Revolutionary workers, what is your political and social program ?

Revolutionary workers, what is your political and social program ?

PART ONE
THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEORETICAL BASES OF THE COMMUNIST PROGRAM AND THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION

This is not a catalog of recipes, rules of conduct, or ready-made solutions for a successful revolution. These do not exist. Using the lessons of the past is not the repetition of ready-made instructions. Without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary politics ; without revolutionary politics, there is no revolutionary organization, and without revolutionary political organization, there is no success in the revolutionary activity of the workers and peoples. With fixed, non-dialectical thinking, one can only make mistakes, relying too much or too little on the soviets, on the party, on the workers’ state, on the spontaneity of the masses, and on the vanguard. Too much pragmatism or not enough, too much spontaneity or not enough, too much activism or not enough, too much workerism or not enough, too much openness or not enough, too much opportunism or too much sectarianism, too much organization and not enough spontaneity, we quickly fall from one fault to another...
We must learn lessons from history, but we cannot do without scientifically studying the present and rethinking the reasoning. We cannot make political fiction, but without a perspective for the future we are going nowhere.

There is no worse crime than depriving workers of the theoretical means to understand the world in order to transform it.

1/ It is not enough to look at the world to understand it ; it requires a philosophy and a political and social theory. One of the indispensable theoretical bases for revolutionary militants is the philosophical and dialectical materialism of the movement, expurgated of Stalinist lies and applied to human societies as well as to the material and living world. Any ignorant or ignored philosophy can only taint the political perspective of revolutionaries with error. The so-called climatic, demographic, or pandemic crises only make the scientific training of revolutionaries even more essential in the face of the pseudo-scientific deceptions of the capitalists. Revolutionary militants must study the world scientifically if they want to transform it. They cannot simply bow respectfully before the work of the great Marxist authors of the past and before recent or ancient scientific works. To teach a dead Marxism as an object of conservation is to kill Marxism and turn it into a religion, which it is not at all. The science on which to base theoretical conceptions is the science of today in motion, not that of the time of the old theoreticians of Marxism. Marxism itself must progress in the light of all facts and all new conceptions. All those who claim to refuse this out of modesty or out of a supposed awareness of their own limitations are only refusing these primordial and indispensable tasks. They are like surgeons who claimed to want to operate on society but without equipping themselves with the surgeon’s scalpels and the knowledge of physiology.

2/ One of the fundamental theoretical bases is the understanding of the respective role and interactions of the three fundamental social classes under capitalism : proletariat, petty bourgeoisie and big bourgeoisie or how big capital can rule the whole of society without representing the general interest and only a tiny fraction of the population ? Why is the proletariat the only revolutionary class ? And why should the proletariat not remain isolated but take the lead of all threatened or oppressed social layers, women, religions, nations, and including important fractions of the petty bourgeoisie ? Separating the proletariat can only be the work of opportunists who want to make the revolutionary proletariat a class only demanding on the economic terrain or of sectarian purists (and often both opportunists and sectarian) who want to believe in a pure revolution that has never existed in history but only in their imagination. Only the capitalist class has an interest in the proletariat not leading all the oppressed, the poor and the exploited, and in particular women, young people, the unemployed, small artisans, shopkeepers and peasants, as well as the false liberal professions that exploit themselves.

3/ An essential point for understanding the current world and its ultra-violent drift is the fact that its capitalist dynamic is dead, the accumulation of capital having reached its limits and productive investments incapable of keeping up with the excessive mass of accumulated capital. This is an inescapable historical fact that requires a detailed scientific analysis and a serious study of the consequences because it changes the entire perspective. It follows that the ruling classes must at all costs prepare for a confrontation to the death with the working people. The capitalist class is aware of this and is actively preparing for it, but the vast majority of organizations and therefore of activists prefer to turn a blind eye, including on the far left, letting people believe that capitalism still has great prospects ahead of it.

4/ Capitalism is a social system doomed to disappear like other social systems before it, and since 2007, it has posed for the first time the immediate need to replace it at the same time as the possibility of overcoming societies divided into social classes based on the production of goods, on the exploitation of human labor. Capitalism did not just reach its limits in 2007, it was a year later in 2008 that a global wave of social revolutions called the "spring" began, which exploded worldwide from 2011. Paradoxically, it is at this crucial moment, at this historical turning point, that most activists claiming to be working class are turning away from this perspective and are engaged in opportunistic electoral and trade union activities that they present as the means to build the revolutionary party but which tie them to the old, outdated society !

5/ With the collapse of capitalism and the resumption of the socialist revolution, the role of the proletariat as a conscious and self-organized historical subject becomes once again of burning relevance ! The only perspective, not only for workers but for all humanity, is once again that of the power of the soviets. These mass organizations, political and not only protest-based but revolutionary, are the indispensable foundation of power for the workers. They allow the transition from class struggle consciousness to revolutionary consciousness. They allow the proletariat to be united with other social strata of the working people. Anyone who does not constantly defend this perspective, in propaganda as well as in social and political struggles, is and will be nothing but an adversary of the revolutionary proletariat.

6/ The social revolution is a rare phase in the history of humanity, one of its crucial moments because it radically changes its course and it is the only moment when the mass of the exploited and oppressed decides its own fate, engages in politics and organizes en masse. It is for such moments that revolutionaries must prepare. The most crucial phase is that of the seizure of power by organized and armed workers. Insurrection is an art, all revolutionaries remind us, and this art must be studied by all militants who want to prepare their revolutionary class for its historic task.
THE POLICY AND PROGRAM OF THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNISTS

A- A program that claims to control everything ?

We must be wary of organizations that intend to rule everything and impose their points of view on workers, but we must be even more wary of those that refuse to say what they will do if we follow them, those that refuse to indicate their perspectives in a program, that is to say the majority of organizations that claim to be workers’ organizations...

For us, this is not a program that intends to be imposed on workers in struggle or in social revolution, but, on the contrary, to be submitted to the workers, amended if necessary, corrected, modified, and thus serve as a compass for orientation, a guide, a reference, a proposal to be made to assemblies, committees, councils, delegates elected and revocable by these organizations absolutely independent of the capitalist State, of the propertied classes, of the organizations linked to them. The aim of this program is precisely to move from struggles for demands to revolutionary struggles, to ensure that the former prepare the latter, to make them succeed by giving workers the political and organizational means to direct themselves before directing the whole of society, to found a new kind of State of the type of the Paris Commune of 1871 or the power of the Soviets before it is destroyed by Stalinism. What distinguishes this type of program from all reformist and opportunist programs is that it shows that every social and political question is directly related to the need for social revolution and that every struggle, every fight of the workers must lead to power for the workers and to socialism.

B- What revolution do we want ?

The word "revolution" is used by so many people, most often in meanings so opposed to our own (from the "revolution" of detergents or cosmetics or artificial intelligence, to the so-called "liberal revolution", from Macron to Javier Milei, not to mention the "national revolutions" of the extreme right to the Stalinists and the political revolutions of all bourgeois nationalists) that it is appropriate to clarify the meaning we give to the proletarian revolution.

Revolution is a very particular moment in the history of a society, a moment when nothing happens as usual and, in particular, when the oppressed and exploited no longer allow their conduct to be dictated to them and act collectively, en masse, organizing themselves and making decisions without referring to any higher authority.

 C- The exploited spontaneously have a reformist consciousness

In "normal" times, the exploited suffer not only from their material situation but also from the lies spread by their enemies. They have neither the opportunity nor the will to contradict the lies of their exploiters, nor to question the established order. They therefore ignore that they are bearers of a proletarian program for the whole of society and believe what the reformists tell them : that they just want the satisfaction of a few demands, generally just the questioning of the latest reform of the rulers, as if the previous ones were acquired and if the entire system were not in question, as if the proletarians did not have broader perspectives (power to the workers with a view to the complete change of the mode of production, the abolition of the property of big capital, the abolition of the exploitation of man by man and the abolition of the State). In particular, this way of limiting social struggles has the effect of removing the proletariat’s role in addressing all oppressed social strata and leaving them to also suffer the domination of big capital and thus fall prey to the fascists if their revolt becomes radicalized. In any case, the proletarians do not, under normal circumstances, give themselves the means to develop their own economic, social and political program and are unaware of its strength and importance. They generally believe that if one cannot prevent a government counter-reform, it is probably pointless to dream of transforming the whole of society ; one probably does not have the strength to do so. This false reasoning is dictated to them by the reformists and opportunists (notably from the false extreme left). The reality is the opposite : if one cannot reform society, it needs a social revolution.

