive value to offer . It has twice plunged mankind into a savage cycle of crisis, world war, reconstruction, new crisis. The theory of decadence is a point of view in motion suggesting a direction that global capitalism seeks to make .

ICP : The "theory of decadence" is not able to understand the evolution of global capitalism. At the time of the First World War, capitalism was existent in less than half of the planet; and even in developed capitalist countries there remained large segments of the population who were not wage labourers ( example: in France, Italy, over half the population was still in the countryside). This meant that capitalism had before itself objectively great development potential, if it could overcome the crisis it was in (that is to say if it succeeded in crushing the proletarian revolutionary movement which was also limited only to one part of Europe). At the cost of two world wars, capitalism was able to recommence a very powerful cycle of accumulation and to extend itself to the entire world.

ICK : By the time of the First World War, although “capitalism had only been implanted in less than half of the planet”, it dominated not merely those parts of the world involved in direct capitalist commodity production, but subsumed all pre-capitalist existing societies under its hegemony. And even though it is only in the last few decades that the capitalist mode of production has come to exist virtually everywhere (with the proletariat now the majority of the world’s population), it survives primarily through the extra economic intervention of the dominant imperialist states militarily, politically, and financially. With no more room to expand within the confines of its constituent form, the national state, since the turn of the last century, capitalism no longer has a socially progressive role to play. This is born out by the destructive, cannibalistic nature of its imperialist form in the last century. In those parts of the globe where the capitalist mode of production has taken root in the last 50 years, we see a spiraling regression into the barbarism, originally seen during the First World War, now dragging the dominant capitalist centers along with it. As we said, “decadence is a point of view in motion”, or put another way: a point of view where the dynamics are far from played out.

3 - The former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc.. have never been communist countries, despite what bourgeois propaganda says, Stalinist propaganda included. It was and still is, for some countries, where a specific form of state capitalism reigns.

ICP : The young countries that gained their independence on the wave of anti-colonial struggles, have used the State, in a more or less pronounced fashion, partially according to the importance of the remaining domination of the former colonial power, to compensate for the lack of local capital, inspired by the Russian "model" as the only means of accelerating endogenous capitalist development . To the extent that this development was effected, this "state capitalism" was inevitably to give way to a classical capitalism.

ICK : A good contribution, with which we agree. As mentioned, the specific form of state capitalism, represented by the ‘Stalinist model’, is but one expression of the import substitutionalist model that pervaded in the developing ex-colonial world, primarily after the Second World War.

4 - The participation of the working class in the electoral circus and to various parliaments is the best means which the bourgeoisie has discovered to divert the proletariat from its historic task: the emancipation of all humanity. Like fascism, "bourgeois democracy" is a terrain where the proletariat has no real place.

ICP : Before diverting the proletariat from its historic task, bourgeois democracy and the electoral circus by plunging it into class collaboration, prevents the return to the path of independent class struggle, including the defence of its immediate interests.

ICK : Again, an excellent clarification. We admit that as an expression of the diversion of the proletariat's historical tasks implied.

5 - We see the unions as organizations tied to the State by a thousand and one strings, laws, subsidies and collaborations. It is impossible to change the union leadership or try to transform the unions as their links with the capitalist state are organic. This implies the rejection of red unions or anarchist unions.

ICP : The present union apparatusses are completely and irreversibly linked to the bourgeois network of collaboration between classes. But how could these (critical) observations about the current situation of the big official trade unions be used to reject "red unions" (which do not exist) or "anarchist" unions? For their daily struggle for immediate defense against the capitalists, the workers need a specific organization, open to all those who want to defend their class interests. This organization cannot be a closed political organization, i.e. the class party, but rather a union-type organization. Without doubt this economic struggle organization (class union) might fall under reformist or even more generally bourgeois influences: this is why it is necessary that the class party conquer the leadership of this organization to maintain it, or to bring it back , to the correct classist way and to direct its action towards the revolution. It is then used as a transmission belt of the revolutionary positions of the party to the workers who are organized in this class trade union and to those who, without being organized in it, nevertheless follow the actions of this trade union.

ICK : By “bound by a thousand and one ties to the state” we mean that the unions are no longer simply bargaining units over the price of labour, but, since the First World War, have become active agents in the defense and advancement of capitalism and its state, as well as acting as an ideological rearguard for capital. We may intervene in union meetings, but one must do so as to advance forms of organization, struggle, program, and extension, which transcend the sectoralist, nationalist trap that unions today embody. Red unions or party unions (as you say, ‘if they existed…’) also become arbitrators in the rate of exploitation and, as such, would fall under the weight of the law of value, with the added confusion of communists being forced to play capital’s game.

6 - We reject the tactics of "united front" and "popular fronts" and "anti-fascists". All these tactics combine the interests of the proletariat with those of fractions of the bourgeoisie and what they ultimately serve is only to divert the working class from its revolutionary goals.

ICP : It is necessary to distinguish: The "political united front" aimed at reformist workers' parties, that is to say, subordinated to the bourgeoisie; they must be condemned along with anti-fascist and popular fronts. The "trade union united front" aimed at unions that were then still independent and kept a class character : that is why our current supported it. Today, with the present unions, this is not possible. The "united front from below" aimed at proletarians, whether or not members of one party or another, for a precise struggle, without involving any political agreement at the top between different components; In Italy it might be the armed defence against the fascists of the headquarters of "workers'" parties and organizations, including the reformist parties. A "united front" of this type should not be rejected today.

ICK : We find this clear on the implications of rejecting the united front particularly on the question of the united front from below.

7 - All nationalist ideologies of "national independence" and the "right of peoples to self-determination, whatever their pretext -- ethnic, historical, religious, etc.. are a veritable drug for the workers . They aim at making them become party to one or another fraction of the bourgeoisie, they lead them to rise up against each other, this leads up to war.

ICP : We must distinguish between the nationalism of the oppressors and the nationalism of the oppressed. The decades of the postwar period saw the proletarians participate beside millions of peasants in the struggles against colonialism and for national independence, that is to say, for bourgeois revolutions: they were right! The proletariat cannot be disinterested in the bourgeois revolution; it cannot stand aside, as advocated by the Mensheviks in Russia: it must be involved in striving to maintain or to conquered its class independence, to try to push this revolution to the end, and if possible, if it is organized into a party, to try to take the lead in pushing for its own international revolution: tactics defined by Marx and Engels for Germany 1848-1850 and applied by the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Now the cycle of revolutionary struggles for national independence -- bourgeois revolutions -- is historically closed across the globe. But national oppressions and the struggles against these oppressions persist and will always persist under capitalism. The Communists are not indifferent vis-à-vis this oppression: they struggle against all oppressions, thus including national oppression, but by integrating them into (and subordinating them to) the proletarian class struggle, specifically the perspective of the union of the proletarians of all countries.

ICK : If we were to do a balance sheet on the effect of national ‘liberation’ struggles, anti-colonialist struggles, struggles of oppressed ‘nations’ on the proletariat of the nations in question – as well as internationally, since the second world war – we would find that in virtually every case the working class lost, or had its capacity for autonomous organization severely diminished for decades, often going so far as to destroy its ability for immediate self defense. In virtually every case, each national struggle played pawn to one or another of the imperialist powers. Support campaigns for national liberation struggles diverted a generation of proletarian militants in the postwar period from fighting on their own international class terrain. Rather than organizing globally with their class brothers and sisters, a whole layer of militants were sucked into supporting this or that liberation movement, which, once in power, would crush every vestige of workers’ autonomy, and often enough every expression of basic human rights.

8 - The working class is the only class capable of carrying out the communist revolution. The revolutionary struggle of the working class necessarily leads to a confrontation with the capitalist state. To destroy capitalism, the working class must overthrow all states and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide: the international power of workers councils, comprising the entire proletariat.

ICP : To make the revolution and to exercise its dictatorship, the proletariat needs a political party; without the party leadership, there can be neither victory of the revolution nor dictatorship of the victorious proletariat . This fundamental lesson differentiates the Marxists from the libertarians and semi-libertarians.

ICK : Building an internationalist party for our class is on the agenda, facing a capitalism bogged down in a growing international financial crisis under sustained attacks of capital against our class, and for which the only ultimate perspective for remedying its crisis, and the rise of subsequent struggles, is a global conflagration. Building an internationalist party implies opening a debate between the various forces within the political proletarian milieu. Globally, the real proletarian camp is very weak, so, for the moment – due to our small numbers – we can only try to be present where the proletariat is confronting its class enemy, by diffusing its own program – the communist program – in order to win the most conscious elements of the proletariat on its own terrain and for the communist program to take the lead in the struggles.

9 - The "self-management" and "nationalization" of the economy are not the means to overthrow capitalism because they do not attack the capitalist production relations. These are actually just forms that capitalism can take . Communism necessitates the conscious abolition, by the working class of capitalist social relations and the creation of a society without a State, without classes, without money, without national borders or professional armies.

ICP : The abolition of capitalist relations first requires a political revolution, that is to say the seizure of power by the proletariat, the destruction of the bourgeois State and the establishment of a Proletarian State, that is to say: the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Proletarian State, that dictatorship of the proletariat, is indispensable to expropriate politically and socially the old ruling class and " to neutralize" the middle classes, to eradicate gradually the capitalist mode of production. We cannot pass directly from capitalism to communism, we can not jump over this intermediate phase which will also be that of the international civil war.

ICK : Overall, we agree. However, during the pre-revolutionary or revolutionary period, organizations like the soviets or working class councils will emerge. These organizations having a dual function – the defense of workers’ interests, going so far as controlling production and its transformation, but above all, working at once on the political level to overthrow the world capitalist system and its states. This is far from those self-management organizations fronted by certain anarchists which in effect self-exploit workers in non-revolutionary periods. This is why we insist that the seizure of power and revolutionary transformation requires not only the party and a solid well-developed program, but also most importantly a fully conscious proletariat, well aware of its possibilities, its potential, as well as having the means at its disposal.

10 - A first step towards this goal is the political revolutionary organization of the proletarians with class consciousness and their union in an international political party. The role of this party will not be to take power on behalf of the working class but to participate in the unification and expansion of their struggles and their control by the workers themselves, and the dissemination of the Communist program in order to raise the proletariat to the level of being a class for itself. Only the working class in its totality, through its own autonomous bodies, such as workers' councils, can establish socialism. This task cannot be delegated, not even to the most aware classs Party....

ICP : The party is the organ without which the proletariat cannot seize and excercise power. This party has a leading, directing function in the revolutionary struggle and the exercise of power. Other forms and proletarian bodies (unions, soviets, etc..) have a secondary role in relation to this supreme body.

