The Capital regime is based on plunder and exploitation: Long may its crisis continue! For class struggle! For Communism!

WORKERS, COMRADES!

Every day the global financial crisis sets new negative records for the capitalist economy. The governments of all countries are bending over backwards to relieve the bankrupt financial institutions and to increase the exploitation of the class that works. The regime’s loudhailers are constantly telling us to trust them, that it is not the end of capitalism. No. Not the end of capitalism, but its death throes, which will only be ended by the communist revolution.

Bourgeois propaganda would have us believe that the crisis has been caused by the misdeeds of a few unscrupulous capitalists or by a lack of financial controls but this is not the case. The capitalist regime is in crisis because of its internal contradictions, as predicted by Marxism. It is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall that propels great masses of capital to move away from the production of commodities and into speculative swindles. It is the crisis of over-production that is bringing industry and commerce to a grinding halt. Behind the crisis of financial capital there lurks the general crisis of the capitalist economy, recession and deflation.

But if the big and petty bourgeoisie weep over their capital going up in smoke, the proletariat, same as ever, has nothing to lose but its chains and has a world to conquer. Pressed on all sides by sackings, longer working days, increased exploitation, lowering of real wages and dismantling of the welfare state, their only option is to rebel against their situation and shout out: LONG LIVE COMMUNISM!

WORKERS!

Capitalism promised to bring wealth, peace, liberty and democracy. Instead it has brought hunger, war, injustice and ruthless dictatorships to control the proletariat, even when they are masked as democracy, or as fake socialism as has already happened in Russia or in Maoist and post-Maoist China. The present economic convulsions, which have already severely affected proletarian living standards throughout the world, can only get worse.

Capital has already shown how it deals with these crises: with wars, which destroy factories, industrial infrastructures and commodities and thus open the way to a new division of the world between new imperialist powers, a war that is as global as its crisis. Capital will try to send the proletariat of all countries, like lambs to the slaughter, into a new imperialist massacre which will inevitably be worse than the ones in 1914 and 1939. That is what awaits the working class if it doesn’t deploy its international and revolutionary strength to put a stop to it.

The capitalist regime will not collapse of its own accord but throughout the world will have to be destroyed by a social revolution. It will be a revolution of the working class against the bourgeoisie and the landowners, like the Paris Commune, and Russia in October 1917.

WORKERS, COMRADES!

Today, the most conscious and combative workers can fight against all this. To confront the overwhelming power of the bourgeoisie along with its politicians and trade-union leaders we need to work to recreate class based trade-union organisations that aim to organise workers to defend themselves, as a class, in their workplaces. We need to overcome the divisions that characterise this rotten bourgeois society; between public and private sector, between young and old, part and full time, locals and immigrants… Racism is the best antidote to class struggle.

Today’s strike, called by rank-and-file trade-unionists, is a step in the right direction. However if workers want to defend their standard of living they will need to overcome every narrow sectarianism and move towards wider organisational unity and greater unity of action; and this will need to happen outside and against the official trade-union confederations, which have passed irreversibly over to the side of the bosses.

In this out and out social war, the class will see that the economic struggle is not enough in itself. Even just to survive the proletariat will have to overthrow this regime of war and starvation. The most combative elements of the class, freed from the influence of ruling class ideology, freed from any lingering hopes that the system can be reformed, will eventually rediscover its true party of old. And then it will come to see, and understand, the social and military reality of the international communist revolution.

December 2008