WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY – The
line running from Marx to Lenin
to the foundation of the Third International
and the birth of the Communist Party
of Italy in Leghorn (Livorno) 1921, and
from there to the struggle
of the Italian Communist Left
against the degeneration in Moscow
and to the rejection of popular fronts
and coalition of resistance groups –
The tough work of restoring
the revolutionary doctrine and the party organ,
in contact with the working class,
outside the realm of personal politics
and electoralist manoevrings
7.For The Class Union
- Australia, Pakistan, Serbia, Spain
- ICP Leaflet Distributed in Venezuela: Fight for an Increase in Wages
May 15, 2021 Israel-Palestine: A War on Behalf of Bourgeois
States
The
violence
of bourgeois war is unfolding once again in Palestine, and is creating
suffering and grief. The Israeli bourgeoisie sees a new crackdown
based on national oppression and ethnic segregation as a means to
quell the effects of the economic crisis.
Evictions
of
Palestinian homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem
lit the fuse. The Israeli state legally justified the evictions as the
recovery of property titles dating back to the long dead Ottoman
Empire. The plan is to tear down those houses to construct new
buildings for Jews. This project has the objective of strengthening
the ethnic segregation of Palestinians and promoting Israeli
nationalism.
In
Jerusalem,
tensions have grown in recent weeks. There have been protests by
Palestinians opposing ethnic cleansing by the Israeli State, as well
as demonstrations by the Jewish extreme right through the Old City,
shouting "death to Arabs".
Police
provocations
on the Esplanade of the Mosques/Temple Mount in Jerusalem corresponded
with the final days of the holy month of Ramadan. These were followed
by Palestinian riots, which soon extended to the whole West Bank and,
in a largely unprecedented development, to Israeli cities where Arab
citizens of Israel have been living among Jews since 1948.
For
centuries,
a ruse has been used by dying regimes to shore up decay in the face of
social discontent. For its effectiveness, the ruling classes endorse
the pogrom.
Groups
from
both ethnic communities carried out raids of the neighborhoods
inhabited by the other, set fire to religious buildings, looted
businesses, and even beat up individuals. These are the expected
fruits of the nationalist policy pursued both by the government of
Israeli capital and by the neighboring states, and also by all the
imperialist powers. This is the crescendo of all their incessant
provocations.
Hamas,
the
bourgeois party that dresses up in religious extremism, has dominated
the Gaza Strip for 15 years and, for its part, controls the political
movement of the dispossessed Palestinians in order to orient them
towards nationalism and to gain influence in the West Bank against its
rival Fatah.
The
launching
of thousands of rockets against Israeli cities from Gaza, which has
been subjected to an Israeli siege for many years, have caused deaths
and injuries among the Jewish civilian population and killed two
Arabs. Israeli reacted predictably, starting the raids on against Gaza
which caused so many casualties among the civilian population, this
time Palestinian. In the meantime, Israeli troops claimed many victims
among those in the West Bank who demonstrated against the worsening of
the occupation regime, while in Jerusalem there were also protests by
the Palestinian community, intolerant of the apartheid regime imposed
by the State of Israel and rebelling against the hateful national and
class oppression to which it is subjected.
But
the
war between the State of Israel and Hamas, while "asymmetrical", is a
war between bourgeois states, fighting as proxies of larger states and
imperialist world powers.
The
rockets
fired on Israeli cities are also part of this war. How did Hamas
obtain these weapons, since everything that enters the Gaza Strip is
subject to the strict control of the Israeli authorities?
Palestinian
proletarians
would be wrong to trust an "anti-colonial" national war of liberation.
They could never win because the large world powers would prevent it,
but also because the Palestinian bourgeoisie will never be willing to
dissolve its coupling with the Israeli one. That impossible national
war has already failed decades ago, with betrayal by all the other
Arab bourgeoisies, who are inextricably tied to imperialism.
This
is
not an anti-colonial struggle. Israel is not the continuator of the
colonial domination that manifested itself in Palestine at the time of
the British mandate. Israel is a country in the imperialist chain
where capital and world finance dominate.
Today
capitalist
domination inside the State of Israel, as well as the occupied
territories, is based on effective collaboration between the Israeli
bourgeoisie and its Palestinian younger sister. The Palestinian side
is weaker, and therefore more servile towards the former, but no less
greedy, cynical and ruthless. These united
Bourgeoisies support
each to other and, through the bourgeois war, like the two jaws of a
vice, tighten their grip on the proletarian class, both Jewish and
Arab.
The
maintenance
and escalation of this bourgeois war, in which almost exclusively
proletarians die, serves to throw both the Israeli workers and their
Palestinian comrades into the arms of their respective
Bourgeoisies.
As
the
economic crisis advances, attacking the living conditions of all
proletarians, economic attacks will take the form of diminishing wages
and increasing precariousness. The Israeli ruling class offers Jewish
workers the meager consolation of a fictitious unity of the nation. It
will demand to be paid for at an ever increasing price of misery and
blood
We
internationalist
communists know how difficult it is for the proletariat to return to
the path of class struggle. When the bourgeoisie is at war,
counter-revolution manifests itself more strongly. But we also know
that the bourgeoisie will not be able to preserve social peace between
classes for long.
The
road
to the class struggle requires the camaraderie of the Israeli
proletariat with the Palestinian proletariat. The workers of both
these sections of the world working class will then break all
solidarity with the bourgeoisie.
To
the
Jewish proletarians we give the mandate to sabotage the infamous
national oppression that the bourgeoisie of Israel imposes on the
Palestinians. To the Palestinian proletarians, to break with the
nationalist leadership that drags them to the slaughterhouse of
bourgeois armed conflict and then consigns the survivors to the market
of wage slavery, a labor force to be sold out.
Our
call
to the Palestinian and Israeli proletarians is for class unity, for
the overthrow of every national bourgeoisie and the establishment of a
dictatorship of the proletariat. The perspective must be of
proletarian revolution throughout the entire region and the world,
overcoming all national boundaries for a future humanity liberated
from capitalism and its infamous national homelands.
Only the proletariat can break the infernal chain of wars, as well as
the no less infamous bourgeois "peace". Only the proletariat can put
an end today to the national oppression of the Palestinians and of all
the oppressed peoples. Only the proletariat can put an end to racism,
an evil of capitalism of every climate. Only the international
proletariat, organized in its class unions and directed by its party,
can support the struggle of its comrades in Palestine, sabotaging the
bourgeois war and resuming the path of the class war for the world
revolution, which alone can put an end to the miseries of the present.
