To survive the proletarian class must fight against the bourgeoisie and all those who live on the exploitation of wage labor.

Only the proletarian class struggle is historically able to end the oppression of man by man and all class divisions through revolutionizing capitalist society from top to bottom!

(«Proletarian»; Nr. 10; Winter-Spring 2014)

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Proletarians!

Workers of all races and nationalities!

 

In recent years the global economic crisis has continued to worsen the living conditions of large segments of the population, not only in poor countries but also in the richest country in the imperialist states who acquired a dominant position in the military and political economic, social violence that characterizes the frantic pace of capitalist development.

The capitalist economic crises is plunging ever greater masses of men, women and children into unemployment, poverty, hunger and death – the atrocious demonstration that the economic system based on profit is unable to provide well-being and peace to humanity. In point of fact in addition to crises there are the wars that are their consequences and which correspond to economic and political clashes between bourgeois powers.

The future which the bourgeois classes, who dominate the economic and social life of every country, have in store for current and coming generations is a future of ever more grinding oppression, increasing misery, and aggravated exploitation for the proletariat and working people. In order to resist this future there is no alternative but the class struggle, a struggle organized on the basis of the antagonism between classes generated by the social organization of capitalism.

Only the proletarian class struggle can resist and, in the end, defeat the bourgeois class and open to mankind the prospect of a higher social organization, without oppression, exploitation and class divisions. Why? Because the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains with which the bourgeoisie has bound them for generations to force them to be exploited, and they have a world to win! In freeing themselves from wage slavery, the proletarians will liberate all humanity from capitalist social oppression.

 

Proletarians!

Workers of all races and nationalities!

 

In all countries, but especially in the most developed capitalist countries, the bourgeoisie not only uses direct violence to subject the workers to exploitation, it relies on a array of collaborationist forces in order to poison the proletariat through all the various weapons of pacifism: from democracy to religion, sports, music, gambling etc. The objective of bourgeois propaganda is not only to bend the proletarians to capitalist economic and political demands, but also to convince them that the wage labor to which they are condemned from birth is a «natural» fact that they must accept and to which they must adapt; to convince them that this wage labor is their necessary contribution to social welfare, to the progress of civilization – and thus that they have to avoid social confrontation and follow the path of social collaboration between the classes inspired by values common to all: prosperity of the company and the national economy, democratic debate of citizens between various opinions, respect for constituted authorities and the law of the land, and of course defense of these values against any attack, defense more generally identified with the defense of the fatherland!

That the workers should break their backs and die, not for their own interests, but for those of the bourgeois homeland, this is the motto of all bourgeois in all countries!

However, it the proletarians thought about what they are forced to give and what they receive in return they would ascertain that in this society based on commodities, money, profit, that they are subject to the laws of capital, to bourgeois rule, to the condition of being exploited for life: their only prospect is a life of exploitation, unemployment, misery and massacres, because even if today wars beat down the masses of proletarians and the disinherited in distant countries, in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, tomorrow they will also explode in Europe and even in America.

But now and everywhere if the proletarians do not die of hunger or fatigue, they risk death in the «industrial accidents», to diseases caused by unsafe working conditions (see the example of asbestos or dioxin), by negligent healthcare, by «police brutality», or the repression of strikes and movements against their deplorable living conditions.

 

For the overwhelming majority of the workers of the world, the future promised by bourgeois society is worse than the present!

 

But the bourgeoisie is astute; The richer and more powerful it is, the more it divides the proletarians into different layers according to trade, according to factory, according to nationality, age, sex, level of education, etc. This division not only serves to differentiate (and lower) wages, it is mainly used to increase competition between the workers themselves. It is thanks to this stratification that the bourgeoisie can ensure the support of the more specialized, better paid upper layer, which in 1845 Engels had dubbed the labor aristocracy. It is through this layer of labor aristocracy and through the urban and rural petty-bourgeoisie that the big industrial commercial and financial bourgeoisie succeeds in penetrating its prejudices, interests, values, into the great mass of the proletariat.

All of the opportunistic organizations, who claim to be defenders of workers’ interests - from collaborationist unions to reformist parties – have the same credo: the collaboration between classes, which is obtained by the typical mechanism of capitalism, which is competition! The more the competition between proletarians sharpens, the more difficult it is for them to fight together, to recognize themselves as members of the same class opposed to the bourgeois class. The more proletarians compete with each other, the more they submit to the laws of the market, to capitalism, to the exploitation of wage labor: the condition of each is not seen as the condition of all under capitalism, but as the result of the individual’s ability to collaborate best with the bosses, the government, the bourgeois. Competition between proletarians destroys the material thrust of the struggle against the capitalist system!

Due to the ongoing work of the forces of social conservation, present generations of workers have lost any connection with the traditions of the great revolutions and struggles between classes. The parties and the Communist International, which called on the proletarians of all countries to launch an assault on capitalism were destroyed by the counter-revolutionary wave of which Stalinism was the most terrible aspect. The glorious experiences of the Paris Commune in 1871, the Russian revolution, the great struggles in Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary and the general international revolutionary movement of the twenties which shook the bourgeois powers of Europe and America, were therefore buried under a thick shroud of falsification of Marxist communism; according to the  capitalists and their supporters, they are nothing more than a «barbaric» past that has reached its completion through the progress of citizenship and bourgeois democracy ...

