Sliding scale of working hours, expropriation of banks and of capitalist groups, workers’ power, Socialist United States of Europe!

Workers are paying the crisis of capitalism all over the continent

Multiplying – national – plans for “saving banks” and for “recovering the economy” will certainly not prevent the capitalist world crisis from worsening and deepening. The volume of exchange between countries has dropped by 25%. According to the World Bank, world production will fall, for the first time since 1945, by1.7% in 2009. The European Commission forecasts a 2% drop in production in the 27 countries of European Union.

The G20 includes the governments of the 19 main economies of the world, the representatives of the EU, of the IMF, of the World Bank and of the WTO. At the occasion of its meeting in London on the 2^nd of April, the European Union displayed how disunited it is: the British Prime Minister, together with the American President, opposed the claims made by the German Chancellor and by the French President for a stronger control on financial societies and markets. As a matter of fact, London is the second most important stock market after New York.

Those who create wealth are the first victims of the depression, from which they are not responsible at all. In the previous period, the working class was suffering flexibility, intensification of labour and debt; now it is violently hit by unemployment, by cuts in wages and in retirement pensions; soon it will suffer the consequences of the public funding of private firms, either through a higher taxation, or through inflation. According to the European Commission, 3.5 million jobs will be suppressed in 2009 and the unemployment rate should reach 9.5% in 2010. The most vulnerable categories of the working class (unskilled workers, elder workers, youth, women, immigrants) are especially hit by dismissals.

Without any class struggle or socialist alternative, the crisis offers some opportunities to the research, by reactionaries, for scapegoats, especially national minorities (Romani people in Hungary, Bulgaria and Check Republic, Magyars in Slovakia…) or immigrant workers. On 2007 September 24^th, the British kingdom’s Prime Minster promised, in the Labour Party Congress, “British jobs for British workers”, repeating then a fascist catchword which has been used for decades in many countries. Following that, the British union bureaucracies, instead of defending the same rights for all, have spread the poison of division and of xenophobia. In Spain the PSOE government pushes the African immigrants to return home. In France, Sarkozy’s government is hunting the immigrants that he himself pointed as “illegal”. In Italy, Berlusconi’s government also attacks people from the European Union (Romanians…).

Alignment of all labour laws on the most advantageous rules of all Europe! Ban redundancies! Fall in the working time without fall in wages! Distribution of labour among all workers! Free move of workers of all countries! Equal rights for all workers!

Whereas « emerging capitalisms » of Ireland, of Baltic region and of Eastern Europe are sinking, the catchword for each bourgeoisie in Europe is: every man for himself!

Within each country, the ruling class resorts to the national myth, and even to religion, it attempts to persuade the workers to scrimp and to support their own bourgeoisie, whereas this bourgeoisie had pushed themselves into the crisis.

The depression does not stem from the extension of a “banking crisis” to the “real economy” through insufficient credit, as mass media, bourgeois economists and reformists repeat extensively. It could not be solved through an intervention of the State to fill the insufficient demand, through a fall in the central bank key interest rates, or through the support of investment or of consumption with a budget deficit. On the contrary, the crisis came through after the debt of American households and, moreover, after low interest rates that were dictated by central banks.

The world crisis does not stem from an insufficient morality by the financial traders, which is not higher during recovery and expansion stages. The resurgence of crises is part of the capitalist production, which rests upon the extortion of surplus value, on unpaid labour, whereas the struggle against the proletariat and the competition between capitalists lead to mechanization and to automation, toward a drop in the share of living labour. Credit allows some temporary escape from the fall in the rate of profit, in increasing the turnover rate of the cycle of capital. Yet, it finally increases the effects of crisis, in cutting the profits of the firms which produce commodities and in increasing the risks for insolvency at all stages of the cycle. The financial hypertrophy which allowed the previous world capitalist expansion stage got transformed into its contrary. The parasitic form of the capitalist finance, as true it is, is a sign of the senility of capitalism, of its imperialist stage. No Keynesian charlatan could separate speculation from capitalism, or make it young again.

The European Central Bank lowered its key interest rate to 1%, and in fact it is openly lending money to the banks in Euro zone. Approving indeed the failure of the member States to convey the euro zone rules which limit the public deficit to 3% of GDP, the European Council claimed that all the “recovery plans” of the European Union would amount to 400 billion euro. Yet it appears that such an amount is the addition of national measures, and not a common plan by the European Union. It truly appears, with that crisis, that every imperialist State helps its national firms against their foreign competitors, whether they are European or not. On the 30^th of January, Christine Lagarde, the French Minister of economy, claimed that “protectionism might be a necessary evil”; on the 9^th of February, the plan for helping PSA and Renault requested as a condition that the production should take place in France, which provoked some protests from the German competitors, from the Commission, from Czech Republic and from Slovakia.

