March 25, 2024 editorial of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France, translated from French
The Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party—NPA) will participate in the European elections in June, with a list of candidates led by Selma Labib, 28, a bus driver, and Gaël Quirante, 48, a trade unionist at La Poste (the post office). We are presenting a list of workers, from the public and private sectors, as well as young people, students and employees, to put forward the priorities of those who keep society running.
We work, we decide
We need decent wages to live on, not just to survive: 400 euros (approximately dollars) more for everyone, and no wages, pensions or social income below 2,000 euros net! We cannot accept austerity at a time when capitalist profits are at their highest. For the French 40 biggest companies (CAC40) alone, profits reached 153 billion euros in 2023, 12 billion more than the previous record of 2022. Meanwhile, Bruno Le Maire, the French Minister of the Economy, has announced that we will have to save 10 billion euros in 2024 and 20 billion in 2025… Billions that he intends to take from our pockets and through budget cuts in public services. At a time when the situation in hospitals continues to deteriorate, when teachers and parents in Seine-Saint-Denis and other working-class neighborhoods are denouncing the ruin of the national education system and the government’s plans for social tracking in schools, with different tracks starting in junior high school, we must assert that our lives are worth more than their profits!
For a world without fatherlands, masters or borders
But we’re neither capitalists’ fodder nor cannon fodder! It’s not because of other peoples that our daily lives are becoming more and more difficult, but because of our own government and the capitalists who are relentlessly attacking our wages, our pensions and our few social rights. Following in the footsteps of the far-right, President Macron has taken up much of their program, pointing the finger of blame at workers with the wrong skin color or papers. We have nothing to gain from the announced duel between the Macron and (far-right) Bardella-Le Pen lists. On the other hand, we have everything to gain from collective struggles to overthrow the established order and challenge the power of the rich and the bosses. There will be no “supreme savior,” no “happy days” under capitalism. The program we are defending is a program of struggle, the realization of which can only depend on the will of millions of workers to take their affairs into their own hands, on a European and even global scale. They have the billions, we are the millions: emergency, revolution!
