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December 13th, 2018


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

Macron did not yield. Supported by the union bureaucracy and the big bosses,
he only seeks to scam and deceive the people


Fight as in May 1968:
Revolutionary General Strike until Macron falls!

The yellow vests do not leave the barricades

 

On Saturday December 12th, the yellow vests, the workers, the unemployed youth from the working class neighborhoods, the retired, the impoverished petty producers, made a hell on the streets of Paris and in the cities of France, facing the security forces. In Paris a true state of siege was mounted, with armored vehicles of the gendarmerie preventing the masses from raising their barricades on the streets. All the exploited entered the fight for the fourth time in a row. They made a huge day of revolutionary struggle while they are preparing a fifth day of revolutionary struggle for next Saturday December 15th which shows that those from below do not leave the streets.

 

The concessions of Macron: a great scam and deception to the people

After the day of political struggle of December 8th, the government of the Fifth Republic saw that it had lost the control of the masses and that its power was staggering and weakening. Before the revolted masses advance against the power of the bourgeoisie, after a week of silence, Macron called for a meeting to the treacherous union bureaucracy of the trade union federations CGT, CFDT, FO, CFE-CGE and CFTC1, to the French imperialist employers' organizations (MEDEF, CPME and U2P2) and to the presidents of the National Assembly (representatives, senators and the Economic Council).

In that meeting they began to devise a big scam and a deception against the workers. First, they mounted a scene to announce that “concessions were given” to the rioting workers and people, making them believe that such concessions as the 100 euros “wage increase” and the suspension of the price increase of fuel, were a result of the demands of the union federations agreed with the employers associations. This is a vile lie. The bureaucracy of the unions prevented the working class from intervening through them in the struggle in the streets. The union bureaucrats supported the hikes in fees and the increase of the fuel prices of Macron, after betraying the enormous combats of the French working class against the labour flexibilization and the loss of the 35 hours of work per week. In these weeks of struggle they did not move a finger while the majority of the working class took the streets, removing from them the restraining vest that the bureaucracy of the unions had imposed on them, putting on the yellow vest and allying themselves with the students and the impoverished sectors of the middle classes of the countryside and the city. That is to say, it is a real mass political struggle against the government and the regime.

But the working class and the exploited people of France are perfectly clear about how things are: who the lackeys of the government and traitors of the workers' struggle are and who really were at the forefront of the barricades and on the streets.

On the other hand, in this meeting, they conspired against the rioting workers, plotting a deception that was quickly exposed as such before the workers and the people. Actually, neither the government nor the bosses granted anything, nor the union bureaucrats got anything. Everything has been a big lie.
The 100 euros of "increase" to the minimum wage announced by Macron will not come out from the bosses' pockets, but from the State treasury, that is to say, what is being granted is nothing more and nothing less than a subsidy to the employers and, in the near future, the masses will have to pay for it with new taxes.
The same goes for the annulment of the tax on social security for retired who earn less than 2000 euros and the new-year bonus, whose payment is subjected to the decision of each employer, whereas all of them, of course, have already announced that they cannot grant it...
What about the increase in the fuel prices? A gross hoax... The increase is postponed. Undoubtedly, with the masses off the streets, with the union bureaucracy regaining control of the workers movement, with the bosses enslaving the workers in the companies, with the state flogging the immigrants, the unemployed and the youth, that is to say, once the situation is stabilized, the hike in fees will return again. On what day of 2019 will this be? The one in which the masses are once again controlled by their leaderships and evicted from the streets.


