they never brought enduring benefits to the workers, but on the contrary have permitted the fragmentation of the working class into a thousand corporately isolated layers, categories and sectors, thus facilitating competition between proletarians, national and immigrant, “legal” and “undocumented”, between employed and unemployed, between full-time and under-employed, between the younger and older workforce, between women and men, etc., this competition which is the supreme weapon of the capitalists and the bourgeois State.

With the decades-long economic expansion and gigantic increase in capitalist profits which followed the last World War, the bourgeois class could grant some crumbs from its profits to the workers. The capitalists granted these concessions, only under the pressure of workers’ struggles, and with the well-defined objective of guaranteeing social peace, i.e. the disappearance of the class struggle which alone can threaten their domination.

But for years and years and to the rhythm of successive economic crises, the capitalists in all countries, under the imperative need to maintain and increase their profits, busied themselves with continuously and increasingly taking away the benefits and improvements formerly obtained by the workers, always increasing their exploitation to continuously attack their living and working conditions.

The institutionalized uncertainty and precariousness which touches very many proletarians, young people, temporary, without-papers, unemployed, today is actually the fate which the capitalists intend for the whole working class, including in the rich and ultra-developed countries which dominate the world.

It is capitalism which leads to the growing accumulation of social inequalities, thus creating the chasm between the antagonistic classes; it is capitalism which leads to the increasing differentiation between rich countries and poor countries, condemning their proletarians to the most abject misery and the hunger; it is capitalism which by producing too many goods, too much capital, is periodically struck by recessions caused by this overproduction and which, at a certain time, will inevitably plunge the world into a grave general economic crisis which it will be able to escape only by destruction and a new world war–if the proletariat does not succeed in stopping it by revolution.

Since 1945, the world has known practically not even one day without a war at one place or another on the planet: capitalism does not know any other solution to its problems and its contradictions. The amplitude, the duration and the extension of these wars undoubtedly depend on the gravity of antagonisms and clashes of interests; but it is a fact that capitalist growth means also the growth of antagonisms and of all the factors which lead towards war.


It is not by chance that, under the pretext of the fight against terrorism, the American government invented the concept of preventive war, before invading Afghanistan then Iraq and going on to threaten Iran; it is not by chance that Russia rearms itself and that China shows its teeth; it is not by chance that the French government reinstates NATO and sends reinforcements to Afghanistan (all the while continuing its usual military interventions: in Chad and the Comoros, very recently in Ivory Coast, without speaking about the Congo or Lebanon). Beyond the particular circumstances, this is the demonstration of the truth which states that while capitalism has permanently produced sixty years of "local wars", it unrelentingly sets out on the road towards insurmountable crises and towards a new world conflict which will be the consequence.

Only one force can stop this infernal race towards war: the force of the proletarians, whose exploitation creates the profits of the capitalists and which animates this inhuman mode of production. However the workers can only escape their current state of enfeeblement and express this force which is able to overthrow capitalism, on the condition of overcoming the competition which divides them, of a complete rupture with the practices of class collaboration which paralyse them, to organize for the struggle for the of exclusive defense their own interests–in a word on the condition of taking again the road of the independent class struggle!

The current anti-worker attacks are not due to the particular spite of a Sarkozy; a Bush or a Putin who does nothing but express the needs of capitalism. No “social dialogue” will ever be able to convince the capitalists who consciously carry out their offensive to increase the exploitation of the proletarians: proletarians and capitalists are not the “two sides of industry”, but class adversaries!
It is possible to resist the attacks which follow one another without interruption, but by carrying out real struggles and with other means, other methods and other objectives than those decreed by the collaborationist trade-union apparatuses and those who tail along behind them.

To have a serious chance of success, these struggles cannot be left in the hands of these apparatuses which are indissolubly chained to the institutions of class collaboration and which can thus only sabotage them and betray them, as we witnessed once again during the strikes around the “early retirement provisions” this autumn: the organization of the workers on a class basis, independently and against all collaborationist orientations, is a necessity.

–General raise in wages, with a bigger Increase for the more poorly paid, corresponding to inflation!
–Increase in all social minimums and the minimum wage!
–Reduction of the working day and the intensity of work!
–Immediate full-time hiring of temporary and part-time workers!
–Reduction of the retirement age with pensions at the full rate!
–Full wages for the unemployed and job-seekers!
–Immediate full citizenship for undocumented workers!
–Release of the workers and youths imprisoned for lack of documents, for participation in strikes, or for confrontations with the police force!

These are some of the immediate demands which meet the most pressing needs of the proletariat; they can be obtained only by a generalized struggle uniting the workers across the limits of the enterprise, the corporation, sex or nationality.

But any success will only be temporary if it does not enlist itself in the resumption of the class struggle against capitalism and its national States.

For the return to the revolutionary class struggle!
For the union of the proletarians of all countries!
For the reconstitution of the World Communist Party!

International Communist Party

Correspondence:
Editions Programme, 3 rue Basse Combalot 69007 Lyon FRANCE