What We, The Workers people, Want : All Power And All The Whealth

What is our demand ? We want... EVERYTHING ! What democratic reform ? We want all the power ! Wealth and power belong to the working people, the billionaires and their State have stolen them from us, we are only taking them back ! Their police and their army do not defend us : they only serve the financiers ! Let’s tear down all the barriers that prevent us from expressing ourselves, from existing, from living and from deciding !!!

Some good minds find it demagogic to question the "rule of law", to present elective democracy as the state of billionaires, to denounce the lies of the democratic system, to attack the police (that of bankers and trusts), to denounce senior civil servants, to question the links between profiteers and politicians...

They find it just as demagogic to call on the poorest to unite to fight against the bandits who organize the theft of all wealth and have the support of all governments, whatever their political color.

For them, any agreement between the exploited and oppressed against their exploiters and oppressors can only be demagogy !!!

Well, it is on this basis that the Yellow Vests have openly established their movement and that it continues without changing direction....

"He who drives is the one who doesn’t eat !" proclaims a Yellow Vest banner, reminding us that those who are so angry that they don’t fear police repression with flash balls and grenades to break through the encirclement, by armored vehicles and horse-mounted charges, are those who are at the point where they can no longer feed themselves and provide a living for their families, and those who are threatened with falling into poverty, as well as those who support this fight of the most deprived ! The common point of the Yellow Vests, who come from the most diverse sociological, ideological and political backgrounds, is : "Enough of the poverty that coexists with insolent wealth ! Enough of a State that serves the richest and is against the poor !"

This is the foundation of the Yellow Vest movement, this is the point of convergence of this struggle : those who live only from their work no longer want to die from it !

In the true sense of the term, it is a proletarian uprising, even if some are described by sociologists as liberal professionals or small entrepreneurs. These are not the people Macron is defending, even if he proclaims himself a defender of liberalism and a protector of small businesses.

The fact that so-called "petty bourgeois" are fighting alongside employees and the unemployed demonstrates above all that the world that lives only from its work has united in the struggle. Yellow Vests proclaim themselves the new beggars, the new wretches, the new sans culottes, the new bare arms of the new French revolution !!!

And what the insurrection of the new demolishers of the bastilles of the wealthy wants is to destroy everything that destroys us, everything that suffocates us, everything that strangles us, everything that steals from us, everything that imprisons us, everything and not a small part.

Even though some yellow vests sometimes had the illusion that partial demands would be met, it quickly became clear that this was just a deceitful stance by the power of billionaires who have no intention of easily releasing money from their safes. It should be noted that the State is careful not to ask the propertied classes to pay and even distributes much more money to the capitalists, supposedly hit by our movement’s profits, than it gives, in a temporary form, to the most deprived !!!

This does not mean that he is not retreating ! He is retreating, and how, but by trying to save what is essential, and also appearances ! He certainly does not want to encourage the insurrection by showing his panic and that of the propertied classes. He certainly does not want, by giving in too quickly and openly, to encourage the entire working class to erupt !

The government, which had declared that it would not back down, even in the face of struggle, even in the face of the gathering of discontented people whom it called lazy, is backing down on fuel taxation (waiving the fuel tax, freezing measures on diesel, gasoline, the carbon tax) and gas taxation, backing down on vehicle technical inspections and the heavy goods vehicle tax sticker, and imposing a moratorium on the price of electricity. It is increasing the activity bonus. It is backing down on ambulance workers. It is giving bonuses to railway workers or employees of nursing homes while pretending that it is not out of fear that these categories are joining the Yellow Vests !!! The mere fact of insisting on saying this... speaks volumes in the opposite direction !!! The government is also delaying the timetable for other ongoing reforms, such as the ordinances on the food law. Others could still be abandoned, such as the property wealth tax. It is thus delaying constitutional reform...

And above all, the government is delaying the main attack which should already have been implemented : pension reform !!!

All these setbacks in no way mean that the State has ceased to be entirely at the service of profiteers and exploiters. It retreats as little as possible while remaining entirely at the service of the tiny minority of owners of big capital. Although the Japanese justice system accuses Renault CEO Ghosn of no longer paying his taxes in the country, the French government continues to cover up for this great international thief. In the midst of the Yellow Vest movement, Ghosn’s case is quite symbolic ! We claim to tax the poor while covering up the refusal to pay taxes of billionaire trusts and their CEOs !!!