Only the party that is based on the historic communist program of the proletariat and which is only comprised of a minority of the class, can direct and unify the working class, that is to say, to free it from the domination of the bourgeoisie. The great mass of the proletariat will make the revolution without having a clear idea of the final goal and the way forward, etc..: It is only after the revolution, when the bourgeoisie has lost its power over society, that the great masses can access to this 'consciousness'. Marx: the proletariat revolution is necessary for it to liberate itself from all the old shit that weighs down on it. (paraphrase)

ICK : Though the Party is essential to the success of proletarian revolution, it is far from the only force playing a direct role in leading and unifying the proletariat. The councils, factory committees, and workers assemblies play the major role in unifying struggles; look at any general strike, e.g. Greece. The process of management is a dialectical relationship between the unitary bodies (councils etc), the party and non-party militants. Accounts of the Russian revolution show that, in the period immediately after the October proletarian seizure of power, all forces – whether Bolshevik, anarchist, left SR or independent – that supported the insurrection under the Bolshevik call of “All Power to the Soviets”, were often referred to as Bolshevik. The party unified more than itself under this umbrella, and was transformed by the very process. “The great mass of the proletariat will make the revolution without having a clear idea of the final goal and the way forward, etc.” This is in part true, however neither did the party itself have a clear idea of the final goal and the way forward, though it and those it regrouped around itself in Oct 1917 had the clearest understanding of what was possible in terms of the “final” goal, and was decisive in its call for Proletarian power.

We understand that much of the confusion around party and class stems from the effects of the meat grinder of the civil war, as well as the attendant problems of the isolation of the revolutionary bastion. Misunderstanding ‘keeping power’ at any cost even if it meant destroying its Revolutionary proletarian goal has cost the cause of revolutionary communism enormously.

However, the party to be built won’t have anything in common with maoist parties and their Stalinist postulate of the “socialism in one country”. China has never been a proletarian power, and the ideology of Maoism was nothing more than a means to press-gang the masses into sacrificing their interests for the benefit of national capital. Neither can the party substitute itself for the proletariat. The party is the intelligence of the proletariat, its conscience, and its intellectual guide, which leads the proletariat in a revolutionary direction by its watchwords. The lessons that the Russian Revolution exposes are the dangers inherent in a party taking in hand the reins of the economy and political life. The future proletarian internationalist party will evolve side-by-side with the political and economic mechanisms that the proletariat will put in place, without taking them over. The party will advise the proletariat by diffusing its program, by constantly struggling to insure that the new political and economic mechanisms always find their way towards communism. It’s through the development and elaboration of its conscience that the proletariat will create the material transition towards communism. This way, the party will be able to see far more clearly which direction to take since it won’t be in conflict with itself holding power, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks found themselves.

11 - Revolutionary practice leaves no room for attitudes of sectarianism and isolationism. Our ideas must be heard within our class. We place upon ourselves the mandate to intervene as often as possible, according to our real strength, in the various struggles of our class, to share and participate in the clarification of the proletarian program, and the building ofmthe revolutionary party.

ICP : The Communists are involved in the struggles and the life of the proletariat, but not to clarify the program! The party's platform, Marxism, is the summation of the great struggles and class historical experiences of the proletariat, not the limited and contingent skirmishes of today! This program is the most valuable weapon of the proletariat, it cannot be subjected to democratic discussion and perpetual revision according to the passing suggestions of the moment, all the more so when the counter-revolutionary influence of the bourgeoisie so crushingly dominates the proletariat itself! This program must be understood, assimilated and intransigently defended by militants who want to place themselves on the terrain of the revolutionary proletariat and contribute to its resurgence. It is a difficult goal to achieve because it requires breaking with all the prejudices and ideology inculcated by the multifaceted and ultra-powerful bourgeois propaganda apparatus . But it is what must necessarily be done before wanting to make one's "ideas" heard by the proletarians and to make them “conscious”.

ICK : “This program is the most valuable weapon of the proletariat, it cannot be subjected to democratic discussion and perpetual revision according to the passing suggestions of the moment, all the more so when the counter-revolutionary influence of the bourgeoisie so crushingly dominates the proletariat itself!”

While it’s true that the party platform should not be modified simply as a result of ‘the contingent skirmishes of today!’ It’s not like trying on a new pair of shoes every week. The minuscule numbers of the communist left leave us with a big question as far as accepting this notion of the invariability of platform. The most important being that the international proletarian revolution, as you know, is not simply a question of platform, or party, or councils, or the conjunctural or periodic objective conditions by themselves.

As all these factors come to the fore in today’s emergent class struggle, the platform must expand, develop, and clarify in order to be a vibrant, living part of the revolutionary process. “Breaking with all the prejudices and ideology inculcated by the multifaceted and ultra-powerful bourgeois propaganda apparatus” requires the conscious capacity of the proletariat to analyze, debate, disprove and demolish capital’s ideological stranglehold. Of course, most of what we’re discussing here represents certain fundamentals. But, substantial as they are, they’re not the final word.

Towards decisive confrontations between the proletariat and the capitalist forces

2010-11-28T10:16:00.005-05:00

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

Additions to our basic positions.

2010-08-26T09:26:00.003-04:00

The internationalist Communists of Montreal are changing their name to “The Internationalist Communists – Klasbatalo!” In Esperanto, 'Klasbatalo!' is a word meaning class struggle. There are two reasons for this. First, the activity of revolutionary internationalists is not restricted to a city, of course, and secondly the militant composition of Internationalist Communists is no longer limited to the city of Montreal.

The Internationalist Communists – Klasbatalo! have made additions to their basic positions.

It has been emphasized that Stalinism was the result of the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution following the collapse of the revolutionary wave particularly in Germany between 1919-1923. Stalinism is also a bourgeois ideology (Maoism one of its variants).

We have added a position rejecting bourgeois democracy. This is nothing new for the ICM (see the article: A circus of darkness and lies: the National Assembly) but we felt we should mention it in our basic positions.

We have also clarified that self-management and nationalization are just other forms of capitalism, which do not address its relations of production.

Finally, the distribution of the communist program aims to raise proletarian consciousness within its own class. Communism requires the working class to consciously abolish capitalist social relations. Following from this we reject all sectarian attitudes and isolationism. Left Communist ideas must have a hearing within our class.

CSIS Visits ICM

2010-07-30T10:32:00.002-04:00

In the wee hours of Thursday morning July 1, 2010, a bomb blasted a Canadian Forces recruitment center in Trois-Rivières. The attack, claimed by an obscure group calling themselves Résistance Internationaliste, followed two others perpetrated in the same manner over a period of six years, the first on a Hydro Quebec pylon in 2004; the second in 2006 blew up the car of a petroleum industry spokesman.

There are indeed few groups in Canada claiming proletarian internationalism, and even fewer carrying the “internationalist” epithet, from orthodox Marxism, as part of their name. As international communists we are therefore part of the second group – it’s a no-brainer.

And so, on July 9^th, the International Communists (Montreal), alias Klasbatalo, got a visit from two agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – Canada’s version of the American CIA. The two men came specially to see one of our members to elicit information concerning the attacks carried out by Résistance Internationaliste.

How to behave under these circumstances

After combing through the files of the Tsarist secret police (the Okhrana) following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Victor Serge published his little volume, “What every revolutionary should know about repression”. The book was intended as a general assessment of the methods employed by police to tail, detain, put on file, interrogate, and intimidate, any revolutionary militant deemed a potential threat to the established order “for the defense of capitalism everywhere uses the same tools; and moreover all police forces work together and are similar to each other.” (V. Serge). And so he put at the disposal of revolutionaries a guide to countering police tactics.

Our comrade managed to act with due caution in this situation: don’t open any doors to them, don’t get drawn into conversation, and feign the most crass ignorance. The two CSIS agents wanted both information on the terrorist group Résistance Internationaliste, and co-operation from our comrade in the identification of "violent and non-violent groups". What, a housecleaning for Canadian leftism?

Our comrade therefore didn’t invite them in, leaving them standing in the doorway (an important psychological barrier). To let them in is to open the door to discussion and to risk putting a foot in your mouth. Keep in mind that investigators from this sort of police agency are better trained than most revolutionaries at subtly leading a conversation. So after simply asking if they had a file on him, he told them quite plainly that he had nothing to say, and shut the door in their faces.

Even if it’s a group worthy of denunciation, with which he has nothing in common, a downright enemy (a group from the extreme right, for instance), a revolutionary militant should not collaborate with the police. It’s more than a question of principle, but his personal security that’s at stake – for anything he might say is subject to interpretation and could be quickly turned against him. The golden rule here is always silence.

Moreover as recently as during the G20 protests, several young militants were victims of police intimidation. When in the hands of police, it is important for a militant to realize that one of their methods is to threaten rape, physical abuse, and murder (sic)! Quite probably some of your personal possessions will be confiscated, ending up in some detective’s bookcase never to be seen again! The golden rule remains the same in these circumstances: if you are permitted, contact your lawyer immediately and say nothing. As little interaction possible – as little expression possible – facing the police squarely will likely get you out of there faster than the militant who babbles, cries and seems frightened.

Every militant has to be ready for this sort of thing and know how to behave under such circumstances, for the revolutionary path is no game, it’s a long-term commitment of which one should be conscious.

Concerning Resistance Internationaliste and terrorism in general

First, let’s put things into perspective: internationalism is a proper designation of the revolutionary worker’s movement descending from Marxism. Internationalism is one of the cornerstones of Marxist theory that rests essentially on class unity and solidarity without borders… Against the national and corporate divisions that entangle the proletariat. Also, faced with bourgeois conceptions of the State and of the Nation, he counterposes his international class party and its internationalist program whose objective is revolution. Against national wars, he advocates revolutionary defeatism and class war.

Secondly, note straight away that orthodox Marxism has always rejected terrorism and political intrigue, which have absolutely nothing to do with revolutionary defeatism and class war. Whatever the propaganda by revolutionary unionists of the 19^th century, anarchistic banditry, or the Bakunian manipulations within the First International, for Marxists, and thus the internationalists, the revolution is not an affair of a handful of individuals with cryptic methods who as a consequence take revolutionary license in the name of the class, through an adventurism rife with intrigue and political maneuvering. It is the affair of a majority class guided by the watchwords of its revolutionary party. The internationalists, a group of individuals belonging to the proletariat whose class-consciousness is more advanced, reject ipso facto the methods of terrorist action.

