FRANCE IN FLAMES - December 12th, 2018

France: huge mass independent actions
The working class doesn’t have the leadership it deserves

The final word hasn’t been said. On its favour, the bourgeoisie has a huge historical class consciousness and also paid agents, which are called to play each one their own role. The working class doesn’t have the leadership it deserves and this places its offensive in jeopardy at each step. The spontaneity of the masses has a limit, which is given by the counterrevolutionary character that the workers movement leaders -paid by the bourgeoisie- have.
However, the bourgeoisie has a problem: it cannot make any concession or reform. The French-German dominance on Maastricht doesn’t allow it.

1968 French May was diverted and the Communist Party managed to re-take the control of the workers movement, because, in order to expropriate such a revolutionary struggle, the bourgeoisie had to concede a 35% raise in wages, the highest raise that the working class got, in France and in Europe, in the second post-war. Only with this, De Gaulle could re-take the control of the working class, with the Communist Party once again betraying the French revolution.
This is the current dilemma. The union bureaucracy cannot even guise the proposals of Macron as a gain for the workers, as they are scam of the government.
The working class, in its experience, starts to distinguish its enemy each time more. This time, it knows that without overthrowing Macron, it can’t get any of its demands. The workers have already lost with every fight in which they put pressure on the government, led by the union bureaucracy. The deception that the cuts and the capitalist offensive can be “soften” or “negotiated” has been left behind… There cannot be an “annulment” of the attacks of the government in the National Assembly. The 35 working hours a week are gone. The clash between the classes is inevitable. The Fifth Republic is in crisis.
The bourgeoisie is anticipating and prepares a way out to stop a potential revolutionary crisis. It knows that if it doesn’t stop this with deception and lies, whether economical lies or by sweetening its regime of dominance, it must take its Armed Forces to the streets, which would be very risky in France, since each time the bourgeoisie uses its army to repress its own people, the horizontal split of it is posed. The rank and file soldiers in the barracks are children, brothers, sisters, partners of the workers that fight in the barricades.
This will be the last card which is willing to use, and it will, it the union bureaucracy and the social-imperialist left disorganize the current offensive and disarm the proletariat. That’s the experience of Egypt or the centralization of counterrevolution in Syria. The bourgeoisie took good care in protecting the Arc of Triumph by swarming it with cops during the last demonstration. If the exploited had taken it, it would’ve been like a true Tahrir Square, as that of El Cairo in 2011, where the working class and its allies, the poor of the farms and the city, made their numbers matter, forcing a general strike and imposing the fall of Mubarak.

The working class has a way out to confront such conspiracy, deception, lies, betrayal and repression: to fight as in May 1968, with picket lines and stopping the production, hitting on the capitalists where they hurt the most, their profits and property. A new French May of 2018 must arise. Macron deserves an indefinite Revolutionary General Strike until he falls. To prepare it and organize it is the current task.
The bourgeoisie sent the traitors of the union bureaucracy to disorganize the struggle, so there is no fighting as in the Commune, where all the dominance institutions of the state are swept away. This is the current moment.
The bourgeoisie also sent the left parties and some of them who claim to be “anti-capitalists” to guise as “democratic” the “court” of the bankers and the French imperialist transnational companies, so there is no seizure of the Bastille.

In 1968, when De Gaulle fled to Germany and the masses controlled France, the Communist Party rose the demand of “anticipated elections” and for the resignation of De Gaulle, in order to prevent a revolutionary crisis and to prevent De Gaulle from falling due to the masses. Stalinism called to “democratize” the French imperialist regime. The same thing is raised today by Melenchon and his “anti-capitalist” appendixes, which are always willing to save the bankrupt capitalism. There’s nothing new. They just re-take today the old policy of Stalinism, to strangle the proletarian revolution.
There’s an iron alternative: either Macron falls, the workers councils, the armed structures of the masses are set up and the French revolution starts; or the imperialist Fifth Republic is “sweetened”, the updated regime is saved, there are snap elections and the mass offensive is disorganized. There are two irreconcilable alternatives. On the one hand, the revolution; and on the other hand, betrayal.
Which crisis do the masses have in order to take new steps forwards? The crisis of leadership, that is to say, the over-accumulation of treacherous leaderships to disorganize the ongoing offensive.
In this period, it is about for the masses to conquer self-organization organs of the exploited in struggle, which should be at the level of the struggle to confront the attack of the government and the capitalists.

 

The ones from the below don’t leave the streets
They have taken too much from us; now we want it all!

They have taken too much from the masses of France, like their greatest gains, as the 35 working hours a week. Their wages and pensions were plunged. The path to the first job of the youth was closed. They left hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth as an industrial army of reserve, without future. They left the pensioners in the worst condition in modern France history.
There is no longer an “Un-submissive France”, as is claimed by the left which is servant of the system. There is a revolted France. The engine of the struggle are the minimum demands to live and work decently, and for the workers to stop funding the state, which spends thousands of millions of euros in supporting the imperialist banks and the French transnational oligarchy. When they went bankrupt in 2008, the state got them out of the crisis, with huge allowances. The French workers don’t accept to keep on paying the military expenses of the French state, which are millions of euros to fund the Armed Forces which invaded Mali and have military bases in the Sub-Saharan Africa with NATO troops. The workers don’t want to pay any more for the expenses of this “nobility” of finance oligarchs, the boards and parasites of the big transnational companies and banks in France.
We are seeing a class clash. Who pays for the imperialist Maastricht, the political and military businesses and the transnational companies? For the bourgeoisie, the workers and the people must keep paying for it. However, they have seen their gains lost, one by one. They have said “enough!” and have transformed the fight for the fall of Macron as the minimum demand that unites all the exploited in France.

The imperialist France, allied to Germany, goes to new adventures of political and trade wars, to dispute the world market to USA. They desperately need to increase the labour productivity and to strengthen the super-profits of their transnational companies, in order to compete in the world.
France looks to England, which is pushed on the one side by USA to exit the EU (Brexit) to hit on the EU, and on the other side it is pushed by Maastricht to surrender it while it leaves. This is happening to one of the biggest imperialist powers of the planet. France also looks at Germany, but in order to get together with it in a bloc which has equal conditions, France has no other way than attacking its working class. The labour market relaxation and the end of the 35 working hours a week mean that the transnational companies need a Chinese or Afrinca waged labour in France.

For the masses, the question is clear: Macron must fall. This would mean the end of the imperialist Fifth Republic and a strategic blow on Maastricht imperialist Europe. The bourgeoisie knows it and the treacherous leaderships that support it know this too. From the revolutionary movement, the task is to collaborate with the workers in France to distinguish clearly who are their allies and who are their enemies, and how their fight is posed under the international current conditions.