France

December 15th, 2018

France in flames

Statement of the Collective for the Re-foundation of the 4th International – FLTI

After the 5th Act of struggle…

The yellow vests do not leave the streets
The limit of the mass actions today comes down to the betrayal of union bureaucracies who support Macron’s government, making a pact with the bosses

On December 15th the yellow vests blocked the roads and marched around the streets of several cities all over France. They confronted the police once again to defend from repression. The protestors in that cold morning met in Paris met a police line in the train stations and the access blocking the entrance to the city, seizing their masks, vests, etc.
The combats continue. The fire of the barricade has not been put down. The masses are not leaving the streets, despite the scam of Macron’s statements, which are not even handouts. The journey of 12/15 was carried out despite the infamous pact between union bureaucracy and the big bosses. The predisposition to fight remains untouched. The masses carry trade unions on their shoulders, like dead weight. They are led by the bureaucracy and they are a big obstacle for the working class and exploited to deploy all their strength in the fight against Macron, by attacking the business and interests of great capitalists.

The struggle must take a leap forward. It must climb a step. The government has placed all the forces of union bureaucracies to prevent it. A new blow against the government is imperative to leave the infamous regime of the 5th Republic in crisis. In order to achieve that the working class must stop the production and the entire France, this would question immediately the property of the big bosses. This would propel the struggles that masses have been carrying out for the last 5 weeks. This is key to a successful combat. If this has not happened yet, if the indefinite general strike has not started yet, if Macron is still in power… it is because Martinez and his CGT are saving him, together with other union leaders. They divide the uprising of the working class. Despite union bureaucracy, hundreds of struggles and conflicts are joining the yellow vests in the streets and barricades, while the student movement joined the revolutionary combats openly.

The day of struggle of December 15 was openly betrayed by all union bureaucracies. From the beginning of this mass political struggle against Macron Stalinist union bureaucracy of Martinez and CGT and his friends said the “stability of the government had to be preserved”.
The leadership of trade union Solidares –influenced by “anti-capitalist left”- and Force Ouvrière (FO) said that the fight was to make “the government change its policy”, not to overthrow it.
All of them are a wall to prevent the factory committees from arising and join mass organizations who are fighting to defeat the government.

Union bureaucracy –based on social-imperialist parties of labour bureaucracies and aristocracies like Melenchon, CP and NPA- try to “change the course” of the masses to pressure struggle like what had been taking place in France…They want the exploited to put pressure on the Parliament to withdraw the bill on labour flexibilization, so it does not attack so hard on the retired. That is how they have been selling out every great struggle of the French proletariat. Masses broke the inertia of useless pressure struggles imposed by the traitors of union bureaucracy and they marched on the streets convinced that without overthrowing the government and the infamous regime there would not be any chance of getting any of their demands.
Those on the top declared war and they are not willing to leave without defeating the working class. Those of the bottom must go for everything.

The unions, led by these real scabs of the trade union bureaucracy, were a dead weight on the masses and their struggles. These were called in an agreement with the employers to negotiate and to cynically agree on the latest handout that Macron tries to give, which, as we have already seen, is a real scam for the workers and the rebellious people. That is why we speak of a union bureaucracy that openly plays a role of scabs, traitors and strikebreakers. In this 5th day of struggle it was proven again.
Because if something is seen among the unionized workers in France today, it is their predisposition, their desire to fight alongside with the yellow vests. That is why hundreds of thousands have put on their vests and marched on the streets despite and against union leaders’ orders.
Thus, in order to decompress this tendency towards a predisposition to struggle among workers' ranks, the bureaucracies of the trade union centrals called for a march of the unions the day before to the 5th day of the yellow vests (that is, 12/14) to break and divide the fight. This was a clear action to separate the unionized workers from the hundreds of thousands already fighting on the barricades. But these union bureaucrats did not succeed, nor managed to stop the 5th day of struggle on 12/15 of the yellow vests, although they did make it more difficult and uphill. But his march did not arouse even the slightest enthusiasm among the workers. No more than 4,000 people marched in Paris under the leadership of the traitor Martinez of the CGT. As always, by his side, there were leaders of the NPA that influences Solidaires, and of course members of FO, a government appendix trade union.
The trade union Solidaires, influenced by the "anticapitalists", which claims to be a “militant” union, has systematically refused to break this front of union bureaucrats that supports Macron’s government. They have refused to call to surpass them and set up committees of workers in companies, factories and other workplaces so that the working class can organize itself with the yellow vests, the unemployed, the rebellious youth and most workers who fight in the barricades. And then they cry and whine that "the unions do not intervene". Scabs! They participated in the demonstration of the scabs of the union bureaucracy on December 14 and not to fight to overcome the union leadership of Martinez and the CP, but to be their servants and their left appendages, which is what they really are.
But despite so much conspiracy against the masses and so much betrayal, it was clear on the 5th day of struggle, and it was shown in the streets, that Macron’s fraud and scam are not accepted or endorsed by the majority of the exploited.

