For 15 days, the French working class have been waging a huge struggle against the attacks on the pensions by the Emmanuel Macron government. The transport workers have been in an indefinite strike since December 5th, paralyzing the economic activity in the country, particularly in Paris. Within these two weeks, the working class conquered a 3-day inter-profession general strike with mass demonstrations and clashes with the repressive forces all across the country.
On December 5, 10 and 17 massive general strikes took place. They paralyzed the entire country. Every sector came out to fight. About a million workers took to the streets in more than 200 cities across the whole country. They were the most concentrated demonstrations of the last decades. There were struggles in the streets and clashes against the repressive forces in Paris and several other cities. The streets were filled with workers, Yellow Vests, Black Vests, immigrants, “sans-papiers” (without documents), public servants, pensioners, high school and university students, who blocked the schools.
Those who also joined the strike were the railway, metro and airline workers and those of almost the entire transport sector, public servants, workers of schools, hospitals, metalworkers, nuclear power plant workers, trash collectors and refineries, which were almost totally blocked. The workers of EDF (France Electricity) took control of the generators, cutting off power in some places. In Marseille, the dockworkers set up picket lines and blocked the docks. In Ile de la Reunion a blatant teacher’s strike took place.
In multiple General Assemblies, the workers have been voting an indefinite general strike, particularly in transport, leaving the capital city, Paris, without metro and reducing the circulation of the trains between cities, regions and international trips to a minimum. In these General Assemblies, workers have forged their unity overcoming the divisions between the different unions and not following their leaderships, such as CFDT and UNSA that want to give the government a truce while the workers vote “no Christmas truce” if the government does not remove the law.
This strike process hits in full the Macron imperialist government, the commander of the employer s’ offensive, which today is concentrated on the pensions. This is what Prime Minister E. Philippe showed when he announced the general lines of the pension reform, which would extend the contributions for 2 years, 42 special regimes would be eliminated, the insalubrity of some jobs would not be recognized and the formula with which the pensions are calculated would change.
French imperialist bourgeoisie is forced to go on this attack on its own working class, all the workers, the youth and the pensioners, if it wants to keep up in the trade war carried out by the imperialist powers. It needs to impose the same slavery as the one in its colonies and semi-colonies. Therefore in 2016, when Hollande was in office, they decreed the labour reform that ended the collective wage agreements and the 35 working week hours. With Macron, one year ago, it increased the fuel prices and made the Yellow Vests break out. Today, the Fifth Republic comes for more, encouraged by the balance of forces it conquered. That is why the struggle against the pension reform is the struggle for Macron to fall.
Facing the resolute struggle of the French working class and a government -that does not seem to stand down- the ‘inter-unions’ made by CGR. FO (Worker’s Force) and Solidaires and the students organizations FSU, UNEF and UNL had to call to another national strike and demonstration for January 9.
However, these leaderships, with Martinez of CGT at the head, only want to moderate the attack and make this working class assault to step back to a pressure economic struggle for Macron not to fall. They did this in 2016, when the huge working class struggle against El Khomri law opened the possibility to overthrowing the government and regime, and those leaderships sat in a negotiation round to sell out that huge working class fight, to support Hollande.
Therefore, we workers need to achieve our demand of stopping the pension reform. If we defeat this reform, we will be in a better position to launch a counter-offensive to recover all we have lost: the 35 working hours a week, putting down El Khomri law; documents, work and decent housing for all the immigrants and refugees. To withdraw the pension reform, we need to bring down Macron and his entire regime.
For this, from the General Assemblies and the strike picket lines, we need to set up factory committees and other self-determination bodies of those fighting in order to gather together all the exploited, immigrants, those without documents, the Yellow Vests, the pensioners, the militant youth. From there, we need to vote self-defense committees to conquer the best conditions to fight and being able to defend ourselves from repression.
We need to conquer the freedom of all the political prisoners, like Georges Abdallah, the Basque prisoners, and drop all charges against all the fighters.
We have to extend and centralize those committees at regional and national level to conquer a revolutionary general strike to paralyze the economy of the country and the imperialist bourgeoisie until the war cry imposed by the Yellow Vests in their struggle all across France last year of “Macron quit!” comes true.