As for other political and social questions posed to society as a whole, the exploited think about them personally but not collectively. They do not express themselves collectively in a public manner on these questions. They therefore never have the opportunity to imagine their own political program and only envisage "politics" as the choice between politicians who are all enemies of the workers. Elections organized by the capitalist state are presented as the only way to "do politics." But this has nothing to do with a revolutionary workers’ policy, even when so-called revolutionaries stand in bourgeois elections.

D- Direct action and class organization : the path to class struggle and class consciousness

Without worrying about the electoral charade, workers can perfectly well engage in politics through direct class action, even if they are currently unaware of it. This is also the purpose of the program of the revolutionary proletariat. They can question the policies of their imperialism, contest its wars, denounce its agreements with the world’s dictatorships, hinder its exactions, undo the agreement between big capital and the petty bourgeoisie, etc. But, as long as they do not meet regularly to discuss all these questions, they cannot experience their own political capacity or measure the impact of their own perspectives on their class or on other social classes.

All this gives us the definition of revolution, which is precisely the moment when the exploited and oppressed unite within mass organizations to collectively take decisions concerning the whole of society and give themselves the means to implement them.

E- How to prepare for the social revolution in the period preceding it ?

It is in current struggles, in a pre-revolutionary period, that revolutions are prepared, and it is particularly in strikes. Even if revolutions are always surprising, all different from each other and unpredictable, we can prepare for them in many ways as long as we have the will and the awareness. The three main ways are the experience of struggles, class consciousness, and knowledge of the past.

To use the limitations of current struggles as a pretext for not pursuing them with revolutionary and socialist policies is to betray them.

E- Struggles and their self-organization

Struggles, even outside of revolutionary periods, prepare for revolutionary struggles, as long as workers organize themselves, make decisions about their own struggle, and can thus verify the results of their understanding of the balance of power, objectives, and methods of action. Experience allows us to verify our opinions about the various social classes, their relationships, the repressive state apparatus, and reformist political and trade union organizations. Having clear ideas in advance (before the revolution) about all this is extremely useful in times of revolution. Seeing the reformists (and opportunists) at work and maneuvering allows us to decipher their speeches, their tricks, their lies, the goals of their organizational methods, and their false pretexts for constantly abandoning the terrain of class struggle and following that of class collaboration. This is how unions and reformist parties bring the struggle onto the terrain of false negotiations and agreements with our class enemies.

Strike Committees : From Striker-Led Strike to Worker-Led Society

To exercise their future political sovereignty and govern themselves by and for themselves, the working people must experience their leadership abilities by doing so directly in their strikes and struggles. Strike committees, conceived in this way, are the embryos of a future government of the working people. Federated at the level of a city or region, they become the backbone of future revolutionary communes. The federation of these communes will then be the expression of the people’s will over their own destiny. To be against this is to leave power to the wealthy. Any enemy of the self-organization of struggles is also an enemy of the perspective of power to the workers. This is why even a simple categorical strike needs a revolutionary perspective to be conducted effectively and victoriously, and why any reformist leadership of struggles leads to a wall, even when these struggles only pursue limited objectives that in no way include the perspective of overthrowing the system.

A democratic organization involving all workers

The strike committee allows everyone in the company to be involved in the decisions and organization of the movement. Colleagues who yesterday were disinterested in the struggle now feel involved in its organization and want to take an active part. There is no reason why some strikers should have fewer rights than others during the strike (especially those belonging to union organizations). Democracy is not only an ideal, it is also a guarantee of trust, awareness, and strength.
A few rules and concepts are essential for this :
Respect and ensure respect for freedom of opinion and criticism, which must be total ! Recognize each member of this committee’s freedom to defend their point of view and to make it known by any means that suits them ! Recognize each organization’s complete freedom to defend its point of view as well, but also the freedom of workers not to adopt its points of view or instructions !
Democracy is not a formalism, but the awareness that workers can only win through their own efforts. It does not confine itself to the company and opens its general assemblies to workers from other companies. It does not prohibit itself from intervening in other companies or outside of companies. The strike committee can grant itself the means to intervene beyond the strike, in social and political actions decided by the workers themselves.

Strike committee : no irremovable representatives

The strike leadership must be elected, accountable, and revocable before the Sovereign General Assembly of workers. Let’s break with the political methods of the bourgeoisie. If we have no control over the politicians who serve the wealthy, let’s control those we elect to our assemblies. To be sovereign and govern itself, the assembly must control its elected officials, its mandate holders, and be able to recall them at any time.

General meetings and the strike committee

The general assembly deciding democratically by giving everyone a voice is not enough. The ruling class has assemblies but also decision-making and execution bodies. The general assembly must be a place for information, discussions, but also a place for preparing a strategy and tactics. The local general assembly must have links with other local general assemblies but also build regional and national links. The local general assembly must be informed of what is happening elsewhere and decide there, who is striking, demonstrating, blocking where and when. We must know what the other general assemblies are discussing and deciding. Without a strike committee, we do not have people mandated to receive information from other general assemblies via other strike committees. It is not just there to talk but to decide on actions, and these must be organized and implemented by a smaller, democratically controlled group that can be dismissed at any time.

The big capitalists have their National Assembly and the government as their executive. Our general meetings must have one too. But not of the same order. Our executive of the struggle is elected, accountable, and revocable before the sovereign general meeting. The strike must be led by the strikers themselves, by democratic assemblies electing local strike committees, electing a central strike committee, and coordinating regionally and nationally ! It’s more democratic ! It’s more effective ! It’s more frightening for our adversaries ! It gives a future to the struggle ! It’s the sign of a mobilization without delegation of power ! It’s a guarantee of success !

The strike committee : elect an executive who is responsible and revocable before the General Assembly

All members of such a committee, without exception, are elected by their assembly. No one is there by right, based on any particular title (member or elected official of a union or political organization), without the strikers having the right to maintain or revoke them.
Anyone who wishes to do so must be able to stand as a candidate, whether they are unionized or not. It is up to the general assembly to designate those it wants to see on this committee.
The strike committee must be as broad as possible because it is thus the most representative. It is obviously preferable that each sector on strike or in struggle be represented within such a committee.
The election is done by a show of hands, in full view of everyone. Thus, everyone’s commitment, for or against, is clear ; This allows for transparency.
The strike committee represents everyone. It does not represent a category of personnel within a company or a particular professional branch within the framework of an interprofessional and inter-category struggle. The movement is united, and the strike committee is responsible for leading it for everyone. None of its members are there to defend the interests of any particular sector. This must be clear to both the committee members and all the strikers.

Factory committees and soviets : embryos of the power of the proletariat and the working people

In the struggles organized by the union bureaucracies, no coordination of sovereign general assemblies is put in place and no occupation of factories, no broadening of the movement organized by the rank and file is proposed, which means that these "struggles" never challenge bourgeois power, that of the bosses and that of the State. Yet "Every strike with occupation poses in practice the question of knowing who is the master in the factory : capitalism or the workers. (If it) raises this question episodically, the factory committee gives this same question an organized expression. It is elected by all the workers and employees of the enterprise. The bureaucrats of the unions will oppose, as a general rule, the creation of factory committees (to avoid this duality of power, even if embryonic ! Editor’s note). It is necessary to open a campaign in favor of factory committees in time to avoid being taken unawares." (Trotsky, 1938) !

Class consciousness

The role of the revolutionaries’ program is to lead to awareness of the need for workers to seize the entirety of state power through their revolutionary councils, without leaving the slightest crumb of power to the old ruling classes. In developing their explanations, they obviously come up against all forms of political and social illusions in bourgeois democracy, in electoralism, in the state at the service of the citizens, and in the trade unionism of negotiation and agreement with the bosses and the state. The parties of the left, the left of the left, or the opportunist extreme left are inevitably resolute opponents of such a program.

F- Knowledge of the past

We do not conceive of revolution in the same way before and after the Paris Commune, before and after the Russian, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Spanish, Chinese, etc. revolutions… Nor after as before the fascist counter-revolutions or the world wars… To ignore the maneuvers and attacks of class enemies, or the deceptions, the errors of the past, is to condemn ourselves to repeat them. Conversely, to reveal the lessons of the past is to give ourselves the keys to the prison. There is, of course, the history of proletarian revolutions and the counter-revolutions that were opposed to them. But even the bourgeois revolutions and those of antiquity teach us a lot about how human society can advance and transform itself. The difficulty is that the propertied classes are masters of official history as well as of science and official ideology and that revolutionaries therefore have the task of giving themselves an image independent of all these disciplines, which is far from easy. Many people believe that the lies of the possessing classes only concern the present era, but this is false : revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars and civil wars are hidden by them so that the working people cannot understand the history in which they are such an essential participant.

G- What is class struggle and what is contrary to it ?

