The French New Anticapitalist Party is currently debating which platform to adopt regarding the next presidential election. We publish here (a translation of) the platform of our French comrades of the Etincelle fraction in the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party)
Platform 5 for the Congress of the NPA
The National Conference of the NPA must decide to present a candidate of the NPA for the presidential election of 2022, coming from the world of work and representing its general, anticapitalist and revolutionary interests. That is to say, to decide on the program and the privileged political axes of this appearance, to decide on the candidate and the steps and efforts necessary to obtain the 500 sponsorships. In an economic, social and political situation profoundly disrupted — on a world scale — by the consequences of the capitalist management of the health crisis that we have been living for more than a year, and of which many developments are ahead of us, the worst against the popular classes as well as the best if they push and coordinate their revolt, our perspectives as revolutionaries must resolutely appear. The presidential election is the opportunity to do so on a very large scale.
As a preamble, on the situation and our objectives
We are confronted with an international situation, with obviously diverse declinations according to the countries, where the failure of the capitalist system to satisfy the needs of humanity — nearly eight billion people — explodes in the form of an extreme polarization between an immense mass of proletarians on one side, a handful of super-rich on the other. In the form also of an overexploitation and precariousness of human labor, which is the counterpart of the enlargement of the industrial reserve army, and which is accompanied by a multitude of forms of oppression and wars engendered by imperialist appetites.
For several years, even before the outbreak of the pandemic and without it putting an end to it, large-scale political and social revolts have been shaking capitalism, one after the other or separately from each other — without an international revolutionary perspective emerging. It is urgent and our duty that the current, revolutionary communist, Trotskyist, with a program of class political independence for the proletariat, carried in dispersed order by many individuals and groups on the planet, asserts and displays itself. A revolutionary pole must emerge, facing today the inanity of the institutional illusions of the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie, of the right as well as of the left, facing the apprentice caudillos of the extreme right like Trump, Bolsonaro… or Marine Le Pen. Everywhere, the bourgeoisie strengthens to varying degrees the coercive workings of its state apparatus. The force remains the first economic agent, Marx was not mistaken, to which the exploited and oppressed can only oppose their own force, that of their mobilizations, to resist, to go on the offensive until imposing their own power.
What will we, the revolutionaries here in France, be able to say and retransmit in the coming presidential campaign, of experiences and political achievements which are those of more than a century of international communist movement and which impose themselves today by their actuality? The concrete situation of the moment will tell us, provided that we commit ourselves to carry this program of class independence, a revolutionary program, far from all the institutional lies called left or frankly reactionary.
For what concerns us in the immediate future, here and now: if the candidates of the main political parties are not all fixed, we know that it is unlikely that a “candidacy of struggles” will see the light of day and that the profile of the parties of the left, “radical” or not (SP, EELV, LFI, CPF), remains narrowly and/or principally confined to bourgeois economic institutions and interests. Our presidential candidacy, which will affirm our anti-capitalist and revolutionary program for the coming months to a very broad popular milieu, must be done in complete independence from this institutional left or “left of the left”. For the NPA, the presidential campaign cannot, in its content and under the pretext of weakness in the face of the danger of the extreme right, be a reissue or a copy of the alliance with the FI (France Insoumise, Party of Mélenchon) in the regional elections that we fought in Occitania and in New Aquitaine.
This campaign will have at least three objectives: to denounce the capitalist system, to put forward some emblematic measures of a program for the struggles as well as the means to impose them, and to trace a perspective to overthrow the power of the bosses and the rich: towards a government of the workers, the only one capable of putting an end to exploitation and inequalities and of establishing a real democracy, that is to say a workers’ democracy, a power of the class which would take all the political and economic decisions.
The emergencies of the hour
The employer’s strategy of shock did not wait for any election date to take advantage of the crisis opened by the pandemic. Mass layoffs, multiplication of precarious jobs, including by legal escape from salaried status, reduction of bonuses and remuneration in general, theft of vacations, managerial and disciplinary pressure, etc. The State has put enormous resources into legally supporting this employer offensive and into bolstering the coffers of the employers, much more than into fighting the pandemic.
The results are there: the “first of the line”, the “corona-profiteers” of the health war have seen their fortunes soar in one year, stock market quotations are through the roof. If certain sectors of the small and medium bourgeoisie are plunged into uncertainty by the health crisis that has become an economic crisis, big capital is strengthening, even if the bursting of stock market bubbles threatens.
