The “yellow vests”: a people’s revolt short of breath, a long wave of people’s illusion

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“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat”.

The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Today. Great surprise has been caused by the so-called “gilets jaunes movement” (the yellow vests), arising in France in mid November, apparently out of nothing, and, reaching its peak at the beginning of December, subsequently losing momentum and potential for mobilization after the Government concessions of 10 December.

The Ghost of the European Unity

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Imperialist dynamics and the Europeanist Illusion

In the post-second-world-war period, the weakness of Europe’s defeated or devastated ruling classes demanded the reconstruction of their economic, political and military apparatus. The USA directed this reconstruction, which was warmly welcomed by the bourgeoisie in the defeated countries as the premise for renewed capitalist accumulation. The Marshall Plan allowed national reconstruction to be launched, once the defeated had been obliged to set up an indefinable artefact called “Europe”. In any event, it would be the “grande bourgeoisie” to install the project for “economic integration”and put it into practice in the defence of diverse national interests. The prospect of a “politically united” Europe was, instead, an illusion of the “petite bourgeoisie” in big European states, providing the “little ideals” and driven by the need for them to be widely involved in the process of capitalist development.

SYRIA: Yet another infamous feat of imperialism's

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We are not surprised by the dispatch of the one hundred missiles launched by the “coalition” of USA-Great Britain-France (after notifying Russia), to bomb the Syrian chemical plants. Our anger grows at the unceasing massacre of proletarians sacrificed in a war without end.

There is no “humanitarian intervention” today, just as there never has been in the past: this is merely a further step in the assumption of positions by the various competitors (from the USA to Russia, from France to Turkey, from Israel to Iran: and we should not marvel, if the “allies” of yesterday become the “adversaries” of today), with a view to more serious, future, inter-imperialist clashes.

First of may 2018: Beat back the anti-proletarian attack. Learn to defend ourselves to prepare for winning

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All over the world, proletarians are under attack. The bourgeoisie and its organs of mass disinformation maintain that “we have come through the crisis”. Yet, disguised as precarious, unemployment grows endlessly. The pace and conditions of work worsen constantly. The veritable mass murders of proletarians in factories, building yards, on the streets and in the fields reaches shocking figures. What is paid out on rent (if and when it’s possible to find a hole to live in!), food, gas and electricity (which, together with a roof over your head, are basic necessities!), transport (to get to work or look for it!) becomes a stranglehold.

Tunisia: a new blaze of rebellion!

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While the protests and clashes in North Africa were raging, turning the entire area upside down – a season of extraordinary battles, those of the so-called “Arab Springs” - we wrote (Il programma comunista, n°2 del 2011): “It was not a revolution. A revolution calls into question not a régime (even the toughest) but a whole mode of production. In Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere there was a powerful and widespread wave of rebellion, originating from the proletarian and proletarianized masses declaring Enough! […] We witness a movement born in the depths of the social subsoil and sparked off by the advance of the economic crisis, which continues its inexorable path, destroying presumed stability and certainty and at the same time pulling down ideological walls and fences and uniting, under the banner of an urgent need to survive, different sectors of a suffering world proletariat abandoned to its own devices.”