France. After the successful mobilisation on 19 and 31 January. No to the fragmentation of the struggle and the stalemate sought by the union leaderships! For a real class struggle!

Prises de position - Prese di posizione - Toma de posición - Statements

No to the fragmentation of the struggle and the stalemate sought by the union leaderships! For a real class struggle!

Even the police forces acknowledged that the demonstrations against the pension reform on 31 January were even more numerous than in the previous week, sometimes bringing together a number of participants not seen since many years, even in small towns. These hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and strikers forced the trade union federations to “toughen up their tone” and go so far as to demand the withdrawal of the project, something they had not tried to do until then!

In reality, these are just words; in the face of a government that wants to act quickly, they do not change their wait-and-see and defeatist policy. Arguing that they want to “put the struggle into a long-term perspective” (sic!), they call for repeated “days of action” which have no future, while in some traditionally more militant sectors the unions are calling for “renewed strikes”. Such repeated days of action or isolated renewed strikes will never make the government back away, all the more so if it is determined to intensify its anti-social attacks in order to finance, in particular, the increase in its military spending and to preserve the average rate of profit of the capitalist economy. It is no coincidence that it has been supported by the International Monetary Fund, that anti-labour agency of international capitalism!

Contrary to what the media claims, the government is counting on the union leadership to control widespread discontent by creating a way, through demonstrations, torchlight processions, etc., for this discontent to blow off steam, so that it does not turn into a real struggle: they have been doing this systematically for years and years in the face of every major movement. The trade union apparatuses are inextricably linked to the system of collaboration between the classes that the bourgeoisie has been building for decades to safeguard social peace: that is why they oppose any real struggle that challenges this collaboration and threatens to disrupt the capitalist order.

So it is useless to want to push the union leadership into real struggle because they neither want to nor can do it. The fate of the present mobilization, as well as the inevitable future struggles, depends on the ability of the workers to take their struggle into their own hands and break out of the confines of class collaboration. The government carries out its attacks in order to defend the interests of the bourgeois class; to try to respond to them, as the trade union leaders and the left parties do, by pushing for solutions to other ways of financing pensions, other reforms, other “distributions of wealth” (i.e. the fruits of capitalist exploitation) is not only a mere illusion, but a certain defeat of the movement from the outset. Indeed, this bourgeois attack, like all the others, can only be answered by placing ourselves on the ground of the exclusive defence of proletarian class interests, which are completely opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie and the national capitalist economy. The proletarians have a chance to confront the bourgeoisie and its state if they take up the struggle on this basis and organise themselves to do so independently of the collaborationist forces.

Against the pension “reform”, independent class struggle, breaking with the collaborationist orientation of the trade union leaderships and their stooges, which only leads to defeat!

Unity of all proletarians, public and private, employed and unemployed, active and retired, French and immigrants, against the attacks of the capitalists!

General increase in wages, unemployment benefits, pensions and all social minima!

Open struggle against the capitalists and their state by the methods and means of class struggle!

International Communist Party

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program