The enemy is the financial oligarchy of France and the imperialist Europe of Maastricht

The workers and the French people know that the one who gives the order to increase the prices of fuel to "reduce the state deficit" is the imperialist Europe of Maastricht. The axis that pivots the businesses of the European imperialist gangs in that continent and in the whole planet are the the government of Macron and the government of Merkel, the Franco-German imperialist axis that has found a vital space in the European continent, from Portugal to the Russian steppes.
To maintain the monetary unity of the euro, the Maastricht Europe does not allow more than a 3% deficit in the public accounts of their member states. France has passed that deficit. Of course the big French capitalists, their bankers and the financial oligarchy are not willing to put a single euro of the super profits they get from the oppressed people they plunder and from the French workers they exploit in order to pay for that deficit. That is precisely what the increase in the prices of fuel is about: making the masses pay the deficit of the functioning of the state.
The government of Macron proudly claims to give subsidies to companies, when he pays to each worker those 100 euros plus. This amounts to 10,000 million euros, as current expenditure of the state, which, we insist, will be paid by the masses with increased taxes, as the French people know well. Hence, one of the key claims that fuelled these battles against the increase in fuel prices, was to impose taxes on the great fortunes.
In France, all the workers and people know that Total, one of the largest imperialist oil companies on the planet, partner of the "7 sisters" in the looting of oil throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world, in its balance in the stock market has shown 12,000 million dollars of yearly earnings that it distributes among a handful of shareholders and parasites that live off clipping coupons. That is to say, with the declared super-profits of one year of one of the greatest French imperialist companies, a wage increase can be paid for all the workers of France. Not to mention the Renault group, whose profits reached 11,500 million euros in 4 months; or Airbus or Paribas bank which is openly one of the largest investment banks in China, associated with the transnationals that enslave the Asian working class

It has become clear to the workers and the French people that Macron's announcement is not a concession and that he does not yield anything. It is a scam and a deception that cannot even be passed as a reform or a conquest by the traitors of the union bureaucracy.

 

The Macron government today is supported by the traitors of the union bureaucracy and the big bosses, who fear for their fall at the hands of the direct action of the masses

The "king" Macron lost control of the masses, so he sees his dominance is endangered. Thus he called his "squires", the union bureaucrats, to subject the masses to this infamous pact, to strangle the heroic struggle of the masses. Martinez, of the CGT, along with all the union bureaucracy, plays a fundamental role in saving the infamous French Fifth Republic, for these traitors will be the ones who will guarantee the application of the bosses' plans, in case the bourgeoisie manages to take the exploited out of the streets.

That is their role, because they are responsible for the French working class losing one of its main achievements, the 35 hours of work per week. They sold out the fight against the reform of the labour code, the fight against the Khomri law, the fight against the reform of the railways and a long etcetera.
For this reason, the CGT did not call for any general strike these days, since it’s a matter of life or death for them not only preserving the property and profits of the capitalists, but also because the bourgeoisie knows that the fall of Macron government at the hands of a direct action from the masses would open a real crisis of power in the heights and in all the dominance institutions of France. This is what this "negotiation and dialogue table" is about: to uphold Macron so that the masses do not topple him and prevent them from advancing in opening the way to achieve their demands, demolishing all the institutions of dominance of the French Fifth Republic. The bourgeoisie knows that this would mean the opening of the revolution in France. It would be putting the first stones to build up a barricade of the Commune to take over the Bastille ...
For this reason the bourgeoisie mounted quickly a real wall to defend its fortress, to "reinforce the Bastille" before the hatred of the masses... It is a sinister agreement of the bosses and the union bureaucracy when the bourgeois power has lost control of the masses, that is, at times when the slaveholder has lost control of his slaves who have risen.