Is it unfair to accuse this state in advance of being sold out to billionaires ? Is it unfair to consider it disqualified from organizing a major national debate ?

People are surprised that the income of the person in charge of organizing the great national debate is being questioned ? But the person who is supposed to give a voice to those who no longer eat properly only earns the modest sum of 14,700 euros gross !!!

The heads of other "independent administrative authorities" (such as the 26 independent administrative authorities) are just as well-endowed as all senior civil servants !!! Not to mention those responsible for audits, reports, missions, commissions, public or semi-public services, and so on, who also earn colossal sums which of course determine the direction of reports demanding rigor, austerity, belt-tightening against the most deprived !!!

It is not surprising in these conditions that the men of the State decide in favor of the rich since they are richly endowed to feel on that side !!!

Of course it’s the state of billionaires, financiers, and bankers ! You only have to look at the sums of money that have been used to save banks and trusts since the collapse of global capitalism in 2007-2008 to understand that the holes in public accounts don’t come from elsewhere, that they are exclusively caused by the theft of public wealth to save big capital. Even the holes in the public SNCF don’t come from elsewhere for the most part !!!

So, has the government backed down on the essentials ? Has it backed down enough, as some say, that it is enough to... stop the movement ? Not at all ! It is taking back with its left arm what it gave up with its right arm ! It has reduced fuel taxes but it is imposing crazy taxes on gas and electricity !!! Electricity is weighed down by 54% taxes and gas is also subject to multiple and crazy taxes !

The same Postal Bank, now privatized, is destroying the savings account income of working-class people and spending colossal sums to speculate, particularly on municipal debt...

The motorway companies are compensated by the State for uncollected sums, even though everyone knows that they have long since recouped their investment in the motorway purchases !!!

The state continues to privatize intercity lines. It continues to destroy hospitals and public health, it continues to privatize geriatric sectors, to close hospitals and services...

The government has therefore only backed down momentarily and by this retreat, it hopes to play on time so that the movement spreads, divides...

Despite these crude maneuvers, the fight continues and the yellow vests must even win over the large battalions of workers from large companies to their movement.

Abolish private ownership of the means of production and capital or let it destroy humanity, we must choose !

The first indispensable element of the class consciousness of the proletariat is the necessity of abolishing private ownership of the means of production, which means that the vast majority of the population is deprived... of any right to the means of production indispensable for working and living.

Reformists of all stripes are adept at making us believe that the most crucial problems affecting workers and the working classes could be resolved simply by a slightly more egalitarian redistribution of wealth, by reducing the range of incomes, by practicing more egalitarian taxation, etc.

This is to hide the fact that the current state of capitalism requires more than ever an awareness that the most resolute class struggle must lead to its conclusion : the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.

There are, of course, other very fundamental elements in proletarian class consciousness, first of all the need to destroy the bourgeois state and the need for an international consciousness, but the abolition of private ownership of the means of production must always be placed in the forefront of the proletariat’s banner of action.

Engels describes the aim of the communists as follows :

"with the transformation of the means of production into social property, wage labor and the proletariat will also disappear"

(The Origin of the Family of Private Property and the State)

Engels also writes (in his introduction to "Class Struggles in France") :

What gives our work (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written by Marx) a special importance is the fact that it pronounces for the first time in its condensed form the formula by which, unanimously, the workers’ parties of all countries of the world demand the reorganization of the economy : the appropriation of the means of production by society. In the second chapter, on the "right to work", which is characterized as "the first clumsy formula in which the revolutionary pretensions of the proletariat are summarized", we can read :

"But behind the right to work there is power over capital, behind power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subordination to the associated working class, that is to say, the abolition of wage labor as well as of capital and their reciprocal relations."

Marx explains that the very foundation of capitalism and the proletariat is the expropriation of the worker’s ownership of his means of production :

Karl Marx, Capital - Book One - The Development of Capitalist Production :

"Historical tendency of capitalist accumulation

"So what lies at the bottom of the primitive accumulation of capital, at the bottom of its historical genesis, is the expropriation of the immediate producer, it is the dissolution of property based on the personal labor of its possessor.