At each turn in the health crisis (first strict containment and then first decontainment), the “first in line”, workers, both employed and unemployed, and youth expressed their discontent. The spectre of social anger haunted the employers and the government on more directly political issues such as the fight against police violence, racism or the authoritarian drift of the state. The pandemic has thus imposed only a relative pause to a cycle started in 2016 with the struggle against Hollande’s Labor Law, reinforced in 2018 by the “rail battle,” student mobilizations, the emergence of the Yellow Vests and from December 5, 2019 by the interprofessional strike against the pension reform. None of these movements had made it possible to impose significant setbacks on the employers, who continued their offensive (by nevertheless pushing back the point-based pension, which is no small thing). But the class struggle was put back in the center of the political game by making a new militant generation emerge.
In today’s social movements against the wave of job cuts that has already begun, we are confronted with the policy of trade union apparatuses that do not encourage struggles and very often hasten to negotiate compromises under the pretext of social dialogue with the employers (wage sacrifices or increases in working hours under the pretext of limiting layoffs, random company takeover projects or false industrial plans). They disarm and crumble the reactions of the workers by circumscribing them to companies, to sectors, isolated from each other. Attempts to regroup existing struggles by union teams have taken place, in which our comrades have participated. It is right in more than one way, not the least being that union activists in the field (of various labels), union organizations are sensitive to the idea that we cannot carry out struggles if they remain confined, and become aware of both the need for coordination and the fact that the union leaderships will not impel it. Helping, wherever our activists are in a position to do so, workers and organizations aware of the struggles to be waged to organize, to meet and to coordinate their struggles — unionized and non-unionized — is one of our immediate tasks. It is one of the essential tasks of revolutionaries today, who must have confidence in their ability to “speak directly” to sectors of the working class that are looking for alternatives to the losing strategy of the union leaderships. This is what the initiatives built around the TUI workers, for example for the demonstration of June 19 in Paris, have been able to prove on a scale that is still modest but nevertheless indispensable. Our party must obviously help, through its propaganda and agitation, in order to move towards a global response from the world of work. In France, which experienced 1936 and 1968, social and political situations sharpened by the general strike, the latter remains a current scenario to popularize.
The same is true on an international scale, where mass movements and hard confrontations with the powers that be continue and multiply. Colombia and Palestine are now added to Algeria, Senegal, Burma, India, Belarus, Chile, Lebanon… Each one has its particularities, linked to the local situation. But each time, these are long and determined struggles, at the forefront of which are the working classes and youth, particularly women; movements that question the galloping inequalities and demand a real democracy “from below”, refusing institutional patch-ups. These movements, of a greater intensity and massiveness than what we have seen in France in recent years, open up new political situations. They give a new actuality to the cleavage reform or revolution: for lack of perspectives and organizations that try to open an independent way for the exploited and the oppressed, the usual institutional political impasses take over. Not to mention repression and even military coups. Revolutionaries can have a decisive intervention in such situations, if they help the movement to go to the end of its possibilities, if they help the workers to contest the leadership of the movement with the trade union and political apparatuses of the “left” or populists of all kinds, while being able to listen to and rely on the strength and spontaneity of our class in movement.
Such situations do not occur on command, and we do not base our policy on prognoses about the next social explosion, which by definition is impossible to anticipate. But we are constantly preparing for it, using all forums, including electoral ones, to defend our orientations.
How to counter the rise of the extreme right?
The Rassemblement National (RN)– Party of Marine Le Pen) has an audience in the world of work, which makes it unique compared to the parties that have succeeded one another in power. We must not only fight foot to foot the racist, sexist and xenophobic prejudices that the RN arouses and amplifies in our class, but also denounce the illusion that this party, intimately and historically linked to bourgeois men and interests, could slow down the generalized social regression. It sometimes claims to be “anti-system” but applauds the worst of the Republic’s institutions, namely its army and its generals when they claim to be candidates for restoring order through a putsch in the country. The impoverishment of workers, and part of the petty bourgeoisie, caused by the economic paralysis under pandemic, can make us fear that, much more than in 2017, a part of the working classes is tempted to vote for the “facho” to block the “banker”, or “for the solution that we never tried”. A fatal error, of course: extreme right-wing figures have come to power in recent years in India, Brazil, Indonesia, Hungary, Turkey, Austria, Italy and, of course, the United States, in order to pursue and aggravate the employers’ offensive in all these countries. Not to mention their deadly management of the pandemic.