Capitalism cannot be reformed On the Repeal of Abortion in Poland
At the end of January in Poland, the constitutional court
confirmed the ban on abortion, except in cases of incest, rape or
danger to the life of the mother, as not conforming to the
articles of the Basic Law on the protection of the life of the
unborn. Ir was all decided democratically, perfect and within the
rules, so therefore, it became illegal to terminate a pregnancy in
the case of serious and fatal malformations of the fetus or when a
death of the newborn is inevitable. The bill originated with the
majority Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice Party or PiS),
whose orientation is "right-wing", "socially conservative" and
"sovereignist".
The new abortion law is worse than the previous one,
which was one of the most restrictive in Europe, but allowed for
abortion in cases of fetal malformations.
Even before the law came into force, an estimated 200,000
abortions were carried out illegally in Poland every year,
obvisously with serious risks for the woman. Another 120,000
abortions took place in one of Poland’s neighboring countries
where abortion is legal: Germany, Czechia, and elsewhere in
Northern Europe. Covid travel restrictions have made it almost
impossible even for middle-class women, who can afford, unlike the
proletariat, abortion in neighboring countries in minimum health
security.
Since the ruling on October 22, street protests in Poland
have never stopped. The Strajk Kobiet ("Women’s Strike") movement
has organized several demonstrations in recent months. On the day
the law came into force, thousands poured into the streets and a
new national demonstration was called on January 29.
Since October, police in Warsaw have attacked the
demonstrations with batons, tear gas and mass arrests. This
brutality has continued in the following months.
As well we know, the demands of women organized in
interclass feminist movements, i.e. led by the bourgeoisie, again,
will result in nothing. Or, at most, a few crumbs which can be
taken back at an opportune moment as well as serving as a
political distraction.
The Polish government is accused of being "right-wing"
and "clerical". But the condition of women in capitalism in all
countries and cultures is everywhere threatened, kept in a
condition of personal and economic inferiority and the first
victim of the harassment and abuse of the present social regime,
especially when it is in the grip of its crises.
As we wrote in our work "Communist Revolution and the Emancipation of Women" in 1979: "In the socialist State women will
be free to have children or not to have children, they will not be
forced to abort or give birth as in bourgeois society (...) In
communism the bourgeois family will be extinguished and replaced
by community life in all its forms. Children will no longer weigh
on mothers, mothers will be able to stay with their children if
they want, finally expressing an authentic maternal feeling, as no
longer produced by selfishness towards their offspring, no longer
deformed by the need to starve other people’s children to feed
their own".
With
over
3 million deaths as of April 2021 and an economic cost which could
be as high as 14 trillion US dollars, the Covid-19 pandemic has
caused social and economic catastrophes, being described as “the
most challenging crisis since World War II.” On 31 December 2019,
the World Health Organisation (WHO) was informed of the outbreak
of a life-threatening viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China; over the
course of the following months, the disease caused a worldwide
health crisis and plunged humanity into the worst economic
recession since the Great Depression. Although viral spread can be
mitigated through measures such as social distancing, use of face
masks and testing and tracing, the pandemic is unlikely to end
until there is a global roll-out of effective vaccines that can
prevent infection and drive herd immunity. Since the start of the
Covid-19 pandemic, the world has seen unprecedented progress in
vaccine development, manufacturing and deployment. Within a record
time of less than one year, 11 vaccines are already in clinical
use and approximately 900 million doses have been administered
across 155 countries. Furthermore, 88 vaccines are undergoing
clinical trials and 184 additional vaccine candidates are at the
pre-clinical stage.
However,
having
licensed vaccines which are produced in large numbers is not
enough to achieve control of Covid-19; they must also be priced
affordably and distributed effectively on a global scale so that
they are available where needed. National interests – especially
those of high-income countries – remain the dominant factor in
vaccine rollout. Developed nations have stipulated massive
advance-purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies, which
means that rich countries have secured the majority of available
doses. Several wealthy nations have pre-ordered a number of
Covid-19 vaccines that far outnumbers their populations, fuelling
an extraordinary gap in vaccine access around the world. The EU
has ordered 1.6 billion doses for its adult population of roughly
375 million, which will create a surplus of approximately 525
million vaccinations. Similarly, the UK has ordered 219 million
vaccines for its 54 million adults (a surplus of 165 million),
while Canada has ordered 188 million doses for its 32 million
adults (an excess of 156 million vaccines). Although high-income
nations only account for 19% of the global adult population,
collectively they have laid claim to 54% (4.6 billion) of all
vaccine doses purchased to date, leaving 3.2 billion doses for the
rest of the world combined. This global disparity in vaccine
access may have devastating consequences: billions of individuals
will not be vaccinated by the end of 2021, which could prolong the
pandemic and raise the risk of further viral mutations emerging,
potentially undermining the efficacy of existing vaccines.
Covid-19
vaccine
technologies, production and prices are entirely controlled by
profit-driven pharmaceutical companies that fiercely compete on
the global market. Despite the WHO’s efforts, vaccines remain
unaffordable and/or inaccessible for many countries. As a possible
remedy, calls have been made for patents to be waived in order to
accelerate manufacturing and supply of vaccines in low and
middle-income countries. To this end, some governments have
proposed a waiver of parts of the TRIPS Agreement, the World Trade
Organisation’s international treaty which protects intellectual
property at a global level. The proposal, which was jointly
submitted by India and South Africa in October 2020, has been
backed by over 100 developing countries. Despite receiving full
support from numerous international organisations, the bid to
suspend Covid vaccine patents is facing opposition by many States,
assiduously working to protect the interests of their
pharmaceutical industries. Those who oppose the waiver argue that
pharmaceutical companies have taken significant risk and should be
rewarded for their considerable investments in vaccine research
and development. Governments in the US and Europe as well as the
International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers claim
that the waiver would threaten profits and disincentivise private
investment in vaccine research, thus hampering scientific progress
and innovation. However, others argue that the urgent need for
vaccines should take priority over intellectual property rights,
and that the waiver could be an important step towards scaling up
vaccination in impoverished areas of the world. In addition,
supporters of the waiver point out that research for Covid
vaccines benefited from extensive public funding, and therefore
private companies should not have exclusive rights to profit from
the results.