So, Résistance Internationaliste, who are internationalists in name only, use methods alien to the proletariat. Terrorism is, and will always be, an expression of the bourgeoisie(Note). The terrorist hijacks as many fractions of the bourgeoisie who oppose it than the proletariat in its entirety. Its weapon is always terror, no matter the victims left behind, leaving all classes confused.

Incidently, Résistance Internationaliste uses two mutually opposing terms: resistance and internationalist. Resistance is not an act of the revolutionary proletariat, which in fact, has no interest in keeping the system in place. They have never resisted since they’ve never had a clue about communism (this system historically never having seen the light of day). Also, what communist regime would it have to defend in opposing its so-called resistance to the capitalist order? Nada.

Moreover, resistance and terrorism have always made good bedfellows within bourgeois fractions and the déclassé, who seek to preserve their assets, their property, wealth, and their capital. It is a weapon of imperialist rivalry. The attacks of Résistance Internationaliste do nothing in advancing proletarian class-consciousness toward a revolutionary outcome. To the contrary! It sows programmatic confusion in our class; it sows fear. And it threatens our lives by dubious acts.

Résistance Internationaliste simply plays the game of the police and of state repression. Terrorist acts lead only to a dead end.

Proletarian comrades, build your class party internationalist!

International Communists, Montreal.

Note: On state terrorism, read the excellent article from the Internal Fraction Communist Current International (August 2005) Terrorism, anti-terrorism : Weapon of the bourgeoisie in its Path towards War, especially the part Terrorism, a War Weapon of the Bourgeoisie.

http://fractioncommuniste.org/ficci_eng/b32/index-2.html

Letter to IFICC

2010-07-24T17:20:00.001-04:00

To IFFIC June 21, 2010

Hello Comrades,

We are always very happy to hear from you, even if it’s somewhat difficult to respond as thoroughly as we’d like. It’s neither neglect, nor certainly any lack of interest on our part; it’s time, rather, that is not always on our side. There are only a few of us, as you know, and all of our energy these past weeks has been spent preparing for our presence at the Montreal Anarchist Book Fair. Though we are not part of that political current, it is always interesting to set foot, make contacts, exchange ideas, and to defend Marxism.

In any case, rest assured – we’ve put aside the idea of an interventionary journal. The fact is that we were struck from the start by the logistical and technical difficulties of such a project. We still see the idea as relevant, although unfeasible with the scant resources of such a small group. It’s that our priority isn’t solely to debate with diverse organizations on issues of the Communist Left – actually, we also hope to intervene as “actively” as possible within our class[1]. We realize, of course, that debating with other groups is part of a larger debate within our class. However, this debate must also be taken directly to the class, and not only to its organizations. Unfortunately, we seem to see most groups who claim Left Communist heritage, sinking into the most primitive forms of sectarianism. It’s not a sect that we need for the proletariat, but a party!

Also, we fully share your concerns about the circumstances that seem to entangle our current and would like to remedy this state of affairs. We therefore agree when you say that: “Today, It seems wrong (for example and simply by way of explanation) to stick to the plan of “redressing the ICC” and to claim to want to re-establish it in this objective, in order to support the minority comrades of the Fraction (that’s been our motivation for “keeping in the background”). The problem is, rather, how you apply it and whether it is worth the effort. In fact, we think that it’s no longer how you stand as the Fraction that will help the ICC out of its impasse, or even an entire opportunist and sectarian current within the Communist Left. It might be best to pull as many members as possible, those who are still more than a bit lucid and dynamic, rather than try to breath life back into the ICC, itself; for after ten years of debating without an inkling of major change, maybe it’s time to adopt another tactic. In fact, not only does the Internal Fraction remain External, but furthermore, this political stagnation they’ve imposed on you – in which you have been “obliged” by the force of events to soak up as a Fraction – after a decade it has certainly not helped your group to see its way clear. In fact, today you find yourselves as part of a split, but when troubles come, they don’t happen as isolated events.

Thus, as with several other groups at the moment – and despite criticisms it has made on the absence of real discussions within the ICC – the Fraction has unfortunately given a pathetic example that it isn’t in the position to better explain its divergences. This adds another element of confusion for our class.

We believe it is always necessary to critique certain political and organizational positions of the ICC as it stands now; however, the ICC doesn’t have the exclusive right to mistakes, political setbacks, opportunism, sectarianism and internal difficulties. The evidence lies in, among other things, the politics of “turning a deaf ear” that the ICT practices with regard to us and, to quote you, in the “exclusion and confusion” that they are going through. These critiques and the balance sheet that you must make of IFFIC will prove necessary for the ensemble of organizations coming out of Left Communism. We’re eager to hear from you on this subject as well.

The ICT as a pole of regroupment

Now, we are curious about your position on this subject: Do you still consider the ICT as a pole of regroupment?

First of all, remember that the IBRP – now the ICT – never wanted to consider itself as a pole of regroupment for groups and for individuals coming out of Left Communism, and is even critical with regard to the use of this term. Also, even though we are always ready to work with them politically, we don’t consider them the pole of regroupment that we would have hoped for in the past. We know, that although the organization contains the most members numerically, this is no indication that its program is best for our class, and that they make fewer political mistakes. Moreover, and contrary to the ICC which plays out all of its psychodramas in front of the class, the ICT seems rather to conduct politics of silence and secrecy. For us, the pole of regroupment (the embryo of the future international party) must be able to conduct a clear politic in bringing the debates before the class, no matter what mistakes or defeats it gathers. In this sense, the ICC in the time of Chirik appears more honest. Now, how can a so-called pole of regroupment (ICT) lose some of its members in Italy without any mention of it in its press[2]? How can it keep silent about something that should be brought to light before the class to avoid any element of confusion and to keep the proletarian program free and clear of any misunderstanding? And what about the public silence of all the affiliates of the ICT on the opportunistic behaviour of the GIO?[3] Their politics of “mise au point” (setting the record straight) regarding us reflects this tendency of shutting up anyone who might tarnish their image. This isn’t bitterness; it’s just a sad report. Their sectarian attitude toward an Austrian group is just as open to criticism.

Common distribution IFICC, ICM and FGCI and political discussions

So, you don’t agree with the contents of the tract, “The Working Class of Greece shows us the way!” Why not?

In our case, we find that the missing call for the proletarian party – the guide to the class struggle beyond simple economic demands within the framework of capitalism – was a grave oversight. This didn’t prevent us from disseminating it widely (2600 copies). Yet, in the tract, “Les enjeux des luttes en Grece”, that you signed with the other groups, there was the same omission regarding the international party. Furthermore, it would be interesting to know the number of copies that the groups disseminated, or was it only diffused on the Internet?

Regarding the proposed discussions between IFFIC and us on State capitalism and the current assessment of the class struggle, put forward by one of us in Paris, it should be mentioned that the ICM never confirmed this proposed discussion. In the past, exchanges between IFFIC and us took up to 70% of our time. We have had to meticulously weigh our every word so as not to not receive a leftist epitaph. This caused us to neglect our own debates as to an eventual platform, even though our exchanges with other groups came from Left Communism.

Comrades, we are not against political exchanges with other left communist organizations; but the fact is that we are a very small group that does not share the politics of IFFIC, of the ICC, nor of the ICT. You have to take into account that not all groups from the Communist Left are at the same level of formation. The dialectic is, after all, the principle force of Marxism. What’s more, political organisations do not all consist of experienced militants or those able to commit up to 100% of their time to militancy – In fact, even within an organization, there may be militants who work up to 60 hours a week, work more often than not physically and mentally exhausting. This is the case for us, actually. As we are in the unfortunate situation (by a rise in general struggles of the working class), in which militants will be called upon to put in much more time. For the small group that we are, it is important that all can participate in political efforts. This is partly why we’ve been late in our replies – that and the fact that we have not been militants of the Communist Left for several years.

In autumn, we also intend to set aside a space on our blog for divergent points of view within the ICM – not that there is any danger of us splitting, but rather to prevent it, and to provide an outlet to a minority point of view if there is one.

The following extract of the article, “Il est minuit dans la Gauche Communiste”, from the Journal Controverses April 2010, inspired us with this idea.

1-… whereas in half the time, during their period of existence (1903-21), the Bolsheviks were traversed by a multitude of tendencies and fractions (these having positively animated their political life, having been freely provided with the material means in order to defend their positions, in the party and publicly, across all its own particular organizational structures.

[1] Following our exchanges in French with hospital workers who have set up a mobilization committee –

[2] A few days after this writing, we found on the ICT’s response in English on its website: the « Istituto Onorato Damen » A Small Clarification http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2009-11-07/the-“istituto-onorato-damen”-a-small-clarification in the article Point à la ligne of the “Istituto Onorato Damien" http://www.leftcommunism.org/spip.php?article180.

[3] Obviously we welcome this publication [From Nationalism to Internationalism], first because it’s a voice from the Communist Left that expresses itself before the class, but also because this booklet is, from a methodological point of view, an example of a political break, fully realized, with a current of the extreme left of capital – something which wasn’t done by some people (you know who I mean) who will end up paying one way or another, one day or another.

For the Fraction, Jonas March 13, 2008

Note from icm: The ’some people’ that Jonas means, is a long time militant of the IWG.

Reprinted pamphlets

2010-06-07T12:57:00.004-04:00

We held an information table at the Montreal anarchist bookfair 2010. On this occasion, we have reprinted brochures of the "old" International Communist Current (ICC). All these texts and pamphlets were published before 2001.

We do not released the texts and pamphlets of Internationalist Communist Tendency(ICT) given the dictates of its sectarian ‘Mise au point’(April 2009): "We advised them [the ICM] we strongly wish that under these conditions, immediately cease the dissemination of public material IBRP and all its sections. "

The following addition has been made in each booklet : « Internationalists Communists of Montreal (ICM) havin't any organisational links with the International Communist Current (ICC) and don't agree with all its political positions. »

These pamphlets are :

Is it possible to reconcile anarchism and marxism?

(ICC reply to Gauche Communiste Libertaire - extracts) 0.25$

Unions Against the Working Class (ICC) 2$

The communist left and the continuity of marxism (ICC) 0.50$

It can be ordered with 0.50$ by pamphlet (cash or cheque to Réal Jodoin) by writing to: CIM_ICM, C.P. 55514, Succ. Maisonneuve, Montréal, (QC) H1W 0A1

Appeal to sympathisers of the Communist Left (Australia)

2010-04-25T09:30:00.006-04:00

We have received this "Appeal" published below from a group of left communist sympathisers in Sydney and Adelaide( Australia) [ Our Answer below ]

Appeal to sympathisers of the Communist Left (Australia)

Comrades!

