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Presentation of the two Statements of the ICT and the ICK-FICL on the Class Struggle

In this issue, we reproduce a statement from the Internationalist Communist Tendency and a leaflet the IC-K and our Fraction distributed during the workers struggle in Egypt, in Turkey and in Greece (both already published on our web site). Though dating back several months, it is always useful to review them so as to assess their validity at the time they were produced, but also return to the political approaches on which they were founded.

They are different in form. One is a "propaganda-intervention" article of the ICT undertaken while the bourgeois media attempted to censor and suppress news of the street demonstrations in Egypt; and the other is a more immediate "intervention-agitation" leaflet undertaken the very night they announced the closure of the Greek national TV broadcaster. Both statements aim to present general orientations of struggle, as –unable to intervene directly there – these can be taken and adapted "locally". Moreover, they provide orientations that the world-wide proletariat can take into present workers struggles. As well, both statements warn against the pitfalls – isolation and democratic illusions – that the political and union forces of the bourgeois States use to oppose the development of the struggle; traps which finally snapped shut on the various workers mobilizations. Reading them again today, it seems that both interventions were correct, without suffering mistakes or particular weaknesses¹.

Since then, and despite censorship and bourgeois media distortions, workers struggles opposing the effects of capital's crisis never cease even though their intensity seems to diminish; a kind of hesitation; as if to catch their breath. Actually, we can consider a first period of struggle to have ended and a new step taken. The 2008-2013 period is characterized – it seems to us, and is indeed described in broad outline – in "The proletariat in Greece shows us the way". Of course, far be it for us to reduce everything to the workers struggles in Greece. But workers combativity and will to confront the bourgeois State in order to oppose to its attacks at the economic as well as political level, as a tendencial characteristic of some struggles and at the same time as objectives and perspectives, have been expressed more particularly, more decisively and more massively, in Greece than in any other country². That was the direction that the communists had to advance everywhere by adapting their slogans to the different moments and steps of these struggles.

Today, it appears that the political dynamic of the struggle in Greece that had developed since 2008 is becoming exhausted due to its international isolation, because in no country has the working class been able to reclaim the banner and the dynamic of the "mass strike" at the level reached by the Athena's workers and required to confront the bourgeois offensive; despite the few attempts here and there. The Greek workers seem exhausted by the absence of significant international response, and are unable to advance their fight to a higher level; and the bourgeoisie takes immediate advantage of this through political initiative aiming at diverting the attention of the Greek workers – and else where – toward the defense of the democratic State using the provocations of the extreme Right or that of supposed "terrorist dangers". The relation of forces between the classes, in terms of local and immediate dynamic, has reversed in Greece precisely because the international proletariat remains weak. Weak in the sense that it largely remains submissive to bourgeois ideology, particularly, for the most part – to the democratic themes put forward by the unions and Left forces aimed at binding workers to "their" State and nation.

Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is only a moment of "relative hesitation" – relative since the attacks can’t but multiply everywhere on account of the very unsolvable economic crisis of capital and its economic, political... and warlike consequences between imperialist powers. But, isn't it the beginning of a response to the Athena workers that the Brazilian workers have given this summer? In the midst of an international soccer competition (the Confederation Cup – a kind of general repetition of the World Cup in this country and an important nationalist mystification organized by the bourgeoisie), , they launched massive and violent movements to express their anger toward the ruling class and its ideology, quite clearly defending their class interests paying no heed to calls for national unity or for the good of the soccer matches, and this despite the massive and brutal repression.

The great masses of workers seeing that their minorities or more militant sectors hesitate at the sheer scale of the task, of the necessity to avoid the democratic traps and erroneous approaches – such of the "indignados" or "Occupy" ideology for instance – this indicates, above all, the concrete, practical, necessity to take up the political fight against capitalism's forces, in the first place from the unions who pretend to be "workers", in the struggle.

Here is the basic call that the two statements which follow, make to the proletarians. In this sense, as well, they remain valid since it’s up to organized communist minorities to lead the way and to immediately take on, at their level of development with regard to their real potential, the political leadership of these struggles.

The IC-Klasbatalo and the FICL, September 2013.

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