Re: French strikers and their value

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

"O frabjous day! Callooh, Callay!"
> Mauro jr:
> Yes, I too greet the french struggles as a possible turning of the working
> class in Europe.
> It's anyway (whether these struggles win or not)a great event at least in
> two senses:
> 1. The bourgoisie (from the radical right one to the radical left) is since
> long saying that the class struggle is over, the working class doesn't exist
> any more, we all are citizens, middel-class equal members of the civil
> society. The french workers are showing that those are lies: the society is
> still class divided and the working class is the only class hit by the
> crisis of the capitalist economy, and anyway when the latter has got problems.
>
> 2. the pressure from the "base" (union members and expecially the most
> not-union member)facing the cuts by the governement has been enough to
> compel the unions to declare the strikes for trying to lead them to... the
> defeat. Will it be a lesson for our class?
>
> The nature of the fight is fundamentally defensive. The hard attack is of
> the bourgeoisie (and its state) against the conditions of the workers. It is
> lasting since 20 years in which the average workers wage in France and Italy
> (I've not here the fresh figures for Britain and Germany) lost a 15% and
> where the total "v" is dramatically diminished also through the millions of
> dismissals. Now they (ruling class and state) are directly robing the
> indirect wage (the pensions and the health). The french workers are fighting
> exactly against these new brutal attack.

All quite sensible up to here.

> It's really hard, though not impossible, to "win", that is to stop the
> attack to the pensions.

Total stupidity from here on.

> This will probably imply some new economical
> "measure" by the state which is searching for money from the workers
> pockets. Surely, our class is not able to cut the profits - which are
> already cutted by the crisis - without the revolution.

Absolute ridiculous total total stupdity at this point.

> And here is the point: either the class (their vanguards, first of all) is
> able to use these struggles for make this truth to arise and spread  in the
> workers consciousnesses, or this battle will be "useless" and politically
> defeated (which, historically,  is worst than materially, economicaly 
> defeated).
> No one, in France and anywhere, can call himself communist without showing
> in the material, objective limits of these great battle the limits of
> capitalism and the need for communism.
> ill the unions (the "moderate" socialist Force Ouvriere and the stalinist
> CGT) play this role? Of course, no. Who is intervening there on a
> revolutionary communist ground?
> Mauro Junior

Well I hope there aren't too many people like Mauro in France.

Revolutionaries need to be advocating practical and political
measures to take the movement forward. Primarily, they need to try
to find concrete ways to get control of the movement out of the
hands of the trade union bureaucracy.

At the same time, they need to show that it is the system as a whole
that is the problem, and the only long term solution to its crisis
is revolution.

Doing the only the first is being a syndicalist. Doing only the second
is being an ultra left propagandist.

Why isn't this obvious ?

Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK











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