Private property, as the antithesis of collective property, exists only where the instruments and other external conditions of labor belong to individuals. But depending on whether these individuals are workers or non-workers, private property changes its face. The infinitely nuanced forms it assumes at first glance only reflect the intermediate states between these two extremes.

The worker’s private ownership of the means of his productive activity is the corollary of small-scale industry, whether agricultural or manufacturing, and this constitutes the nursery of social production, the school where manual skill, ingenious address, and the free individuality of the worker are developed. Certainly, this mode of production is found in the midst of slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it only prospers, it only deploys its full energy, it only assumes its integral and classical form where the worker is the free owner of the working conditions that he himself puts into effect, the peasant, of the soil that he cultivates, the artisan, of the tools that he handles, like the virtuoso, of his instrument.

This industrial regime of small, independent producers, working on their own account, presupposes the fragmentation of the land and the scattering of other means of production. As it excludes concentration, it also excludes cooperation on a large scale, the subdivision of labor in the workshop and in the fields, machinery, the learned domination of man over nature, the free development of the social powers of labor, concert and unity in the ends, means, and efforts of collective activity. It is compatible only with a narrowly limited state of production and society. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur aptly puts it, "to decree mediocrity in everything." But, having reached a certain degree, it itself engenders the material agents of its dissolution. From that moment on, the forces and passions that it represses begin to stir within society. It must be, it is annihilated. Its movement of elimination, transforming individual and scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of production, making the dwarfed property of the many the colossal property of the few, this painful, this terrible expropriation of the working people, these are the origins, these are the genesis of capital. It embraces a whole series of violent processes, of which we have reviewed only the most striking under the heading of methods of primitive accumulation.

The expropriation of the immediate producers is carried out with a ruthless vandalism spurred on by the most infamous motives, the most sordid passions and the most hateful in their pettiness. Private property, based on personal labor, this property which, so to speak, welds the isolated and autonomous worker to the external conditions of work, will be supplanted by capitalist private property, based on the exploitation of the labor of others, on wage labor [1].

As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently and thoroughly decomposed the old society, as soon as the producers have been transformed into proletarians and their working conditions into capital, as soon as the capitalist system is finally sustained by the economic force of things alone, then the subsequent socialization of labor, as well as the progressive metamorphosis of the land and other means of production into socially exploited, common instruments, in a word, the subsequent elimination of private property, will assume a new form. What is now to be expropriated is no longer the independent worker, but the capitalist, the leader of an army or a squad of wage-earners.

This expropriation is accomplished by the operation of the immanent laws of capitalist production, which lead to the concentration of capital. Correlative to this centralization, to the expropriation of the great number of capitalists by the small, there develop on an ever-increasing scale the application of science to technology, the exploitation of the land methodically and together, the transformation of tools into powerful instruments only through common use, hence the economy of the means of production, the interweaving of all peoples in the network of the universal market, hence the international character imprinted on the capitalist regime. As the number of potentates of capital who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this period of social evolution diminishes, misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation increase, but also the resistance of the ever-growing and increasingly disciplined working class, united and organized by the very mechanism of capitalist production. The monopoly of capital becomes a hindrance to the mode of production that has grown and prospered with it and under its auspices. The socialization of labor and the centralization of its material springs reach a point where they can no longer fit within their capitalist envelope. This envelope shatters. The hour of capitalist property has come. The expropriators are in turn expropriated.

Capitalist appropriation, in accordance with the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the first negation of this private property which is only the corollary of independent and individual labor. But capitalist production itself engenders its own negation with the fatality which presides over the metamorphoses of nature. It is the negation of the negation. It reestablishes not the private property of the worker, but his individual property, based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, on cooperation and the common possession of all the means of production, including the land.

To transform private and fragmented property, the object of individual labor, into capitalist property, naturally required more time, effort, and pains than the metamorphosis into social property of capitalist property, which in fact already rests on a collective mode of production. There, it was a question of the expropriation of the masses by a few usurpers ; here, it is a question of the expropriation of a few usurpers by the masses.

Notes

[1] "We are... in a completely new condition of society... we tend to completely separate all kinds of property from all kinds of work." (Sismondi : Nouveaux principes de l’Econ. polit., t. II, p. 434.)