The defeat of the proletariat in the world and in Russia assured capitalism additional decades of life; beginning with World War II, each extra decade of life for capitalism has meant a decade more of destruction, of massacres, poverty and exploitation for most of the world’s population.

Over the decades capitalism has expanded and developed in all countries, but it has not changed: a mode of production living off of the exploitation of wage labor, it can not escape its internal contradictions which continue to deepen, increasing the destructive force of its cyclical crises. These are indeed the material contradictions of capitalist society that thrust the proletariat onto the terrain of confrontation between the classes under the absolute necessity of the struggle for survival. The Asian or African proletarians who risk their lives on the seas in search of a better future demonstrate that they have the same strength and fortitude as did German Italian, Irish, Greek and Spanish proletarians in the last century who themselves embarked upon interminable and perilous journey in search of a job.

Then as now, what is pushing the proletariat is not «faith», or «hope», but hunger. The vicissitudes of capitalist economic cycles plunge broad proletarian layers, including in rich countries, into the same situations of hunger and misery that the proletariat has already encountered in history.

But if the pressure of hunger may give the strength to rebel, it alone cannot suffice for the proletariat to act as a class.

The media have for a long time spoken of the growth of unemployment and misery in Europe and America; but this has only caused the mobilization of charitable and religious organizations. It is indeed not the hungry, the needy, that the society of Capital fears, but the proletarian who acts and is organized with his class brothers to defend themselves, especially if they are grouped around a political program aimed at the overthrow of capitalism in all countries!

 

Proletarians !

Workers of all races and nationalities!

 

The way to get rid of wage slavery and capitalist oppression has been traced out historically: it passes through the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat whose objective is the conquest of political power in all countries, the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus erected by the ruling class to defend its economic and social system.

The class struggle cannot appear unexpectedly, as proletarian class organization on the terrain of defense of its immediate interests cannot surge up unexpectedly .

Chained by the bourgeoisie and its reformist lackeys to the requirements of capital, deprived of their class organizations and their revolutionary program with which they had fought in the 1920s, the proletarians must re-emerge from the abyss into which the Stalinist counter-revolution and bourgeois democracy have plunged them. The proletariat vanguard have the task of recovering and defending the thread of class tradition that will allow the most combative sectors of the proletariat to advance towards the renaissance of the international class movement;

Indeed, history has shown that this class movement relies on the encounter between the formidable  objective thrust of the struggle of the proletarians to defend their living conditions, and the program of revolutionary communism; on the meeting between the proletarian masses in struggle and the party of class, essential organ of the anti-capitalist revolution.

There is no alternative for the proletarians: either they struggle against oppression and exploitation, and in this struggle they realize that they are in possession of the force capable of overthrowing this society; or they give up and renounce this struggle and they are condemned to being docile victims of the bourgeoisie in times of peace as in times of war.

The path of proletarian emancipation is sown with obstacles and pitfalls, constructed by the bourgeoisie and its reformist lackeys  who occupy themselves in guiding the workers onto the disastrous path of class collaboration.

The proletarians can avoid them in entering into struggle for the defense of their basic working and living conditions, because it’s from this struggle that can develop the proletarian strength independent of the bourgeoisie and its agents.

The fundamental objectives of the struggle are those that unify the proletariat into one class army:

 

1.  Struggle against competition between the proletarians!

2.  Struggle against unemployment and undeclared underpaid employment!

3.  Union between unemployed, temporary, seasonal and full-time workers, union between   the native-born, immigrants and undocumented workers!

4.  Struggle for the reduction of the working day and for higher wages!

5.  Struggle for full wages to the unemployed and laid-off!

6. Classist reorganization into solely proletarian defensive organizations

7. Demands consistent with the exclusive defense of proletarian interests, immediate and general!

 

Unity is strength, but to become a real force capable of resisting the enemy and counter-attacking this union must be forged on a class basis: it must overcome the division sown between the proletarians: competition, «every man for himself» attitudes and petty-bourgeois individualism and be aware of the irreconcilable antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The class union can only exist on the basis of the force necessary to reconquer the classist terrain: pacifism, legalism, genuflecting before the so-called higher interests of society – which are only the interests of the capitalist class – the willingness to compromise and sacrifice for the national or local economy, are huge obstacles to the class unification which is necessary to resist the capitalist class.

 

Workers of all countries, unite!

 

This is the call that the Communists always have launched, launch today and will always launch out to the proletarians of the world. This union has a fundamental goal: to pass from the struggle for the defense of living and working conditions over to the revolutionary struggle to change the world, to transform society in its entirety according to the needs of the human race. Revolutionary communists work towards the formation of the indispensable organ for the proletarian revolution which is the class party; but at the same time they participate in the daily struggle of resistance to the capitalists in defending the invaluable lessons of past struggles, all the while gaining an appreciation of and incorporating the material necessities expressed by workers in struggle.

 

Long live the May 1 of struggle, Long live the classist May 1!

For the resumption of the class struggle in all countries!

For the reconstitution of classist organizations of proletarian defense!

For the reconstitution of the powerful and compact Communist Party, essential organ for the anti-capitalist revolution!

 

04/26/2013

 

 

International Communist Party

www.pcint.org

 

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