Macron and his possible allies, from the left and the right, present themselves as a bulwark against the RN. From LREM to the RN, passing through the Republicans, it is however for years the odious racist and security overbidding, driven by political competition to capture a reactionary or blinded electorate, but also serve an employer policy of division of workers. If the extreme right is not in power, the previous governments and the current one have taken up some of its discourse, and even more of its security and repressive methods against those who contest their policies. By imposing more muscular methods and legislation, by praising police exploits, by outbidding Islamophobia, the current government trivializes fascist temptations and proves to be the best recruiter of the RN, an ally of the latter in its strategy of “de-demonization”. Hollande and Valls have largely opened the way for Macron.
This discourse transpires even within the institutional left, which calls for borders to protect “France” from immigration. So they can call for a more republican or proximity police force, and an army that would abandon all political temptations. As if the aforementioned army did not act to maintain imperialist order, today spectacularly in Africa, and why not tomorrow in France if the capitalist system felt threatened?
The current political “polarization”, where only reactionary camps seem to be opposed electorally, is the result of the denials of the left in power, of forty years of anti-social policies. The policies of Mitterrand and his communist allies, of austerity against the workers and the poorest in the name of “socialism”, had allowed the FN to enter the political scene with a bang. Jospin and his plural left government (of which Mélenchon was Secretary of State and where the CPF had a few ministers) allowed the Front National (Party that preceded the RN, led by Marine Le Pen’s father) to reach the second round of a presidential election for the first time. Finally, the five-year term of Hollande and his Green allies put the Le Pen daughter on the map, allowing her to beat records in terms of the number of votes.
In this coming presidential election, and beyond, it will be necessary to convince the world of work that the extreme right, its mortal enemy, cannot be fought in the ballot box but by class unity in the struggles, sometimes by confronting it by a majority of workers, with or without papers, beyond status and nationalities; and that a fortiori it cannot be fought by an electoral union between left-wing parties — or an electoral cartel between parties that have been crippled and discredited by their past policies. Who else but us, the revolutionaries (Lutte ouvrière and the NPA), will be able to make this voice heard in the electoral campaign? The voice of the struggles, and they alone, against a future austerity, of the right or “of the left” or even “green EELV”? This is why we regret that once again the revolutionaries are leaving in a scattered order during this election. We are far from fulfilling the responsibilities that are ours in such a period.
Radical” left or not, always institutional
In power, the left (if the term has any meaning) has pursued the same policy as Macron, who himself came from it. The parties of the so-called “radical” left (if the term has more meaning), the CPF or the FI, are probably not perceived by many workers in the same way as the SP and its potential allies, and nevertheless rivals, the Greens. If the CP has today lost a lot of its working class base, if Mélenchon seems to be losing electoral aura, the fact remains that the CP and LFI milieus are among those with whom we rub shoulders in our militant activity, with whom we share struggles. In order to increase the balance of power, a preoccupation with a “united front” obviously leads us to seek alliances with all or part of their organizations, activists or sympathizers, in struggles with precise objectives. The objectives of these struggles are also part of the debate, if not of the fight, and we have to preserve a programmatic and strategic delimitation. Strike together, when possible, but march separately, because it almost always is! It is in the thorny turns that we see the real nature of these currents: their solidarity with the institutions and framework of the capitalist state is not in doubt. In 2015 in the wake of the Daech attacks, CPF and Greens voted in favor of the state of emergency. More recently, in March 2020, a unanimous National Assembly spoke out in favor of historic public aid of 450 billion big capital. Macron adopted a martial speech and declared: “we are at war”. In this context, it is indeed social war credits, granted to the employers, that the unanimous parliamentary left has voted. As soon as it is a question of “national unity”, in reality of closing ranks behind the “French” big bosses and their profits, the CPF and the FI (and even Ensemble) are present.
It is the honor of the NPA to have never given in to these sirens, and to have defended class positions independent of the bourgeoisie and opposed to any national union, again this year in the health crisis. Only the revolutionary extreme left, mainly Lutte ouvrière and other smaller Trotskyist or libertarian organizations, has held the same positions. It is this independence that must be brought to life in the future campaign, as opposed to the compromises that have led some comrades of the NPA behind the FI in common campaigns in the municipal and regional elections (in New Aquitaine and Occitania), in a “logic” that must be banished for the presidential election.
We need a candidacy of the NPA, in complete independence from all those who, in the name of the left, led before Macron and then in part with him, the anti-worker policy that we know, or from those who speak of renovating the left, or even greening it, but have nothing else to offer but the same old and hopeless dead ends. Hence the absolute necessity for the NPA to present its working class, anti-capitalist and revolutionary candidacy.