The
ongoing
debate over the production and distribution of vaccines leads to
an important question: to what extent are Covid vaccines the
result of private research and investment? Virtually all currently
available Covid vaccines are largely the product of
government-funded research rather than private investment. The
development of several viable vaccines in less than a year
represents a monumental scientific achievement, but the
springboard was decades of massive public investment in vaccine
research and testing. It is estimated that the US government’s
National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent 17.2 billion dollars in
vaccine technologies from 2000 to 2019; this funding was essential
to the speed and success of the Covid-19 vaccination programme.
Most of the leading vaccine candidates prime the immune system
against the viral spike protein (the viral receptor-binding
domain), an approach based on the pioneering work of scientists at
the NIH and other government- funded institutions. Specifically,
two fundamental discoveries that emerged from public research laid
the groundwork for nearly all available Covid vaccines: the viral
protein designed by Barney Graham and his colleagues at the NIH,
and the concept of RNA modification, first introduced by Drew
Weissman and Katalin Karikó at the University of Pennsylvania. In
addition to the key contributions made by public research in the
past, an unprecedented amount of public funding has been poured
into vaccine development and manufacturing during the pandemic.
Initially, most pharmaceutical companies were reluctant to invest
in Covid vaccines. Creating vaccines, especially in the wake of an
acute health emergency, did not prove profitable during previous
epidemics. The development process is long, and the outcome is far
from certain. In some cases, the failure rate may be as high as
94%. Furthermore, vaccines are generally regarded as low-margin
products with a limited expected growth potential compared to
pharmaceuticals in other therapeutic areas. Therefore, private
investors showed little interest in the race for a vaccine. Only
when governments and agencies stepped forth with funding pledges
did pharmaceutical companies get to work on the Covid vaccine.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the leading six
vaccine candidates have received an estimated 12 billion dollars
of taxpayer and public money, including 1.7 billion dollars for
the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, 1.5 billion dollars for the Johnson
& Johnson vaccine and 2 billion dollars for BioNTech’s and
Moderna’s messenger-RNA vaccines. According to a recent study,
public grants accounted for 97-99% of the research and development
funding towards the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, with less than 2%
coming from private industry.
Waiving
vaccine
patents will not change this reality. But the fact that the
bourgeois state is ready to intervene in cases of emergency, in
times of peace as well as of war, by providing capital, tax
concessions of every kind, by imposing moderate or sustained
prices, by making its forces and means available, does not alter
the fact that goods are produced and sold in any case, within
capitalist relations of production. The state of the capitalists
helps the capitalists to solve their problems, it comes to the aid
of the capitalists. Obviously, by referring to the other classes
and the half-classes. But the fact that the bourgeois state, in
cases of emergency, is ready to intervene, in time of peace as
well as in time of war, by providing capital, tax concessions of
all kinds, imposing moderate or sustained prices, making its
forces and means available, does not mean that goods are not
produced and sold within capitalist relations of production. The
state of the capitalists helps the capitalists to solve their
problems, it comes to the aid of the capitalists. Obviously, by
referring to the other classes and the half-classes. Thus it does
not escape Marxist analysis that the "public contribution" of the
bourgeois state goes to strengthen capitalism, does not condition
it, and is not qualitatively different from that of private
investors. While the recent vaccine news has brought hope, it has
also exposed our economic system’s dramatic inability to deal with
a global threat such as the Covid19 pandemic. A solution can only
be achieved through the eradication of existing property
relations, the single greatest barrier to universal access to
lifesaving vaccines and therapeutics.
Port of Montreal: Capitalism needed a special law to put an end to the strike
The movement, which seemed so combative, lasted only a
few days. This time, the federal government used its joker to
violate the right to strike of workers across the country. This
time, it was the longshoremen at the Port of Montreal who got a
taste of the violence of the state, which has no qualms about
abusing its powers to serve the interests of the bosses and crush
the workers. The special law forced the workers to return to work
or face fines of up to $100,000 per day of "violation. Now that
the strike has been broken, a mediator-arbitrator will have the
role of deciding the content of the next collective agreement.
Faced with this reality, we must accept the following facts: for
Canadian democracy, the right to strike is in fact a privilege
that the state can take away at any time.
Anger and the will to fight
The 1,150 dockworkers at the Port of Montreal have not
had a work contract since December 2018 and have never been able
to come to an agreement with the employer side. The union’s
demands were mainly opposed to changes in shift assignments that
the bosses wanted to impose on its employees, who already have to
deal with unstable schedules, making it very difficult to balance
work and family. In August, the inflexibility of the bosses had
already pushed the union into a strike (for a period of 10 days),
which was then postponed after an agreement in principle was
reached. However, with management unwilling to back down, 99% of
CUPE Local 375 members voted for an indefinite general strike on
April 26. Unfortunately, all this fighting spirit did not carry
much weight in the face of the repressive measures taken by the
Canadian government, which hastened to impose a special law with
the aim of breaking the strikers. The latter was adopted by the
House of Commons on Wednesday night, April 29.
Special laws are not emergency laws
Special laws have long been commonplace in Canada. A
similar law had crushed the postal workers in 2018. In 2017, it
was government lawyers who were victims of a law passed by the
provincial government. 2015, it was CP employees, broken by the
federal government. Since the creation of the Labour Code in 1964,
no less than 42 special laws have been used to break various
strike movements. So we see that the state, which itself has
framed the workers’ right to strike as an essential element of
democracy, has no qualms about taking it away from the most
combative elements of the proletariat when they decide to fight to
defend their working conditions. Many people are offended by these
laws, which they consider undemocratic, and the fact that they
have been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional reinforces
their position. But this is not the case. Court overruling may
indeed save some union sections or individuals affected by the
laws from paying the hefty fines imposed on them. However, they do
not prevent these laws from performing their real function of
breaking the movement, which they do every time. Workers should be
under no illusion that although the courts work hard to give the
impression of impartiality and equality of all before the law,
they are bourgeois institutions that serve primarily to
consolidate the power of the ruling class. Workers cannot count on
them to defend them.