Then, the main contradiction of capitalism is not between “producers” and “financials”, but between the expansion of productive forces and nature of the relations of production, namely the relation of exploitation between waged workers and capitalist employers. One aspect of these relations of production is the nation-State, which used to be initially an improvement against the feudal parcelling and was a favourable framework for the accumulation of capital, and now which narrow character prevents the expansion of productive forces. Such an archaism in the national separation first appeared in Europe, where capitalism was born, through inter-imperialist conflicts which resulted into the rule of the –relatively– larger United States of America. The European Economic Community–European Union appeared in 1957 due to such a contradiction, and due to its impotence, since European bourgeoisies, which existence has lasted to the repeated betrayals of proletarian revolutions, keep unable to merge and to unify the old continent.

Hence, the opposition between the French imperialism and its German opponent, which economic superiority has been reinforced by the reunification (France tried to prevent it) and by the integration of Eastern Europe countries into the market, has played a grimy role in the explosion of former Yugoslavia in 1991 and in the simultaneous multiplication of boarders in an already broken up continent. The EU was already in need of a constitution allowing itself to function with 27 countries in preserving the rule of Germany and France. The economic crisis just worsened the changing problems and discrepancies between Britain, France and Germany.

The governments of the old European powers, whether they are formed with bourgeois parties (Italy, France), with workers’ parties that are on the service of the bourgeoisie (Britain, Spanish State) or with combinations of the two (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands), all were “liberal” when it turned to destroy the conquests of the working class. In a second, the crisis transformed them into “Keynesians” well decided to save their banks, and, for some of them, to save their car companies. According to the World Bank, 17 countries within the G20 implemented protectionist measures since the “recession” has started. No way of letting the market work and clear the inefficient firms! Whether there was no need for alternate governments, and even less for upheavals in political regimes, demonstrates that various economic policies are an issue of conjuncture rather than of economic dogma.

The governments in Eastern and Central Europe, whether they implemented or inherited from the restoration of capitalism, now can be aware of the ingratitude of the European Union founding States, which were promising them prosperity and solidarity if they would sell their local best industries to Western European capitalist trusts, if they allow them to exploit the cheapest local working class. Now in troubles, they realize that their imperialist bosses in the European Union refuse to give them the financial support they seriously need.

Like other European countries that are not EU members (Island, Belarus, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine), Hungary, Latvia and Romania then had to ask support from the International Monetary Fund, a world institution implemented by the United States in 1944. In order to receive that support, the Hungarian government cut the wages of the civil servants, the Latvian government proposed an austerity budget, whereas the Romanian government did not finish negotiating the adjustment plan.

Expropriation of banks, of finance companies and of funding companies! Control on production, on transport, on credit, on trade by workers from cities and from countryside! Plans for high-level projects on a continental scale in order to satisfy the needs and to rescue the environment!

Breaches on democratic liberties and increase of militarism

Under the pretext of fighting against terrorism, those of the European states who possess atomic weapons, who are threaten Iran, who are taking part to the occupation of Afghanistan, who are contributing to Israel armament (it has just been demonstrated how it is used in destroying Gaza strip and in killing thousands more Palestinians) everywhere have reduced democratic liberties.

Under the pretext of bringing security to the population, whereas they increased inequalities, whereas they expel a substantial part of the youth and of the proletariat from production, whereas they consign this population in ghettos, all the bourgeois governments have been creating dozens of jails, have been increasing the number of those whose job is to spy, to intimidate and to repress the movements of the oppressed and of the exploited. The army is on patrol in many public places.

Under the pretext of bringing peace, most of the member States of the European Union are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance under hegemony of the United States which was created in order to prevent any social revolution in Western Europe and to restore capitalism in the East, whereas the Stalinist bureaucracy, who won the political counter-revolution from 1923 to 1927, finished the job in violently crushing the proletarian uprisings in Germany in 1953, in Hungary and Poland in 1956, in China in 1967, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Poland in 1971, in Poland in 1981, in China in 1989…

Under the military pressure of the American imperialism and of the NATO, the USSR bureaucracy entered a very expensive arms race, since, due to its usurpation of the political power and to its economic privileges, it was quite unable to rest upon the revolutionary mobilization of the proletariat of all Europe, which only could save the collective ownership in the East, overthrow capitalism in the West and then allow the victory of socialism, which 1917 Russian revolution was the foreword.

