Over all these months, workers in every country have experienced at their own cost the disastrous effects of the survival of the capitalist mode of production, which has for some time now reached the end of its historical deadline. The 2008 crisis, never resolved, had already resulted in authentic social massacre: unemployment, increasingly precarious jobs, intensification of exploitation, massive forced emigration, destruction of natural resources – all in the name of a desperate search for profit to stem the tendential fall of its average rate.
Onto this dramatic scenario, burst the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, widely predicted by numerous scientific studies and institutional bodies worldwide, which no countries were prepared for. A surprise? No. Capital does not reason far in advance according to long-term hypotheses or forecasts, and certainly not in terms of prevention, because its law is that of self-valorisation in the shortest possible time - on pain of its own death.
So the workers (male and female, employed or unemployed, pensioners and redundant, locked down and pushed back into domestic work and care-giving) have paid heavily for this chaos in society and healthcare which has accompanied the outbreak and spread of the pandemic: in workplaces that were never closed (factories, building yards, storehouses, etc.), turned into hotbeds of infection: hospitals and care centres quite incapable of facing up to exceptional demands of this nature; in working-class homes and neighbourhoods, where it is impossible to “practice social distancing” and ensure “hygiene measures” - whole populations gripped by fear and disorientation, subjected to barrages of contradictory data and information, political polemics, contrasting statements by quarrelsome and contemptuous “experts” and “scientists” inevitably under the thumb of a “medical science” that subordinates public health to the laws of economic advantage. Culpable ineptitude and obedience to the law of profit at all costs!
The already tragic consequences of the 2008 crisis thus worsened all over the world: more lay-offs, more precariousness and redundancy pay, more ridiculous benefits scattered as a prelude to lay-offs, as well as regimentation, the suspension and annulment of any initiative, demonstration or struggle under the pretext of the “ban on crowds”, the control and harsh repression of those (and there were more than a few of them!) who dared and dare to raise their voices and their heads.
Economic crises and social crises: the capitalist mode of production has demonstrated, yet again, that it is impotent when faced with disasters caused by its own way of functioning. An end needs to be made to it: these death throes have been dragging on for a century and a half and - as well as the general debasement of social life and the enormous daily suffering of proletarians exploited to the bone and sick or dead because of their work - have produced two world bloodbaths and hundreds of local wars and are preparing (you can feel it in your bones) more, inter-imperialist slaughter.
It is necessary to react against the fear, the chaos in society and healthcare, the exploitation growing day by day and the increasing state repression!
Hold out against all threats, all abuses and tyranny, on the streets, in the squares and in society!
Resume the path of the class struggle: not a moral but a vital imperative!
We must struggle, fight, once again claim drastic reductions to working hours for the same wages, with rises and guarantees for everyone (male and female, young and old, immigrants and domestic workers…), with the State and “owners’ associations” paying for those who are laid off or unemployed.
We must claim the “duty of health” starting from the places where we are obliged to work and the neighbourhoods we are obliged to live in.
We must organise ourselves on the territory and centrally to defend ourselves from the attack by Capital, led by its armed wing (the State, which is not a father and benefactor to us, but our immediate enemy), refusing both the cages and prisons of all types represented by the practices of trade unions and associations wholly integrated into the system, and the foggy demagogy of those who wish to take advantage of a militant proletariat to build themselves an institutional “political” career.
All this, which must nonetheless be secured and defended militantly, is not enough.
Or rather: it is not possible unless we direct ourselves towards something reaching well beyond the immediate, everyday horizon; unless the resumption of a defensive economic and social struggle is seen as training and preparation for something far more drastic and definitive; i.e. unless we once again place on the table the question of winning power and overthrowing bourgeois institutions to put into practice the dictatorship of the proletariat which will have the task of getting rid of all the foul and blood-streaked remains of a mode of production condemned by history, opening the gates to a classless society, to communism. A conquest and an exercise in power which are indeed far from immediate and may appear to be a mirage: but which are the only possibility of survival for us and for the generations to come. And which, above all, must be prepared today, with patience, method, passion and organisation (objectives, means, precise, clear and coherent methods).
There is no alternative: all around us smoking ruins and immense suffering are accumulating, whilst a new, devastating world war looms on the horizon.
It’s back to the fight, organising the revolutionary party and resuming the path towards communism.
There is no time to waste!
March-April 2021