This new wall of lies and deception that was built is because the workers with their combats have also put into question the police control of the streets of France. The bourgeoisie knows that in new and superior clashes with the repressive forces and the army, the workers will have the weapons at their reach, as they would’ve conquered them from the picket lines and barricades.
The French ruling classes was forged in the massacre of the Paris Commune and in deceptions and lies, with which they diverted the fight of May 1968, supported by the union bureaucracy in general and Stalinism in particular. They know very well that they need to give back the control of the workers' movement to Stalinism, to the social-imperialist left and to the bureaucracy of all the unions, totally corrupt and sold to the bourgeois state.
That is why Macron called Martinez, the general secretary of the CGT, to organize this meeting to deceive the people and made him the de facto vice-president, as head of the internal police within the labuor movement that the bourgeoisie has to control the unions. This is why the capitalist system and its regimes and governments supported and covered up the Communist Parties since 1989, especially in Europe, after they handed over the USSR. It is in order to control the unions with manu militari. Stalinism knew and knows perfectly that job.
As we saw in various statements, the entire left (the former Trotskyists among them) whined about the unions not participating, when the masses were in the streets and had already completely surpassed the union bureaucracy. But Martínez and the CGT, the social-imperialist bureaucrats of Force Ouvrière (Workers Force) and other trade union federations, paid heed to these currents and participated: they closed a pact with the big bosses to support Macron and deceive and swindle the people.
When we write this statement, it is clear that the masses are not falling for Macron's deception and scam. They are still waiting for his resignation. The union bureaucracy has had to take another stand. It announced a new action of the unions for this Friday, December 14th, with which it intends to ride on the crest of the wave to try to control the revolutionary tide. However, it is highly discredited. The union bureaucrats are not yellow vests. They are not fighters of the barricade. They do not bring conquests. They only betray. They are enemies of the "vandals", as they call those who fight on the streets of France. They are enemies of the yellow vests. They are servants of the Fifth Republic.

 

After the most advanced steps of May 1968, a new revolution tries to stand up in France

In that tumultuous year, Paris was shaken by an enormous revolutionary struggle. The student’s movement occupied the universities and for a month, combative militant students were the spark that ignited the prairie that led the labour movement to intervene and set France on fire.
In those years began a revolutionary mass uprising throughout the world. After the fighting against the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy of the metalworkers in East Germany in 1953 and the workers' councils of Hungary, the working class clashed with the Stalinism, lackeys of the imperialism, in the streets of Prague. In Tlatelolco, Mexico, hundreds of students were killed in violent repression when they were fighting in defense of education. A huge masses' uprising radicalized the world working class that confronting at the left with the infamous pact of US "democratic" imperialism and its partners, the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy, signed in Yalta and Potsdam after World War II.
In 1968, the US with President Lyndon Johnson from the Democratic Party invaded Vietnam (a reminder to today's left that is so pleased and welcomes this party as progressive) and in response, the Vietnamese masses carried out the Tet offensive, attacking all the Yankee barracks and even his Embassy in Saigon.

The anti-war movement, with its vanguard, the black movement, radicalized in the USA in a real pitched battle against the police of the murderous Democratic Party of the masses of Vietnam.
Che Guevara died in Bolivia, surrounded and isolated by Stalinism, and the student movement dressed in red the universities of Paris with their revolutionary struggle.
The French working class, breaking the barrier of the treacherous trade union bureaucracy of the CGT, controlled by Stalinism and the CP, burst into along with the student movement in a 15-day general strike that even led to De Gaulle's government fleeing out of France and took refuge in Germany, afraid of the masses may have overthrown him with their revolutionary combats. The working class in France, just as it happened in Czechoslovakia, earlier in Hungary and as soon as it was made in a generalized uprising in the world, hit towards the left against the Stalinist control of the world workers movement and its counterrevolutionary pact with imperialism.

The lessons of that combat are alive in the consciousness of the masses. Every revolution that begins, takes elements of the previous ones and the tracks of the past leave their mark on the exploited masses. And in the bourgeoisie, there was a clear class consciousness to face the new mass battles.
Today Macron (worried about being 1968 De Gaulle) on the one hand looks at Berlin and on the other, at the barricade. He has not yet embarked on the trip because he hopes that the traitors of the trade union bureaucracy and the self-styled "New Left", true social-imperialist currents, will extinguish the fire of the barricades.
On the boards of the big transnationals, the bourgeoisie is preparing itself for the possibility that the masses defeat Macron, something which it is not willing to allow, but when it sees it power in danger, it develops its entire class instinct and consciousness.

Thus, in case the current plan of deception and lies fails, they have already sent their bourgeois left wing, which goes from Melenchon to the "anti-capitalist" servants of French imperialism, to request that Macron resign, to advance the elections and to "democratize" France unifying both chambers in a Single National Assembly.
While he sends the police to the street and raises these walls against the masses, the bourgeoisie also prepares this new deception to sweeten the regime of the V Bonapartist and counterrevolutionary Republic with doses of "pseudo-democratic" lies. Why? Because the bourgeoisie’s General Staff, as we have already said, learned perfectly from the French May.