Society is divided into large social classes which are determined not by salary, professional function, category of activity, country, status, nationality, origins, skin color, religious or non-religious beliefs, type of residential area, personal opinions, or other sociological criteria, but by position in relation to the ownership of large capitals and means of production.

We can thus distinguish three fundamental social classes : the big bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. Of course, most people do not divide themselves into these categories and are even unaware of their existence, but social revolutions depend on them. If the first two unite against the third, the revolution cannot win. If the third manages to unite with a fraction of the second and lead it, the capitalist class can be overthrown.

In a normal period (neither revolutionary nor pre-revolutionary), the petty bourgeoisie (even the impoverished and proletarianized one) will have no desire to unite with the proletariat. A serious economic and social crisis, as well as a political one, is needed for the illusions of the petty bourgeoisie to be sufficiently damaged and for the proletariat to be able, with the help of a correct policy, to attract this fraction of the so-called middle class and direct its anger against the capitalist class and its state. The first correct policy of the proletariat consists of demonstrating that the workers do not want to make concessions to big capital but understand the demands of the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, the one that exploits no one and cannot survive even by overexploiting itself (small traders, peasants, fishermen, false liberal professions, delivery men, self-employed people and others). It also concerns other social classes such as poor women, the unemployed, young people, the homeless, undocumented immigrants, all those whom society despises and oppresses. The proletariat must therefore not be content to unite within its own social class but must address other classes, understand how they reason, how they fight and how important it is to dissociate them from the capitalist class in order to isolate and defeat it.

The policies of the reformist political and trade union left and opportunist organizations (especially the pseudo-extreme left) aim for the opposite objective : the so-called class purity of the workers, which isolates them from the struggles of other sections of the working people (made up of all those who suffer from capitalism, live essentially from their work and exploit no one, whether they are employees or not). In particular, the reformists claim to unite employees and employers in the defense of the "interests of the country", the "interests of the company", the "interests of the profession", the "interests of the sector", the "interests of employment", the "interests of industry", and assert that the capitalist state power, if it were well directed, would be responsible for helping them in this. These reformists, who have nothing but disgust for an alliance with the ruined or impoverished petty bourgeoisie, do not disdain to unite with the capitalists and their states ! The reformists are only willing to unite with the petty bourgeoisie in the "national interest", that is to say in the interest of the capitalists and behind their representatives, essentially when it comes to transforming the people into cannon fodder !

The class struggle therefore has as its summit not the isolation of the proletarians, stupidly set against all the intermediate layers, but the isolation of the capitalists...

H- What most opposes reformists and revolutionaries ? The question of the state and the struggle to destroy it !

It is the question of the nature of the state that is the most decisive division between reformists and revolutionaries, and also the best way to distinguish false revolutionaries, who are revolutionaries only in label.

Reformists claim that what would determine the state would be the political color of the governing party, or the democratic nature or otherwise of the constitution, or finally the corruption or otherwise of members of the government and state institutions, or the respect or otherwise of the basic rights of citizens and others. Revolutionaries want to overthrow and demolish the capitalist state ; reformists want to "conquer" it, that is, to be invited to lead and participate in it. Revolutionaries want the arming of the proletariat and the disarmament of the capitalists and their armed forces. Reformists want the opposite.

Reformists demand that the capitalist state take measures to satisfy the popular classes and workers. Revolutionaries assert that satisfying popular aspirations requires the overthrow of the state.

Reformists assert that change must absolutely come through electoral change through elections established by the bourgeoisie. Revolutionaries, whether or not they participate in these elections, assert that the bourgeoisie could not recognize a vote that went against its fundamental interests.

Reformists call on workers, through their struggles and their votes, to express their discontent and "make themselves heard" by the capitalists and their rulers. Revolutionaries call on workers to form the embryos of their future state, which will overthrow the capitalist state, its elections, as well as its elected and unelected institutions.

Reformists talk about restoring the credibility of state power under the pretext that this improves democracy. Revolutionaries argue that there will be no true democracy until workers overthrow state power and replace it with their own.

Reformists call "democratic" those modes of action that do not challenge the capitalist state. Revolutionaries do the opposite. There is nothing more democratic than the direct power of the exploited, through soviets, that is, strike or struggle committees, revolutionary councils of the working people and their decision-making assemblies, directly putting their decisions into practice.

Political or trade union organizations are of two kinds : those that call for the formation of a soviet government and those that do not. The former are the only ones to truly defend the interests of the workers. Those who do not systematically speak of this perspective cannot in any way be called socialists, communists, or revolutionaries. Opportunist organizations try to camouflage this division and are content to speak vaguely of "workers’ organizations," lumping friends and enemies together. They know perfectly well that these are not the same thing at all, but they choose to make pacts with enemies to strengthen their groups.

Of course, the worst enemies of the power of the workers’ councils will, as soon as the revolutionary workers themselves form these councils, pretend to be in favor of them in order to manipulate them and prevent them from playing their role and becoming the new state power, that of the workers. This is why it is appropriate that as many workers as possible be aware in advance of the organizations that are not in favor of the power of the workers’ councils and refuse to campaign in their favor.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS ON THE REVOLUTION ! WHY CAN THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION ONLY BE GLOBAL ?

A- The international situation : war and revolution

 The final collapse of capitalism dates back to 2008, even though it has managed to remain in power until today, because its dynamic is definitively dead. By massively aiding capitalists so that the system would not collapse immediately, central banks flooded an economy already suffocated by excess capital. The fatal disease of the system is in fact that of overaccumulation, which means that there is too much capital ready to be invested compared to profitable productive investments, which makes it inevitable to create an ever-growing mass of capital that is invested only in increasingly dubious speculations that central banks must periodically buy back.

 With the COVID pandemic, the capitalist system did not choose to intervene to block the virus by interrupting international communications and was still ultimately forced to shut down the global economy. The system’s state of delayed death was visible to all. The pandemic was used by global capitalism to halt and, again, postpone a revolutionary situation that had developed in 2011 following the global collapse of 2007-2008, and it was diverted through dictatorial so-called health measures or crushed in blood as in Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine. And more recently in Palestine...

But this is not enough : these are, as on the economic level, only palliative measures. The march towards world war is the true response of the ruling classes to the revolutionary danger. All countries are arming themselves for this global conflagration, for a veritable slaughter. War economies are being launched in all countries, starting with the "great democracies" that have democratically consulted no one before embarking on the only modern adventure of which this deadly system is capable !

Yes, the capitalist world is doomed, but not for the reasons that are frequently cited : not because of the climate and carbon dioxide, not because of the great migration of people from poor countries oppressed by imperialism, not because of Muslims or North Korea, nor because of artificial intelligence or robots, but because its economy has reached its limits, and one of the very principles of capitalism is that it cannot be limited ! The climate crisis is nothing more than a decoy to deceive people. There is no clear trend toward warming any more than there is toward glaciation, and a few spikes in one direction or the other on our scale do not indicate the general direction of the climate.

Deglobalization (the end of the world economy) is a reality, as is the loss of US dominance and the worsening of global competition, but they are not taking on the appearance of a war between the two blocs, one around China and Russia and the other around the US, a round of war with weapons and not just economic warfare, because the global system is inexorably dead in its dynamics.

In fact, the most worrying signal for capitalism is indeed the wave of revolutions, the springs, which began in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Yemen and which have traveled around the world, movements also reaching imperialist countries like the USA and France (with the Yellow Vests).

B- Capitalist states are sinking into dictatorship, but isn’t communism the opposite of freedom ?
No, communism is not the opposite of freedom in general, but only of the freedom of capitalists ! The freedom to exploit, to terrorize, to kill, to destroy, to oppress—yes, we want to demolish it once and for all, and we see no point in hiding it. On the contrary, it must be proclaimed, and all those who don’t do so are not people who "take into account the balance of power," as they claim, but militants who have no desire to prepare workers for their future task.

Capitalist democracy is nothing but the "freedom" to choose among bourgeois politicians who will govern us, which is not a choice of society, nor of economic or political functioning, which is nothing but a gross deception. Every time workers see their so-called "favorite" candidate govern, they are obviously cruelly disappointed and it takes them many years of right-wing or far-right government to start hoping again in a left-wing government that will disappoint them again. For the interests of workers, even the most basic ones, to be defended in government, it is necessary that the workers themselves govern ; this is the only way to have a truly democratic government.

No government can grant freedom to both capitalists and workers. There never has been one in the past and there never will be one in the future.

In any case, most state functions are not elected but appointed, and workers do not participate in their selection : generals and other officers, heads of the police and special forces, heads of intelligence services and espionage and counter-espionage, heads of the gendarmerie, prisons, justice, administrations, public services, semi-public companies, private companies and in particular trusts, financial institutions, ministries, the press, religions, diplomacy, the media, science and research, education at all levels, etc. All these people are on the same side and it is not ours. They are fierce defenders of the capitalist world, its interests and its laws. They are our direct enemies, and to claim that we should hope that they take measures in our favor is like asking a goat to give milk or a giraffe to have a rabbit’s neck. It’s unnatural !