From those struggle organizations we must raise, in the first place, the demands of our class siblings in Algeria, Mali, Chad, Congo, Sudan, Tunisia, etc. to liberate them from the French imperialist plundering, thus questioning the power of the Fifth Republic. Out with the imperialist military bases in Africa!
The current struggle is a decisive one. This attack must not go through. It is us or them.
Luisa Campos and Ana Negri
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In France a combat trench against the imperialist Maastricht is kept alive
The current struggle of the French exploited is decisive for the whole of the European working class. The latter has fought aggressively along the recent years against the attack of imperialism across Europe, even opening the way to the continental general strike in 2009-2010. But it was sold out and betrayed by the trade union centrals led by the CPs and the social democracy and by the reformist leadership of all fur that sustained them both.
The reason is, after 1989, the bourgeoisie preserved the CPs for it to play from the unions the role of internal police of the labor movement. Thus they imposed hard partial defeats on the working class of imperialist Europe, which allowed them to throw over their backs the weight of the capitalist crisis. This allowed the bourgeoisie of the Franco-German axis to enter the current commercial war.
In Greece, the working class has staged hard and countless general strikes since 2008, which were led to wear and tear by the CP that even broke the workers' heads when they tried to take over the Parliament. In this way, Stalinism prevented the proletariat from advancing in overthrowing the government and the regime and led them at the foot of Syriza, which imposed a fierce attack by removing absolutely all the conquests of the the Greek proletariat.
In Spain, the CP strangled the struggle of the Indignados which in 2011 had put the struggle for the Republic on the agenda, and so they allowed the Bourbon monarchy to self-reform, and today, to repress the people of Catalonia that fight for their independence.
In Portugal and Italy they played that same sinister role: they left the Portuguese working class receiving courses in schools on how to spend less and brought the struggle of the Italian proletariat at the foot of a regime totally in crisis.
Actually, Stalinism has become the staunchest of Maastricht's supporters but is not alone in this task. The anti-capitalists, the reformist leaderships, partners of the CPs, held them on their shoulders, obstructing the path of the proletarians towards independent mass actions that would take decisive blows to overthrow the governments and their regimes. the CPs and their supporting partners always left the proletarians on their knees before their respective bourgeoisie, divided country by country. Moreover, these parties of the labor aristocracy that feed on the crumbs that fall from the exploitation of the colonial and semicolonial world, since 2015 have been leading the European working class towards an "anti-terrorist front" with the imperialist bourgeoisie shouting "the enemy is the ISIS ”, which the bourgeoisie used as a pretext to advance its counterrevolutionary offensive against the rebel masses of the Maghreb and the Middle East.
The renegades of Trotskyism, today called "anti-capitalists," dedicated themselves to supporting Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, some of them even entering their ranks. In France they supported the CGT through the Solidaires trade union center. And they even presented the enemies of the working class as their friends. They told the European proletariat that Putin was it's ally though he is the murderer of the Syrian people and responsible for the partition of Ukraine.
In the United Kingdom, social-imperialist currents such as the English SWP has supported the Labor Party from the left by calling to "democratize" the imperialist Europe of Maastricht. They presented Corbyn as "anti-capitalist," while he proposed to maintain the status quo with the European Union. That is, it offered the British working class more of the same, a status in which the British proletarians have lost everything. Reformism wanted to unite UK workers to the pro-European imperialist gang, separating them from their true ally: the working class of the continent. As a result, the working class went with Johnson who revived the old dream of a "thriving England" in the hands of Anglo-American imperialism. Surely, now they will blame the "backwardness of the masses" the same as in 2010, when, from the TUC (English trade union center), they proclaimed "English work for the English", imposing the division of the working ranks between British and immigrant workers. That is the current tragedy. But the crisis is open and the working class has not said the last word.
Therefore, today more than ever, we must unify the ranks of the European working class! The possibility of regrouping the proletariat of the Old continent lives in the struggle of the workers of France. There the flame of the struggle for class independence and against the imperialist Maastricht is kept alive. The combat is class against class, of the exploited of Europe against the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The fight in France against retirement reform is the struggle of the entire European working class. It must not remain isolated. If this fight is defeated, the road to a black night can open across the continent.
Therefore, the European working class must stand up. We must prepare a fight plan and an unified Continental General Strike together with the most exploited and oppressed sectors: the immigrants and the "sans-papiers" (undocumented).
We are the same class, we have the same enemy! Down with imperialist Maastricht! |
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