In '68, almost 30 days of combats of the student movement were necessary so that the French proletariat could break the stranglehold of the union bureaucracy tightly controlled by Stalinism, as he had been doing since the outbreak of WWII. Already at that time, the traitor Thorez, the general secretary of the French Communist Party, disarmed the maquis, which was the French resistance that had smashed fascism and the workers to work 12 hours a day in the worst conditions of slavery for "rebuild the France”. And years later, when "distributing wealth time" arrived, workers only received more hunger, misery and oppression. The working class was sold out and also paralyzed when French imperialism organized the massacre and genocide in its Algerian colony that was struggling to become independent.
The fate that the Foreign Legion prepared for the Algerian workers and peasants was the same for the workers of France: miserable wages and slavery. That was the engine of the French May. The working class broke with the Communist Party and the bureaucracy of the unions, they broke with a 15 day general strike of and together with the student movement took over France.

So it is disgusting when reformism talks about the "Welfare State" of French imperialism. They are, and always have been, part of the workers' aristocracy and of the upper strata of the French and European proletariat, from where they arrogantly look down at the working class of the French colonies and the semi-colonies that this imperialism oppresses and plunders.


In 2018 the workers have entered
the combat breaking union bureaucracy’s siege
The bourgeoisie can read very well the conditions and the current development of independent
mass actions in France

The bourgeoisie and its government behave today as they are doing, because they draw the lesson from '68. The revolution began in that year when Stalinism and bureaucracy lost control on the labour movement.

But this time the working class broke the straitjacket and it did not wait 30 days of combat of the student movement to leave the factories to fight, like in 1968. This time, the workers and the exploited masses entered directly into political struggle to overthrow the government, despite and against the union bureaucracy. The proletariat entered this fight together with the student movement and the ruined middle classes. The union bureaucracies were surprised, like the bourgeoisie, by this great independent mass action. After huge betrayals of the bureaucracy of the CGT and other trade union, it was the workers' movement that putting on the yellow vests, was the advance of the exploited in the barricades that began to burn Paris.

A gang of the French bourgeoisie, like that of Le Pen, tried to use the action of the masses with its "anti-Maastricht" policy, but gave the order to leave the barricades because there was the working class, the rebellious youth and the student movement fighting... Breaking with the vests of the bureaucracy, the workers movement is already on the streets. Their method of struggle is the barricade. The students, by hundreds of thousands, are also there. The time limit of the French May have been shortened. The trap of the new wall, based on the scam of the pact of the union leaders with the government, is for the working class to go back to be under bureaucracy’s control.

The bourgeoisie knows and wants to prevent the barricade evolves to the picket, the picket to the roadblocks, the road blocks to stop the production and from there to open the way to the Factory Committees to break the corset of the bureaucracy and impose the general strike.
If the current conditions develop, these will lead to the Factory Committees and the open defeat of the union bureaucracy that controls each particular factory. This is the way to a new May '68, a May French based on Workers' Councils, the rebel student movement, barricades and pickets. This is necessary in the dynamic of the combat that has been established. And for that reason the new wall and the infamy mounted by the bourgeoisie and the sweetened class collaboration politics of the left, including the "anticapitalists", which does not want Macron -De Gaulle- "to flee to Germany". They want his resignation and anticipated elections.
What travels through France is the ghost of the revolution and of the French May, and that begins to travel all over Europe.

 

The working class needs to set up the self-organizing masses organisms with direct democracy that will set up the Self-defence Committees and the Workers' Militia

The task of the moment in France is to set up the ad hoc organisms suitable for the current combat, to organize the masses in struggle: the Consumers Committees, Young people of the cités Committees, Students Committees, Factory Committees, Unemployed Committees and Committees of the picket lines of the barricades centralized at the local, regional and national levels.
The issue is about raising the power of the workers and the exploited masses. It is about disarming the police and arming the people. As in the revolutionary France of 1793, one man, one rifle! And as it was shouted in the Paris Commune: "whoever has the weapons, conquers the bread!".

