Presentation of the bulletin 26

After the n°25 dedicated to the last manifestations of the opportunist drift of the ICC, this n°26 of our bulletin returns at the more "traditional" rubrics. The reader will thus find here:

- the fruit of our work of analysis of the situation ;

- a great part devoted to the debate within the proletarian camp, with a text on an article of the IBRP in connection with the decadence of capitalism, the correspondences of an "isolated" sympathiser, as well as critical standpoint about some articles of the ICC;

- and finally an article of Rosa Luxemburg (1)dealing with the conditions made to our class within the framework of capitalist overexploitation. It is remarkable that a text written a century ago kept such a topicality and we want to underline the way in which the revolutionaries of the time (and not the smallest ones, indeed !) implied themselves directly, concerning the fate of those which certain dirty minds of today quickly describe as "lumpen-proletariat", or even as "decomposed" workers......

These deaths, these poor poisoned by discarded food, it is our class ; and their fate is the one that a great number of workers live today and which awaits the majority of them in a capitalism in crisis. They are, like all our class, the carriers and the protagonists of the future revolution of which we are, us the communists, the theoretical and political vanguard expression. Here is what seems to say to us comrade Luxemburg in this article. It is not pity or finer feelings that she agitates, it is a cry of combat that she launches; it is a call to those which, among the workers whose fate is – temporarily ! – less dramatic, would tend to settle in the poor and illusory comfort that the bourgeoisie grants to them… provided that they accept the fate which is made to certain of their brothers of class, reserve army of the capital. Provided that they give up their being of class, the revolutionary mission that the history assigned to them.

Rosa wrote that in … 1912 !

Who will dare to assert that we don’t find exactly the same elements today ? Who will not recognise, in the down-and-out workers of 1912 in Berlin, in Joseph Geihe, Karl Melchior, Lucian Szczyptierowski whose she speaks of, the fate made to the unemployed workers, to the ‘recalculated’ [unemployed workers to whom the French State had "to recompute" the unemployment indemnities that it had removed] to the clandestine immigrants, to the subscribers on the ‘resto du cœur’ [distribution of food to the poor made by associations in France ] of our time ? TV fixed-price compassion images added.

Today like then, our class undergoes the blows of a bourgeoisie, whose economy is in crisis, and of its States, clearly decided to defend this system of exploitation against any threat coming from the "dangerous classes" according to the expression of this epoch. Today like then the revolutionaries, the Communists, have the responsibility to indicate the direction to the masses suffering in a misery necessary to the good walk of the business and profit, to make angry mature, to make it converge toward those responsible for that, and to carry the class towards the conscience of itself.

The objective looks far away ; and the expiry of a revolutionary reaction of the proletariat can seem so distant that it would not concern us or not any more, the more so as, everywhere, the dominant class does not cease seeking to inject into our veins the "poison of the impotence" : there would be nothing to do against growing misery and barbarism, except relying on the bourgeois State, democratic preferably. But there is a problem ! Since nearly two years, the horizon tends to clear up. The evolution of the world situation reveals more than ever the true face of capitalism. It is contradicting, even more radically, the massive ideological campaigns – who followed up the collapse of Stalinism – on the "definitive historical triumph of capitalism" and "the radiant future of the bourgeois democracy". The media and ideological machine of the exploiting class has more and more difficulties to hide that the violent convulsions of the economic crisis and the wars multiplying across the world are closely linked, that misery and barbarism are not external phenomenon to the capitalism but, on the contrary, are its most natural manifestations. For the working class which is today engaged in a dynamic of revival of its struggles, this situation – full of potentialities of awaking – opens tremendous perspectives of development for its historical fight against capitalism. “The war unleashes, at the same time that the reactionary powers if the capitalist world, the generating forces of the social revolution which ferment in their depths” (Rosa Luxemburg in Le Socialiste du 01/08/1904, In the Storm))

Those who doubt, who despair or get impatient, we refer them to Rosa Luxemburg, to the cry of combat she never stopped throwing, to her unwavering confidence in our class, even in the worst situations; and those who underestimate the discreet but essential role of the revolutionaries in the present period, we simply refer them to the contribution of our predecessors of the Communist Left who, during the terrible years between the two world wars, made the balance of the past defeat and prepared the work for the future generations ; for our generations. Without the contributions of these comrades of the years 1920/1930, without their doggedness and their determination, would we be able to pursue the work today ? And these lessons that we have taken back from our elders, haven’t we the duty to hand them down to the new generations of workers ? To hand them down in the heat of the revolutionary action if we can, or by the political foundations that we will have been able to establish on the base of all the experience of our class and of its organisations ?

Let’s leave the doubt, bitterness, despair and the “veins of feeling” to the petty-bourgeoisie and to the classes without any historical future. Us, in the proletarian camp, we have all the motives to be confident in the situation, to trust our class, to pursue the struggle and the clarification, to work for the regrouping of the forces on clear political bases so as to provide our class with the political organisation which is necessary for it today and which will be indispensable tomorrow.

Our comrades of the Left, during the terrible years of the counter-revolution, have been able to keep alive the lessons of the Red October. Our generations have the fortune and the distinguished honour to see the decisive struggles standing out on the visible horizon. And it is by accomplishing, today, the tasks which are ours that we can really contribute to the victory of tomorrow.

June 26, 2004

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