With all these powers in their hands, even a universal suffrage election of a president cannot be democratic, since workers have no political rights in their workplace, no right to assemble, to make leaflets, to launch discussions, programs, etc. If they do, they are immediately dismissable in the name of private ownership of the means of production. Workers are without rights in companies and not free citizens as they are presented to us.

C- Isn’t capitalism the only possible way of operating ? Didn’t communism fail in the USSR ?

Is capitalism eternal ? It has survived catastrophic international crises and world wars ! And also revolutionary waves of revolutions !

It has held its own in the face of violent popular discontent by responding with increased state violence in all its forms (military dictatorships, fascism, extermination of peoples, world war), but there is another limit to capitalism than the efforts of workers and peoples to rid themselves of the most powerful system of exploitation in history. And these are the limits that this system imposes on itself because it is full of contradictions.

Indeed, the system wants to accumulate ever more capital, it always wants to reinvest this capital to extract this new capital from human productive labor, but the productive investments it seeks must also be ever more profitable, exploit human labor more efficiently, and all of this is not eternally compatible. There comes a time when the mass of capital increases relative to the capacity for new investments and, from then on, this situation can only worsen.

And this is the situation that manifested itself catastrophically in 2007-2008 and from which capitalism can no longer escape. Interventions by states and financial institutions can delay the collapse, but only by aggravating the scale of the problem, by increasing the mass of capital without increasing profitable productive investments !

The capitalist system, like the other socio-economic systems that preceded it (ancient collectivism, ancient slavery, feudalism, serfdom, colonial forced labor, bourgeois crafts and commerce) also reached their limits and disappeared under the weight of their contradictions. It was when these systems were demolished or destabilized by these internal contradictions, these modes of production having reached their limits, that the struggles of the oppressed and exploited and wars overthrew them. It is this stage where the system is completely destabilized by its own contradictions that capitalism is currently reaching. The limits of the system do not only arise from the fact that the rich are too rich and the poor too poor to the point that the gap between them becomes a chasm and the contradictions between rich and poor explode. We are at the point where the excess wealth of the capitalists directly weighs down capitalism itself. There is too much money for this capital to find profitable investments ! The limit of the accumulation of big capital has been reached. The capitalist system is not only being challenged by the working people but by capital itself and its laws of operation. Capitalist development has exceeded the limits of capitalist functioning. The production of new wealth, essential to the formation of new capital, is in relative value less and less assured since a growing fraction produces nothing and only speculates. The capitalist system is therefore gradually committing suicide, by increasingly preventing itself from creating new wealth that could be the real basis of new capital. Aid from states and central banks delays the fall but prolongs the situation, increasing the share of capital that is not based on real productive profits, and therefore increases the extent of the destabilization. The reformists are careful not to point out this situation, to warn workers about it, to prepare them for the profound change in the type of struggles that this capitalist collapse necessitates. And for good reason : this historical situation of capitalism is critical for the system but also for reformism itself.

As for the idea that capitalism is the only modern way for society to function because communism has failed, it is based on the immense historical lie of Stalinism. First of all, it should be remembered that all the communist leaders of Russia, without exception, who led the Russian Communist Party from 1917 to 1922, never claimed that the Russian Revolution of October 1917 had inaugurated communism in Russia, nor even that it could do so in the decades to come. On the contrary, they claimed that it was the first step in the world revolution that alone could lead to socialism. The claim of building socialism in Russia was invented only during the Stalinist dictatorship, precisely when the bureaucracy’s policies were turning their backs on socialism. Russian revolutionaries had always maintained that the struggle for socialism could only be international, completely contradicting the Stalinist lies of "socialism in one country."

Stalinism proclaimed itself the first communist country all the more loudly because it was a counter-revolutionary movement, and imperialism found it in its own interest to spread this lie about the supposedly communist USSR, which meant that the whole world heard this enormous lie.

For Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades, Russian society in the hands of the Soviets, already backward, devastated by war and civil war, certainly could not pass directly to socialism and, despite its gigantic efforts, it could only hope to hold out against the threatening imperialisms if the revolution triumphed in a few countries more developed than itself. It could only move towards socialism as the first revolutionary step of the world proletariat, which was exactly the policy of the Communist Party until 1922. The Russian Revolution, isolated by the defeat of the revolutions due essentially to the betrayal of the social-democratic parties and the reformist trade unions, could only be defeated, and not because of the "failure of communism," but because socialism can only be an international revolutionary movement.

It was not the non-existence of the international revolution that killed the Russian Revolution or condemned it, but its betrayal. The world revolution did indeed begin to develop after the Russian Revolution, but it was diverted, deceived, misled, and suppressed by reformists and fascists. It is therefore not a generous, baseless dream, but a genuine movement of the proletariat that can only be international and can only triumph internationally or perish.

And the latest revolutionary wave, which began with the Arab Spring and swept across the world, is a reminder of the international nature of great revolutionary waves. The only revolutionary perspective is inevitably international, because both our strength and our enemy are international.

D- Why would the revolution be even more relevant today than in other times ?

Because we are on the brink of the abyss, close to an immense catastrophe that has been announced only to capitalists and not to workers, yet mortally threatens the latter. And against this historic catastrophe, there is only one remedy : for humanity to take another step forward, taking its own fate into its own hands.

What is the evidence that this critical situation is very close to us ?

First, there are the economic signals that began in 2007-2008 with what was called the "subprime crisis" and which is in fact the general tendency of big capital towards crazy speculation due to a growing lack of productive investments in relation to the increasingly excessive mass of capital. Capitalism has since ceased to be a system based on alternating growth/recession punctuated by bankruptcies and has since considered that any fall of a trust was "systemic", that is to say, threatened the entire global edifice ! This means that States and central banks have used all their means to "save" capitalists when they were threatened by bankruptcy. The last operation of this type was the one to save the banks, particularly American and Swiss. This situation, in which the system is constantly on the brink of collapse, is completely new in the history of capitalism and shows that the capitalist mode of production has reached a limit it cannot cross, that it has succeeded so much that its success exceeds what its functioning allows. This means that a growing share of capital can no longer produce new real profits, based on the exploitation of human labor. This capital, whose mass is constantly growing, is becoming "harmful" and must periodically be bought up by states and public financial institutions. This operation of permanent bailouts thanks to public funds is a mark of the new morbidity of capitalism.

The Covid crisis, the massive population attack it caused, with deaths, injuries, and orphans, the slowdown in the entire economy and the increase in unemployment and poverty, and finally the propensity of governments to take advantage of it to increase social dictatorship everywhere, all this has shown that the global system is at the end of its rope. The inability, or rather the refusal, of governments to combat the pandemic has underlined that we have left the dynamic phase of the system and entered that of its necrosis.

A few years before the start of the pandemic waves, a wave of revolts and revolutions swept across the world, beginning in 2011. Revolutionary situations were crushed in blood and transformed into wars and civil wars or bloody dictatorships. In Syria, the revolution was not only transformed into a civil war, it was also transformed into a world war in the sense that the great imperialist powers intervened concurrently, each choosing a side in the civil war and clashing with each other more and more violently. These powers then began to pursue such a policy in each conflict, thus pushing towards a new war, the one in Ukraine, which followed the transformation of the Ukrainian revolution into a civil war and this war continues to this day. And the situation in Israel/Palestine is still of the same type. At the beginning, there was the rise of revolts and revolutions, on the Palestinian side, against both the Israeli and Palestinian ruling classes, then there was the armed action of the possessing classes and their allies to transform this situation into a military confrontation which became more and more barbaric and has not ceased.

The world is once again divided into two imperialist blocs, one around the USA and the other around Russia/China, and these two groups threaten in every region of the world to transform any local uprising into a massive military confrontation with increasingly barbaric massacres.

The global system has entered a war economy where ever-increasing funds are being devoted to the production of weapons of mass destruction, with each side striving to create machines of destruction, each more terrifying than the last.

The possessing classes, far from recognizing that all this was only the product of the necrophiliac stage of their system, are quick to blame any other cause, notably Islamism on the one hand and... carbon dioxide CO2 on the other ! But neither caused the global economic collapse of 2007, nor the pandemic, nor the division of the entire planet into two imperialist blocs. Neither side claims to be Islamic. Neither supports the growth of carbon dioxide. This is just nonsense to hide the fact that the system has reached its limits and that it will now only be able to throw us from one horror to another. There is no more terrorist crisis than there is a health crisis, a climate crisis, or even a migration crisis, but only one definitive crisis, the one that signals the final days of capitalism coming to an end.

