Proletarians! Comrades!
As the economic crisis hurls us and our human and social condition into the abyss, whilst unemployment and lay-offs increase throughout the world, the reinforced concrete wall, erected by the massive social control exercised for decades by right- and left-wing parties and union organizations is beginning to crumble. The first signs are coming from a young immigrant proletariat that openly challenges employers, an avant-garde that does not shut itself up in the silence of the warehouses or the factories and is not afraid to come out onto the streets and demand a general improvement in its living and working conditions, and from the never-extinguished struggles of proletarians all over the world: from the rebellion of the South-African miners to the fights of the Argentinian, Spanish, Greek, French, Belgian, U.S. workers. But this is not the only sign. Within the proletarian movement two opposing currents are starting to clash: one supports the need, the necessity, the desire to fight, the anger and indignation, the other invokes “rights”, “social peace” – in a word – surrender. Only by answering any attack by capital blow-by-blow can there ever be any hope of putting a higher price on our skins, today in the workplace (or non-workplace!), tomorrow when faced with a new world war.
The programme can only be the following, as it has been for a hundred and fifty years right up until today:
Extend and unify the struggles, working towards the creation of territorial organisms of economic and social defence, open to all proletarians, independently of their age, gender, nationality, collocation (or non-collocation!) in production, etc. Demand large increases in wages to partially guard against the tragic erosion of salaries and pensions, and a full salary for those who are laid off or unemployed, to be paid by the State and the employers. Claim a drastic reduction in working hours for the same wages in order to relieve the pressure of the crazy pace of work. Recover the weapon of the strike, which must be wrenched out of the hands of those who have turned it into sort of harmless outing, so that it once again becomes a means of striking at capital. Refuse any support for the higher needs of one company or another, private or public, and especially of the national economy, through which the state, the government, the employers and the unions blackmail us unceasingly, calling them “our mutual interests”. Refuse any nationalist temptations by which the ruling classes in all countries try to set proletarians one against the other.
Proletarians! Comrades!
What is responsible for the tragedy that is striking us is the capitalist mode of production. It must therefore be overthrown, along with the bourgeois class that manages and directs it, and replaced by Communism, founded on the needs of the human species and not on the laws of profit. This is the prospect that the International Communist Party is working towards and the more combative proletarians will have to organize themselves and work to strengthen it and establish its international roots: the urgency and importance of this are becoming more and more evident day by day.
International Communist Party