The forces of those from below are
not exhausted at all
A huge conspiracy is underway to disorganize what the masses built

The development of revolutionary days of struggle of the exploited in France needs of a real strong action of those from below, not a pact with the government; it needs a synchronized and coordinated action of all the exploited, opening a mass insurrectional mass process. That is at the top of the agenda today. The workers and the French people know what it is: it means starting a new May 1968. This would mean that the exploited conquer an indefinite general strike until the government falls. Thus, the revolutionary days that shook France for weeks would climb a key step in a fight that would leave the regime in crisis and open a revolutionary crisis in the heights, as happened in May '68 after 15 days of strikes, which forced De Gaulle to escape to Germany for a week. Martinez's great betrayal is sitting down with the government and the big bosses to strangle this enormous mass onslaught, dividing the ranks of the exploited, preventing the path to the General Strike. That is why Martinez, general secretary of the CGT, today is a real prime minister without a portfolio of Macron, the commander-in-chief of the internal police of the labour movement, which are the union bureaucracy and the social-imperialist parties. They say nothing about the struggles of the colonies such as the Island of Reunion and Guadeloupe, because they defend the French bosses’ left pocket.

Martinez and the scab CP do not represent anybody today. They are supported by the state that keeps them at the head of the unions and, by the left, by the renegades of Trotskyism that disguise this rotten union bureaucracy, one of the most treacherous in Europe, as "anti-capitalists".

Down with Martinez and the traitors of the union bureaucracy! We have to recover the trade unions to put them
at the forefront of the barricade
combat against Macron!
Open the road to factory committees! All the exploited must wear the
yellow vest!

At the top of the agenda we can find the task of recovering unions and setting up factory committees so that the force of all the exploited in France ends up exploding in a centralized and generalized action.
The method of the assembly voting the action committee and sending delegates to the barricade is the path that the working class needs to go through so that the organization of the struggling masses can take a leap, so that the relative spontaneity of today opens the way for a superior organization that leads to prepare and organize new and superior combats such as the one that is proposed: as we said, the indefinite general strike that overthrows the government. The immediate task is to coordinate and centralize at the local, regional and national levels the committees of yellow vests, secondary and university students, pensioners, the unemployed, immigrants and refugees and, above all, factory committees and recovered unions. It is at the top of the agenda to extend and coordinate them nationally, getting rid of the bureaucrats who tie their hands to fight.
The crisis of revolutionary leadership of the French proletariat is nothing but the overabundance of treacherous leaderships that want to undo what the masses conquered with their struggle. The role of these leaders is to stop a higher mass attack and, above all, prevent the self-determination and self-organization organisms of all the struggling masses from being set up, an issue that would blow up that privileged layer of worker aristocracy and corrupted bureaucracy, that the big employer corrupts and sustains with the crumbs that fall from the super-profits of the super-exploitation and plundering of the colonial and semicolonial world. A centralized combat body of all workers and exploited in France would question who really should govern, whether the government of the French imperialist gangs or the government of the revolutionary working class with its armed councils.
That rotten social-imperialist, union and political bureaucracy is the one that the French proletariat must leave on the side of the road to advance its battles.