For the revolutionary proletariat, there is no question of falling into all these traps. Reformist organizations completely tied to the system and to capitalist states (and their opportunistic followers) completely refuse to respond to the situations created by the fall of the system. They refrain from giving any interpretation other than that of the propertied classes. They thus push the workers into the trap set for them. There is no question for them of uniting workers, nationals and immigrants alike, no question of combating the war economy and political and financial investment in ongoing wars, no question of denouncing the so-called "economic aid" and other "bailouts" using public funds and the resulting destruction of public services (notably that of public health). Even less is there a question of linking all these attacks together to enable a proletarian response.

Reformist organizations (followed by their opportunistic lapdogs, such as fake ecologists or fake far-lefts) have been careful not to support the wave of revolts and revolutions that has swept across the world, to take advantage of it to rebuild proletarian internationalism, showing that the same struggle concerns all the working peoples of the world, breaking the propaganda of the direct adversaries of these uprisings, the imperialist rulers. They have been careful not to unmask those truly responsible for these killings, nor to denounce both the anti-Islamists and the terrorists cloaked in Islam. They are careful not to denounce both imperialist camps equally. Just as they are careful not to link all these completely new events in history to a deadly phase of capitalism. They speak only of a "serious crisis," as if they were content with the term "serious illness" at the bedside of a person in the final stages and in palliative care.

E- But to only worry about a future revolution is to do nothing while waiting for it to happen ?

Not at all ! It’s about dealing with our current struggles, but differently from the reformists, almost in reverse. When the reformists refuse to put forward political demands, the revolutionaries campaign for them. When the reformists refuse to put forward objectives that allow the struggle to be extended, the revolutionaries do so. When the reformists mortally combat any form of workers’ self-organization, the revolutionaries defend them all, without rejecting any of them, because they have no religion for soviets or factory councils or any other form of organization as long as it allows the workers en masse to decide for themselves without being the reformists’ lapdogs.

Revolutionary communists do not tell anyone to wait for some "great evening," or "a D-day," or "a zero hour." They do not denigrate current struggles in the name of the future greatness of revolutionary struggles to come.

On the contrary, they say that it is the current struggles that are preparing the revolutionary struggles of tomorrow and the ability of workers to organize themselves in order to become capable of leading the whole of society tomorrow.

To achieve this, it is essential from now on that the largest possible fraction (but tiny minorities are better than none) be educated about the revolutionary perspectives of the proletariat and know how to defend them from now on in the struggles, by building militant networks, by questioning the domination of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the reformists and the opportunists at their expense, by proposing in the struggles and strikes small and large committees, councils, decision-making assemblies, elections of elected and revocable delegates, propose to train them and federate them at all levels, raise everywhere the level of consciousness of the workers, combat the reformist, pro-imperialist, conciliatory, collaborationist state of mind, and lead the workers to question submission to the capitalist State and to the class law of the system of exploitation.

This requires that revolutionary activists put forward demands during the struggle that break with reformism without detaching themselves from the aspirations of the workers at the level they are at.

These demands, which prepare for the revolutionary situation, while taking into account the fact that we are not there yet, are called transitional demands, in transition between social calm and revolution.

F- It would require a socialist revolution that would act simultaneously on an international scale, which is impossible.

It is precisely one of the products of the influence of reformists within the working class and of those who believe they are militating alongside it that they have implanted the big lie according to which the antisocial attacks that strike on a national scale are not the product of the international situation of the capitalists, of the state of the world system, but of the harmful action of this or that national government that these reformists denounce, just to make us believe that if they governed all these misfortunes would not happen. They want us to believe in a national political and social reality that would not depend directly on the global reality of the capitalist system ! An imbecility that would not even deserve to be fought because it is so ridiculous, if they had not made it the thesis of all the unions and all the left-wing parties, in no way fought by the opportunists of the false extreme left who only mobilize in the name of this or that government accused of all the evils, while waiting to do the same to his successor. Their refrain is that it’s all their fault... and all they have to do is fill in the blanks with the names of Macron, Biden, Modi, or this or that government. This prevents the class struggle from being fought over fundamental social objectives and also from taking on its natural character... that is, international !

This desire not to seek to understand, and to let the working class understand, the problems of the capitalists, of their economic system and also of the capitalist states, leads the workers to think in terms of purely economic demands and also to not know at all the analysis of the state of the system which is however the foundation of any class struggle which is considered, thought out and therefore leads to methods of action, objectives and perspectives which can lead to successes and even to victory.

For the revolutionary workers’ program, the starting point of any proletarian policy must be the analysis of the crisis of capitalism because its consequences are decisive for the struggles of the working class and its potential, and also for the methods that only lead... to a wall !

The collapse of the capitalist system is driving any reformist struggle into a wall, and that is precisely what the reformists, these false friends of the workers, want to hide... This explains why, in a critical period for capitalism, the reformists are more attached to it than ever and fight revolutionaries more violently than ever, hunting them down in trade union and political organizations, calling them all sorts of names, from madmen to ignoramuses, barbarians, conspiracy theorists and fascists.

As for an internationalist vision of the social crisis and consequently of the class struggle, it should certainly not be expected from the reformists and their reformist followers, including the pseudo-extreme left.

Well, yes, it is not the international proletarian revolution that is a utopia, it is the maintenance in power of world capitalism !
A PROGRAM OF ACTION LINKING IMMEDIATE DEMANDS AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION TO THE SEIZURE OF POWER BY THE PROLETARIAT ALLIED WITH THE WORKING PEOPLE !

Quote from Leon Trotsky, in "Program of Action of the Communist League (Trotskyist)" :

"Our program of action is intended to be that of the proletariat leading the other working classes of the nation from the struggle for their immediate demands to those for the establishment of workers’ and peasants’ power. It contains broad general slogans for the realization of which the mobilization of workers in towns and countryside can and must be carried out : workers’ and peasants’ control, large-scale nationalizations, measures for the defense of the poor peasantry, soldiers’ rights, etc. But for each of these demands, it provides the means to fight for their realization : the organization of the interested classes into committees (factory committees, peasants’ committees, soldiers’ committees, etc.) in which the initiative of the workers in struggle would be aroused and developed. This cannot only be workers registered in parties and unions, but the broadest masses, thus constituting, through the Workers’ Alliance, in a vast network of committees, the true representation of the workers not waiting for manna from above, but carrying out their demands. We are not saying to the workers : here is an excellent plan, trust us ; we are saying to them : here are solutions to get out of the quagmire ; here are the methods on which you must unite and which you must use to achieve it. Because the present situation can only offer a favorable outcome to the workers if they take their cause, their interests in hand and defend them ardently… Let’s get to work to form a factory committee in my company.

Quote from Leon Trotsky in his "Transitional Program" :

“The strategic task of the next period—the pre-revolutionary period of agitation, propaganda, and organization—consists of overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective conditions of the revolution and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (dismay and discouragement of the older generation, inexperience of the younger generation). The masses must be helped, in the process of their daily struggles, to find the bridge between their current demands and the program of the socialist revolution. This bridge must consist of a system of TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS, starting from the current conditions and the current consciousness of broad layers of the working class and leading invariably to one and the same conclusion : the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

Far from leaving the struggle for demands in the hands of the reformists, the communist program, with the help of its transitional demands, aims to bring it onto the revolutionary political terrain by constantly making the link between the economic, social and political necessities of the moment and the increasingly pressing need to establish organs of proletarian power, the soviets, and their seizure of power over the State and all of society by expelling the exploiters...

The program of action that revolutionary communists must propose to the working class has an extremely simple and decisive goal : to break the law that governs current society, which is the law of profit based on the exploitation of human labor and the private ownership of the means of production, also known as capitalism. This law is neither a law of nature, nor a human law, nor a law based on the common agreement of the inhabitants. It is presented as a general law of any economy, as a law of the nation, as a law of the Republic, as a law of all citizens, as a collective interest of the entire population. This law decrees that private ownership of capital, factories, banks, insurance companies, and finance is untouchable regardless of the crimes committed by its owners. And this law allows the rights of the vast majority of the population to be trampled underfoot, both within a country and outside it. A capitalist does what he wants with his capital. He has the right to withdraw it from a company to close it down. He has the right to demand that employees work more by paying them less under penalty of being fired. He has the right to sell the company to whomever he wants and whenever he wants. He has the right to destroy the lives of his employees, by exerting crazy moral pressure through his management, to move them, to threaten them, to fire them. He thus has the right to break up entire families, regions, sectors of activity by throwing employees into the street, by ruining them, by making them lose housing, health, children’s education, access to gas, electricity, telephone, bank account, etc. He can completely destroy the lives of millions of proletarian families. In the USA itself, families who were not miserable to begin with lost their homes and found themselves on the streets. In Greece, we have seen how far this can go, to the point of completely destroying society, removing all security for people who had nationality, qualifications and employment. The illusion that capitalist society would continue to develop its economy and well-being forever is irretrievably collapsing.