An issue for the NPA too
A presidential campaign is an important moment for the diffusion of our ideas to a much wider public than the circles we reach through our usual activities. It will help in the construction of the NPA: recruitment on the basis of its propaganda and agitation, the impulse of campaign activities that can become regular activities for the committees (towards workplaces, youth, working class neighborhoods and collectives of struggle whose specific interests we can make ourselves the spokesperson), but above all to the identification of the NPA on a profile. A successful campaign can bear fruit, with the objective of strengthening our organization numerically and politically, in the perspective of building a revolutionary party. In a distorted way it is the expression of the balance of power and also participates in it. The stakes are high, and it is worthwhile for the organization and its sympathizers to join together in this effort. Knowing that the problem is not (or not only) the candidate but, first and foremost, the political content of our campaign, its program and the axes that flow from it. This is why comrades who are either too committed to the FI or outside the NPA will have difficulty in bringing the party together. It is in this case that the candidacy of Olivier Besancenot would be the most likely to respond to this need.
The National Conference will obviously have to address the question of the comrade or comrades in a position to carry this candidacy. The best way to proceed would be to start by putting forward and publicly announcing a collective of “spokespersons”, not “pre-candidates” who would jostle for a primary and be put in competition, but a team of animators of struggles, of different ages, regions and sectors, especially of companies, who could each represent the NPA in the presidential election. Our party does not lack “candidates” capable of standing up to the politicians of the bourgeoisie. A collective decision on the choice of the “presidential candidate” would come at a later stage, as in 2012, although it should not be long.
What campaign for the revolutionaries?
(A sketch of ideas and demands, immediate and transitory)
A. Denouncing the capitalist bankruptcy
The pandemic has highlighted the inability of the capitalist system to respond to the vital challenges facing humanity. If the governments have been criticized for the most part, their common policy of austerity imposed on public services, first and foremost on health, and the largesse offered to big business show the class interests they serve. The crying shortages of masks, tests, vaccines, which have led to spectacular price increases at the time when they were most needed, condemn capitalist production, guided solely by profit. In France alone, more than 100,000 deaths and an incalculable number of collateral victims are at stake.
At a time when it is urgent to vaccinate all of humanity as quickly as possible, patents are an unacceptable obstacle. They must be removed. But in order for vaccines to truly become a “public good of humanity”, it will be necessary to impose the expropriation of “Big Pharma”, the necessary requisition of production lines, logistic platforms and health centers to administer them as quickly as possible, in defiance of the enrichment of shareholders. Such an exceptional effort on a global scale can only succeed if it is based on the conscious and active mobilization of the workers of these sectors, and is organized under their control.
On the one hand, there is mass unemployment, due to the scorched earth policy of big capital, which is laying off workers and falling back on its financial assets as “safe havens”. On the other hand, there is the great misery of essential services, health, education, transport, the Post Office, culture and housing. Millions of people need to be hired for free quality public services. It is necessary to take from the capital accumulated by the capitalist class, the part of which is concentrated in the banks and the financial circuits. This can only result from a large-scale social confrontation to make the billionaires bend politically.
The social consequences of the crisis are already being felt hard by the poorest workers and by young people from working-class backgrounds. The employers’ appetite has no limits and is taking the whole society into the abyss. In this context, the government’s attempts at a reactionary, racist and security-oriented headlong rush to divert attention, divide our class, silence protests through repression and compete with the extreme right on the electoral terrain are particularly dangerous and irresponsible, especially as they are fueled by the evolution of the international situation.
The growing tensions between the great powers, the return of a certain protectionism, the war waged by the rich countries on refugees, the imperialist military expeditions that follow one another (notably by France in Africa) and the weakness, the abandonment or the pure and simple capitulation of any perspective of emancipatory struggle or even of resistance of the traditional workers’ movement, contribute to nourish the extreme right: nationalist and racist, conspiracy and anti-Semitic, or religious and reactionary, or all at once as these currents reinforce each other, among others in their common determination to maintain women in a situation of minors and simple procreators. There is a real threat that these currents will develop on militant grounds in the coming years — and history has shown where these monstrous offspring of capitalist barbarism can take society.
Faced with these dangers, we must revive a perspective of class struggle, therefore internationalist, which explicitly and frontally opposes the reactionaries of all sides without forgetting to draw perspectives, even when the balance of power is difficult to get out of this situation which feeds them.