Yet, the restoration of capitalism, since 1990, by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Germany, in Russia, in Central Europe and in China did not put an end to the NATO. This organization has been used as a protection for the joint imperialist attacks in Balkans in 1995 and in 1999, in Afghanistan in 2001. Austria, which official position is that of a neutral country, also took part to these NATO operations. On the 3^rd and 4^th of April, Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown, Berlusconi, Zapatero… celebrated, together with Obama, the 50^th birthday of the NATO. Even if he has a new style, the new president, which gave so much hope to the stupid reformists in Europe, has the same interests as the previous one, namely the interests of the American bourgeoisie. The division between European bourgeoisies leads them to be submitted to the United States, which the continuing existence of the NATO is a demonstration, whereas their economic decline is increasing.

Indeed, the European imperialisms are unable to merge their armies and to protect their East European vassals against their powerful Russian neighbour, which itself attempts to preserve its own sphere of influence, as it was shown through the invasion of Chechnya and through its military foray in Georgia. All the more, despite the opposition of the British government, some EU countries (France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg) created in 1992 a Defence Eurocorps (Eurokorps) composed with 60 000 soldiers, and the EU officially created a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) which aim is to override the NATO. Besides, the German bourgeoisie, the French bourgeoisie and the Russian neo-bourgeoisie refused to join the world power in its second invasion of Iraq in 2003 (whereas Central Europe countries and Britain were following the American imperialism). Merkel and Sarkozy refused to extend the NATO to Georgia and to Ukraine in April 2008.

Self-defence of workers’ struggles and of workers’ organizations against all the gangs of capital! Break of all the European countries with NATO if they are members, removal of ESDP! Immediate retreat of all European troops from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Chad, from Kosovo, from Bosnia, from Lebanon! Close-up of all British and French military bases in the world, close-up of all American military bases in Europe! Disbandment of professional armies and people’s arming!

The working class and the youth need new parties and a revolutionary workers’ international in order to take the power and to get rid of capitalism

The destruction of Iraq and the wars in the Balkans represent a serious warning. If the working classes in the United States, in the old European and Japanese imperialisms, in the new capitalisms intending to become imperialisms in China and Russia, are not able to overthrow their ruling class when necessary, rivalries will intensify and lead to new confrontations for a reorganization of the world. If a progressive solution does not appear, that is a revolutionary, internationalist and socialist one, the fascist demagogues will get some audience back and they will try to crush the working class and all its organizations. The environmental issue is urgent too. Any continuation of capitalism, namely this mode of production based on the research of profit and on private ownership, irreversibly damages both the planet and the possibility for a future flowering of humanity, for an association where the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all.

Election in the European Parliament will take place in June in all member States. There is no way for conscious workers to vote for lists with candidates of bourgeois parties or of coalitions with bourgeois parties.

All what the workers have the opportunity to do in that election, which political scope in more limited than in national elections, is to express themselves, possibly in voting for candidates from workers’ organizations. First, they only take place every five years, whereas real democracy would impose the deputies to be dismissible. Then, the national bourgeois governments hamper the ability of candidates from “small lists” to be presented and elected. Finally, and most of all, the European Parliament has even less power than the national parliaments which are used as a make-up for the rule of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the decisions of the European Union are taken by the European councils and by the Council of ministers, namely by agreements between the national executive powers (either unanimously or through “qualified majority”).

This “lack of democracy” is a sign of the inability of the ruling class, the decaying bourgeoisie, to unify Europe. The intermediate classes in the capitalist society, the traditional petite-bourgeoisie (peasants, craftsmen, self-employed…) or the waged petite-bourgeoisie (management) are also unable to do it, since the action takes place between the two fundamental classes of the capitalist society. Only the exploited class, the proletariat, who has no country, has the ability to achieve this historical task, through the Socialist United States of Europe, as a transition towards the Universal Republic of workers’ councils

Any attempt by the workers and the youth in Europe to get rid of exploitation and to liquidate all that capitalist, colonial, warmongering and reactionary jumble has always faced the counter-revolutionary policy of the union bureaucracies and of the social-democratic or Stalinist parties, during the revolutionary wave that ended the First World War, in the mid-thirties, at the end of the Second World War, after 1968.