Faced with this there is no mystery or anything to invent. As much as reformists and treacherous leaders tell the masses and harp on them in their ears, the only thing they can do is "union struggles or pressure on Parliaments to get crumbs", the working class and its allies have already entered into the political struggle. And this subsumes the economic struggle and for the masses everything comes down to the Government's fall to get even the smallest of its demands. Union bureaucracy cannot control the barricade battles of the yellow vests. They slip like in a frozen lake.
What the masses have ahead of them is to raise the workers' councils and their militia from the barricades in order to unite all the oppressed and exploited classes of society. This is no mystery. These are the Soviets. Those that the reformists together with the bourgeoisie have sworn never allow them to set up again. That is their job, they are paid for it.
The masses that today have entered the combat in France have seen the development of the Maghreb and Middle East revolutions opened in 2011. The blood left by the masses in that combat has not yet been cooled. The French imperialist bourgeoisie itself has tried to use it with dozens of "ISIS attacks" to deceive the people and with a false "national unity" to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie.
These events, as well as the combats throughout the region, are still fresh. There the coordination of workers and soldiers in the Syrian revolution and Libyan militias occurred... In Cairo, millions were grouped in Tahrir Square and the tenth day of mass actions, from there was called a general strike and so the "pharaoh" Mubarak was overthrown... The memory of Tunisia and how with a revolutionary general strike, occupying police stations, the political prisoners were released and the government of Ben Ali fell... The blood of the masses who staged the revolution of the Maghreb and the Middle East is still hot as well the tragedy of their defeats.

Also in North Africa and the Middle East, the NPA, the self-titled "New Left" and the other reformist leaderships, made the masses believe that with Constituent Assemblies, "democratizing" the bourgeois regimes, they would conquer bread and freedom, without expropriating capitalists and advancing towards socialist revolution. There clearly is the strategy of these traitors who promised bread "deepening bourgeois democracy" (ie, the fiercest dictatorship of capital), but what the masses received were the bayonets of fascism and counterrevolution, after the lies of reformism were imposed.

All these are the dangers that the French masses have before them. But the last word has not been said yet. The flame is still on. The mass combats do not stop. They aim to sweep the citadel of power. The conditions were created to raise the power of those from below to fight against the power of the  ones on top and to destroy all the ruling institutions. A pre-revolutionary situation has opened in France. The most backward of it are the reformists who do not know how to beautify this infamous imperialist Republic with sweet phrases and make-up to "democratize" it, when actually in order to conquer the slightest demands it must be demolished.

 

The forces of the French working
class are in their brothers in the colonies and semi-colonies that
French imperialism oppresses and
in the workers in the rest of Europe

Masses struggle in France can only triumph decisively and unite with that of the working class of the colonial and semi-colonial world, fighting together against the imperialist Transnationals of the Fifth Republic and the regimes and the oppressors murderers Governments. Independence of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion and all the colonies! A people that oppress another cannot liberate itself!

Out with the troops, military bases and financial oligarchy of French imperialism from Mali, Chad, Syria, all of Africa and the whole semicolonial world!

The strength of the French working class lies in unity with workers throughout Europe. Their victory will come if they smash imperialist Maastricht.
The combats of France are followed by all the workers in Europe with an enormous expectation and even they begin to imitate their example. This happens with the workers of the Spanish State who fought against the autocracy of the Bourbons, even those of England in crisis; from Belgium to the Greek workers who entered into struggle actions as it was the last general strike in Athens, which threatens today to be ignited by the spark of France.
In “times of peaces” the treacherous union bureaucracies of Europe call opulent meetings of unions from all over Europe. Now they would never do it. Because the path masses are following is the one of Hamburg, which prepared a “hell” against G-20 in 2017, like the one in Paris today.