Today humanity faces the same ultimatum posed to it since the eve of the First World War, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg and Friedrich Engels before her - Socialism or Barbarism.

The world capitalist system has seen its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the working class taking the brunt of the blow, everywhere facing wage-freezes, job-cuts and worsening working conditions. The threat of global environmental catastrophe looks more possible than ever before. Bloody and brutal conflicts rage on around the globe - from Iraq to Afghanistan, Somalia to Sudan, Colombia to Mexico.

In contrast to these emanations of a moribund society we also see the germs of a new world - without exploitation or oppression, without poverty or scarcity, without wars or national borders - in the class struggle of the international working class.

The Communist Left has its origins in the Left currents of the Communist International which came into being as a proletarian response to its opportunist slidings when faced with the retreat of the international revolutionary wave in the 1920s. Whilst the Communist Left had expressions in many countries its most prominent representatives were to be found in Germany, The Netherlands, Italy and Russia. In the period of counter-revolution which opened at the end of the 1920s, it was the Communist Left which proved to be the most intransigent defenders of proletarian internationalism and the most rigorous in drawing up the balance sheet of the revolutionary wave.

Whilst sympathisers of the Communist Left do exist in Australia, at this point they do so only as individuals suffering largely from political isolation. In order to effectively intervene in the class struggle, it is necessary that revolutionaries organise themselves into a political organisation, founded on the basis of shared positions and principles.

However, at the present hour the immediate formation of such a group is not on the agenda in Australia. What is needed at present is the coming together of internationalists for discussion conducted with the goal of initiating and maintaining contact between comrades (particularly those who are geographically isolated) and collective political clarification of the positions which define the communist programme today.

Thus, we appeal for the initiation of organised discussions between all sympathisers of the Communist Left in Australia. It is proposed that the discussions are conducted under the name: ‘Internationalist Communist Affiliate Network'.

We propose the criteria for participation is agreement with the most elementary positions of left communism today:

- Imperialist war and national movements of all stripes have nothing to offer the working class but death and destruction. The working class must oppose all bourgeois camps. By calling on them to take the side of one or another faction, the bourgeoisie divide workers and lead them to massacre their class brothers and sisters.

- Parliament and bourgeois elections are a masquerade. Capitalist ‘democracy' does not differ at root from any form of capitalist dictatorship. Any call to participate in the parliamentary circus can only reinforce the lie that elections offer any real choice for the exploited.

- All unions are organs of the capitalist system and act in its service. The fundamental role of the unions is to police the working class and sabotage its struggles. In order to defend its immediate interests, and ultimately to make the revolution, the working class must struggle outside and against the unions.

All who may be interested in taking part are encouraged to write to InternationalistWorker@gmail.com. We also welcome any comments, questions and criticisms.

With fraternal communist greetings, Fabius, Jack, Max, Niccolo, Thomas

Internationalist greetings comrades!

It’s good news to hear that left communists are beginning to organize in Australia. We wish you a warm welcome.

As you mentioned, capitalism is facing its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Most importantly, we’re faced with a set of circumstances that cry out for an international and internationalist response from the world’s working class. Today, it is more than a question, of general debate and analyses, but an actuality.

The attacks on the working class, carried on throughout the world today, have crystallized around Greece and the EU. In many ways, Greece has become the weathervane and mine-canary for not only the European but the global ruling class. For, in virtually every country and region, the very same austerity measures, the very same attacks on wages and living conditions, whether in the private or public sectors, with the same nationalist rationales ‘of staying competitive in a global market’, are being advanced.

The competing brothers of Capital are united in their attacks on the international working class, while the proletariat is kept divided, fragmented and atomized by repression, the unions, and capitalism’s left wing. One would think that the very similarity of these attacks should create the means for a unified common fight-back by the world’s working class. This is indeed the task facing us and the international working class, which is an important reason why we welcome your invitation for discussion, and debate. A number of months ago we put forward a proposal for online discussion forum to help facilitate debate amongst the Communist Left, of which a copy is printed below. In any case we welcome any questions, contributions and assessment, analysis, and debate as you progress as a group. Don’t hesitate to ask, we’ll try to help in any way we can.

Internationalist Communists Montreal ICM-CIM

The working class of Greece shows the way!

2010-03-24T10:55:00.002-04:00

Social movements have been mushrooming, one taking up where the other leaves off, uniting, building and gaining strength. This is the situation in Greece these past few weeks – a situation the bourgeois media throughout the world tries to hide, or worse, distort. The extent of censorship in the news media reveals the international capitalist class’s greatest fear: that this situation will spread, and that the main player in this brewing Greek tragedy, the working class, will set an example for workers of other countries.

The Greek working class fights back in force

The latest plan the country’s government announced was a powerful offensive as taxes went up by 21%, salaries slashed (reduction of 60% by the 14^th month and of 30% by the 13^th), public and private pensions frozen, with massive tax hikes (on alcohol, tobacco and fuel), with increases in other taxes (housing and property). These vicious attacks have a fundamental and direct impact on the working class. Capitalism intends to force the working class to pay for its crisis.

The country’s overall bankruptcy and its current attacks on the working class are in their entirety the complete responsibility of the bourgeoisie – and not just in Greece. This is the real significance of the European Union’s "recommendations", with the German bourgeoisie leading the way, along with the IMF who, with its "support" of Papandreou, the Greek First Minister, will oblige the Greek bourgeoisie by making its own working class pay.

Such attacks are currently underway in Spain as well as in Portugal. Similar attacks will hit the working class of other countries in the weeks to come.

Facing these attacks, struggles, strikes, street demonstrations, massive delegations and assemblies, are erupting and spreading throughout Greece, in opposition to this scandalous bourgeois plan. In all sectors, in all categories, the working class is mobilizing in its anger and refusal to endure circumstances whose sole responsibility lies with the capitalist system.

These workers are showing the way for their class brothers throughout the world

-On a mass scale, it’s through struggle that their furious rejection of the anti-worker government and its bosses’ policies are expressed – and not through the sterile means offered by bourgeois democracy (elections, referendums, social dialogue, union negotiations, etc.). They inspire us to do likewise and more.

- They demonstrate because these days they no longer have any choice – their unfailing determination pushing them into direct confrontation with any and all forces blocking their just struggle – escalating clashes with the forces of capitalist order sent by the "socialist" government of Papandreou; expelling all "false-friends" from their street demonstrations – particularly union pontiffs whose organizations are party to government policy. For workers the world over, the determination of the Greek working class should be welcomed and adopted.

Though still dispersed and still expressing themselves through the trap of corporatism (with union encouragement), they are clearly attempting to spread, to join and to unite their struggle with others, mutually expressing their solidarity, realizing that their concerns and their interests are the same. This is what we’ve seen in the willingness shown by workers in separate demonstrations – to converge, to coalesce and to unify their forces, which the unions knowingly organized in separate locations.

For the working class to impose a balance of forces to force the bourgeoisie to retreat, understanding the unity of its struggle is indispensable and in fact vital. Such unity is achieved through the spread of active solidarity within each movement to other sectors and corporations, by dispatching mass delegations to factories and companies in each area. There is no worse or greater source of defeat than a fragmented and dispersed social front; it is just what the capitalists order and often get, thanks to the sabotage of the unions.

The confrontations unfolding in Greece show us that, if we are to develop our fight, spread our struggles, and unite them into a massive and powerful common front, then we must take things into our own hands. We must lead, control, and organize them ourselves. General Assemblies are a means to this end, for as many workers as possible must be gathered to decide the major objectives, directions and demands of our struggle, nominating elected delegates subject to immediate recall – delegates to represent us in the strike committees. We can't let our class "war" fall into the hands of so-called "specialists"!

Capitalism’s crisis can only get worse. Let there be no illusions. We can no longer buy the lies of the government and the media in the pay of the capitalist class! Today, the states of certain countries at the heart of capitalism are already on the verge of bankruptcy – Spain, Italy and especially Great Britain – with all states deeply in debt.

The entire international capitalist class intends to make the working class to pay for its crisis in all sectors, public and private, active workers, unemployed and pensioned, in every country, on all continents, from capitalism’s periphery to its center. None of us will escape. We can have no illusions!

Just as our class brothers in Greece are doing, we have to reject the fate that capitalism has in store for us. We must enter en masse in struggle, organizing a large, compact and powerful battlefront to drive back the bourgeoisie.

This is how our consciousness will develop, in our realization that capitalism is a deeply bankrupted system leading humanity to yet more misery and to its ultimate destruction through generalized war. It must be smashed. The only force capable of doing this is we, the international working class.

The world’s bourgeoisie wants the working class of all countries to pay for its system’s crisis.

Capitalism’s bankruptcy has only one outcome: a deepening misery for all of the exploited before demanding their lives be sacrificed in a world war, as we’ve already seen in 1914 and 1939.

Today, workers everywhere must reject the enormous sacrifices the bourgeoisie is imposing on them, so that tomorrow they will have the strength to do away with this class and its system.

March 9^th, 2010

The Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current.

The Internationalist Communists of Montréal (Canada)

E-mail of IFICC : inter1925@yahoo.fr

To see our site : :www.bulletincommuniste.org

E-mail of ICM : cim_icm@yahoo.com

To see our blog : http://klasbatalo.blogspot.com

Charest and Godbout, the asbestos capitalists’ lapdogs

2010-02-25T10:47:00.001-05:00

This February, Premier Charest was in India defending the interests of the asbestos lobby.

Asbestos is not environmentally friendly, don’t forget. Linked to a variety of diseases, it endangers workers exposed to it in any form. Harmful effects persist even as it breaks down – airborne fibers are dispersed and ingested through the lungs. Toxic effects can take years to become apparent – up to 20 - 40 years after one’s exposure, though longer and shorter intervals are possible. These effects can range from benign to severe, notably to respiratory passages (lung cancer, mesothelioma). Profit-hungry manufacturers are responsible for thousands of deaths globally from asbestos use.

Charest’s attitude is hardly surprising, given his role as representative of the bourgeois state, defending capitalist production – in this case the Quebecois asbestos manufacturers. His greenwashing in Quebec serves only to pacify the naïve environmental lobby.