Lies about the ravages of “globalism” and the relevance of protectionism are not the prerogative of the extreme right. The trade union and political left never misses an opportunity to extol the virtues of French industry or to call for “relocations. “As if employers and workers shared common interests within national borders. To this illusion, which brings xenophobic and racist reactionary backward steps, ferments division of our class, we oppose the common interests of the workers of all countries against planetary capitalist exploitation, starting with the common interests of the workers of Europe. The economic crisis that affects us is not “French”, and the anger of the world of work has manifested itself in recent years, and even in recent months, throughout the world. These struggles around the world are also ours. The need to change the world is our program.
B. Advance a program of struggle to the end
Nationalist “industrial plans” are being bandied about by the left and the unions in the face of workers facing layoffs. But the search for buyers or requests for subsidies for relocation have never helped to stop the rise in unemployment. Claiming to stop unemployment by “relocating”, i.e. by moving it to other countries, has nothing to do with defending the world of work. It is the increase of the exploitation of workers in the world that we must denounce and fight, starting with what is happening in this country. Modernism, the automation of production lines, the irruption of digital technology with its lightning advances, should be translated into a reduction of working hours. But no. And beyond the effects of technical progress, the increase in unemployment is the best weapon to maintain the employers’ balance of power. Flexibility, speed, managerial pressure and unemployment blackmail are the secrets of increased productivity.
This vicious circle will only be broken by the fight for the prohibition of layoffs and the sharing of work among all, without loss of pay, the only barrier to the employers’ ambitions to pocket all the gains in productivity. Obviously, this is a tall order, especially for workers who are forced to fight with their backs to the wall and isolated when a social plan is announced. This kind of measure can only be imposed by a balance of power involving all workers — and all the working classes condemned to insecurity. This requires the coordination or the convergence of struggles that the trade union leaderships maintain dispersed and without perspectives, by the capacity of this new militant generation in the companies and the trade unions to regroup and address all the others by the constitution of class struggle workers’ poles.
In general, it is necessary to convince people that “it is not the workers who have to pay for the crisis”, which is a political slogan. To accept even a small setback is to strengthen the employers’ offensive, which also aims to test the capacity for resistance. Minimum and maximum programs are closely intertwined. It is necessary to demand the maintenance of salaries and bonuses, at the expense of the employer, whether or not there is partial unemployment, and at least 400 euros of increase per month for all.
The debt that the States are accumulating to bail out the bosses with billions, and that they want us to pay tomorrow, is not “our debt”. It is theirs: the workers do not have to accept to pay for it.
The increase in official unemployment is only a partial indicator, to be added to the explosion in the number of homeless people or the queues at the soup kitchens. And this is before the programmed end of partial unemployment (and therefore the real wave of layoffs), before the drastic austerity measures that will be taken under the pretext of repaying the “Covid” debt (which has served to subsidize capital).
Faced with the brutal interruption of all income, the government has set up a “universal salary” for the petty bourgeoisie: 1,500 euros minimum for the owners of bars, shops or restaurants at a standstill. But what about the others? Temporary workers, seasonal workers, delivery men and women, undeclared workers, home help, young people entering the job market?
The rapid development of situations of extreme poverty is spectacular in the student milieu, at least the great mass of students belonging to the working classes, more easily accessible to the media than working class youth, and because most of them are under 25 and do not even receive the RSA. But the situation is the same for all the youth who have seen their income severely cut, whether they are enrolled in college or not. To all these young people, we reserve charity and we refuse a decent income.
However, by paying this amount to the restaurant owners, the state is unwillingly admitting that one cannot live in the crisis on less than 1,500 euros — in reality it is at least 1,800 euros that is needed. No one should get less. No income below 1,800 euros, no salary, no unemployment or pension benefits, no minimum social benefits! In some trade union circles, the demand for a minimum income of 2,000 euros for all is rightly put forward. This is not begging, it is not a question of a generalized RMI that some people demand, but a necessity that starts from social needs, that will have to be financed by the capitalists and that can only be imposed through struggle.
Many other emergency measures are necessary: to allow young people from the working classes to study, to build housing, for good quality public transport that is free for all, for access to leisure and culture in good sanitary conditions, for equal access to health care, for measures in favour of women’s rights (access to free abortion, to emergency means in the face of the violence that is inflicted upon them). These measures raise the question of immediate financing. We do not advocate the indebtedness of the State or of social insurance, which is a way of not threatening the revenues of capital. We demand that public facilities and services be provided free of charge from the wealth accumulated by the capitalist class.