The bourgeois workers’ parties and the union bureaucracies are more and more funded by the subsidies of the bourgeois State and less and less by the contributions of the workers. The old reformist apparatuses who often already served the ruling class (SPD, LP, PS PSOE, SPO, PCF, PRC…), and the new ones who attempt to play that role (Die Linke, NPA, SSP, Respect, Parti de gauche...) indeed represent the capitalist “Europe”, which it would be sufficient, for them, to be more “democratic”, more “social” and less “liberal”. They all claim to reform capitalism in regulating finance, in better sharing resources, in advocating individual ecological responsibility, in trusting the UN, in humanizing the “immigration policy”… What the union leaders are doing is to negotiate and to implement the plans of the bosses and of the government, to co-manage the firms; what the reformist parties are doing, when they reach the government, is to honestly manage capitalism; what they all do is to sacrifice the immigrant workers, to prevent the general strike, to support their own bourgeoisie. Opportunism leads to the submission of the proletariat to its exploiters, under the cover of an alliance with any of the wings of the bourgeoisie: “national”, “industrial”, “republican”, “democratic”, “anti-imperialist”… fraction.

This includes the left wing of reformism. The degenerated “Trotskyites” have long supported the “popular fronts” against which Trotsky had founded the 4^th International. During a decade, together with Stalinist fragments, they distorted the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum in an “anti-capitalist movement” and they are now entering coalitions with bourgeois parties when they are strong enough. In Italy they kept being members of the PRC (a minority of the Stalinist, the former PCI) when the latter entered the Unione government in 2006 with the DS (the majority of the former Stalinist Party) and with the bourgeois Margherita (from the Christian Democrat party). In 2004 in Britain, the SWP and the ISG founded Respect, a coalition with anti-US Labour Party members (including the deputy Galloway), with capitalists from Pakistan and with clerical organizations (Muslim Association of Britain, Muslim Council of Britain). In France, before disappearing in the NPA, which is open to the “ecologists”, the LCR had voted for Chirac in 2002 and presented candidates in common “left” lists in municipal elections in 2008, together with bourgeois parties like the PRG (from the old Radical party), the MRC, the Greens... Still in France, LO called several times for a reinforcement of the police, for the restoration of the order in suburbs in 2005 together with all “the left”, it took part to several lists in the first round of municipal elections together with the PRG, the MRC, the Greens and other bourgeois parties; the PT, then renamed POI, led chauvinistic campaigns together with the small nationalist bourgeois party MRC, and it was also part of “left” lists with the MRC, the PRG…

Now, the main enemy is in our own country. The working class must defend itself and defend all the oppressed people (women, foreigners, national minorities, homosexuals…) against the ruling class and all its institutions. The workers, the employees, the technicians must unite and win the unemployed, the semi-exploited categories (self-employed, management), the training youth in order to overthrow the rule of the bourgeois minority, to gain the political power, to abolish the old relations of production, to widen the European revolution, to work together with other workers’ governments resulting from the socialist revolution in the countries that are members of the EU and in the others (including Turkey which is rejected by the capitalist “Europe”). The proletarian revolution will also solve democratic problems that are still on (abolition of monarchies, secularism, right of minorities, emancipation of women…) and it will allow the development of science and technique towards the satisfaction of social needs and the preservation of environment.

In order to succeed, the working class must pull the unions bureaucracies down and build organs for larger fights, and centralize them in order to aspire to the power. This is still not enough: all the experience of the workers’ movement teaches that the agents of the bourgeoisie act within double power organs in order to submit them to the ruling class, to the maintenance of the bourgeois State, to the coalition with the bourgeoisie, in order to finally suppress any content and to dissolve them for the sake of bourgeois parliamentarianism… or of police and military terror.

Since the capitalist crisis began, the spectre of communism is haunting Europe again. For becoming real, for getting rid of the boarders, for abolishing classes, a party is necessary, an international is necessary. The vanguard militants, the revolted workers and young people who aspire to really change the world, who are currently isolated, demoralized, powerless and disseminated within the anarchist circles or in so-called Trotskyite organizations, have taken refuge into trade-unionism, are made useless in sects that despise the proletariat, must gather, get organized in order to build, during class struggle and on the basis of Marxism, a workers’ party, with a democratic organization, a revolutionary and internationalist program, like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party.

Independence of the working class, break of all workers’ organizations with the bourgeoisie! Overthrow of all bourgeois governments, establishment of workers’ governments! Dissolution of the capitalist European Union, abolition of frontiers, Socialist United States of Europe!

Groupe Bolchevik (France) & Gruppe Klassenkampf (Austria)