In his approach to India, Charest found a considerable ally in that trade union corpse, Clément Godbout. Parti Québécois candidate in ’73, FTQ president from 1993 to 1998, member of the administrative council of the Chrysotile Institute since its creation in 1984, becoming its president in 2002… – (the asbestos lobby’s compensation for his work as a saboteur trade-unionist). This spokesman of the Chrysotile Institute – a defense organism of Canadian capitalist asbestos producers – had called upon Indian workers to pressure their government for safety regulations regarding its use. This institute has so little credibility that specialists have demanded their funding be suspended, maintaining that it’s a "waste of public funds", a stain on the scientific and moral reputation of the government and the Canadian people, themselves – "exposing innocents" to the health-hazards of asbestos. [1] India, in spite of being an emerging capitalist power, bases its economy purely on very low wages and lack of health and safety regulations in the workplace – a sickening exploitation of the proletariat. Clement Godbout offers poisoned bait to Indian workers by inciting them to struggle alone against the asbestos manufacturers. To demand safety regulations for its use is, according to journalist Rima Elkouri, an utterly hypocritical and irresponsible attitude, as Canada is all too aware of the impossibility of working safely with asbestos. [2] Clement Godbout just keeps yapping as he learned so well as a trade unionist: expecting workers to fight sector by sector, isolated from other sectors in other countries.

Only an international struggle of the working class can end the use of harmful products such as asbestos.

[1] http://www.cyberpresse.ca/la-tribune/200901/26/01-821010-des-specialistes-reclament-la-fin-du-financement-de-linstitut-du-chrysotile.php

[2] http://www.cyberpresse.ca/opinions/chroniqueurs/rima-elkouri/201002/02/01-945330-honteux-et-indefendable.php

Robert Perrault (1952-2010)

2010-01-25T14:10:00.002-05:00

After a long battle with cancer, Robert Perrault, a GIO/IWO sympathizer, passed away Monday January 11^th at the age of 57.

For most of his life Robert was active in the Maoist group the PCC (m-l) even participating in the electoral circus as one of that Stalinist party’s candidates.

Eventually he realized that the theory of “socialism in one country” put forth by Stalin was a dead-end for the working class and that what the Marxist Leninist groups had been advancing was state capitalism, not socialism. After reading the booklet, “From Nationalism to Internationalism”, he got in contact with the International Communists of Montreal (CIM/ICM) in spring 2009. From our very first meeting with him, we remember his spirit of openness towards internationalism and the political proletarian camp. He spoke of his Maoist background not to brag or share anecdotes but to expose the sectarianism within those groups and their break with the international revolutionary objectives of the proletariat.

At this meeting, we strongly encouraged him to get in touch with le Groupe Internationaliste Ouvrier/ International Worker’s Group (GIO/IWO) the Canadian affiliate of the International Communist Tendency, (the former IBRP) and a sympathizer Parti Communiste Internationaliste (Le Prolétaire). At a second meeting we learned that even if politically he was closer to CIM/ICM, he had chosen to become a sympathizer with the GIO/IWO giving technical assistance to Notes Internationalistes publications and other projects.

He would have liked to have been involved with us during the exchanges between the GIO and the CIM in May 2009. He maintained personal contact with one of us. Always the optimist, he ended his last e-mail to us “Vive la vie! Vive le communisme!” (Long live life, Long live communism).

Robert was for a brief period a militant internationalist. We will remember his lack of sectarianism and his will to clarify the political differences between the CIM and the GIO.

Robert, you will remain always in our hearts and minds.

Proposal for an online discussion forum within the Communist Left

2009-08-31T16:42:00.004-04:00

The purpose of this virtual exchange forum would be to encourage discussion between groups of the communist Left, so that these groups:

Participate in strengthening the foundation of the proletarian camp by setting up a permanent meeting place for a fraternal exchange of ideas;

Contribute to the clarification of the communist program with regard to the struggles of today’s working class;

Attempt as far as possible to bridge the gap between various elements not so much as to put aside differences between its participants, but in order to eventually be able to intervene within the struggles of the working class

We also hope that the mere presence of such a meeting place will engender a clearer definition of what constitutes the proletarian camp in the 21^st century, rooting out any outside elements that would confuse the class that is ours. The class that produces the surplus value can indeed defend its immediate interests; but only a revolutionary minority united around an internationalist class party can instill class-consciousness in the working class in order to guide the struggles in a revolutionary direction.

Since in general the Communist Left is very low in number and divided on certain questions, its intervention in the class is minimal and dispersed – sometimes with serious differences, of course; but sometimes with the same political point of view or with minor differences. We think that a place of theoretical debate and practice could be a step toward greater unity and clarity of the proletarian political program.

Also, different groups of the CL have already suggested such a forum for debate.

IBRP [New name Internationalist Communist Tendency]

« From its formation the two organizations which founded the IBRP have made it clear that the Bureau did not claim to be the international party of the proletariat but neither are we a mere academic discussion circle. It follows from this that the activity of the IBRP, in total coherence with its Platform and its own strategic aims, has always aimed to encourage discussions between different groups at an international level, concretely aimed at the rebuilding of a real revolutionary international party. The entire activity of the IBRP, though not claiming to be the party nor the original nucleus of the future party has been taken up with the theoretical and political debate with other groups. International correspondence in various languages, meetings and discussions with elements who have contacted us and the publication of an English review Internationalist Communist (unfortunately now suspended for financial reasons) have been for many years our daily work.» 25 Years of the Bureau: Balance Sheet and Perspectives, May 2008

IFICC

“In this particularly difficult situation for our class, we can only observe and deplore not only the weakness of communist minorities but especially the sectarian isolation endured and maintained by these groups and organizations in the proletarian camp.

What the class needs – and only its communist vanguard are in position to provide, and moreover it’s their responsibility – is guidance, clear political reference points, definite objectives indicating the sense of its struggle and the real stakes involved.

To engage in struggle, to go on strike, the working masses essentially have no need of communist minorities; this it can and does manage on its own. However, to lead the struggle in such a way as to turn the balance of forces in its favor; to avoid the pitfalls and the inevitable traps set by the bourgeoisie, its left apparatus and its unions; to comprehend the magnitude of the situation and the depth of the issues, the communist minorities are indispensable and historically it is for this specific task that the class has given rise to them.” La bourgeoisie à l'offensive tous azimuts ; le prolétariat en ordre dispersé. (The bourgeoisie in an all out offensive; the proletariat in scattered array.) Bulletin #47 26/07/2009)

ICC

“For a sect, dialogues with others obviously have no purpose. "We don't agree! We don't agree! We're not going to be convinced!" Why can't revolutionary organizations convince other revolutionary organizations through debate? They can, because it's only the sects who refuse to question their own certitudes.

How did all the revolutionary regroupments of the past come about if it's impossible for anyone to convince anyone else through debate?” Sectarianism, an inheritance from the counter-revolution that must be transcended - International Review no.22 - 3rd quarter 1980

“ … the politicization of the proletarian struggle is linked to the presence of a communist minority within its ranks. The fact that the internationalist milieu is still very weak indicates the distance the working class still has to travel in order to engage in revolutionary struggles and give birth to its world class party, an essential organ without which the victory of the revolution is impossible” 18th ICC Congress: Resolution on the International Situation - International Review no.138 - 3rd quarter 2009

Of course these quotes are not exclusive but reflect the urgent need of a forum for practical and theoretical discussions considering the scale of the current crisis and a struggling working class without any revolutionary political orientation for the long term that is to say communism. It is important, for instance, to take stock of struggles in Greece and in Guadeloupe, to study the consequences of the growth of state capitalism in the current and future struggles of the working class, etc.

Proposals for basic criteria to participate in this meeting place:

· Acknowledgment of the dictatorship of the proletariat

· Acknowledgment of the necessity of an international working class party

· A minimum of intervention in the class (e.g. drafting and dissemination of leaflets)

It goes without saying that internationalism is a criterion but we believe it is included in the first two criteria and that only the international working class struggle can lead to victory over capitalism.

For the moment we are sending out invitations to the IBRP, OPOP (Brazil-Workers' Opposition, the ICC, Pcint (Proletarian) and to IFICC.

Possibly other groups (and /or individuals that match these criteria could be added.

We hope, through this forum, to see groups of the CL evolve fraternally toward a relative homogeneity – wherever possible – or to see them break away from the proletarian camp should discussions arise with concepts completely foreign to the interests of our class.

This will be an internal tool for groups of the CL. The implementation of texts will be accessible only to participating groups, this restriction to prevent leftist groups from confusing or hampering the discussions. However, the site would be open for all to read, and thus the conscious elements of the class. Admittedly it is restricted to Internet access, but let us not forget that its primary purpose is for groups of the CL.

The texts should be published in English and French. The responsibility for translation lies with the groups participating.

Obviously, this is a proposal. We hope it will be discussed and possibly modified by the participants proposed. The CIM will not set up this website. In the event of your agreement, we await the proposals of a new site or an addition to the current one.

Internationalist greetings

Internationalist Communists Montreal (ICM)

From Nationalism to Internationalism

2009-08-26T17:18:00.007-04:00

We have just published a booklet, "From Nationalism to Internationalism".

This booklet tells the story of an activist over a period of about 35 years. For him, it is an easy enough transition from nationalist to Maoist groups, for almost all of them are fundamentally nationalist, with the Stalinist justification of the concept of "socialism in one country" for the latter. He has been well acquainted with Maoists having been a militant founder of the Maoist group In Struggle! (En Lutte!) This booklet is his political autobiography.

In the introduction he writes: “The purpose of this booklet is to comment on my political activity as a militant, while grounding myself on my current knowledge of Left communist positions.”

His booklet is both intended as a criticism of past activities (for example, a critique of the Maoist current in which he’d long evolved) and to show that these same activities were alien to the proletariat. In fact, he is writing this booklet so that young workers and students can avoid the same mistakes and gain an understanding of the politics of the Communist Left, the real proletarian camp. To learn from our struggles and past mistakes is an important aspect of Marxism.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The October 1917 Russian Revolution was the first step toward world communist revolution in an international revolutionary wave that ended the imperialist war and lasted several years. The failure of that revolutionary wave, particularly in Germany in 1919-23, condemned the Russian Revolution to isolation and rapid degeneration. Stalinism was not the product of the Russian Revolution, but its gravedigger. The bourgeoisie’s biggest lie for the past 80 years has been in calling Stalinism “communism”. “

It can be ordered for 8 dollars (cash or cheque to Réal Jodoin) by writing to: CIM_ICM, C.P. 55514, Succ. Maisonneuve, Montréal, (QC) H1W 0A1

Table of Contents

Introduction

My origins

My years in the dead-end of nationalism or the nation before classe struggle

Taxi drivers’ Struggle against Murray Hill

My years in the dead-end of Maoism or socialism in one country

October 1970 crisis

Other important events in Quebec and internationally that influenced me

L’Atelier Ouvrier

The In Struggle! (En Lutte!) team

1976 Olympic Games underground

Once again, the police and their mercenaries

Dissolution of the Maoist group In Struggle!