The aim of the program of action proposed by revolutionary communist militants must be to consciously make the complete destruction of this law which is the foundation of capitalism indispensable. Obviously, there can be no question of convincing anyone whose interests are attached to the bourgeois order, bourgeois parties, reformist parties, bourgeois unions, reformist unions, including the left of the bourgeois left and not even the extreme left organizations which would consider that their interests are attached to elections and union apparatuses, themselves invariably attached to the bourgeois order.

The aim of the working class’s program of action must be to start from the immediate needs of the working class and to link them by indestructible bonds to the destruction of the law of capital. It is therefore a matter of showing the necessity of breaking the law of capital, of showing its possibility, of demonstrating its inevitability and its vital character for the working class. Not to destroy the law of capital, in the present circumstances, is to allow it not only to exploit us, to rob us, but also to destroy us morally and physically, beginning by demolishing our morale, at the individual and collective levels.

A- Destroy bourgeois law, in other words the law of Capital and labor !

It is based on an observation : the State, the Republic, the nation, the institutions, justice, taxes, the police, the armed forces, the administration are in no way at the service of the community, are in no way products of the democratic decision of the population but at the exclusive service of big capital. To be convinced of this, it is enough to see that the State has been able since the 2007 crisis to take hundreds of billions of euros out of its coffers to help banks, trusts, insurance companies, financiers and the stock markets and, on the other hand, it no longer has even a penny for pensions, social security, the unemployed, health, education, transport, public services...

For the law of capital, the worker doesn’t count, the unemployed doesn’t count, the pensioner doesn’t count, the small craftsman, the small fisherman, the small farmer, the very small rentier doesn’t count either. We can throw them out on the street. We can liquidate them. We can close their bank accounts. If they protest, we send the police. We can take away their right to housing, to housing their families, to feed them, to educate their children. We can reduce them to begging. And this on the scale of entire peoples. Those who are not yet convinced will become convinced very quickly. If they protest, they will then see that any protest is considered an attack on the law. We can beat them, club them, arrest them, accuse them of all crimes. Any demand, however minimal, therefore inevitably attacks the law of capital.

As for capital itself, it is religiously protected by the law. Even if it has committed every possible and imaginable crime, including crimes against the bourgeois state, against the currency, against systemic stability, including crimes against the viability and very future of capitalism. We just saw this with the 2007-2008 crisis. All the financiers whose risky operations brought down the system were not subjected to any serious investigation and did not have to pay. Not only were they not worried, but they were spared the consequences of their actions. They speculated wildly and did not have to pay. And this is because a law was enacted during the crisis : "all big capital cannot fall." At the cost of trillions of dollars, all the major companies, all the major banks, all the major insurance companies were saved from bankruptcy, and it was the states and central banks that paid the bill, that covered the holes, that prevented the bankruptcies, in the name of safeguarding the global system. They bought up companies, provided masses of capital for free, not only loaned but given. And they did this at the risk of completely ruining themselves, of disarming the bourgeois state itself. They also bought up the rotten securities produced by private owners of capital, and they continue to buy them up. And big capital continues to produce them at a rapid pace. We do not want to complain here about a drift of the state, a misuse of the law, the nation, or the Republic, but, on the contrary, to underline their inevitable functioning under capitalism.

For capitalism, only the worker who claims to keep his job when the boss fires him, who claims to stay in his company when the boss closes it, who claims to keep his home when he is evicted, who claims to keep his bank account when the bank closes it, who claims to have the right to medical care when he cannot afford it, the unemployed person who claims to eat, not sleep on the streets, to get medical care, to study, the retired person who claims to live or survive, etc. is criminal in the name of the law in power.

We cannot appeal to the same law as capitalists ! We cannot appeal to the same state as capitalists ! We cannot appeal to the same justice as capitalists !

We cannot continue to believe that capitalists will end up saving our jobs, saving businesses, saving the economy, saving society, saving countries, saving people. We must finally convince ourselves that, on the contrary, they will try to put us through the wringer. They are certainly doing this gradually, pretending to seek to protect us, to spare us unemployment and poverty. But they are constantly moving towards this objective and, above all, towards that of destroying our physical, moral, social and political capacity to react in a class sense.

B- The class politics of the proletariat is the opposite of the class collaborationist policies of the political and governmental left, trade unions and the extreme left !

A class reaction of the proletariat means several things :

No negotiation with the bourgeoisie, no search for agreements, no attempts at "solutions" with buyers, sacrifices in exchange for job guarantees, no attempt at bargaining to reduce, so-called, the sacrifices.

No search for employee-employer-state agreements which supposedly benefit employment and the company

No so-called national solution, that is to say where bosses and workers of the same country would claim to have the same interests.

No economic plans : the question facing workers is not how to solve economic problems. If the bourgeoisie is incapable of making its system work, neither are we ! If the bourgeoisie is only capable of filling its coffers, crisis or no crisis, it is up to us to do the same and only defend our wages…
No call for intervention by the State and the government that makes it a supposed neutral intermediary between the classes
No purely economic demands, political objectives

No promotion of separate interests of workers based on professions, sectors of activity, divisions desired by the bourgeoisie (by nation, by professional category, between men and women, young and old, between employees and unemployed, between nationals and immigrants, with or without papers, etc.)

A class policy is internationalist, based on class struggle, without any attempt to find an understanding between opposing classes...

C- The proletariat must put itself at the head of all the struggles of the working people and become the leading wing of the socialist revolution !

But a proletarian policy in no way means that workers only make demands for themselves. It means that workers stand as candidates to provide solutions for the entire population, for the whole of society. They affirm that social rights must replace the rights of capital, completely and in all areas of social life. This concerns all popular classes, not just the working class. It is a program that also addresses the middle social classes threatened or hit by the crisis. To all these classes, the proletariat affirms that it will defend them against big capital, against the banks, against the trusts, against the usurers, against debt, against the bourgeois state. But for this to happen, the middle classes must choose to break with bourgeois society and switch to the camp of the proletariat.

To do this, the proletariat must show that it is the leader of the protest against bourgeois society, by breaking with all union policies that assert the opposite. Even when the unions talk about struggle, they demand state aid, government aid, to find good bosses, to save industry, to save the country, to save jobs. Thus, they develop a program diametrically opposed to the program of action that is necessary for the working class to become the pole of protest against the system. They develop an economic discourse as if it were only necessary to find good economic solutions to resolve the system’s problems. They contribute to making people believe that the system will pull through and that this is the condition for the proletarians and the people to pull through. They also develop a nationalist discourse that is criminal in the situation because it delivers the workers to the extreme nationalists, the fascists...

No more admitting that a boss declares that the company’s coffers are empty. We must draw from our personal income and assets. No more admitting that a boss tells us there is no more work. Work or not, it is a matter of choice for big capital based on profitability. It is not our problem. We demand, in all cases, to be paid. No more unpaid unemployment benefits. No more electricity cut off, telephone disconnected, credit cut off, account closed, jobs eliminated. When a capitalist, a banker, an insurance company is in difficulty, society finds billions to save them. Let’s impose that the same be true when it comes to workers.

We must also put an end to the logic of the leadership of the trade unions who beg for small compromises, sign counter-reforms, divide the struggles, abandon them along the way and organize days of action with no follow-up.

We must unite precarious workers, the unemployed and those who have jobs, public and private sector workers, automotive workers and those in the audiovisual sector, those in research and those in construction, those in education and those in department stores. It is up to us to defend our future. No one will do it for us ! It is not about each of us defending our own company but about collectively defending the fate of the working class.

D- The leadership of the struggles : the proletariat and working people must lead their own struggles without entrusting them to political and trade union apparatuses linked to the States and the exploiters !

The workers, if they do not want to suffer the full force of unemployment, poverty, and also dictatorships and wars, inevitable consequences of the crisis, just as fascism and the world war were consequences of the 1929 crisis, must lead their own struggles today and will have to lead society tomorrow. As long as they allow themselves to be led by the trade unions, they cannot appear to be the social force capable of supplanting the capitalist system because the unions are institutions that are part of the system even when the militants of these unions are not aware of it or do not want to be. Of course, we do not consider trade union militants as enemies but as workers like any other, to be convinced like any other, as reformist as other workers, as marked by the law of the system as other workers. As long as the workers do not begin to break the moral chain that binds them to capitalism, we revolutionaries will not carry the majority of trade union militants along with us. Breaking the chain of capitalism requires first that workers believe that the imminent catastrophe implies that they are ready to come together, to assemble to talk about the situation, to freely exchange opinions on it, on the means to face it, to fight, on the demands as well as on the means of action. The demands and the means of action that revolutionaries propose are intended to be proposed first and foremost in these workers’ assemblies and not only in the unions where the entire union apparatus is intended to torpedo them in advance, to prevent them even from being disseminated and discussed. Even in the assemblies, the bureaucratic apparatus will seek to silence the voice of revolutionary militants, but the assembly can decide that it still wants to listen to them and can impose this on the bureaucrats.