The limit of the current battles is an accumulation of reformists, former Trotskyists, Stalinists, defenders of the Fifth imperialist Republic and the business of the great French employers in the semi-colonial world. They are the ones who prevent the forces of the exploited from being centralized in a mortal blow against Macron’s government.

In 1968, when they called themselves Trotskyist and revolutionaries, the ancestors of the French NPA, the Communist Révolutionnaire League (LCR) of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, openly called the French working class to break with Stalinism and march to the revolutionary general strike, as it was proven by the statements of Alain Krivine at that time. They even argued that in order to conquer the slightest demands, it was necessary to overthrow De Gaulle and move on expropriating and imposing workers' control of the imperialist companies.

There are no more traces left of old LCR, which even in a centrist way was looking for a way towards socialist revolution. There are only spoils and waste left. For decades they have publicly renounced -and in Congresses- to the struggle for conquering the dictatorship of the proletariat. They are true advocates of "democratic" dictatorship of capital, the most perfidious of dictatorship of a handful of monopolies that expand their profits based on millions of exploited in France and in the colonial and semicolonial world. That is why they are against a mass revolutionary action that overthrows Macron and places at the top of the agenda the dictatorship of the vast majority of the exploited against a minority of parasites. They are nothing but a new batch of the French Communist Party of '68; its most faithful heirs. Together with Mélenchon, they fight to "democratize" this imperialist regime. Today they support "De Gaulle-Macron". 50 years passed and lots of water under the bridge...

Today they are in a strategic single front with the bureaucracy of the French trade unions. It has been a while since they have become a social-democratic party based on the furious defence of the Fifth imperialist Republic. And not only them, but also all their appendices, that from within the NPA, shriek and shriek that what has to be set up is the party of Lenin and Jean Jaures, of Trotsky and Gramsci, to cover up that they have liquidated all vestige of a revolutionary Trotskyist party in France and internationally. They have taken the IV International to the mud of Stalinism. They call to set up a "broad", "non-sectarian" left that fights "for more democracy". These people have abandoned the fight for the socialist revolution as an immediate task to solve the demands of the exploited of the world a long time ago. They have crossed the Rubicon.

These capitulations and policy of NPA, the appendix of French Stalinism, is not only an international policy of the heirs of Pabloism, but also of Solidaires, the trade union that the NPA influences. In 2016 they made a block with the CGT to sell out the fight against the El Khomri law of labour flexibilization at national talks with Hollande’s government. Then, in May 2018, in the middle of the struggle of the railway workers and the students, they met with the CGT, with Mélenchon, with sectors of the bourgeoisie that had been part of the SP (Generation.s) and with different NGOs to set up a movement called "Popular Tide". As in the mobilization of scabs of 12/14 against the struggle of the yellow vests, when the attack of the labour flexibilization against the workers took off, they called a march... on Sunday! whose goal was not (and they made it very clear) to overthrow Macron, but to put pressure on him so that he "changes his policy". That was their situation, when they were surprised and overcame by the hurricane of the yellow vests that ran the curtain and clearly showed the face of the traitors in this tragic play where the masses fight and their leaderships betray them.

The treachery of the leadership of the trade unions and the reformist left puts the revolutionary alliance of the workers and the impoverished popular sectors of France in serious crisis

The crisis of the leadership of the proletariat is becoming more acute. Despite this, France's mass combat does not leave the streets. And this, on the other hand, is followed with great attention by millions of workers in the world. In the G-20 Summits, imperialism has been concentrating its offensive to impose its prescription of labour flexibilization all over the world, to make workers pay for the crisis of 2008, when the financial oligarchy vanished and spent in advance more than 90 billion dollars that human work has not yet produced. It is a perverse and bankrupt capitalist system; 1% of parasites that has started a fierce class war at the international level.

In Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, China, Russia, the USA, France, Iran... There is no longer a country where there is no fight against this international plan of labour flexibilization, while union bureaucracies prevent this struggle from being coordinated and centralized as happened with the struggle for 8 hours, which unified all the workers of the world. These leaderships paid by the capital not only refuse to this but even to unify the struggles in every country, just as they do in France. They do the same everywhere. That is what they are paid for.

