France

December 15th, 2018

France in flames

With barricades, roadblocks, blockades to the oil companies, taking schools
and fighting in the streets, insurgent France stood up!
Macron lies, says he retreats in fuel, gas and electricity increases
while militarizing all of France, but the masses do not leave the streets.

They stole us too much, now we want everything!

Free fuel! Recover the 35 hours per week and finish with labor flexibility!
Increase in salary and decent jobs for all! Let’s defeat education and retirement reforms!
May the capitalists pay for the crisis!

We must expropriate the transnationals and the imperialist bankers who exploit the working class and plunder and oppress the colonies and the semi-colonial world!
We must nationalize them without compensation and place them under workers’ control!

The enormous struggle of the “yellow vests”, the working class, the young people of the cités (the working class neighborhoods), the students, the ruined middle class, the small producers and the peasants, continues to put the Macron government and the set of the regime of the V imperialist Republic on edge..
Hard matches have already begun. The masses are already fighting in the streets, fighting goes on from behind the barricades. The revolutionary days have begun and a phenomenal independent action of the masses has united all the exploited in the same demand: “Down with Macron!”.
The workers, driven by a brutal increase of the diesel prices and high cost of living, have come out along with the rest of the exploited and oppressed classes of society to face the increase in diesel. But that was the spark that lights the meadow for all sectors to enter the fight with their claims: against the high cost of life, to recover the 35 hours/work-week, against the brutal attack on education and youth, against labor flexibilization, for decent retirements. All the exploited who have something to claim have come together at one point, which is where the flames that burns the bins in the barricades comes from and drives millions to fight: none of the most minimal demands of the workers and the poor people can already be resolved and conquered without defeating the government.
The economic struggle that has been waged for years by the French working class and its youth has been transformed into a mass political struggle.
The unions were “surprised” by this huge mass action. The union bureaucracies, servants of French imperialism were overwhelmed and surpassed by the vast majority of the working class. This came into political struggle and this time its organization is not the unions, but the barricades and the street fighting and unity in the struggle with all the exploited sectors and the ruined middle classes of the countryside and the city. Youth, the most exploited sectors, are the advance of this fight. In the words of Trotsky in the 1930s, from the Paris Commune to the French May of ‘68, through the revolutionary uprisings of the 1930s, the working class speaks and fights with the language of the barricades.
This new mass attack resumes from the most advanced historical combat of the French proletariat.
Without the shackles of the the trade union bureaucracies and the social-imperialist parties, the masses gain the streets. The clash with the police is inevitable. The self-defense committee emerges, the barricade emerges. The vanguard that fights there is seen with sympathy by millions of the exploited who are represented in that struggle. There is no sector that does not enter the fight with the demand for “Macron, resignation”.
Against those who said there were no conditions for superior struggles of the workers, against the treacherous leaders who said that one could not triumph or get conquests from the bosses, the masses in France demonstrated, in a decisive battle, how they can really push back the enemy, even circumstantially, fighting for everything to achieve even the least.
For their organization and their struggle and for their conscience, the reformist leaderships have been far behind and out of the current battles of the masses. From the corners of the desks where they negotiate and sell out the struggles, they now offer themselves as mediators and negotiators on behalf of the exploited. But nobody recognizes them. The government has no one to negotiate with. Nobody negotiates! May Macron fall! That is the only way to victory.
Day by day the revolutionary days were raising and demonstrating in higher actions, the level of consciousness of the masses. In the fight, they are learning. All the sectors that enter the combat carry their claim. Although the government has ceded the increase in diesel, the fight does not stop. Nobody believes Macron. Already the fight is for everything and for Macron to fall.
The situation is tense. The polarization between classes becomes unbearable for the bourgeoisie that has lost control of its slaves The reason is that “reformism without reforms” has lost control of the masses. They are in the streets and from there they do not retreat.