Years ago, the working class rose in Romania and Renault workers there shouted: "We want to earn like the Renault workers of France!" That did not happen. The union bureaucracies divided the European working class, including the workers of the same transnational corporations, relocated in the East where they turned those countries into "maquilas". The workers of those countries were forced to work and the wages of the workers of the imperialist metropolises were sunk. That is how they managed to make the French workers earn as the Romanian workers.
Today the French working class has conquered a huge step forward to fight: it broke the control of the union bureaucracies that submit it to its own imperialist bourgeoisie. It is time to call the workers of the French transnationals, who are oppressed and exploited in Eastern Europe and all over the world, to revolt along with the working class of the metropolis.
The Paris Commune was an example of militant internationalism of the world proletariat. This proclaimed that all the workers of the world were citizens of the commune. 

Let’s fight like in May ’68!

Open the road to the Revolutionary
General Strike until Macron falls!

We must disarm and dissolve the murderous police who threaten to take the workers and the poor people of France in a bloodbath!

The Self-defence Committees, the pickets and the Workers' Militia have to be set up!

Let’s seize the Bastille!
Down with the Fifth imperialist Republic!

We must conquer bread, work, education, decent pensions, recover the 35 hours week shift and defeat the slavery that capitalists want to impose!

May the bosses and the bankers pay the crisis!
Progressive taxes to the great fortunes!
Statization without compensation and under workers control of all the Transnationals and imperialist banks!

For the Commune of workers, peasants and poor people!

Down with the imperialist Maastricht!
Let's the flames of Paris ignite the revolutionary fire in the entire European and world working class!
For the Socialist United States of Europe!

International Coordination
Secretariat of the FLTI

France: huge mass independent actions
The working class doesn’t have the leadership it deserves

The final word hasn’t been said. On its favour, the bourgeoisie has a huge historical class consciousness and also paid agents, which are called to play each one their own role. The working class doesn’t have the leadership it deserves and this places its offensive in jeopardy at each step. The spontaneity of the masses has a limit, which is given by the counterrevolutionary character that the workers movement leaders -paid by the bourgeoisie- have.
However, the bourgeoisie has a problem: it cannot make any concession or reform. The French-German dominance on Maastricht doesn’t allow it.

1968 French May was diverted and the Communist Party managed to re-take the control of the workers movement, because, in order to expropriate such a revolutionary struggle, the bourgeoisie had to concede a 35% raise in wages, the highest raise that the working class got, in France and in Europe, in the second post-war. Only with this, De Gaulle could re-take the control of the working class, with the Communist Party once again betraying the French revolution.
This is the current dilemma. The union bureaucracy cannot even guise the proposals of Macron as a gain for the workers, as they are scam of the government.
The working class, in its experience, starts to distinguish its enemy each time more. This time, it knows that without overthrowing Macron, it can’t get any of its demands. The workers have already lost with every fight in which they put pressure on the government, led by the union bureaucracy. The deception that the cuts and the capitalist offensive can be “soften” or “negotiated” has been left behind… There cannot be an “annulment” of the attacks of the government in the National Assembly. The 35 working hours a week are gone. The clash between the classes is inevitable. The Fifth Republic is in crisis.
The bourgeoisie is anticipating and prepares a way out to stop a potential revolutionary crisis. It knows that if it doesn’t stop this with deception and lies, whether economical lies or by sweetening its regime of dominance, it must take its Armed Forces to the streets, which would be very risky in France, since each time the bourgeoisie uses its army to repress its own people, the horizontal split of it is posed. The rank and file soldiers in the barracks are children, brothers, sisters, partners of the workers that fight in the barricades.
This will be the last card which is willing to use, and it will, if the union bureaucracy and the social-imperialist left disorganize the current offensive and disarm the proletariat. That’s the experience of Egypt or the centralization of counterrevolution in Syria. The bourgeoisie took good care in protecting the Arc of Triumph by swarming it with cops during the last demonstration. If the exploited had taken it, it would’ve been like a true Tahrir Square, as that of El Cairo in 2011, where the working class and its allies, the poor of the farms and the city, made their numbers matter, forcing a general strike and imposing the fall of Mubarak.

