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Since the beginning of June, thousands Spanish miners of the Asturias are on struggle against the perspective of closure of the coal mines of their region, the last ones of the country. Strikes, Days of Action, Marches to Madrid, local demonstrations, and above all blockages of the roads, the highways and the railway connecting Madrid to the port of Gigón passing through the city of León. The international bourgeois press of course has kept silent on this struggle as well as the Spanish press made all it could to minimize the reality and the importance of the violence of the confrontations with the police and thus the political significance of this workers fight. For more information, we refer our reader to the article of the Internationalist Communist Tendency : The Struggle of the Asturian Miners1.
This struggle of the miners is the expression of a new moment in the present classes struggle arisen from the crisis. The very fact that it develops in Spain, heart of the “democratic and citizens” movements of the “Indignados” that we didn't stop denouncing the trap and its use by the bourgeois forces, comes to mark the difference between a movement which refuses to define itself on a class ground and thus rejects the political struggle between the classes and against the bourgeois State and a genuine workers struggle which affirms itself and develops in opposition to the political, union and State forces of capital. The struggle of the Asturian miners comes to mark the end of the “Indignados” and others “Occupy Wall Street” that the bourgeoisie won't be able to use as massively as it could do it the last two years. The struggle of the Asturian miners comes to manifest that only the workers struggle can bring a true perspective, a real path, for the fight against capitalism.
The miners of Asturias resume the way that the proletariat in Greece showed us. The resistance and the fight against the dramatical economical measures that the bourgeoisie strikes in all countries, can't limit itself to pacific occupations of city places and to hollow speeches about a “greater and better democracy” or even to a “new society”... which would be “more democratic”. It is from the places of production, in particular by paralysing the latter through strike or occupation, that the working class must fight against the attacks which fall the ones after the others. It is from this places that it must dash into the streets and must seek to spread and unify its fight.
Inevitably, the bourgeoisie and its State are more and more forced, because the crisis, to radically oppose the development of these workers retorts. Less and less, they'll be able to let the working class develop its struggle without opposition. For this, the political forces of the Left, leftists and unionists, are in front line in order to attempt to take control of these struggles and to lead them into a harmless ground for the State. Here at once, there is a political fight for the immediate direction of the struggle that the more militant and more conscious workers as well as the communists have the particular responsibility to assume with determination. But today, the scale of the attacks against the working class and the anger and the rage that they provoke, push the workers to oppose directly to the State by trying to block its functioning. It is the significance of the demonstrations in Athens which aimed at preventing the Deputies to enter to Parliament to vote the austerity and misery plans. It is still the significance of the blockages of the roads and highways, the occupation of the coal mines and of the small towns of miners of the region. In both cases, Athens and Asturias, the workers didn't hesitate to defend themselves against the police repression which looked at maintaining the functioning of the State apparatus. The miners didn't hesitate to organize and to arm themselves in order to take responsibility for this class violence against the State repression.
For all these reasons, in their turn, the Asturian miners show us the path to follow. They show us the level up to which we must today rise the workers' retort.
Only the working class is capable to lead the struggle up to block a region. Only the working class is capable to oppose the State by hampering the functioning in a first time - in the future for destroying it. Only the working class is capable to outflank the political manoeuvres that the bourgeois forces don't stop setting up. Only the working class is capable to organize and even to “arm” itself in order to oppose it own violence to the bourgeoisie's one. Only the working class is capable to endow itself with political class consciousness and with a political vanguard organization which goes with it – both being indispensable weapons and tools for the orientation and the direction of its class fights.
The Asturian miners are today isolated. And nevertheless, they show us the path to follow. For them, searching for active solidarity of the other sectors of the working class in the country and elsewhere in the world is an imperious need. Not leaving them isolated is a duty for the other sectors. Joining them in the struggle and follow the path they've opened is the condition for developing and globally strengthening the workers fight, but also to break up their isolation.
It is true in the Asturias and in Spain. It is true in all Europe and elsewhere.
Solidarity with the Asturian miners !
Let's go on the path they have taken following the example of the proletariat in Greece !
Against the attacks and generalized misery, against capitalism, against the bourgeoisie and its State, let's oppose the unified front of the workers struggles !
The Fraction of the International Communist Left, June 28th 2012.
1. It is particularly “surprising” that the ICC has not mentioned yet this struggle, not even its section in Spain up to now. Except its nucleus of new militants in... Turkey. Since we don't understand Turkish, we are unable to take knowledge of the political content of this statement. We are curious to know it since, following the bourgeois propaganda of these last years, the ICC has presented with great enthusiasm the movements of the “indignados” and of the “Occupy Wall Street” as the example to be followed in opposition to the genuine workers struggles, the genuine class struggles, linked to the production places; such a the proletarian resistance in Greece. In the light of this opportunist enthusiasm, the present silence of the ICC about the miners enlightens the reality of its contempt for the genuine workers struggles and its fear of the real classes struggle. [This note as well as this article has been written in French before the English ICC newspaper World Revolution published a short and very vague statement on this event in its July issue].
"In order that consciousness and the knowledge that the proletariat must have of itself and of the world it has to transform, develop, it must have the ability of developing in its ranks a vanguard. The role of the members of the proletariat's revolutionary party is to bring to the knowledge of the proletariat the conditions of its revolutionary destiny. The proletariat will reach the highest point of its political maturity when the problems which are the subject of the discussions of the vanguard and the party will be largely discussed in its press and in its political meetings.
The condition of the revolution is thus not only that this discussion takes place but also it develops. Our task is to favour its opening and its development.
(...)
We don't have to impose a thought but to seek, in the working class and in common with it, the means to make the revolution. We don't think we hold alone the monopoly of the “revolutionary thought”, enclosed in a tabernacle and that we show to the prostrated believers. All the contrary, we think one manifestation of the working class is to give birth to political groups. Our task is not other than to participate to the life of these political groups, as expression of the class, and to favour their birth and their development. It is only through the development of the revolutionary action that the positions acquired can verify themselves ; it is only through the life of these groups that the positions are acquired, strengthened and developed.
What is important for the revolution, is not that the party have a sufficient number of members but that the proletariat's consciousness be mature in order to accomplish the task of leading the society. All the goal to reach is there. It means making that the whole class, its more advanced elements of the great industrial proletariat be able to accomplish the most gigantic revolutionary task of History".
Extracts
of the article “Small Aspects of a Great Problem”
["Petits aspects d'un grand problème"]
Internationalisme
n° 37, 1948, translated by us
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