That is why the combats of France -where the working class and the exploited have overcome this earthenware of labour bureaucracies and aristocracies- are a blow by the left to this brutal imperialist offensive. The Syrian resistance has not surrendered and from the streets of Idlib identifies the assassin Al Assad with Macron, while they call to fight together with the yellow vests from the last trenches of the revolution. The Iranian working class, and its vanguard, the metalworkers, have entered into enormous class maneuvers. In Hungary, workers have also rebelled against labour flexibilization and even against the owed salaries. In Haiti there has been a workers revolt... Masses fight back.
December 17th is the anniversary of the day Mohamed Bouazizi was immolated in Tunisia for being an unoccupied computer technician who was not even allowed to sell vegetables on the street. Today those young people burn Paris. These traitors and scoundrels of the union bureaucracies accuse them of being "vandals", when it is the rebellious youth who put the Palestinian flag in front of the Zionist consulate in France. And if these gentlemen of the bureaucracy are upset that the youth burn their cars, better store them and go out to fight, instead of destroying workers’ struggle.

New traps and conspiracies against
the struggle of the masses: the government proposes "citizen initiatives" and referendum,
while Mélenchon and the New Left supports constitutional reforms

While the government sees its fraud and deceit to the people fail, with the postponement of the increase in diesel; and while union bureaucracy is not able to control and disorganize the revolutionary tide that has begun, Macron seeks to impose new traps on the masses. Its objective is none other than to divide not only the workers' movement but also that from the other exploited classes with which it has forged an alliance in the streets.
With his new proposal to accept the "citizens' initiative", that is to say, there can be referendums in France without the need of approval of a section of the National Assembly, Macron has agreed with Mélenchon and his front "Un-submissive France" to open a debate on this issue.
The treacherous trade union bureaucracy is not enough anymore. Now comes the time of the New Left, the time of the Podemos and Syriza that with the demagoguery and lie of "expanding democracy", they strangled the revolutionary struggle to end with monarchy in the Spanish State when the Indignados rose up with the war cry of "Republic". This European New Left is the one that in Greece with Syriza left intact Troika’s power and today administers its business from the government.

Now in France, relying on the middle classes that have entered the fight with just democratic aspirations, the government seeks to seduce them with the New Left to leave the streets and yellow vests and go to vote.
New traps... but the masses fight for bread and for recovering everything that the capitalists have taken from them. The crisis of the government and of "Un-submissive France" is that the masses have an aspiration a thousand times more democratic and revolutionary than Macron, Mélenchon and the lackeys of the New Left. They only seek to prevent the masses from taking the Bastille, armed as in the revolution of 1789-1793 or with the workers taking power as in the Commune in the nineteenth century.

What the reformist left and the government want to prevent is the minimal and elementary democratic demand of the masses that Macron falls in order to achieve their minimum demands for bread, decent pensions, work and cheap diesel. The scoundrels of the New Left and the bourgeoisie know very well that fighting for these minimal demands (which bankrupted capitalism cannot give) and overthrowing Macron would mean the beginning of a workers' revolution, which terrifies the ruling classes of France and all Europe.

Ultimately, the "democracy" of the New European Left has put very far away the guillotine and, as we have already said, it does not dream of continuing the struggle of the revolutionary Jacobins of the democratic revolution they proclaim to carry out. How is it possible to "reform" and "democratize" the Fifth Republic of the imperialist gangs that with their troops and military bases are fighting with fascist methods for the colonial and semicolonial world and to defend their interests, without expropriating the transnationals and bankers and without a victorious socialist revolution? Again, the New Left proves to be as old as the theory of the "2 stages revolution" of Stalinism that led the world working class to historical defeats.