In fact, bourgeois democracy is only following its normal
evolution in this rotting capitalism. In the countries of advanced
capitalism, the bourgeois state tends to centralize and impose
tighter and tighter control over workers’ organizations and
society in general. This interference in labor disputes will only
get worse and the state’s repression will only become more
violent. There is no point in hoping for a return to the "real
democracy" (which has never existed) that some liberals dream of,
and which calls on strikers to defy special laws and take the
protection of the courts. In such a situation, workers should not
be blind to the fact that the contradictions between labor and
capital are becoming more and more severe. Therefore, the unions
must be ready to take the struggle to a higher level.
Lack of combativeness of the union leadership
As has happened so often in the past, the longshoremen
were left powerless when they were hit by the special law. As long
as this situation continues, workers across the country will never
really be able to defend themselves. In the future, it will take a
convergence of struggles that brings workers together by the
hundreds, and then by the thousands, to create a movement strong
enough to challenge the special laws. This will only be possible
by breaking out of union corporatism. Unfortunately, we cannot
currently count on the union leadership, which tends to lack
ambition, if not courage. We need the rank and file to fight to
force leadership to act and change this unequal balance of power.
In the context of the Port of Montreal longshoremen, the isolation
of the movement allowed the government to crush it in a matter of
days. This must stop.
In March, the case of the container ship Ever Given got
stuck across the Suez Canal due to "a gust of wind". Just to
reduce transport costs, the bourgeoisie, with idiotic zeal, builds
ships as big as a small city, 400 meters long and capable of
loading 18,300 containers. For a week, the blockade of the
waterway, through which 12% of world trade passes, has
demonstrated how the circulation of goods, an artificial
counterpart to the natural turnover of living organisms, can put
world capitalism in crisis. The damage is estimated at 10 billion
dollars a day, for the delayed sale of all that useless junk.
The huge ship, that stranded mountain of steel, a symbol
of all modern capitalism and its hyper-productive madness.
Capitalism commits working humanity to an idiotic
dissipation of energy to saturate the world with useless goods.
The bourgeois class, for the sole purpose of conservation,
ceaselessly spreads the reactionary ideology of ecology, made of
"sustainable developments", "green transitions", when capital can
never stop or even slow down on the mad race of production as an
end in itself.
Now, in Italy, an ad hoc ministry "for the ecological
transition" has been set up, promising new investments in
infrastructures, still poured with concrete, but definitely
"green". On the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States,
we hear Biden singing the same song with his new plan "Build back
better", which plans to invest 2,000 billion dollars in
infrastructure, 650 billion of which for roads, bridges and ports
alone.
But the ideology of ecologism is looking for more noble
support than advertising talk and finds followers among
specialists in the natural sciences. In this field it has been
proposed for a long time the addition in the geological
stratigraphy of a new age, the current one, called Anthropocene,
in which the human species would influence in a decisive way the
future of the earth’s crust, water, atmosphere and living beings,
the so-called biosphere.
We maintain a strong skepticism in the face of the
alleged science of this era of social decay, and we are not at all
inclined to consider as due to the human species the work of
devastation that is instead imposed by the capitalist mode of
production. What determines this ruin are the necessities of
valorization of capital, in its chaotic action for the sole
purpose of producing a profit, and certainly not to meet the vital
needs of the species.
Marxist theory teaches us that capital is a relationship
between men, which is not identified with the productive capacity
of the species, with its technical endowment, with scientific
knowledge and with the forces of nature, all of which are now
subject to the reproduction of capital. Whenever the urgency
arises to reckon with the devastating effects on nature of the mad
race for the accumulation of surplus value, we look with strong
suspicion at what is produced in terms of "scientific" analysis
or, even worse, of incongruous proposals by the bourgeois
political class, only interested in its slice of the social
product.
But that we have entered the anthropocene is our thesis!
The anthropocene is communism! That era of our history as a
species in which the development of man’s capacities has come to
be able to influence the whole life of the planet. It is a new and
immense force. It is enough now to remove it from the arthritic
but still rapacious hands of Capital. Tomorrow, the communist
society, having stifled today’s nauseating, moralistic, terrorist,
commercial "green" rhetoric, and no longer deaf and blinded by its
internal conflict between opposing interests, will be able to see,
know and foresee the very long cycles that regulate in grand,
delicate and complex balances the life on our Earth. And, with
caution, try wisely to intervene, in a project extended to the
whole globe and to several generations.
Going along with the current fashion, even a recent study
carried out by an Israeli university, the Weizmann Institute of
Science in Rehovot, has come to the "distressing" conclusion that
the historically accumulated mass of minerals processed by man,
excluding therefore the products of agriculture, would have
exceeded that of living organisms on the planet, even excluding
the water they contain.
We do not guarantee at all the seriousness of these
university "studies", that we know by now are more and more moved
by mercantile and career interests, especially today when the
exanguious financings are contended with the most indecent
methods. Therefore, we cannot evaluate how much the data used in
the research are reliable, or even falsified, nor if the authors
at least show to know which quantities they are talking about.
The fact remains, however, that we feel no need for
further study, as we knew this before. We are in fact well
convinced of the problem of the progressive mineralization of the
biosphere. Iron or wheat? Beyond calculation errors, given the
immense amount of data to be collected and correlated, we do not
deny a certain verisimilitude of the conclusions reached with our
thesis. That is, if the overtaking of the mass of mineral products
processed by our species, defined in the study as anthropogenic
mass, on that of the total living biomass, which according to the
research would occur as early as 2020, had not yet been reached,
it will certainly be in a few years.
The biomass on Earth would be around 1,100 gigatonnes,
relatively constant over a wide geological span (a "giga" is a 1
followed by 9 zeros). Conversely, the anthropogenic mass has
evolved very rapidly in the last 120 years: even at the beginning
of the 20th century it did not exceed 3% of the dehydrated
biomass. Moreover, the race of the anthropogenic mass has
experienced a formidable acceleration in recent decades, doubling
every 20 years.
It is evident that not even the capitalists, even if they
wanted to, and not even if they were united, have the slightest
possibility of stemming this infernal eruption. This is
demonstrated by the deluge of proclamations by eminent politicians
and heads of state in the last two decades, of world gatherings
devoted to ecological talk and to the "historic" treaties that
were supposed to curb "climate change" and "defend the
environment".
Other consequences that capital cannot control are those
of agriculture, deforestation and livestock breeding, all ancient
activities but now implemented on a very large scale, aided by the
enormous development of the means of production, which, however,
do not give strength and wealth to this society but only generate
new imbalances and new crises, as well as the misery of the
proletarians who work there. The same can be said for mining
activities, a real robbery of the goods of the subsoil.
