Proletarians! Comrades!
First of May 2012: the crisis gains momentum and is hitting hard, all over the world. Soaring unemployment, widespread precariousness, pensions cut or annulled, growth in the cost of living, the lives of proletarians turned upside down and massacred. In return they promise us an imaginary future (when the crisis is behind us!), a wondrous rise in employment and salaries: in exchange, of course, for accepting all the “necessary sacrifices” today! The same old tune that the right- and left-wing bourgeoisie, national unions and minor unions have always sung us in all its possible variations.
Do they think we’re stupid?! We are undergoing an unprecedented and ongoing attack that is making the attack that has been going on for almost forty years now (at least two generations of proletarians!) more radical, with the prospect that things are only going to get worse over the next few months, in Great Britain as everywhere else – and these sharks are trying to make us toe the line!
The crisis of the capitalist economy is a structural crisis of overproduction of goods and capitals. It can only be answered by the bourgeoisie in two ways: by tightening the chains of proletarians even further and preparing a new world bloodbath which – their delusion! – , by destroying human beings and goods and re-allocating markets, might launch again the economy. This is their perspective, this has always been their solution. What should ours be? This crisis cannot be answered by reformist illusions, with appeals to the State (the political and military arm of Capital) and to democratic institutions (the tools of bourgeois dictatorship), with programmes drawn up by parties and unions which for decades have proved to be the meek tools of Capital, with dramatic demonstrations of self-destruction (which weaken and isolate us), with strikes here and there which divide the workers, and with marches that appear more like funeral processions or exhibitions of folklore. The only answer is to organize ourselves once again to fight in defence of our living and working conditions, creating independent territorial organisms for economic and social defence that take on the task of providing everything necessary for the fight and for the survival of proletarians - from assemblies to pickets, from strike funds to problems of housing and the cost of living and to organized responses to blacklegs, provocation, aggressors and similar scum.
But this is not enough. What must once again make itself felt amongst combative proletarians is the urgent and immediate need to strengthen and establish international roots for the revolutionary party, which is a necessary aid in the fight of resistance to capital today and, when objective and subjective conditions make it possible and demand it, a guide in the fight for the conquest of power. Ourproletarian and anti-capitalist answer to the crisis (preparation for revolution) thus proceeds through the strengthening of the international communist party, today as yet a minority but not eliminated after almost ninety years of counter-revolution.
The crisis of the capitalist economy tells us once again that this mode of production is in its death throes – an agony which, by dragging itself out, poisons the whole world every single day, in every way. It must be thrown out once and for all onto the rubbish dump of history. We must organize to defend ourselves today and attack tomorrow!
International Communist Party
(Internationalist Papers – Cahiers internationalistes – Il programma comunista)