Establish, wherever anger rises among the working people, assemblies with decision-making powers, electing delegates and bringing them together in committees and councils to develop programs, strategies, methods of action, drafting leaflets, speeches, posters, websites and other means of propaganda and intervention and as soon as possible, federating these grassroots organizations of the working people and, if possible, linking them with those of other countries. Ensure that each struggle on a particular issue allows for linking with other struggles and putting forward the overall program.

E- Some will say : we, workers, will never be able to govern the whole of society by ourselves.

This is what we often hear from the working class : "We don’t have the skills, we don’t know how to make the whole economy and society work." Those who say this are victims of the lack of opportunity for workers to discuss and decide collectively on issues concerning fundamental questions of society, even in societies that call themselves democratic.

The capitalists and all their political and social, governmental, or media supporters, of course, have no desire for workers to discuss and decide politically. On the contrary, they do everything to make workers think that, in every general political or social question, they understand nothing. By having no real element of information and collective discussion, workers are unlikely to develop their own ideas and confront them with reality. Another fundamental element works against workers, preventing them from becoming aware of their capacities : the fact that the organizations that lead the struggles do not want workers to organize decision-making assemblies (they vote on all orientation of their strikes and demonstrations, slogans, method of action, perspectives), electing elected and revocable strike committees, independent of the union and political apparatuses, independent of the employers and the capitalist government. The reformists fight first against these attempts at self-organization of workers and against the activists who try to defend them in strikes and other struggles.

However, many workers will say, do you need skills to run the company ?

Indeed, and precisely, it is the capitalists who lack these skills, not the workers ! These skills are possessed by employees, in every field. As long as they do not act collectively, by directing themselves, employees do not feel they have this knowledge, but collectively, they are the ones who possess it. The ruling classes only have it because the workers obey them. But even a president who claims to have nuclear weapons doesn’t even know if his atomic suitcase is connected or how. Ministers who move from Education to Health often know no more in one field than in the other. Generals lead armies, but they often do not even know the technical means of these armies. It is the workers, from the manual worker to the technician and engineer, who have the technical and scientific knowledge, including researchers who are also employees. The capitalist class is not selected by its intellectual skills but by the possession of capital and means of production, inherited from parents and grandparents, or by rapid fortunes made through speculative or even productive investments, but this requires more financial skills than scientific and technical ones.

As for the social choices that the overall management of society requires, capitalists have the skills to impose their particular interests, which are diametrically opposed to those of the vast majority of the population, and to make people believe the opposite, but they are incompetent to concern themselves with the needs of the population.

When it comes to political choices, reformists present capitalist democracy, in which this tiny minority of owners of big capital dictates its law, as the ultimate in democracy and claim that the rejection of this unacceptable political order would be antidemocratic, that it would be a "communist dictatorship" ! But they forget to say that, under capitalist democracy, their democratic pretensions do not extend to having the population elect the main functions of society : the bosses and leaders of society’s main institutions. The only office that is eligible is that of President of the Republic. And the only ones who can apply for it are first sorted by bourgeois society. The only ones who have access to the major media too. Not surprisingly, it is the large capitalist groups that own the media just as they hold the links with the major institutions of society, the national bank, private banks, private, public, and semi-private companies.

Left-wing and union leaders are hiding all this and pretending that "good elections" could change this social order, and this is a complete lie. Only the establishment of elections for workers’ delegates in assemblies in which workers impose their own decisions and do not allow themselves to be manipulated by political and union reformists can achieve true democracy and impose it within a state that is a workers’ power. Certainly, this would not be democracy for the capitalists, but they are less than one percent of society and do not act at all in the interests of humanity !

Strike Committees, Factory Committees, Soviets (Revolutionary Communes) and workers’ government : To the dictatorship of capital over society let us impose the dictatorship of the labor of the revolutionary proletariat

F- The question of power was posed from the start by the revolutionary and socialist movement

Complete emancipation means governing oneself directly. But to govern themselves in the future, the people must begin by directly governing their struggles, and this begins with the establishment of strike committees in businesses and in their places of residence. These committees are the embryos of the future self-government of the people by electing a leadership of the struggle that is responsible and revocable before the people’s struggle assemblies. Their coordination will then be the premise of new Revolutionary Communes like the Communes of Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and Bordeaux in 1871, the last great revolutionary insurrection of the People in France and the first government of the poor, the oppressed, and the exploited. And like Fernand Pelloutier, founder of the Bourses du travail, we believe that the task of trade unionism is "to accustom (the working people) to do without a government. (It) must therefore advise, instruct, but not lead."
The proletariat will not miraculously move from its adaptation to the system of exploitation to its revolutionary and communist role. It needs steps forward. The formation of soviets is a step, but it does not mean that revolutionary ideas have necessarily triumphed to the end. But soviets, or any form of mass political self-organization, are an indispensable element. It is from these workers’ councils that the working class can begin to control not only the economy but also forge links among the petty bourgeois layers, challenging the monopoly of state forces. It is these soviets that can build an embryonic state that develops in the face of the bourgeois state, before consciously aiming to overthrow and destroy it from top to bottom by placing the revolutionary proletariat as the sole force holding state power. As long as this perspective is not mapped out, any revolution can turn against its authors and the revolutionary role of the proletariat can end in failure.
A PROGRAM OF ACTION AGAINST THE HIGH COST OF LIVING, POVERTY AND WAR !

What we no longer want : private interest at the expense of public interest and the entire social organization geared to the benefit of the tiny minority of owners of big capital.

1°) We reject poverty, inequality, precarious jobs with barely paid wages, difficult ends of the month, not being able to eat enough while tons of food are destroyed, medical care, housing, having our electricity or gas cut off, or even being evicted...!

2) We no longer want private ownership of the means of production (capital and businesses) which allows the owner to close a factory, to fire one or a thousand employees, to impose his wages, his working conditions, his workloads, his thousand and one wishes as well as those of the management he imposes and his development choices.

3) We no longer want the state of great fortunes to serve exclusively those who own capital, through the corruption of politicians and administrative leaders. We no longer want great fortunes to hold all the major media, ideological, religious, moral, informational, and youth education power, military, police, judicial, administrative, or public service power, as well as power over the entire economy.

4) We no longer want public money to serve private interests. It must be prohibited to distribute public funds to banks and trusts, large private companies and insurance companies, stock exchanges and financiers, etc.

5) We no longer want the capitalist order which is based on the patriarchal order and the oppression of women.

6) We no longer want laws and constitutions that favor capitalists against the working people, making injustice reign by defending private ownership of the means of production of the great fortunes (land, businesses, factories, housing, etc.)

7) We therefore want all wealth to belong to the working people and all state power to be subject to the working people organized into committees and assemblies.

What we want : to prioritize the public interest of all over the private interest of a minority of ultra-rich owners of capital, means of production, land, energy, etc.

Against big capital :

The expropriation of billionaires and the richest 10% !

The removal of all links between exploiters and the state

Any corruption of state personnel by owners of capital is considered a crime.

The placing under the direct control and permanent direction of workers’ councils of every large company, bank and financial institution.

Against fraud by the richest and large companies :

Tax fraud has been institutionalized by the wealthy and their servants. Their entire economy is based on legalized exploitation and widespread fraud. To hide this fraud from the public, the wealthy and large corporations hide behind commercial and banking secrecy and tax havens.

The $30 billion in tax evasion is hidden behind trade secrecy ! The capitalist economy is based on widespread fraud and legalized exploitation for the benefit of a handful of people and their minions.

Let us impose :

The abolition of trade secrets

The opening of the books of companies and banks to prevent any tax evasion under the control of workers’ committees in the sector

Collectivization of the banking system to control what is done with the money !

Cancellation of debt (workers do not have to pay it) and of household and small business debt !

Economic measures :

The opening of account books
The abolition of commercial secrecy
For public services under workers’ control !
Expropriation of banks, credit companies, large groups
The collectivization of the economy

Against the high cost of living and poverty :

The community ensures that all those who live from their work (workers, farmers, artisans, small traders, young people, women, etc.) or are unemployed or retired have at least a sufficient income to live on, indexed to inflation.
Immediate increase of all salaries by 300 euros net ! No salary and no income less than 2000 euros/net per month ! Indexed to inflation !
Abolition of taxes on salaries (CSG, CRDS...) and all indirect taxes.
Progressive income tax from 4000 euros net/month.
Tax on wealth, assets (from 400,000 euros).
Sliding scale of salaries and sliding scale of working hours !
Equal pay for both sexes.
Sliding scale of salaries and price monitoring committees.