Vegetable biomass is estimated at 900 gigatonnes while
that of buildings and infrastructures is 1,100. Urbanism and
capitalism, and land rent, worse if small and fractional, are
incompatible with each other. Think of the "ghost" cities and
towns, old or new from the plans of governments forced to deal
with capitalist anarchy, and greedy for huge profits and rents
from construction contracts. Not to mention the myriad of
industrial plants abandoned due to the capricious change of the
rate of profit between sectors and productive regions of the
world: ruins that in every corner of the planet mark a monstrous
civilization unable to provide even for its own survival and that
clutters the space with its corpses.
Capitalism catapults immense quantities of goods in those
hubs of the world market that are called cities. Hence the
frenzied giantisation of cyclopean concrete agglomerations,
temples of real estate investment, an instrument of solidification
of otherwise evanescent capital. No plan can limit the expansion
of cities beyond the "walls", exorbitantly overflowing into the
countryside. In this horrible world colonized everywhere by
capital, the agony of associated life is consumed. A civilization
that only destroys the work of the dead neither knows nor cares to
recover what has been inherited from past generations. In squalor
lives the species Homo sapiens: how history plays with words!
"The Basis of Marxist economic analysis is the
distinction between dead and living labor. We define capitalism
not as ownership over the heaps of crystallized past labor, but as
the right of subtraction from living and active labor. That’s why
the present economy cannot lead to a good solution which would
achieve, with the minimum of present labor effort, the rational
preservation of what past labor has given us, and the best basis
for the effect of future labor. The bourgeois economy is
interested in the frenzy of the contemporary rhythm of work, and
it favors the destruction of the still useful masses of past work,
not caring about posterity" (Murder of the Dead, "Battaglia
Comunista", 1951, no. 24).
We wrote this 70 years ago, before the word ecology was
being bandied about by anyone and everywhere, even in the
Stalinist East, it was being immolated on the altars of
productivism.
The consequences are devastating for the entire animal
kingdom, in an environment increasingly artificial and less
suitable for their reproduction. The mass of all animals is said
to represent a small fraction of the planetary biomass, less than
4 parts per thousand since they do not exceed 4 gigatons, while
the mass of humans is much lower, amounting to only 0.01% of
living species.
The plastics present on the planet are estimated to be
about 8 gigatons, twice the mass of all terrestrial and marine
animals. It seems that many end up forming large floating islands
in the Pacific Ocean. Why is so much of it produced? Because the
rate of profit in its production is sufficiently high. Is there a
remedy? In this society, no. Even in these pandemic times, no
government is willing to give up on "development". All assemblies
are forbidden, except in the factories!
The proletariat alone will have the task of saving itself
and the human species if it is able to suppress the suffocating
domination of capital and its demented endless reproduction.
On January 1, 2021, opportunists celebrated the 62nd
anniversary of the so-called "Cuban revolution", a reference of all
the opportunist parties and movements that proclaim themselves
socialist, but which are nothing more than a masquerade of the
political alternatives that the bourgeoisie counts on to give
continuity to capitalist exploitation.
On this occasion the bourgeois government of Cuba announced
that "In accordance with the new economic context of the country as
of January 1, 2021, the Ministry of Finance and Prices modified the
wage scale of the country, setting the minimum wage at 2100 Cuban
pesos". Likewise, Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuban president, announced that
Cuba will unify its two current currencies, the Cuban peso (CUP) and
the convertible peso (CUC), as of January 1, 2021: "It is considered
that the conditions are created that allow announcing the beginning
of the task as of January 1, 2021 with a single exchange rate of 24
Cuban pesos for one dollar", said Díaz-Canel.
These announcements, long awaited and announced on
television by Díaz-Canel, accompanied by the former president and
leader of the "communist" party of Cuba, Raúl Castro, are part of a
set of tasks indicated by the Cuban leadership, framed in the
so-called "ordering task". "We reiterate the transcendence and
importance of this task that will put the country in better
conditions to carry out the transformations demanded by the updating
of our economic and social model on the basis of guaranteeing all
Cubans the greatest equality of rights and opportunities", Díaz-Canel declared.
In monetary matters, the "ordering task" consists of the
disappearance of the CUC, created in 1994, and the establishment of
a single exchange rate.
With these measures, the Cuban bourgeois government is
sincere about the advance of the currency devaluation process and
the existence of an inflationary process, like the one currently
undergone by many capitalist countries. The fact that an apparently
low initial exchange rate was established (24 pesos per dollar) will
not prevent the rise of the inflationary wave and the exchange rate.
In fact, after the government’s announcement, it was observed that
in the black market it reached prices of up to 45 CUP or Cuban pesos
per dollar.
Although the government has established that the population
must make its cash transactions only in CUP (Cuban Pesos) and has
opened the use of credit cards in dollars to those who receive
remittances from relatives abroad, in practice it is imposing the
payment in Dollars or Euros in cash, especially for all the services
and needs of a foreign tourist; and it is in these market spaces
where the real devaluation of the Cuban peso will prosper.
In correspondence with this monetary policy, the new salary
scale or table was set, which has a minimum salary of 2,100 pesos
(87.5 dollars at the official exchange rate and 46.67 dollars
according to the street value). In the new wage tabulator the amount
increases according to what the government determines as degrees of
complexity of the work and according to the number of hours worked
during the week. Thus, the 2,100 pesos apply to the complexity group
I, but only if they work 44 hours per week; if the workers work 40
hours per week, their salary will be 1,910 pesos.
The occupations of service workers will be located from
group I to VI (from 2100/ 2910 pesos to 2660/2415 pesos); those of
administrative workers, from group III to VII (from 2300/2090, to
2810/2555 pesos); and operators, from group II to VIII (from
2200/2000, to 2960/2690 pesos). Obviously, most of the salaried
population will fall between wage groups I and VI.
In the case of technical positions, they will be from group
VII to XXV (from 2810/2555 pesos up to 6610/ 6010 pesos); and the
cadre positions from group XVII to XXXII (from 4610/ 4190 up to
9510/ 8645 pesos).
Then there is a set of provisions for different
specificities of work situations that complement the 32 salary
groups.