Fight against pesticides in a suburban town

Years ‘89 and ‘90: the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites

Summer of 1990 :The Mohawk bourgeoisie’s struggle against the Quebec and

Canadian bourgeoisie

Memoir that plays into the hands of bourgeois democracy

1996 socio-economic summit

Summit of the Americas Quebec City April 2001

Discovering the existence of the communist Left

The International

Appendices

I- Basic Positions of internationalists of Montreal

II- "every man for himself"

III- Marxism and the police

IV- Terrorism, a War Weapon of the bourgeoisie

V- A circus of darkness and lies: the National Assembly

VI- from The Question of Trade Unionism in Quebec

VII- Data on major Quebec companies

VIII- Origin of the Communist Left

IX- Capitalism is dying !

Summary of the French version of the response of ICM to the Mise au point du BIPR

2009-05-03T19:07:00.003-04:00

First, we would apologize for any confusion caused, and explain that the release of the document without addresses and coordinates for the IBRP-GIO . Although it is presented as an IBRP tract.

That this occurred as a result of a computer sending error by one comrade in the group. (details if necessary)

The text was prepared in anticipation of a reply on doing a joint distribution, should that have had occurred. We had made the request april 03, 2009.

We decided not to do a distribution of the IBRP leaflet at our meeting last week, and that is as far we had taken it as a group.

We in no way wished to convey the idea that we were a sympathizing group officially tied in any way to the IBRP.

We chose the IBRP tract-leaflet because it encapsulated many of the crucial points affecting the class struggle today, very well.

It has never been our intention to denigrate the IBRP or any of its organizations. To this extent, we apologize to the comrades of the GIO for leveling the charge of being an opportunist group – this instead should have remained leveled at one comrade within the group, and the charge of opportunism specific to a particular set of events that you are aware of.

On this same point we’re thoroughly convinced that you have only heard one side of the events properly. Our point here was not to denigrate but to have the truth come out.

Though we have no official ties with the IBRP, we adhere to most if not all positions within the IBRP’s platform and overall approach. We are in continual debate and discussion on the platforms and programs of the IBRP and the ICC, IFFIC as well as the Bordigist ICPs and evolving our own elaborations.

Folowing from this, it must be said that whenever we made contact with those interested in the IBRP in particular, we have directed them to the Bureau and the GIO. And we will continue to do so, while encouraging all contacts to familiarize themselves with all the groups within the communist left as well as their publications.

We are not cops, informers, counter-revolutionaries or hobbyists getting their jollies from spurious factionalism. So while we understand your response to our error, we hope you will rescind your decision to not allow our use of your leaflets and tracts. We will continue to use quotations from all the groups on the communist left, including the IBRP when appropriate, with proper credit given.

In any case, the spread and development of the class struggle today, around the world face the global economic crisis currently raging, can illustrate how our communication errors are secondary in this situation. “The entire communist left has to relate to the actual working class struggle, wherever it finds itself, and not to the petty debates that are often manufactured between communists. To blow these out of proportion is idealism of the worst kind.” Jocks (CWO)

If these problems and misunderstanding are not resolved today, we hope that they will be in the future.

The National Assembly: A Circus of Lies and Hypocrisy

2008-11-23T16:38:00.002-05:00

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!

2008-10-13T16:19:00.014-04:00

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

2008-05-29T16:14:00.003-04:00

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!

2008-05-01T15:56:00.013-04:00

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

Against Bourgeois Charity

2007-12-04T17:03:00.003-05:00

December 4th 2007

The commando-bouffe action don't go anywhere
In December 1997, the Comité des Sans-Emploi (CSE) undertook a strong-arm action to denounce the misery and cruelty which capitalism as a whole perpetuates. They were dissatisfied – and for good reason –with charitable organizations connected with capitalism, supposedly to help the proletariat in need. The CSE had set up a commando to requisition food from the Hotel's restaurant, a restaurant as chic as the Queen Elisabeth hotel itself, where the privileged of bourgeois society pile in to pig-out on ostentation and expensive food. Ipso Facto, this commando-bouffe attacked the bourgeoisie on their own turf by defying the legality of its repressive apparatus. While some Quebec celebrities performed as clowns, ringing the bells of La Guignolée soliciting funds in order to offer a more festive Christmas to thousands of Quebec's pauper proletarians, a hundred individuals invaded the Queen Elisabeth to take over this buffet.

Today, 10 years later, the situation has hardly changed for those living in misery. And it won't change so long as our class does not organize to abolish this cannibalistic system that is capitalism. Our class is the proletariat, the class that produces the wealth benefiting another class – the bourgeoisie – that monopolizes this wealth by a plethora of supposedly legitimate laws and regulations that it set up through its State. While a handful of individuals flaunt their obscene wealth, all over the world most human beings have no access to clean water, staple foods, or a roof over their heads…

Charity, a concept particular to the bourgeoisie, will never eliminate social inequality or poverty. As a matter of fact, charitable organizations were initially conceived by the bourgeoisie to "humanize" its barbaric system of organized plunder, while at the same time absolving the conscience of its class. As well, it would have us believe that its so-called liberal ambition of distributing the wealth is on the agenda, while throwing crumbs to the most dispossessed of our class in order to shut us up and force us to accept the fate that is our lot each hour of every day. The action undertaken by the CSE pertinently questions the legitimacy of a system based o production for profit benefiting only the bourgeoisie, which squabbles over the world's wealth. Characteristically, their disputes find expressions in bloody wars where workers die on the front lines.

Because capitalism is permanent war! At its base, it is a war between the classes that make up this system. Everywhere the bourgeoisie attacks the proletariat, by demobilizing its organization, cutting social services, reducing retirement funds, whenever not confronted directly over the cutting of our social wage. For this reason, the capitalists are united against the working class everywhere on this planet. Subsequently, capitalism is already engaged in a cannibalistic war within the global ruling class itself, we find them competing with each other to monopolize new markets, disputing the old ones, and plundering natural resources worldwide.

No, capitalism has hardly evolved toward a greater level of social welfare since the First World War, whatever its partisans might say: its cycle of crisis / war / reconstruction (a cycle which unblocks a stagnant economy) was not contained at all after 1945. On the contrary the spread of local imperialist confrontation continued throughout the Cold War, causing more death than ever, and leaving the planet with the even greater threat of total destruction through nuclear war. Moreover, since the decomposition of the Eastern Bloc in 1991, ending the post-war balance of power, the great powers have seen new prospects on the horizon and the field is open once again to divide the world's wealth.

Actions such as those undertaken by the CSE in 1997 are very legitimate but unfortunately don't go anywhere. Ten years later, this sort of action didn't make one iota of progress in the class-consciousness of the unemployed in general, and the Comité des Sans-Emplois in particular. This is evident in the commemorative nature of the commando-bouffe action. To effectively subvert capitalism while establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat articulated through workers' councils, it is necessary to build an organization capable of uniting all workers. An internationalist anti-Stalinist working class party must be built now so that the proletariat can effectively unify in a fight against its exploiters. From factory to factory, company to company, strikes must extend to all sectors of production leaving aside the union structure that no longer has the same interests as those of our class. It's the dictatorship of the proletariat based on workers' councils and committees that must emerge in the battle against capitalism – a dictatorship completely opposed to the dictatorship of party, parliamentarism and bourgeois legalism! Today the working class must take in hand the reins of its destiny by setting up its class party to enable its own conscience to emerge more sharply than ever in the struggle it has always carried out against the class that exploits it!

No compromise with the bourgeoisie! Workers, to your party, to the Revolution!

Some international communists, Montreal December 4th 2007

cim_icm@yahoo.com

An irrational accommodation: capitalism

2007-11-28T16:59:00.008-05:00

November 2007

For several months, the press and bourgeois media spearheaded a massive campaign to divide immigrant workers from their Québécois and aboriginal counterparts. The pretext: reasonable accommodations for Jews and Muslims. Even if, for example, no Islamic religious organizations requested the right to wear the veil during voting, the media kept on about it. The whole point of this divisive debate is to have us forget that the vote is utterly useless for the proletariat, regardless of their origin. Amongst politicians, this has culminated in the creation of the Bouchard-Taylor commission given the task of touring Quebec. Everyone - bourgeois, petit bourgeois and workers are invited as "citizens" to offer their opinion. This campaign serves to fuel the worst of bourgeois ideology: racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, of 'every man for himself'. The capitalist class has only one aim in mind: to prevent the proletariat from affirming its solidarity and its unity as an international working class. While making believe that the Québécois proletariat would have something to safeguard, to defend against all immigrants from Arab countries or elsewhere, all this media hoopla endeavors to do is to make them believe that the immigrant situation (1) is separate from the working class, from the misery of its own condition as an exploited class.

We have even heard that "lady of the manor" Pauline Marois, speak to us of "Our identity" as nationalists. This "Identity" being the right to be exploited by our own home-grown business people... The bourgeois elites, as always, stand in the way of any real workers solidarity, which must extend beyond nationality. This "faith" in the "secular" bourgeois State as ultimate judge of peace and social cohesion, is just the kind of crap that's thrown out for the unions. Behind this whole debate about reasonable accommodation is the defense of "secularism" which is in fact the defense of the special status given to the capitalist state and bourgeois democracy.

The government has no intention of diminishing the importance of religions, to the contrary – its aim is to reinforce them. It will be under the staff of "our secular State" that courses on all religions will flourish in the schools in the autumn of 2008. Religion will always be the opiate of the masses.

In the face of worldwide misery and barbarism in full putrefaction, there is but one prospect for the working class – to firmly reject the competitive rationale of its own exploiters, of "every man for himself". No matter what their origin, language, colour of skin, or religion, the proletariat has no interest in common with national capital. It can only really defend its interests, by developing everywhere its solidarity with the international working class, by resisting any attempt to foster division as immigrants, Canadians, Quebecois and aboriginal peoples.

Only the assertion of its common interests in struggle will permit the proletariat to gather all its resources, to affirm itself as a world class united in solidarity, to bring down the capitalist Moloch before it destroys the planet.