The working class has a way out to confront such conspiracy, deception, lies, betrayal and repression: to fight as in May 1968, with picket lines and stopping the production, hitting on the capitalists where they hurt the most, their profits and property. A new French May of 2018 must arise. Macron deserves an indefinite Revolutionary General Strike until he falls. To prepare it and organize it is the current task.
The bourgeoisie sent the traitors of the union bureaucracy to disorganize the struggle, so there is no fighting as in the Commune, where all the dominance institutions of the state are swept away. This is the current moment.
The bourgeoisie also sent the left parties and some of them who claim to be “anti-capitalists” to guise as “democratic” the “court” of the bankers and the French imperialist transnational companies, so there is no seizure of the Bastille.

In 1968, when De Gaulle fled to Germany and the masses controlled France, the Communist Party rose the demand of “anticipated elections” and for the resignation of De Gaulle, in order to prevent a revolutionary crisis and to prevent De Gaulle from falling due to the masses. Stalinism called to “democratize” the French imperialist regime. The same thing is raised today by Melenchon and his “anti-capitalist” appendixes, which are always willing to save the bankrupt capitalism. There’s nothing new. They just re-take today the old policy of Stalinism, to strangle the proletarian revolution.
There’s an iron alternative: either Macron falls, the workers councils, the armed structures of the masses are set up and the French revolution starts; or the imperialist Fifth Republic is “sweetened”, the updated regime is saved, there are snap elections and the mass offensive is disorganized. There are two irreconcilable alternatives. On the one hand, the revolution; and on the other hand, betrayal.
Which crisis do the masses have in order to take new steps forward? The crisis of leadership, that is to say, the over-accumulation of treacherous leaderships to disorganize the ongoing offensive.
In this period, it is about for the masses to conquer self-organization organs of the exploited in struggle, which should be at the level of the struggle to confront the attack of the government and the capitalists.

The ones from the below don’t leave
the streets
They have taken
too much from us; now we want it all!

They have taken too much from the masses of France, like their greatest gains, as the 35 working hours a week. Their wages and pensions were plunged. The path to the first job of the youth was closed. They left hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth as an industrial army of reserve, without future. They left the pensioners in the worst condition in modern France history.
There is no longer an “Un-submissive France”, as is claimed by the left which is servant of the system. There is a revolted France. The engine of the struggle are the minimum demands to live and work decently, and for the workers to stop funding the state, which spends thousands of millions of euros in supporting the imperialist banks and the French transnational oligarchy. When they went bankrupt in 2008, the state got them out of the crisis, with huge allowances. The French workers don’t accept to keep on paying the military expenses of the French state, which are millions of euros to fund the Armed Forces which invaded Mali and have military bases in the Sub-Saharan Africa with NATO troops. The workers don’t want to pay any more for the expenses of this “nobility” of finance oligarchs, the boards and parasites of the big transnational companies and banks in France.
We are seeing a class clash. Who pays for the imperialist Maastricht, the political and military businesses and the transnational companies? For the bourgeoisie, the workers and the people must keep paying for it. However, they have seen their gains lost, one by one. They have said “enough!” and have transformed the fight for the fall of Macron as the minimum demand that unites all the exploited in France.

The imperialist France, allied to Germany, goes to new adventures of political and trade wars, to dispute the world market to USA. They desperately need to increase the labour productivity and to strengthen the super-profits of their transnational companies, in order to compete in the world.
France looks to England, which is pushed on the one side by USA to exit the EU (Brexit) to hit on the EU, and on the other side it is pushed by Maastricht to surrender it while it leaves. This is happening to one of the biggest imperialist powers of the planet. France also looks at Germany, but in order to get together with it in a bloc which has equal conditions, France has no other way than attacking its working class. The labour market relaxation and the end of the 35 working hours a week mean that the transnational companies need a Chinese or Africa waged labour in France.

For the masses, the question is clear: Macron must fall. This would mean the end of the imperialist Fifth Republic and a strategic blow on Maastricht imperialist Europe. The bourgeoisie knows it and the treacherous leaderships that support it know this too. From the revolutionary movement, the task is to collaborate with the workers in France to distinguish clearly who are their allies and who are their enemies, and how their fight is posed under the international current conditions.

December 13th, 2018

 

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