But the task of the regulation is not only limited to
establishing a single exchange rate and a wage scale. The Cuban
government has announced the elimination of subsidies and the
adjustment of prices. First, "the gradual elimination of excessive
subsidies and undue gratuities". "The policy is to subsidize people
and not products, to avoid the egalitarianism that we sometimes have
in society". Secondly, "to maintain the salary as the main source to
finance the consumption of workers and their families, and to
eliminate salary distortions to stimulate the incorporation to
employment and promotion to management positions". In other words,
the Cuban government abandons the control of prices of goods and
services which, according to them, stimulated a supposed
egalitarianism, and emphasizes what all workers know: that they only
count on their salary to meet the cost of living. Of course, the
government stated that the established minimum wage covers the cost
of the reference basket of goods and services (CBSR=1,528 pesos).
But what the government does not say is that with these economic
measures the amount of the CBSR will move rapidly and will put the
workers with a very weak salary to be able to cover their needs and
those of their families. And in an environment of worker
demobilization and repression, wage changes will continue to depend
on centralized decisions by the Cuban government.
Like other opportunist governments, which declare
themselves "left" and "socialist", the Cuban government claims that
this is not a neoliberal adjustment. But it is evident that the
Cuban bourgeois government seeks to get ahead in the framework of
the economic crisis, with a declining tourist sector, with the loss
of economic support from Venezuela, with at least 40% of the state
enterprises operating at a loss. The Cuban government is betting on
increasing the opening to the world market, on giving viability to
some merchandise export opportunities and on lowering the operating
costs of transnationals setting up in Cuba, mainly labor costs,
which is one of the cheapest in the region, surpassing only
Venezuela’s salaries.
The demons of speculation, hoarding and shortage of goods
are unleashed. The price of 80 grams of bread alone, which every
Cuban receives through the rationing card, has multiplied 20 times
since January. The 11.2 million resident Cubans receive that bread
daily, whether they are communists or opponents, working or
unemployed, at a price that used to be 5 cents Cuban pesos (CUP), a
tiny cost if expressed in dollars. Now, as part of the economic
adjustments announced by President Miguel Díaz-Canel, bread will
cost one peso, or 4 cents, according to information published in the
Official Gazette. The prices of basic services (water, gas,
electricity, transportation), notary fees and taxes also increased.
One of the immediate consequences of these measures will be
an estimated inflation of three digits, which has also been
recognized by the Cuban government in its announcements.
In an attempt to contain an inflationary process, the
prices of agricultural products will be regulated by the municipal
and Havana provincial governments; but we know that these controls
will fall at the mercy of market dynamics.
The minimum wage in Cuba went from 400 to 2,100 Cuban pesos
(from 17 to 87 dollars). The average wage increase was 450% and 500%
in the case of pensions.
But workers will be harassed by inflation and the fall in
real wages, and in the street the dispute for the acquisition of
dollars in cash will become more acute and it is expected that
transactions in this currency for the acquisition of basic
necessities will increase. The black market in foreign currency will
have a "license to kill" and the salaried workers will be the main
ones affected.
As in the entire capitalist world, Cuban wage policies are
oriented to protect the profits of public and private businessmen.
Although it is foreseeable that the Cuban government will implement
new wage adjustments and apply some price control measures for some
goods and services, the trend of falling real wages and growing
unemployment will continue. In Cuba we will see the same anti-worker
policies applied by different bourgeois governments around the
world. We will also see the flexibilization of the workday, casual
labor, hourly work, overtime work and all the labor modalities that
allow the capitalists to economize on their wage payments. The Cuban
government seeks to make Cuba attractive for transnational
investment, at the cost of the over-exploitation of the workers.
Neither Cuban wage earners, nor wage earners around the
world, should be fooled by this false socialism. Sooner rather than
later, the Cuban proletariat must react by resuming its class
struggle and united action for the improvement of its wages and
working conditions, breaking with the calls for the defense of the
"socialist homeland".
At 5 a.m. on November 19, 2020, at the Coles
distribution center in Smeaton Grange, a suburb of Sydney,
New South Wales, Australia, 350 workers stopped work,
opposing the announcement that the plant would be fully
automated at an unspecified date in the coming years. In
response, Coles management soon called a lockout that was
initially scheduled to last until February 11, 2021.
In the face of this attack, workers - and the
United Workers Union in which they were organized -
responded by initiating one of the longest strikes in
Australia’s recent history. After 14 long weeks, the
strike ended on February 27, 2021: 71% of the vote was in
favor of reaching an agreement, dubbed the "Coles Smeaton
Grange (UWU) Regional Distribution Centre Enterprise
Agreement 2020".
Coles is an Australian supermarket chain with 100
thousand employees that operates under a national duopoly,
since together with its competitor Woolworths it holds 80%
of the distribution market in Australia.
Despite the historic duration of the strike and
its importance, given that its outcome will play a crucial
role in determining how Coles will deal with the
automation of its other stores in the future, the
bourgeois press, even the left-wing press, has essentially
- and deliberately - ignored it.
Far from being the victory of historic magnitude
as the UWU proclaimed, the manner in which the strike was
conducted and the concluding agreement represent a searing
defeat for workers. The great fervor of workers’ struggle
was completely wasted.
The strikers were supported with only 60-70
Australian dollars (AuD) per head per week by a union with
300 million in assets, about 90-100 million in liquid
funds, and about 100 million in annual dues. Some were
forced to sell their homes; others ended up separating
from their spouses.
UWU officials have consistently intimidated
workers by fearing disciplinary action and police
intervention, demanding that the picket line at Smeaton
Grange be broken up. They were careful not to organize at
the other Coles distribution centers the most basic of
protests, despite the UWU’s organized presence at all
plants. They argued with the police behind the scenes
without consulting the workers, promising that the picket
line would be short-lived. According to a member of a
grassroots group of strikers - the Concerned Workers
Smeaton Grange (CWSG) - although the NSW police did not
show interest in intervening, UWU unionists still
successfully urged workers to break the ongoing roadblock
and simply rail at trucks entering and leaving the plant.
Solidarity strikes and "hard" picketing are
illegal in Australia’s corporate system of labor relations
called "Fair Work", introduced in 2009, but there as
elsewhere the anti-strike law is a paper tiger in the face
of sufficiently strong action.
In 2012, at a Coles distribution center in
Melbourne, members of the National Union of Workers (NUW),
which would later merge with United Voice to form the UWU
in 2019, won their battle through determined picketing,
despite a court order declaring it illegal and ordering
its revocation.
The Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA) signed
at the conclusion of the strike provides:
- exit incentives for 50-80 workers, out of the
total 350, while clauses 5, 36 and 38 praise the "mutual
interest" of workers and bosses in increasing
productivity;
- workers who do not benefit from the redundancy
incentive will be progressively laid off;
- clauses 34.4.8-34.4.9, limit the payment of
redundancy incentives to 52 weeks;
- the promised redundancy payment will last 80
weeks, but it is to be seen whether Coles will opt for
more disadvantageous resolutions for its profits when the
closure process of the center will definitely start;
- until layoff, workers will receive a wage
increase of 3.5% per year for up to 3 years (the union had
claimed a 5.5% increase), a pittance for workers short of
reserves, if not in debt, because of the strike;
- 1000 AuD signing bonus; the union demand was
5000 Aud; the issue of the 14 weeks of lost wages is
absent from the text, despite the fact that it was Coles
that forced the strike by choosing the lockout route.
In the meantime, the management is trying to
flush out the most combative of the workers involved in
the strike, labeling them as "extremist anti-worker
socialists" and even as infiltrators of ASIO (the
Australian spy services).
Ultimately the union acted as an obstacle rather
than a collective condenser of resources: there was no
tangible support, no strike funds, no contributions to
members, no solidarity action in other workplaces, while
there was a suspension of picketing and attempts to gain
the support of other Coles workers. Coles management and
investors are right in being satisfied. Meanwhile,
unionists are complaining that union membership in
Australia has inexplicably dropped to 9%!
From the other UWU trade federations, no critical
voices have been raised against the agreement. The UWU
Hospo Voice, the tourism and catering federation, even
said it was none of their business. According to one CWSG
member, some leaders of the Sydney Seafarers’ Federation -
the Maritime Union of Australia - privately voiced sharp
criticism of the handling of the Smeaton Grange strike but
chose not to express it publicly in order to maintain
union unity. So much for uniting workers over divisions
between companies and categories!
Pakistan
On February 10, a strike was called in Islamabad
by the All Government Employees Grand Alliance (AGEGA)
union, which organizes federal government employees,
essentially demanding a substantial wage increase,
adequate health care and standing against the
privatization process.
The workers who took to the streets marched to
the press club, despite the fact that several union
leaders had been arrested the previous day. Their union
headquarters in Islamabad was attacked by police who used
tear gas in an attempt to clear the premises. Workers who
came to defend it were pelted with rubber bullets. In
several areas of the city there were bitter clashes
between workers and police. Some highways, such as the
Kashmir highway, were blocked.
"A well-armed contingent of police, including
riot units and the anti-terrorism department were deployed
on Constitution Avenue and in the Red Zone, and
paramilitary troops in government buildings", this is what
newspapers write, and that more than a thousand tear gas
shells were fired. The Minister of Interior, responding to
questions from journalists, with sarcasm and intimidation
declared: "we have never used so many tear gas, many more
are ready".
It should be pointed out how in the streets the
federal employees of the capital, if they found the harsh
repression of the government, were able to react by
organizing and defending themselves. In two hundred were
arrested.
In the bourgeois camp, the Pakistan Democratic
Movement (PDM) a conservative political movement, today
aligned against the government of Imran Khan, has
cautiously stood up for the striking workers describing
their movement as against "neo-liberalism". The truth is
that this, like the other organizations of the ruling
classes, will not hesitate, when they have the opportunity
and the demands of Capital require it, to attack the
living and working conditions of the wage-earners.
The next day the workers continued their protest.
Federal offices in the capital remained closed. Other
unions, denouncing the violence, joined the strike in
several cities in Pakistan. Adhesions were registered in
North Waziristan, Belucistan and Sindh province, but also
in several districts such as Dasu Kohistan. In Punjab,
civil servants from various areas including electricity
and railway workers, represented by their respective
unions, joined the strike. A substantial number of strikes
and demonstrations in favor of the workers brutally
attacked by the police show us a significant, as well as
fundamental, worker solidarity.
The next day, with unusual haste, the government
approved a wage increase for federal workers, following
which the unions ended the protest in Islamabad. The
salary was increased up to 25%. The initial demand was 40
percent. Workers who had been imprisoned were released and
lawsuits dismissed. An achievement due to struggle and
solidarity memberships.
These days have been an important lesson for the
entire working class of Pakistan, which will have to
understand more and more how their unity in the struggle,
through sincere and combative class organizations that
nurture workers’ solidarity, are fundamental conditions to
oppose the attacks of governments of all political colors.
Serbia
On April 24, the strike resumed at FCA Plastic in
Kragujevac, Serbia, which employs 90 workers and supplies
bumpers to the plant in the same town where the Fiat 500L
is assembled. FCA Serbia is 66% owned by Stellantis and
the remaining 37% by the State of Serbia. FCA Plastic is
now part of Stellantis, although it enjoys a certain
autonomy.
The strike continues the struggle that began last
December over the new company contract. The points in
dispute are the anti-strike clause that prohibits the use
of collective abstention from work for three years and the
amount of the production bonus.
The workers of FCA Plastic are members of Savez
samostalnih sindikata Srbije (SSSS), the Confederation of
Autonomous Trade Unions of Serbia, the largest
confederation of the regime in the country, which
succeeded the old union controlled by the Tito party and
from which it inherited most of the structure. This is the
majority union in the FCA Serbia, while a minority of
workers is part of the Ujedinjeni granski sindikati
"Nezavisnost" (Ugs-N), Union of Trade Unions
"Independence", another trade union confederation of the
regime born from a split from the SSSS in the ’90s, a
reflection of the struggle between the opposing
pro-Milošević and pro-Western bourgeois factions.
While at FCA Serbia workers accepted a company
contract - obtained according to the FCA Plastic Strike
Committee by "dirty methods" - at the latter the SSSS
section refused to sign. In response, in January, the
company management, in order to blackmail and intimidate
the workers, reduced the wages of holidays and that of
production stoppage (a kind of layoff) due to
overproduction, exacerbated by Covid 19.
After a series of one-hour warning strikes in
January and February, following the failure of
negotiations on February 18, 90% of the workers went on
strike. This first strike lasted a full month, ending on
March 24, when the company paid the dues related to the
days of production stoppage, but reduced according to the
January decision.
On April 24, according to the words of the
struggle committee, the workers decided to radicalize the
strike, resuming it and accompanying it with
demonstrations under the city hall.