Some internationalist communists of Montreal

cim_icm@yahoo.com

(1) Note: from 1840 to 1930, 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to the USA. It is alarming to read the racist report of an American functionary:

« With some exceptions the Canadian French are the Chinese of the Eastern States. They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational. They do not come to make a home among us, to dwell with us as citizens, and so become a part of us; but their purpose is merely to sojourn a few years as aliens…

…They are indefatigable workers, and docile… All they ask is to be set to work, and they care little who rules them or how they are ruled. To earn all they can by no matter how many hours of toil, to live in the most beggarly way so that out of their earnings they may spend as little for living as possible, and tocarry out of the country what they can thus save: this is the aim of the Canadian French in our factory districts. »

Massachusetts Report on statistics of labor Boston 13th 1881

Misery + barbarism = capitalism

2007-11-26T17:11:00.005-05:00

November 2007

Today, throughout the world, capitalism in crisis is manifested in plans of economic management resulting in factory closures, massive layoffs, wage cuts for those wanting to keep their jobs, and intolerable attacks on retirement and pensions, thus further emiserating the working class, and let's not forget the two thirds of humanity perpetually starved by this system.

Today, here, there and everywhere, this very same capitalism disgorges its barbarism in every conceivable form, proliferating war and creating hotbeds of tension, propagating massive, savage acts of terror – not to mention the rise of ecological catastrophes that kill and maim thousands, each and every day.

Through the mass media, the ruling class conveys its endeavors to legitimize all anti-working class policies in the name of a supposed "imperative need", of an ideologically manufactured "globalization", as it seeks to whitewash the daily atrocities in its wake, while offering us up as local scapegoats, brushing us off or putting it all down to fate or "stroke of luck".

EVERYTHING THAT THE BOURGEOISIE TELLS US IS A LIE OR A DISTORTION OF REALITY

What it's looking to do here is to defend its sordid interests as best it can through increased exploitation of the working-class and by massively intensifying the massacre of human beings, as it sees fit.

Here nearly a century ago, the great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg very clearly expressed this reality of the capitalist system and the class that wallows in it, when she spoke to workers of the time. "Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds (…) Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth--there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law--but the ravening beast, the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form."

IT IS THIS SAME CAPITALIST REALITY THAT THE WORKING CLASS TODAY HAS TO LOOK SQUARELY IN THE FACE!

CAPITALISM PRODUCES MISERY

TThe truth is that capitalism, in spite of claims to the contrary, is a system historically at the end of its road, a decadent system, dissolute and bankrupt, which, for close to 40 years, has seen a period of overt economic crisis marked by convulsions, of dire consequences for the working-class. In just 20 years, we've seen the stock-market crash of 1987, then in 1990 the American Savings and Loans crash, in 1994 that of the US bond market, in 1997 and 1998 financial crises which affected countries like Thailand, Korea and Hong Kong then Russia and Brazil, and finally the bursting of the IT bubble in 2001-2003. In the past few months we've witnessed a new and terrifying shock, one appearing at the financial level with the bursting of the real-estate bubble, and a cascade of bankruptcies for many major banks and mortgage companies, with terrible economic and social repercussions (according to an eminent bourgeois pundit: "The worst of the financial crisis is ahead of us.") Today, this shock is accompanied by the awakening of the commercial war that delivers itself in particular to the great capitalist powers which manifests itself, amongst other things, in the competition between the dollar and the euro and in the explosion of oil prices. It is all this that the ruling class seeks to minimize but has already made the proletariat pay for heavily.

CAPITALISM, IT'S EVER MORE BARBARIC

The truth is that capitalism is by far the most barbaric system that humanity has ever known. For the past century, it has spread conflicts all over the planet, going so far as to subject humanity to two world wars. And since the end of the Second World War, contrary to the phony façade of peace that the bourgeoisie tried to give its system, not a generation of the proletariat has known the capitalist world without warlike confrontations here or there. Even at this moment, Afghanistan, Iraq, the horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur) and other corners of the globe (for which the bourgeois media have only contempt) are smoldering with fire and blood; the ominous thud of boots on the ground are felt on the border between Turkey and Iraq (where 100, 000 Turkish troops are amassed), around Iran, in ex-Yugoslavia around Kosovo and several countries of the Caucasus; not to mention the many hotbeds of tension, temporarily cooled, ready to erupt at a moment's notice (the Middle East).

And in all its warlike tensions, one finds the great capitalist powers (the USA, Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia, China…), on the front lines decked out in the hypocritical flag of "peace-keeping", or pulling the strings behind the scenes and fueling the engines of death (since 2006, the arms race has surpassed records made at the time of the Cold War). One thing is certain: it is the "elite" who are responsible for the massacres and destruction ravaging the world. In this world dominated by capital, they are the main culprits responsible for the future storms on the horizon. Because of major rivals who oppose them and assert themselves ever more openly, overall the logic of capitalism today has dealt a mortal blow, it's major confrontations that they are preparing themselves for (Cf. The proliferation of secret negotiations and other meetings, official or not – where the most contemptible bargaining takes place and where the drives of their true natures are expressed – in view of forming alliances and over the long term imperialist blocs), it's a new world war they want to impose on humanity.

THE SOLUTION IS IN THE HANDS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Against the torrent of anti-working class measures everywhere, exacerbated by the intensifying economic crises, the working class is far from being without response.

To take for example only these last few months, let us cite, among others, the great social movement which until spring inflamed the whole town of Oaxaca (Mexico) and its area and which threatened to spread to other parts of the country, let us cite, at the end of summer, the illegal strike of the 27,000 Egyptian textile workers for wage increases (40% obtained), that of the 73,000 General Motors workers in the USA, for wages, social security and retirement benefits; let us cite as well the difficult struggle of Chilean copper miners (38 days of strikes this summer) and by coal miners in Peru for wage increases; let us cite finally, last July, the bus drivers in Iran, on strike for wages and better working conditions. The European proletariat is not to be left out here, notably (but not exclusively) in the transport sector: in Germany, recurrent strikes of railway workers in spite of being declared "illegal" and "prohibited" by the courts; in France, rail and public transport strikes (the RATP) for retirement benefits and with Air France for wages…

Thus, it is with great determination – and often with immense courage – the anger and distrust of workers finds some expression everywhere. These struggles show clearly that the working class is not ready to accept the sacrifices that capitalists and their state seek to impose on them.

Legitimate as these struggles are, will they be enough to drive back the exploiters?

For its struggle to be effective, the working class initially must take the battle to the capitalists; and, for that it is

necessary to spread and extend its struggle by means of mass delegation to other factories, enterprises and sectors, and to do everything possible to unite them. To undertake this requires the workers to take their struggles in hand, through independent general assemblies, strike committees subject to immediate recall, and not to retreat back to the unions, which ceased to be organizations in defense of workers' interests long ago. Quite the contrary! It's the road the working class must take to effectively defend its interests today and to repel the relentless attacks of capital.

But this is also the way that tomorrow will enable it – through the development of its struggle and because it is the revolutionary class – to launch "the assault on the heavens" and to overthrow the system which, otherwise could lead humanity to a new (and surely a last) world war.

LET US DEVELOP AND UNIFY OUR FIGHT AGAINST CAPITALISM,

AGAINST LOGISTICS OF MISERY AND DEATH

Some internationalist communists(Canada) and the Internal Fraction of ICC (France and Mexico)

Mail contact : cim_icm@yahoo.com

Link of the IFICC: http://bcommuniste.ifastnet.com/

Poland, August 1980: The proletariat rediscovers the weapon of the mass strike

2007-10-09T10:48:00.013-04:00

We are publishing this “old ICC” text because it shows us what the working class is capable of when it defends its interests independently of unions, but also how unions with their expert negotiators can sabotage their struggle. In Poland, the ‘independent’ unions subordinated workers’ political and economic demands, following the age-old tactic of the ‘democratic’ defence of the unions rather than the interests of workers. It also reminds us of struggles such as in ‘75, of the United Aircraft workers (Pratt & Whitney) that the FTQ union bureaucracy reduced to the question of the legal recognition of the union.

Some internationalist communists, Montreal

Poland, August 1980: The proletariat rediscovers the weapon of the mass strike

After the announcement of increases in meat prices workers responded in many plants with spontaneous strikes. On July 1st the workers of Tczew near Gdansk and the Warsaw suburb of Ursus downed tools. At Ursus, general assemblies were held, a strike committee was elected and common demands were put forward. During the following days the strikes continued to spread: Warsaw, Lodz, Gdansk...

By making quick concessions through pay increases the government tried to prevent a further extension of the movement. In mid-July the workers of Lublin went on strike. Lublin is located on the railway line which links Russia to East Germany. In 1980 this was a vital supply line for the Russian troops in East Germany. The workers’ demands were: no repression against striking workers, withdrawal of theing workers, withdrawal of the police from the factories, wage increases and free elections of trade unions.

While in some places the workers resumed work, in other enterprises more workers joined the strikes. At the end of July the government hoped to extinguish the strikes by using the tactic of negotiating with the workers factory by factory. But on August 14th the movement was on the rise again: the tram drivers of Warsaw and the shipbuilders of Gdansk came out on strike. And in other towns many more workers joined the movement.

What made the workers strong...

The workers had drawn the lessons of the struggles of 1970-71 and 1976. They saw that the official trade union apparatus was part of the stalinist state and always took sides with the government whenever the workers came forward with their demands. This is why it was vital that the workers in the mass strikes of 1980 took the initiatives themselves. They did not wait for any instructions from above, but came together and held meetings in order to decide themselves about the time and focus of their struggles. This could be seen clearest at Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot, i.e. the industrial beltopot, i.e. the industrial belt on the Baltic Sea. At the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk alone, some 20,000 were employed.

Common demands were put forward at mass meetings. A strike committee was formed. At the beginning, economic demands were put into the foreground. The workers were determined: they did not want a repetition of the bloody crushing of the struggles as had happened in 1970 and 1976. In an industrial centre such as Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot it was obvious that all the workers would have to unite in order to make the balance of forces tip in their favour. An inter-factory strike committee (MKS) was formed, which was composed of 400 members, two delegates for each factory. During the second half of August some 800-1000 delegates met. By forming an inter-factory strike committee the usual dispersal of forces was overcome.

Now the workers could face capital in a united way. Every day there were mass meetings at the Lenin shipyards. Loudspeakers were installed to allow the workers to follow the discussions of the strike committees and the negotiations with the government delegation. Shortly afterwards microphones were installed outside of the meeting room of the MKS, so that workers attending the mass meetings could directly intervene in the discussions of the MKS. In the evenings the delegates . In the evenings the delegates – mostly equipped with cassette recorders to record the debates – went back to their plants and presented the discussions and the situation to factory assemblies, giving back their mandate to the general assemblies.

