The violent revolts that are shaking Algeria and Tunisia in these first few days of 2011 speak the language of a proletariat up in arms, in the same way as similar revolts before them elsewhere in the world, such as in Haiti and in Egypt (where, not by chance, in the same few days, we witnessed the classical attempt, invariably made by the ruling classes, to deviate social malcontent down the blind allies of religious clashes). From the edge (increasingly closer to the centre) of what is still for the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie the “best of all possible worlds”, come unmistakable signals. Poverty, hunger, unemployment, a total lack of prospects, the impossibility of survival are more and more frequently the conditions in which the proletariat finds itself: only a slight, privileged layer is safe (and not for long now), thanks merely to the crumbs that fell from the rich banqueting tables of imperialist reconstruction in the few decades following the second world war – the economic boom that the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie proclaimed would never end and which, in any case, was only made possible by forced exploitation of the proletariat in all countries. And so, long live the struggle of Algeria’s and Tunisia’s proletariat, however the situation may develop over the coming days and weeks, because they are providing the whole of the world’s proletariat with precious signs and lessons.
Always obliged to play at massacres in the context of the psychosis invented over the past decade in order to divide and paralyze, the international observers, the mass media, are actually forced to “admit the inadmissible”: with ill-concealed concern, they have to recognize that here Islamic fundamentalism and Al-Qaeda (the rags and tatters that it is always useful to wave around) are really nothing to do with it and the afflicted masses in the poor areas of Algeri and Tunis, the big cities and the towns in the interior, are out on the streets and battling with the police and the army, driven by these material factors and (at least for the moment) not in the name of one ready-made ideology or the other.
Algeria and Tunisia are no far-off, under-developed backwaters: they are big countries that joined suave capitalist modernity some time ago. The former, in particular, arrived by means of a long and bloody anti-colonial rebellion which concluded – in the absence of a militant proletariat in the capitalist strongholds and a revolutionary party able to direct it and give a class direction to the anti-colonial revolts – in the triumph of a young and aggressive local bourgeoisie, destined to go the way of all bourgeoisies: that of competition on the world markets, the extraction of plus value from labour and thus the exploitation of the proletariat. There, just as anywhere else.
Algeria and Tunisia are close at hand (and not only geographically), because the world economic crisis (beginning in the mid-‘70s) is gradually burning up all the “counter-trends” that capitalism can bring into play to try and delay the final moment of reckoning: and this is something that the young and very young Algerian and Tunisian proletarians and just as young proletarians from the French banlieues some years back (French citizens to all effects) as well as the proletarian immigrants to Italy (whom so many would paralyze in useless claims for “citizenship rights”) all share, in the generous drive to break a social order and peace that are oppressive and castrating. The proletarians from capitalist strongholds, rocked asleep by decades of opportunist ideology and practice lavished on them by parties and trade unions whose only interest is to keep the lurid world of capital on its feet, are slow to understand that the only way is that ofopen battle. By acting in this way they also delay the help needed by their admirable Algerian and Tunisian class brothers: the creation of a battlefront reaching way beyond national borders, that unhinges once and for all reformistand nationalist objectives, cementing the struggles in a single attack on the capitalist fortress.
If the martyrdom of the Algerian and Tunisian proletariat is not to be in vain, just like that (unfortunately inevitable in such conditions of isolation) of other cities on the borders and at the centre in the near future, it is nevertheless necessary not only to take the direction of open conflict once again and cement struggles that today are separate and far away from one another, but also to understand, in the very midst of these struggles, the need for acquiring organization and political direction: the need for the revolutionary party.
Algeria and Tunisia are close, both one to another and to the rest of the proletarian world, thanks also to this urgent historical need which can no longer be postponed.
International Communist Party