The company refused any compromise, despite the
fact that the strike soon ended up leading to the blocking
of activity at the FCA Serbia plant as well. The company
has thus started to move some machinery from the FCA
Plastic plant to the FCA Serbia plant. At the same time it
started circulating rumours about redundancies in the
striking factory.
No solidarity came from the SSSS section of the
"mother" factory.
The Strike Committee for the time being proclaims
its intention to continue the struggle, but it is clear
that under these conditions the only chance of success
would lie in extending the strike to the assembly plant of
FCA Serbia, something that the majority union - Savez
samostalnih sindikata Srbije (SSSS) - is careful not to
do, having supported the approval of a company agreement
similar to the one contested at FCA Plastic.
The workers’ movement in Serbia is no exception:
the crucial issue is the defeat of regime unionism through
the rebirth of the class union.
Spain
In pandemic-hit Spain, the government instituted
a fairly strict confinement that lasted until May. This
had serious economic consequences. About 4 million workers
- out of a national total of 20 million - were put on
"temporary" rest, but for 800,000 of these it was
permanent. The government instituted a layoff freeze, but,
of course, companies were often able to circumvent it.
Since May, the confinement measures have been
gradually relaxed, until the return to normal on June 21.
This contributed to a second wave of the pandemic, which
peaked in October. This time, the confinement measures
were softer: curfew from 11 a.m. to 6 a.m., some
restriction on mobility, limits on gatherings. The
government then tried to safeguard the Christmas shopping
season, another factor that contributed to a new upsurge
of the pandemic, after a partial downturn in November.
Museums and tourist attractions considered
non-essential were closed during the first shutdown and
workers temporarily laid off. At the Sagrada Familia in
Barcelona, there was already discontent among workers
prior to the virus, who had thus organized in good numbers
into a small grassroots union, the SUT, Solidaridad y
Unidad de los Trabajadores. However, the Works Council - a
kind of factory council that in Spain is provided for
workplaces with more than 50 workers - was all in the
hands of the regime union UGT, Union General de
Trabajadores.
Even in Spain in the grassroots unionism there is
a debate about whether or not to participate in these
bodies of corporate representation of workers. For
example, the anarcho-syndicalist-led CNT (Confederacion
Nacional de Trabajo) does not participate, but the SUT
does, even though it correctly believes that the center of
union life should not be the company.
Among the main reasons for the dissatisfaction of
the workers of the Sagrada Familia were the fixed-term
contracts of three years - in violation of the same law -
the lack of a schedule of shifts, often communicated or
changed at the last moment - in violation of the
collective bargaining agreement - the payment of holiday
work without a surcharge, the constant delay in the
payment of wages, the prohibition for workers to be able
to sit for the entire 6-hour shift.
When the facility reopened to visitors,
conditions worsened even further: several workers were
transferred without notice to other sites; overtime was
not paid; vacation shifts were no longer granted to allow
for rest; and the company refused to explain various
errors on payroll. But the most serious thing was that
only a small portion of the retired workers were called
back to work, resulting in a heavy increase in loads: for
example, before the pandemic 40 workers handled an influx
of 1,500-2,000 visitors per hour; in September the company
had reduced the workers to 6 for an influx of 1,000
visitors per hour, 4 times as many.
On September 26, the workers went on all-out
strike with three demands: permanent contract, shift
scheduling, and recall of all active workers.
The company responded by replacing the strikers
with private security personnel. The pickets were
constantly threatened by the police, until a violent
confrontation ensued on the last day the site was open,
November 7.
This was followed by the new period of closure
due to the measures against the pandemic until December 16
when the company announced the dismissal of 231 workers
and the transfer of another 55 to another site, all based
on an agreement with the Works Council, i.e. the UGT.
A small example of how phony and hypocritical
democracy proves to be when the workers return to the
struggle, with means and tools proper to class unionism,
and how their wider organization is needed.
ICP Leaflet Distributed In Venezuela
Fight for an Increase in Wages
The bourgeois government of Venezuela has
announced an "increase" in the minimum wage, starting in
March, which thus rises to 1,800,000 bolívares. That’s
$0.95, which, added to the Cesta Ticket, makes $1.9
monthly, what the government calls the "full wage". Shopping vouchers - called "Cesta Ticket" - also come in
at a monthly value of the same amount. Pensions have been
raised to the same level as the minimum wage.
In the salary scale for public employees, the
highest salary is $2.89 per month ($3.84 with the Cesta
Ticket).
The "Canasta alimentaria", i.e., the basket of
food expenses, is estimated to be $282 for 2021, an amount
clearly not attainable by any worker, skilled or
unskilled.
In the petrochemical sector, the demagogues of
regime unionism are promoting an agreement with the bosses
for a basic wage of $16.6 per month and a Basket Ticket of
$43.62, plus an "economic warfare voucher" of $8.35, for a
total of $68.67, equivalent to 24% of the cost of food.
Even in the private sector, wages are higher than in the
public sector, but the wide gap between the amount
received and the cost of living remains.
Proletarian families manage to survive only with
remittances from relatives who have emigrated to work
abroad.
The productive apparatus is paralyzed for 70% due
to the decay of activity in the oil sector, already the
driving force of the Venezuelan economy, the fall in
consumption and the economic effects of the Covid
containment measures.
Economic paralysis fuels unemployment and reduces
the economically active population. Although between
February and March the exchange rate stopped at 1,800,000
bolívares per U.S. dollar, inflation does not stop and
real wages will continue to fall.
The government is pushing real wages down to
support the national and transnational capitalists who are
trying to maintain and expand their profit margins.
Workers are trying to fight back and are
beginning to meet and try to stage protests to demand
better wages. This reaction is still weak due to the lack
of grassroots organization and the treacherous and
demobilizing action of the current unions.
To continue the struggle, workers need to
organize grassroots workers’ committees and unite in class
unions, outside of the regime unions, joining their
struggles for wage increases. Struggles and protests are
needed, despite the restrictions for Covid and government
repression. These actions of struggle must converge in the
general and all-out strike, without minimum services, of
all categories and in all economic activities. Meetings
and assemblies inside and outside of workplaces must be
promoted. There is no other way for the wage-earners
subjected to capitalist exploitation.
And, on this path, it is important to keep away
from the electoral appeals of vote-seekers of all colors.
Unity of action of all workers for a general
increase in wages!