This allowed for the largest number of workers to participate in the struggles. The delegates had to hand back their mandate, they were recallable at any time, and the general assemblies were always sovereign. All of these practices are in total opposition to the way unions function.

As soon as the workers from Gdansk-Gynia and Zopot joined, the movement spread to other cities. In order to sabotage contact between workers, the government cut the telephone lines on August 16th. The workers immediately threatened further extension of the movement, if the government did not re-establish phone lines immediately. The government gave in.

The general assembly of the workers decided to set up a workers’ militia. Previously consumption of alcohol was widespread with workers, it was collectively decided to prohibit alcohol consumption. Workers were aware that they needed a clear head to confront the governmentar head to confront the government.

A government delegation met the workers in order to negotiate. They met in front of the entire general assembly and not behind closed doors. The workers demanded a new composition of the government delegation because their leaders were only from the lower ranks. The government gave in.

When the government threatened the workers of Gdansk with repression, the railway workers of Lublin declared that « if any of the workers in Gdansk were physically attacked or hurt in any way, they would paralyse the strategically important railway line between Russia and East Germany. » The government grasped what was at stake. Its war machine would have been hit at a most sensitive spot – and during the Cold War this would have been fatal.

In almost all the major cities workers were mobilised. More than half a million workers, they were the only force in the country capable of confronting the government. What gave them their strength was:

the rapid extension of the movement, rather than getting worn down in violent confrontations as had happened in 1970 and 1976,

self-organisation, that is, workers taking the initiative themselves instead of counting on trade instead of counting on trade unions,

holding mass meetings where they could unite their forces and exercise control over the movement, allowing for the biggest possible mass participation and negotiation with the government in front of all the workers.

The extension of the movement was the best weapon of solidarity – instead of only making declarations, the workers were going into the struggles themselves. This made it possible for a different balance of forces to develop. Since the workers struggled so massively, the government could not impose its repression. During the strikes in the summer, when the workers were confronting the government in a united manner head on, not a single worker got beaten up, let alone killed. The Polish bourgeoisie realised that it would have to weaken the workers from inside the movement.

The workers at Gdansk demanded that the concessions the government had granted to them would apply to workers in the rest of the country. They wanted to oppose any divisions and offered their solidarity to the other workers.

The working class acted as a central point of reference. Apart from other workers who went to Gdansk in order to establish a direct contact with the striking worontact with the striking workers, both farmers and students came to the factory gates in order to receive the strike bulletins and other information. The working class was the leading force in society.

The reaction of the bourgeoisie – isolation

The danger that the struggles in Poland constituted for the bourgeoisie could be seen in their reactions in the neighbouring countries.

The borders between Poland and East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the USSR were sealed off immediately. Previously Polish workers had travelled every day to East Germany, above all to Berlin, to go shopping (in Poland there were even fewer goods in the shops than in East Germany). But the bourgeoisie wanted to isolate the working class. Direct contact between the workers of different countries was to be prevented at all costs. And there was every reason to take such a measure! In the neighbouring Czech coal mining area of Ostrava the miners also went on strike – following the Polish example. In the Romanian mining districts, in Russian Togliattigrad the workers also followed the Polish road. Even if there were no direct strikes as a reaction to the Polish workers’ struggles, the workers in many countries in the west took up the slogans of their class be slogans of their class brothers and sisters in Poland. In Turin in September 1980 the workers shouted: "Let’s struggle as the Polish workers did"

Because of its scope and its methods the mass strikes in Poland had a massive impact on workers in other countries. Through their mass strikes the workers showed – as they had already done in 1953 in East Germany, in 1956 in Poland and Hungary, 1970 and 1976 in Poland again – that the so-called ‘socialist’ countries were in reality state capitalist governments, enemies of the working class. Despite the isolation imposed around the Polish borders, despite the Iron Curtain, the Polish working class, as soon as it took action, functioned as a massive pole of reference with a world wide impact. Precisely at the height of the cold war, during the war in Afghanistan, the workers in Poland sent an important signal: they opposed the arms race and the war economy by their class struggle. The question of the unification of the workers between East and West, even if it was not yet concretely posed, resurfaced as a perspective.

How the movement was sabotaged

The movement was able to develop such a strength because it spread quickly and because the workers themsel and because the workers themselves took the initiative. Extension beyond the confines of individual factories, general assemblies, revocability of delegates – all these measures contributed to their strength. While, in the beginning, there was no union influence in the movement, the members of the newly founded ‘free and independent’ trade union, ‘Solidarnosc’, soon started to hold back the movement.

Initially the negotiations took place in the open, but it was soon proposed that ‘experts’ were needed in order to work out the details with the government. Step by step the workers could no longer follow and participate in the negotiations. The loud speakers in the halls and in the ship yards, which transmitted the negotiations, no longer worked because of some ‘technical’ problems. Lech Walesa was crowned as leader of the new movement. Solidarnosc (1), the new enemy of the workers, had managed to infiltrate the movement and started its job of sabotage. Solidarnosc completely distorted the workers’ demands. Whereas initially economic and political demands were in the forefront, they now pushed for the recognition of the ‘free’ trade unions, with economic and political demands only to be second on the list. They followed the old tactics: defence of the trade unions, insteaence of the trade unions, instead of defence of the workers interests.

Previously workers in Poland had been clear that the official unions took sides with the state, but now many workers believed that the 10 million strong Solidarnosc was not corrupt and would defend their interests. The workers in Poland had not yet gone through the experience of the workers in the west in dealing with ‘free trade unions’.

Walesa promised that "we want to create a second Japan and establish prosperity for everyone" and many workers, due to their inexperience with the reality of capitalism in the west, had illusions in such a possibility. Solidarnosc, with Walesa at its head, quickly took over the role of playing the fireman for capitalism, trying to extinguish workers struggles.

In autumn 1980, workers, protesting against the Gdansk agreement, went on strike again. They had seen that, with a ‘free’ trade union on their side, their material situation was getting even worse. Solidarnosc was already beginning to show its true face. Soon after the end of the mass strikes Lech Walesa was being flown around in an army helicopter, taken to striking workers to urge them to abandon their strikes: "We don’t need any more strikes because they push our country into acause they push our country into an abyss, we need calm".

From the very beginning Solidarnosc sabotaged the movement. Whenever possible it snatched away the initiative from the workers, prevented them from starting new strikes. In the summer of 1980 the mass strike movement could reach such proportions because the Polish bourgeoisie, as well as the stalinist regimes in the rest of Eastern Europe, were ill equipped politically for confronting the class other than with repression. This was unlike the west, where trade unions and bourgeois democracy play the role of a buffer. In the context of political backwardness in the capitalist class in Eastern Europe, and in the context of the Cold War, the Polish bourgeoisie was very suspicious of Solidarnosc. However, it was not their subjective feeling, but the objective role which Solidarnosc was to play against the workers, that was decisive. Thus, in 1981 there was a growing recognition in the stalinist government that Solidarnosc – albeit an ‘alien’ body in the stalinist set-up – could play a useful role.

The balance of forces was changing

In December 1981 the Polish bourgeoisie could finally start repression against the workers. Solidarnosc had done its best to disarm the worone its best to disarm the workers politically – preparing their defeat. While, during the summer of 1980, the workers had not been attacked because of the self-initiative and the extension of the struggles, and because there was no union to disarm the workers, in December 1981 more than 1,200 workers were killed, and thousands of workers were imprisoned or driven into exile. This military repression took place following an intensive co-ordination between the ruling class in the East and the West.

After the strikes in 1980 the western bourgeoisie offered Solidarnosc all sorts of assistance, in order to strengthen them against the workers. Campaigns of ‘assistance for Poland’ were started, and cheap credits from the IMF were granted, in order to prevent the idea spreading that workers in the west could follow the Polish example. On Dec. 13th 1981, the day when repression was unleashed, the West German social-democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the arch-stalinist GDR leader Erich Honecker met outside Berlin and pretended not to know anything about what was going on. However, in reality, not only had they given their backing to repression, they had also passed on their own experience of confronting the working class to the ruting the working class to the ruling class in the East.

In the summer of 1980 it was not possible for revolutionaries to intervene within Poland due to the sealing off of the borders. But in September 1980 the ICC distributed an international leaflet in more than a dozen countries, which also circulated in Poland thanks to the help of some contacts. In our later interventions in Poland, the ICC always criticised the illusions of the Polish workers. As revolutionaries, we saw that our job was not to share the illusions of the workers, but to warn workers in Poland about their lack of experience in confronting ‘radical’ unions, telling them about the experience of the workers in the west. Even if our positions on the union question was not very popular in Poland, forcing us to ‘swim against the tide’, events proved us to be right.

One year later, in December 1981, Solidarnosc showed what a terrible defeat it had been able to impose on the workers. Subsequently, Lech Walesa became President of Poland. This was an expression of the confidence he enjoyed from the church and the western countries. He had already been an excellent defender of the interests of the Polish state in his capacity as leader of Solidarnosc.

The historical significance of the struggles

In the 20 years that have since passed, many of the workers who took part in the strike movement have retired, become unemployed or been forced into emigration. But their experience is of inestimable value for the whole working class. The ICC wrote in 1980 that "the struggles in Poland represent a great step forward in the world wide struggle of the proletariat, which is why these struggles are the most important for half a century." (Resolution on the Class Struggle, 4th Congress of the ICC, 1980, International Review 26). They were the highpoint of an international wave of struggles, the lessons of which we underlined in our report on the class struggle in 1999 at our 13th congress: "Historic events on this scale have long term consequences. The mass strike in Poland provided definitive proof that the class struggle is the only force that can compel the bourgeoisie to set aside its imperialist rivalries. In particular, it showed that the Russian bloc – historically condemned, by its weakened position, to be the ‘aggressor’ in any war – was incapable of respon– was incapable of responding to its growing economic crisis with a policy of military expansion. Clearly the workers of the Eastern bloc countries (and of Russia itself) were totally unreliable as cannon fodder in any future war for the glory of ‘socialism’. Thus the mass strike in Poland was a potent factor in the eventual implosion of the Russian imperialist bloc." (IR 99).

According to Welt Revolution n°101, organ of the ICC in Germany, August-September 2000

(1) Even if the foundation of a ‘free’ trade union can only be explained by the illusions and the lack of experience of the workers in Poland itself, there is no doubt that organised efforts by the KOR (a partially pro-western oppositional group) were only possible because of help from the west for the systematic construction of Solidarnosc. Despite the enmity between the two imperialist blocs, there was a unity against the working class.