Proletarians, comrades!
The economic crisis has started to have a devastating effect on our already hard living and working conditions.In the name of profit, a class of parasites (the bourgeoisie in all its variations, both right- and “left”-wing) and its attendant officials (the embodiment of a union aristocracy that has nothing to do with the workers) continues to keep us chained like slaves, without ever being made to pay for the destruction of our lives – indeed, continuing to collect its incomes, interests, dividends, interests.We pay the price of this exploitation without a moment’s respite in terms of those thousands of our comrades assassinated in their workplaces, by the so-called “social diseases”, the harmful factory environment, the infernal acceleration in production rates, the work that suffocates our existence, and our miserable salaries.This terrible situation is now aggravated by lay-offs, mass unemployment, relocations, clandestine labour everywhere, widespread insecurity in employment, the drastic reduction of salaries – all delights that we share with our brother immigrants.This mode of production, whose only objective is profit, fuels the competition of each man against the other and produces today’s commercial wars and tomorrow’s real warfare.It must therefore be removed by using the scalpels of our class violence.
Proletarians, comrades!
The bourgeoisie is well aware that far more is needed than consumer support, a few social buffers and the distribution of alms for those who are worn out by years of labour and are “out of production” or have been thrown out onto the streets to share the same conditions as part-timers, immigrants, young people.They ask us to have patience, to be well-disciplined and alert in the factory-gaols, to appear peaceful and obedient, to kneel down before the State, the bosses, the priests and the police, to make sacrifices to give a new boost to the machinery of capitalism, choked by over-production, and so start to swell the profits once again.Briefly, they encourage us to take everything optimistically and with resignation, becausethey are afraid of our fight, which they are already calling “a social emergency”.The truth is that our class (the class of those with no reserves) will have to pay an enormous pricein every country of the world.And in the end, when it has been demonstrated that there is no way out of the crisis except by cementing the national economies by means of the stimulus provided by war production, we shall be taken directly from our workplaces to the battlefronts, to be used as cannon fodder.War is their solution for emerging from the crisis – no other ways exist for them, as has already become clear in the past.
Proletarians, comrades!
The union organizations, who should be safeguarding our living and working conditions, have not called a single strike for the purpose of responding to the attack blow by blow: around us they have placed a sanitary cordon to stop our anger from fully venting itself.And yet, an important episode has highlighted our great potential for battle: the audacious immigrants of Rosarno (in Italy) and elsewhere in the world, who showed how to respond to the violent attack on their living and working conditions.They are our real class brothers and this is no coincidence: they have not been educated in the corporative, fascist-like school of the present national trade unions, they have “nothing to lose but their chains” and have attempted to shake them off.This is the lesson that must be spread and promoted in the ranks of our class: the “united front of all the exploited” against the bourgeoisie and its lackeys, the re-birth of “fighting organisms”, of “workers’ self-defence organizations”, of “territorial organizations for economic and social battle” closed to the bosses and their lackeys and able to fight without quarter and with courage and constancy.
We must take up the weapons of the class struggle: those weapons that the institutions organized by the enemy have defused over time but that all of us are familiar with from direct experience, from the struggles we have taken part in in the past.The demands of this “independent front” must correspond to our living and working requirements alone and it is around these demands and these fighting methods that it will be necessary and possible to reorganize our class front.
Large wage increases for everyone and larger ones for the worst-paid categories
A drastic reduction in working hours for the same wage
Full wages for those made redundant, the unemployed, immigrants and workers with insecure jobs
A general increase in pensions
Class unity without any distinction of race, gender, religion, age or nation
Unrelenting strikes with no limits in time or space
Block of production and services
Extension of the struggle beyond the borders of categories and companies, outside the confines of local territories and nations
Only by starting from this type of determined defence will it be possible to develop the necessary strength to move on to a general offensive.In fact these immediate objectives of ours, whilst being necessary for survival and for reorganizing our ranks today, will not suffice alone to shake off the dictatorship that the imperialist bourgeoisie imposes on us through its parliamentary democracy and all its democratic institutions.The regime of capital is a regime of war, of destruction of human qualities and means a deterioration of life on earth to the extent of threatening its very existence.In order to win, the offensive to which we are summoned must be located in the perspective of a social and political revolution, of the conquest of power and the establishment of our class dictatorship, until the final victory of communism, a society that is finally classless.For all this a basic weapon is needed, made up of theory and practice, science and organization: theclass Party, the revolutionary Party. To this fight and to this perspective, to the class war, our party, your party calls you and awaits you.
International Communist Party
(International Papers - Cahiers Internationalistes - Il Programma Comunista)