The masses have entered into a phase of political struggle. In this fight to defeat Macron, the professions and the different branches in which unions are organized according to their industrial activity are no longer differentiated. The students, the ruined middle classes, etc., also enter the struggle.
While for the economic struggle the organization is the union; for the political struggle, this time in France, the organization is the barricade, the factory committees, the student committees, the committees of ruined small producers, the neighborhood assemblies.
These are the organizations that are emerging and unite all the masses in struggle. They are the organisms of direct democracy and self-determination of the exploited, embryos of their power.
Reformism only distinguishes the working class in economic struggle, since for them politics is only something for the bourgeoisie and its parties or for themselves to manage the exploiters’ businesses from the government.

The bourgeoisie uses different methods to dominate its slaves: fascism, the dictatorship of sweetened capital such as bourgeois democracy; kings, generals; and even governments of workers’ parties that manage their businesses to deceive the workers.
And despite the fact that unionists and reformists in particular do not like it, the working class also uses and is obliged to use different methods of struggle: slowdowns, general strikes, sit down strikes, strike pickets, fighting of barricades, the workers’ militia, the insurrection, the revolt.
In this case, the masses in their political struggle in the streets begin to set up the organizations to unify those who enter the fight. It is about coordinating, massifying, extending and generalizing the self-organization bodies of the exploited, the power of those below. It is about the picket goes one step forward to the self-defense committee and this to the militia. It is about representing all classes and class sectors that enter the struggle to overthrow the government. It is about preventing all collaboration with the bourgeois power of the structures that the revolutionary masses set up and to make them independent of the state of the exploiters to the extreme degree. Well, it’s about preparing for his overthrow.
Any program that does not start from this premise is not a revolutionary or socialist one. It is a typical program of servants of the bourgeoisie who seek to give different outputs to this huge clash of classes that is ongoing.

While we were writing this chronology and accounting for the different columns and notes with which the revolutionary Marxists follow the events of France, the government of Macron finally had to retreat and announce the suspension of the increase in fuel, gas and electricity prices. But even so, all sectors of the masses have a reason to continue fighting: the workers to whom 35 hours/workweek were robbed by the government and to whom the labor flexibilization was imposed by decree; the working youth who cannot even get a job, and the ruined middle class that sees its living standards to drop abruptly. The students have been brutally repressed in the lycées and today they take the streets. In Macron’s France the only ones who use to win are the parasites of the MEDEF and the bankers! That is why the cry that crosses all the barricades, pickets and blockades is: “Macron: resign!”. The fight does not end. The fight continues.

We are before revolutionary days in France. They are enormously spontaneous, but they have surpassed all the containtion wall of the reformist leaderships. In these independent actions, the masses have exploded in a combat motorized by the hatred to the government and the regime for the unprecedented suffering they imposed on them.
Their method of struggle and organization, like the barricades and embryos of coordinating organisms, as well as the objective of their struggle, which is the fall of Macron, means that together with spontaneity a high level of consciousness of the working class has developed. and the oppressed who enter the combat.

The treacherous leaders will try at every step to disorganize these revolutionary milestones conquered by the masses. The conditions to lay the foundations and set up a revolutionary party in France are already more than mature.
This fight arises from a level of consciousness that leaves behind the “union leaders” of the surrender and betrayal, the reformist left that for years has claimed to “moderate the adjustment” and also the charlatans who talk about the “France Insoumise” but when this insurrection comes quickly to ask Macron to resign and the elections to be anticipated to prevent the revolutionary tide from defeating Macron with its direct action and also from sweeping out with all the institutions of the infamous imperialist regime.
The fact is, the fall of Macron by the working class would lead to immediately open a huge revolutionary crisis in the heights. All institutions of power would be dislocated. The reformist left tells the bourgeoisie to renounce its government before that happens.
Currents such as the NPA or liberal-petty-bourgeois social democrats such as the PTS of Argentina, tell the bourgeoisie to save themselves by making cosmetic reforms to the regime of the Fifth Republic, unifying the legislative and executive power. They are all ways to close the path for the only way forward that the workers have, which is to fight for the workers’ peasants’ and popular Commune to take the Bastille.

