Everywhere in the world our living and working conditions are under attack and the militarization and State control of our lives are taking giant steps forward, with the ideological accompaniment of nationalism, chauvinism, hostility towards the “foreigner”, sexism: in other words division within the proletarian class. All the bourgeois parties – right as well as “left” – draw up or have drawn up elaborate reforms of the labour market, like the Loi Travail in France, the Jobs Act in Italy, Agenda 2010 in Germany; or they plan harsher measures with the sole objective of making working conditions flexible, increasing pressure on the working class, limiting wages. In a word, increasing the exploitation of workers! All over the world, these parties are also united in agreement in another sense: in strengthening their repressive apparatus to an ever greater extent with consolidation of the state of emergency (for example in the USA, France, Germany, Turkey etc.) and in providing the police and legal apparatus with a growing number of special measures for intervention, such as provisional arrest, the use of Tasers, harsher laws. Where the working class is more militant, for example in Italy amongst the – often non-EU – workers exploited in the field of logistics, or where the working conditions prove even more abominable, the battles there are countered by the State with recourse to police violence and judiciary repression. Even widespread “popular” protests, like those by the gilets jaunes in France, showing vague discontent with capitalistic relations and in which wage workers have also taken part, serve the State by providing the ground for experimenting new repressive measures and for exercising power.
At the basis of this increasingly aggressive attack on our living and working conditions is the structural crisis in which capital has found itself since the end of the cycle of accumulation in the second post-war period up until the mid-1970s. The greater exploitation of our labour-force commodity corresponds to capital’s attempt to defeat this crisis, together with other political-economic measures such as the rise in the public debt with investments in public works and military expenditure, as well as more and more extreme policies on finance and interest. That some countries enjoy a better economic situation than others (such as, for example, Germany as opposed to Italy) does not alter the fact that we are still immersed in this crisis, to which capital responds by intensifying attacks on social conditions, as far as the proletarian class will allow. Up until now, attempts to oppose capital have been rare, mostly producing poor results: the working class does not yet possess independent, grass-roots union structures and, on the contrary, is paralyzed by the action of the official, State-linked unions and by democratic ideology.
Through strikes without warning, without time limits and with no regard for the interests of the nation, of the State, of one’s “own” enterprise, leading up to general strikes, our class does, however, possess the necessary strength for exercising pressure on capital and thus opposing its attacks, striking at what it cares most about: profit. This is why the proletarian class must organize itself collectively in militant, grass-roots organisms for the defence of living and working conditions, through which the practice of the social pact can be broken, opposing all bourgeois institutions, official unions and parties, and pursuing its own interests, forcefully and independently of the “demands” of capital and the nation. These dynamics, however, can only develop through struggle and not by sitting round a negotiating table.
But, in order to pass over to the counter-attack, alongside the rebirth of these proletarian organisms of economic defence, the political organization of the proletariat must be at work, representing the historical experience of these same battles and impressing upon them a revolutionary perspective, since the attack by capital can be driven back only to a certain extent at a union level. The deepening capitalist crisis will inevitably lead to increasingly violent attacks, wars, expulsions and devastations. The only perspective for changing anything in this context is a general political counter-attack, the seizing of political power and the battle to set up a classless society. For this perspective, what is needed is the strengthening and worldwide establishment of the guide of the revolutionary process: the International Communist Party.
International Communist Party
(il programma comunista – kommunistisches programm – the internationalist - cahiers internationalistes)