France – Pension “reforms”

Every defence of national and company interests is a defence of capital’s interests.
The old world must give birth to Communism but only the workers struggle can make it happen.

[In September and October 2010, a massive wave of strikes and demonstrations swept through France to oppose the government’s latest attack on worker’s living standards. This leaflet, translated into English, was produced by our Parisian comrades and speaks for itself]

Workers!

You are told the State is massively in debt (to the tune of E.1,500 Billion), that the Office administering benefits and pensions has an appalling deficit and that you must therefore make sacrifices to save the system. Notably to accept you have to work longer for a smaller pension.

The reality is that the capitalist system is an economic system which is outmoded and parasitic. This miserable system which relies on the mean and despicable exploitation of wage labour, just as feudalism uses to rely on the exploitation of serf labour, has become a hindrance to humanity’s future development. It has only survived up to now thanks to two world wars.

Ever since 1975 the capitalist economy has experienced cycles of expansion and recession every 5 to 10 years. That is to say that every 5-10 years there is a recession which lasts on average two years. After the cycle before last, which ended in 2000, and the recession which followed it, industrial growth in the European States and in North America has virtually ground to a halt: 1% average annual growth in the USA between 2000-2007; 0.47% in Japan; 0.5% in France; -0.6% in England; -0.2% in Italy. Germany is the only exception with growth over the same period of 2.3%.

With each recession “les prélèvements obligatoires ” (equivalent to National Insurance contributions in England) decrease and the deficit in the social security budget continues to rise to astronomical levels, not to mention all the exemptions from charges allowed to the bosses. And what does the future hold? In 2009 the world approached a recession of 1929-like proportions, a situation only avoided by getting further into debt. As for China, which shows us prodigious, although slightly embellished, figures for industrial growth, its current expansion is due to State investments of several billion dollars and a huge extension of credit. About half of this credit is used for speculative purposes. We can therefore say that China, just like Europe and the United States, is faced with a situation of over-production.

How does the bourgeoisie ensure the survival of this economic system which guarantees it its class privileges? By putting pressure on the proletariat, by keeping unemployment levels high so it can exert a downward pressure on wages, by replacing long-term with short-term contracts by making work more ‘flexible’ and by increasing workloads, etc, etc.

The upshot is poverty on the one hand (according to INSEE – the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques – 13.5% of the French population are living on less than E.850 per month) and immense wealth and parasitism on the other. And these measures, which for thirty years now have been applied as much by governments of the ‘left’ as of the ‘right’, how effective in fact are they? Have they actually brought about economic recovery? No! The only result has been the massive growth of a stratum of parasites (CEOs, shareholders, speculators) and States and private individuals getting into ever greater debt.

We are on the eve of a new crisis of over production deeper even than the Great Crash of 1929. The capitalist system came within a hair’s breadth of it in 2009 and avoided it only by getting even deeper in debt. And now it’s you they want to bail the system out!

And the measures proposed by the government, do you think they will solve the problem? Probably not, because they are totally ridiculous! They presuppose the assumption that the rate of unemployment can be brought down to 4.5% of the active population, and that this would result in a sufficient surplus to plug the hole in unemployment benefit funding. They must be joking! Since the 1980s, according to INSEE, unemployment has never dropped below 9%. And of course the INSEE’s unemployment figures, just like its inflation figures, are government figures, and thus rigged in the interests of propaganda. Basing our own figure on those of working age, and on those who actually have a job, one can arrive at a far more accurate figure: 5 million out of work before 2007, and almost 7 million today. As for the rate of growth in industrial production (along with agriculture the basis of all wealth) we already know it was virtually zero in the period which preceded the recession. That is why these measures really are not viable. Now they just want you to work until you are 62, but in a couple of years time, if the crisis hasn’t hit before then, they’ll want you to work until you’re 65, and then 67!

Why should we make sacrifices when the annual production of wealth per inhabitant is higher today than it was ten years ago and much higher than 20 or 30 years ago? Should we do so to save an economic system which is based on exploiting wage labour, and guaranteeing the privileges of a tiny minority of parasites?

We do well to remember the Moulinex workers, who accepted anything and everything to prevent the closure of their factories and ended up losing their jobs anyway.

The big industrial and financial bourgeoisie and its government are preparing a whole ‘tranche’ of austerity measures to get you to pay for the crisis.

Meanwhile there is a solution: Communism! Capitalism has now developed the economic basis for communism on a massive and global scale, but it has had its day. All production is now already organised collectively and is centralised. The means of production now require social organisation. Lone individuals are no longer able to control them and utilise them as was the case in the days of the artisan. The workers no longer own what they produce as their personal property or own their means of production. There is a contradictionbetween this economic base and capitalism’s mercantile relations of production.

This is why it is necessary to oppose the bourgeoisie and its State by rejecting its so-called ‘reforms’ and its austerity measures.

This must be done at first on the economic level by means of trade union struggle; in the process rediscovering the sense of solidarity and brotherhood between fellow workers by overcoming professional, racial and age divisions, and by rejecting the defence of national or company interests; capital’s interests in other words.

For this it will be necessary to set up a trade union that defends class interests; a union which, unlike the class collaborationist organisations such as the CGT, CFDT, and FO, won’t organise workers on the basis of job category but will rather try to overcome all divisions; a union which won’t hesitate to initiate radical struggles which go beyond company and regional boundaries; a union which will try to organise general strikes on a national scale and, when the moment arrives, on an international scale as well.

But to go beyond this economic system, which is leading us all to disaster, an organisation which fights economic battles will not be enough. It will be necessary to organise on the political level as well in order to overthrow the power of the big industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie and expropriate it. There is no other way.

For this you will need to enrol in the ranks of your party, the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST PARTY, which keeps itself firmly anchored in the programmatic foundations of revolutionary communism, and whose aim is to abolish capitalist relations of production (capital and wage labour) to allow a communist society to freely develop.

The old world must give birth to communism but only the workers’ struggle can make it happen.