But this is not enough to defend all working people.

“The peasant, the artisan, the small tradesman, unlike the worker, the employee, the minor civil servant, cannot demand a wage increase parallel to the increase in prices. The official bureaucratic struggle against the high cost of living only serves to deceive the masses. The peasants, artisans, and traders, however, as consumers, must actively interfere, hand in hand with the workers, in price policy. To the capitalists’ lamentations about the costs of production, transport, and trade, the consumers will reply : “Show us your books ; we demand control over price policy.” The organs of this control must be PRICE SUPERVISION COMMITTEES, composed of delegates from factories, trade unions, cooperatives, organizations of farmers, city “little people,” housewives, etc. In this way, the workers will be able to show the peasants that the cause of high prices lies not in high wages, but in the excessive profits of the capitalists and in the hidden costs of capitalist anarchy." (Leon Trotsky, "The Transitional Program")

Against unemployment : Worker hiring office

We will not tolerate the transformation of a growing portion of the population into unemployed or destitute people living on the scraps of a decaying society. Available work must be distributed among all existing workers, and this distribution must determine the length of the workweek. The average wage of each worker remains the same as with the old workweek !
We must :

Impose workers’ control over production through committees !
Control the immediate hiring of staff in both the private and public sectors.
Reduce working hours until unemployment is eliminated and eliminate unnecessary (or harmful) work !
Control the accounting books of large companies, banks, financial institutions and the State.
Control production costs.

On the pension issue : Let’s control and manage our pension funds ! Down with co-management of pension funds ! Down with pension funds, even public ones, managed by unions !

Whether it’s funded or pay-as-you-go pensions, workers often have to contribute despite increasingly low wages. And this is unacceptable ! Here’s how the labor and socialist movement posed the pension issue from a revolutionary perspective !

JULES GUESDE AND LAFARGUE AGAINST THE WORKERS’ CONTRIBUTION

A part of the socialist and trade union movement at the time of the vote on the pension law in 1910 denounced "the levy on workers’ salaries" :

It "aggravates the misery of workers, makes the burden of the day more difficult for workers and reduces already insufficient family resources." The workers’ levy constitutes "an extension and aggravation of the exploitation of employers. The employer takes as much as he can from the product of workers’ work (a maximum of profit, dividends, profits), and (the) public authorities (add) a new levy to the levy already made : (doubling) the employers’ theft with a legislative theft. (...) Socialism essentially consists of putting an end to the levy made on the product of each day’s work by employers (...). Accepting that deductions from wages are requested as a means of warding off illness and old age (...) cannot be accepted by a socialist. The salary is barely sufficient for the employee’s daily needs ; forcing him to not lack everything at an age he is no less certain to reach, forcing him to deprive himself during his working life and to deprive his family of the bare necessities, is not improving his condition, but worsening it.

Jules Guesde (member of the French Workers’ Party) in the Chamber of Deputies, session of March 31, 1910.

The same Jules Guesde wrote : "It is the employer, the one who profits from work, who has the obligation to anticipate and provide for the bad and old days of workers."

"Pension funding was to be taken from the inheritance of capitalists who at the time already owned "more than half of the national wealth, which their members acquired by eating, lusting and sleeping. The inheritance tax would only affect parasites who were as harmful as they were useless." (Paul Lafargue (French socialist of the French Workers’ Party, 1842-1911).

For pensions, as for social security or public services, for example, it is not up to the working people to pay through taxes, levies or contributions to finance their needs, while it is we who produce all the wealth, but to the capitalists who steal the fruits of our labor.

Pension funding must come exclusively from profits and wealth generated by the exploitation of labor !

The exclusion of employer and state representatives from all funds (pensions, health, unemployment) ! It’s our money ! It’s up to us to manage it directly !

The unions must leave the COR but also all the institutions of capital such as the CESE which is at the origin of numerous reports, notably against the SNCF.

Workers’ control over production through committees responsible to workers’ general meetings.

On the question of health :

 End of private hospitals and liberal professions !
 Opening of public beds and hospitals
 Social security that reimburses everything 100% ! End of private mutual insurance
 Training of health personnel ! Taking over training by the community
 Expropriation of pharmaceutical laboratories ! Workers’ control !
 
On the question of housing :

Prohibition on denying anyone the right to decent housing at a decent price
No to evictions !
Empty housing must be made available to the homeless under the control of workers’ councils.
Requisition and Collectivization of non-residential housing (maximum one second home)
On the question of schools :

Committees of teachers, students, and parents monitor the proper functioning of education alongside workers’ committees and working people’s councils.
The content of education must no longer be used to justify inequality, exploitation, imperialism, dictatorships, wars, and other social crimes.
Schools, like all public services, are placed under the control of branch workers’ committees and working people’s committees !

On the issue of immigration :

Publicly combat hatred of immigrants and all those who spread it
Eliminate all opposition between nationals and foreigners
Unite the peoples against imperialist domination, the peoples of the imperialist countries supporting all efforts of the oppressed countries to free themselves
Eliminate the exploitation of the countries oppressed by imperialism and the big trusts and return the wealth to the people
Eliminate all fascist legislation that arouses hatred between peoples and that authorizes rich countries to kill migrants at their borders
Anyone who lives from their work has the right to live in the country of their choice.

Against war and the fascisation of society :

The disarmament of the capitalist class and the arming of the proletariat
The rejection and denunciation of the extreme right, whether pro- or anti-Islamist, whether religious or supposedly secular
The rejection of the two imperialist blocs and their pretexts for war
The international union of proletarians
More than ever, proletarians, we have no capitalist homeland to defend, no capitalist economy to protect, only chains to break and bring down !

Economic planning to meet the needs of the people

The people must direct the economy and production according to their basic needs. This direction imposes popular control over production. In all sectors of activity, we must establish committees at all levels of production. This control must prepare us to directly direct the nationalized economy through workers’ committees in businesses and factories, establishing collective ownership of the means of production by the people. Planning, responding to the needs of the people, will avoid the plundering of natural resources and the blind overproduction of goods linked to competition and the anarchy of capitalist production, which sometimes leads to wars. The development of the economy will no longer have profit as its objective, but the well-being of the people.

The expropriation of large capitalist groups

We must expropriate all the large groups that steal public aid in the name of defending employment while they have laid off or eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs. The same goes for the polluters !
Expropriation and nationalization can only be done under these conditions :
We refuse the buyout
We link the problem of expropriation to that of the power of the working people.
The expropriation of private banks and the collectivization of the credit system
In our society, finance capital dominates. The banks concentrate in their hands the real command of the economy. It is impossible to take a single serious step in the fight against the despotism of the monopolies if we leave the levers of control of the banks in the hands of the capitalists.
To achieve a single system of investment and credit that meets the interests of the entire people, we must merge all the banks into a single national institution. Only the expropriation of private banks will provide us with the investment and means necessary to organize economic life according to our needs.
The expropriation of banks in no way means the expropriation of small bank deposits. On the contrary : for small depositors, COLLECTIVIZED BANKING will be able to create more favorable conditions for farmers, artisans, and small traders, preferential, i.e., cheap, credit conditions.
However, BANKING COLLECTIVIZATION will only yield these favorable results if state power itself passes entirely from the hands of the exploiters to the hands of the people.
In conclusion
, the wealthy and their advocates (government, state, media) will demonstrate the "impossibility of realizing" our demands. Smaller capitalists, especially those marching toward ruin, will also invoke their account books. We will categorically reject these arguments and references. It is a matter of preserving the people from decline, demoralization, and ruin.
It is a matter of the life and death of the people and, by the same token, of the future of humanity. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying our demands, which inevitably arise from the evils it has itself engendered, let it perish ! The "possibility" or "impossibility" of realizing the demands is, in the present case, a question of the balance of power, which can only be resolved by struggle. On the basis of this struggle, whatever our immediate practical successes, the people will understand better than anyone the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
THE MEASURE THAT IS THE GUARANTEE OF ALL PRECEDING MEASURES IS THE STRUGGLE FOR THE FORMATION, FEDERATION, AND AWARENESS OF THEIR HISTORIC ROLE OF THE FACTORY COUNCILS AND SOVIETS AND THE ALLIANCE OF THE WORKING PEOPLE (BETWEEN THE PROLETARIAT AND THE PETTY BOURGEOISIE WHO LIVE FROM THEIR LABOR).