The impoverishment of large sections of the population is already at work and will profoundly modify the conditions in which we will be militating in the years to come. This impoverishment does not only affect the working class. But if the reactions, angry reactions and mobilizations that it will inevitably provoke are directed by sectors of the petty bourgeoisie, then the confrontation will not go all the way. For these sectors will not enter into direct conflict with the capitalist groups or with a distorted consciousness of what is needed: to preserve their small property, their right to live, but without the perspective of a real change of society. Worse, they could do it in a “poujadist” mode, that is to say, on the extreme right, against the allegedly privileged wage earners. Only the working class is the bearer of such a change, which can only be initiated by an overall movement, a general strike, a May ’68 that would go all the way. And revolutionary history shows that in the event of a wave of social protest, revolutionary activists, even if they are in a very small minority, can be at the head of decisive struggles and embody such a politics of class independence. Provided they have the political audacity and a working class presence.
C. Only a workers’ power can solve the urgent problems of humanity
If mobilizations of our class can impose some emergency measures to the bosses, it is in power that it will be able to change society from top to bottom. We militate for the end of wage slavery, the abolition of private property of the means of production and their pooling under the control of those who work, in the service of the whole society. We will seize every opportunity in this campaign to popularize our socialist and communist ideas with the help of general public formulas.
A truly democratic government, at the service of the people, as demanded by the Yellow Vests, the Chilean youth or the Algerian population, will not be possible thanks to a few institutional tricks, such as the RIC, a constituent assembly or a VIth Republic. It can only result from a fight to the death against the billionaires who own the economy, the media, the weight on the institutions, the justice, the police, in short the state apparatus. That is to say all the effective powers of information, decision, centralization and coercion. In a word: a revolution!
Such a government can only be forged in the heat of an overall struggle in which working men and women take with them all the oppressed layers. It will automatically put an end to the indecent privileges that make politicians live like the privileged — and recruit themselves from the privileged. Mandated and revocable, paid at the average worker’s wage, the activists and elected representatives of a workers’ government will have nothing in common with the little Bonapartes who aspire to the highest office!
A workers’ and people’s power will lead a struggle against all the reactionary vestiges on which capitalism relies, against all the prejudices, racisms and sexist discriminations or those linked to sexual orientation. It is the only way to achieve not only equal rights but real equality, as the movements against racism and police violence, or the feminist and LGBTI movements that have erupted all over the world, are rightly demanding. For the indispensable struggles for democratic, civil or women’s rights have shown that equality in law, when it exists, does not prevent state racism and sexism, and that these problems are systemic.
Like its ancestor of the Paris Commune, a workers’ government would fight against all national withdrawal, would open the borders to all the workers of the world, brothers and sisters in arms in the class struggle — as much as it would close them to the capital that it would put under its control. This is the internationalist meaning of our defense of freedom of movement and settlement for all: air, open the borders! We live here, we work here, we stay here and we vote here!
A workers’ and people’s power will also put the harmony between human beings and nature in the foreground. Global warming and ecology are used by governments as a pretext to justify, on the one hand, new subsidies to companies, and on the other hand, new taxes and layoffs for the working classes. We take up the formula: “Ecology without class struggles is gardening”. We intimately link the fight for the climate, the biodiversity, to our social struggles. Even by practicing what he calls “the ecological transition”, limited to certain sectors and nevertheless subject to the laws of the market, capitalism will never be green. For, in the words of Marx, it “exhausts the two sources of all wealth: the earth and the worker. “Only a democratic planning of production, under the control of the workers concerned, would allow this production to be organized according to social needs, while preserving the natural balance to the maximum. But above all, only the workers have the strength to put an end to the capitalist madness that is leading the planet to chaos.
All the problems of the day, extreme inequality, endemic unemployment, systemic oppression, the emergence of pandemics, the destruction of the environment, are on a global scale and stem from the dictatorship of multinational capitalist groups. The social revolution that will put an end to this dictatorship of profit will have to rise to this scale. The contagion of the current struggles around the planet encourages it!
It is urgent: “socialism or barbarism” is the alternative we want to pose on a mass scale. It is time to make credible another society, a revolutionary break with capitalist barbarism. Our campaign must help to popularize this objective.
Armelle (92, CE), Aurélien (Paris, CE), Gaël (92, CE), Marie-Hélène (Rouen, CE), Zara (Paris, CE).
May 16, 2021.