"Un-submissive France" (allies of the Podemos and Syriza, and the "anti-capitalists" as appendages of them) has been preparing itself for moments like these; they are willing to play "siren songs" making the masses believe that "democratizing" the regime will make the bourgeoisie pay for the crisis. This is a lie, an infamy and a new shot to the back of the exploited, which only pursues the objective of breaking the worker, peasant and popular alliance that is leaving without social base and sustenance to the imperialist regime of the V Republic.
The alternative is clear and it is the same one that took place in revolutionary Greece after 40 general strikes and in Spain when it was revolted by the "Republic of the Indignados": either the organizations dual power of workers, popular sectors impoverished and students are set up, and the bourgeoisie and its state are disarmed; or they will divert the revolutionary struggle of the masses and subject the working class to its institutions of domination and to the most cruel and brutal exploitation and attack of its conquests, and when not, to decisive counterrevolutionary blows.
In the imperialist Europe of Maastricht, which is in a trade war with the USA and fighting for the planet with the other imperialist powers, with some of them being in open bankruptcy, there are no margins of concession for the Gaullist France of the arrogant financial oligarchy of Paris. It is them, the exploiters, or us, the workers.
The bourgeoisie fears that the revolutions of the armed workers' councils will return to Europe, the ones that expropriated from Berlin to the Russian steppes during the 20th century. This time they will do so in the central imperialist countries.

To prevent this, the bourgeoisie has educated, trained and corrupted with crumbs and coins to this social-imperialist left, which calls itself European "New Left", which has written thousands of books revising and destroying Marxism so that, at times like this, the can betray the beginning of the proletarian revolution!!!!!!!!!!!

At the G-20 summit, the imperialist powers evaluate and define their plan of war against the world workers
Against the new betrayals of reformism, the fighting banner of the Fourth International must be recovered

In the last G-20 Summit held in Buenos Aires at the beginning of December, imperialism agreed on a truce in this commercial war, including between the US and China. The powerful glimpsed over their shoulders and saw that through their disputes over the markets and the world trade had been breaking a new revolutionary offensive of the underdogs.
In China, the trade war -through lifting of customs barriers- has already opened an acute crisis of recession and layoffs. Over 9,000 strikes go through the cities with the highest concentration of workers in that country. Hundreds of thousands of students have marched on the streets to fight with the workers to set up independent trade unions against the bourgeois scoundrels of the "red businessmen" who are the true slaves of the working class on behalf of the transnationals and imperialism.

At the G-20 Summit they agreed a 90-day truce to close their gaps, while the Democratic Party of the Yankee imperialists tries to channel the brawling fight of the black workers, the martyred immigrants in the productive process of the USA, of the women and the rebellious youth, by including candidates from those sectors to better deceive, divert and disorganize the struggle of the American working class. This is an imposture and a real scam to subjugate the working class and the exploited to the Democratic-Republican bipartisanship of Yankee assassins.

While temporarily trying to close the gaps from on top, the masses did not give them a break in their attack. But the exploited resist and fight. On the battlefield, a thousand and one battles are fought, but a thousand and one betrayals also stand out. It is under these conditions that the struggle to recover the program, the theory and the strategy of the Fourth International is opened. This is an immense task because it was delivered to the mud of betrayal and ignominy. Its clean banner was placed at the feet of the bourgeoisie. No revolutionary force claiming Trotskyism can allow it.
The banner of the Fourth International today fights with the metalworkers of Iran against the murderous clerics and millionaires ayatollahs who, together with Al Assad and Putin, massacre the Syrian masses; it is in the barricades of the yellow vests; in the rebellion of the Hungarian workers; in the combats of the Chinese working class and its rebellious youth, which today rises again as it did in '89 in Tiananmen.

In each decisive battle of the proletariat the forces will arise to recover and refound the Fourth International, the only party that proposes the socialist revolution as the only concrete and immediate solution for the world working class in the current battles.
Regrouping the forces of the international revolutionary movement for this purpose is the task of the moment.

Let’s fight like in May 1968!
Let’s seize power in Paris as in the Commune!
Let’s fight for the revolution of the councils of workers and soldiers throughout Europe as the Bolshevik Party conquered in the USSR and the ones that the Revolutionary Third International of Lenin and Trotsky fought for!

International Coordination
Secretariat of the FLTI