The combats of December 1st

The most critical point of this revolutionary combat occurred on Saturday, December 1. Being fed up with so much attack, of dealing with hikes in fees, the increase in taxes, the deterioration of public services and above all the increase in fuel prices, hundreds of thousands of workers and exploited took to the streets and raised their barricades, burning cars, establishments, businesses and everything they found in their path to demonstrate the anger of those below and attacking national buildings. The emblem of the “light city”, the Arc de Triomphe, was enveloped by a true cloud of tear gas thrown by the murderous police, but when it dissipated it clearly distinguished in its façade graffiti saying “Yellow vests will triumph”, “France is ours” and «justice for Adama”, in allusion to the young black worker who was killed by the police in 2016.
On this same day, the insurgents showed their anger by going to the rich neighborhoods of the capital, burning dozens of high-end cars and attacking the luxury stores and one of the symbols of the power of imperialist France: the banks.
Throughout Saturday, the exploited fought hard with the CRS (anti-riot police) and the gendarmerie, which responded, as expected, by repressing them recklessly and leaving hundreds of demonstrators injured and detained.
In the cities and rural areas of the interior of the country the hatred of the exploited was also felt, as happened in Toulouse, Marseille and Bourdeaux. There were pickets on routes and roads. In some cities, the airports were taken for a few hours and the entrances to the fuel tanks of Total, the French imperialist oil company, were blocked.
On Monday 3, after the struggle of Saturday and encouraged by those actions, the drivers of about 350 ambulances blocked the National Assembly in Paris against the reform of the financing of the sanitary transports.
The combative students speaking the language of the barricades also entered this class war. On Monday and Thursday, the secondary students joined the fight, and at the cry of “Macron, Renunciation” they set up their barricades and pickets from early in the morning and blocked 200 schools in support of the “yellow vests” and against the new curricula that is being applied, which leaves hundreds of young people out of high school and college. In the Paris region they burned cars, drove back firefighters and stoned the police, who repressed them harshly. In the interior this measure was also felt, with strong mobilizations and confrontations with the police in Montpellier, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nice, Toulon, Dijon and Lyon, among many other cities.

We must set up the power of those from below!

Open the way to the Commune of workers, peasants and the poor people!

For a Worker-Peasant Provisional Government supported by the self-determination organisms of the working class and the masses in struggle

Independence for Reunion Island, Guadeloupe, Martinique and all the colonies oppressed by the butchers of the 5th Republic!
French imperialism treats the oppressed peoples of the colonies as slaves; and that is what it wants to impose today on all the exploited in France. Today the rebellion in the metropolis has already reached the Island of Reunion. Therefore, it is time to fight for the liberation of their class brother sand sisters from the colonies, such as those in the Island of Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, because the people who do not liberate their siblings will never be able to liberate themselves from the yoke of the capitalists.
The enemy is at home! Take out the troops and military bases of the French imperialist transnationals from MALI, CHAD and all of sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb and the Middle East!
The best allies of the French insurgents are the workers of Burkina Faso, who today are also fighting against the rise of fuels, of Iran, of Yemen, of Mali, of Chad, of Niger, of Algeria and of Syria; where the French oil transnationals plunder, super exploit, add to the misery and bombard the exploited without mercy.

Let the borders be open! We are all immigrants! Full rights to immigrants! Equal salary for equal work! Papers for everyone and decent homes, right now!

Stop chasing those who fight! We cannot fight with our mates taken hostage in the prisons of French imperialism. Drop all charges for workers and popular fighters!
Acquittal to Air France workers!
Let’s take all the prisoners of these days out from the prisons of the 5th. Republic!
Freedom to George Abdallah who has been imprisoned for 35 years, and of all political prisoners!
For the unity of workers throughout Europe!
Yesterday, during the days of general strike in Greece, it was written on the walls: “Spark in Athens fire in Paris, it is the insurrection that is coming”, today the spark of Paris has to reignite the fire in Athens! May the fire of Paris spread to all of Europe, and burns Athens, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, London, Brussels, Lisbon!

Down with Maastricht!
For the Socialist United States of Europe!

Ana Negri and Maria Batista