December 6, 2021, Editorial of the Workplace Newsletters of the Etincelle fraction of the NPA, Translated from French
Christmas is approaching, but our politicians are preparing some rather unconventional gifts for us. It’s time for their big family reunion: they argue a bit, but in the end, they get along just fine.
The great feast of predators
Now, Valérie Pécresse has won the Republican presidential primary election. Finally: a woman. It’s about time! On the other hand, her program is taking us back to the 19th century. She wants the elimination of 150,000 civil service positions, the introduction of immigrant quotas, retirement at 65 years of age [in France the current age for retirement is 62] Basically, she’s singing in the same anti-worker key as Le Pen (extreme-right), Zemmour (even further right), Darmanin (current Minister of the Interior), President Macron and friends; she’s simply stealing the title of first flautist of her party from Éric Ciotti. Macron, for his part, is off to sell planes to a Saudi dictator.
It’s like a shower of ideas drawn from the depths of sewers. As for the institutional left (Socialist Party, Communist Party), it’s thrown itself into the storm of crap ideas as well: under a thin veneer of hypocrisy, they still defend the police, along with the same old pro-business economic nationalism, with a few anti-migrant overtones here and there. They propose very little regarding the concerns of the working classes.
What about the real problems?
Christmas is approaching and for working people, it’s hard to find something to celebrate with the family for this holiday. There’s a new wave of COVID, and a new variant due to the lack of vaccines for the whole world. And the poor keep getting poorer, the rich are getting richer: there are 309,000 more millionaires in France despite, or perhaps thanks to, COVID!
The bourgeoisie acknowledges that all workers are essential. That doesn’t stop them from laying off more and more in order to over-exploit those who remain. Yes, we “are at war”, as Macron says, but it’s a social war.
Anger is simmering. Hospitals are failing apart all over, and caregivers demonstrated this past Saturday. The people of Guadeloupe and Martinique are rising up against their misery: they face cops, curfews and heavy sentences for protests … Just like good old colonial times…
Wealth is piling up in the stock market. Migrants are drowning in the English Channel and the Mediterranean. Should we blame the smugglers? The smugglers aren’t the ones who erected the barbed wire fencing around European countries: and without this border fence there would be no smugglers! The only thing these countries are accomplishing by installing more barbed wire is to give the smugglers the opportunity to take better advantage of the migrants by raising their fees. It is the States that have killed and kept the migrants in prison-slums on the borders of Europe.
A fight for a new society is necessary
Christmas is fast approaching, and the big bosses, the shareholders and their political henchmen think they are protecting themselves from social explosions by dividing us, turning us against each other. But the immense wealth they are accumulating is being created by no others than the workers of the world.
Together we could challenge the power of this parasitic and selfish ruling class, and even seize and exercise the power in a revolutionary way in their place. We could finally build an open society, welcoming all cultures without borders, where we could choose democratically what to create, and where work would be distributed equitably among all; a society in which today and tomorrow’s technical progress would no longer be aimed at war and the enslavement of the majority, nor would it result in the pollution of nature, but would serve to free all of humanity from misery and oppression.
Through our struggles we have the power from now onwards to impose our will on the big bosses: the equitable distribution of working time, an increase of wages, the end of industrial secrecy and patents, and the opening of borders to men and women rather than to solely capital interests!
It is this program of struggle for another society that our comrade Philippe Poutou is defending in a presidential campaign that has already begun. It is time to come together for a cause that is worthy!
That is the meaning of a vote for his candidacy.
