Today's Topics:
1. Britain, Brighton Solfed statement on disaffiliation of a
member - CN: Sexual assault (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. France, Alternative Libertaire AL - Essay: The Neoliberal
Novelanguage (fr, it, pt) [machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. US, black rose fed: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF COUNTERREVOLUTION:
INTRODUCTION TO "BLOODSTAINED" (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. France, Alternative Libertaire AL Octobre - Orders: Block
everything in the unit to win! (fr, it, pt) [machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. France, Alternative Libertaire AL - Company Rating, 3 days
of consecutive strike rather than 3 days per quarter ! (fr, it,
pt) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Brighton Solfed have taken a collective decision to permanently exclude a member due to
allegations of sexual assault made against them. The member was formally suspended at the
end of April, after we were informed that they had been excluded from two other groups,
and since then attempts were made to try and start a process whereby this member could be
held accountable for their actions. However, due to the survivors' wishes for space and
privacy, this was not possible in any transformative sense without going against the
survivors' autonomy. ---- In light of this, the Brighton local of Solidarity Federation
has taken the decision to permanently exclude the member from the group. Our reasons for
this are: ---- We believe the survivors ---- The refusal of this member to acknowledge
even the possibility that they have caused harm The local has decided that we don't feel
safe in this members presence In our decision, we are following other groups who have
excluded this person.
Attempts were made to guide this member towards acknowledgment of their abusive behaviour
and to seek therapy. Due to the circumstances, and to respect survivors privacy, we will
not be making any more statements on this situation. However, we will be reflecting on
this situation internally as Solfed, and we are currently working towards clarifying our
process and our approach to these instances of abuse within our communities.
Brighton Solfed take matters of abuse very seriously, and many of our members have found
this situation very stressful and upsetting. Our thoughts and solidarity go out to all
survivors of abuse.
Brighton Solfed have taken this action because survivors need to be believed, and our
organising spaces need to be safe for all, including our members. Solfed are fighting for
a better society, a society in which survivors are respected, and any form of abuse is
confronted.
If you want to contact Brighton Solfed about any of the issues raised in this statement
then please email brighton@solfed.org.uk
http://www.brightonsolfed.org.uk/brighton/brighton-solfed-statement-on-disaffiliation-of-a-member
------------------------------
Message: 2
" The political speech is meant to give the lie the accent of the truth. " The book
Orwell's 1984 has lost none of his sharpness as seen flourish in political professionals
language and a new vocabulary, enabling them to spend a little to its opposite. But, good
news, Alain Bihr provides tools to analyze how political power manipulates language and
words in ways that prevent us from developing subversive thinking. If we only think in
words, the master of words is master of thought ... ---- For example, in the book, we see
how the socialized part of the wage becomes a " social charge ", thus making it appear
as an additional cost without any link with the salary. The " freedom ," she supplies
no thought of emancipation in mainstream political discourse, but serves instead to make
an apology for submission to capital and the state. The book is in the form of an index,
each entry of which analyzes one of the main concepts whose meaning has either been
reversed (it indicates the opposite of its original meaning) or obliterated (its
emancipatory use has been made impossible).
A university book based on a Marxian analysis grid, it may sometimes seem difficult to
access for those who are not initiated into the criticism of Marx's political economy,
whether through the university or the university. a militant structure.
But if the rigor and depth of the analysis do not rebuff, even if you accept not to
understand everything immediately (it is possible that a concept not explained in one
entry is in another), we will find in each entry of this book of what to thwart the
language of capital and states.
This work can be useful for the unionist to explain a law, beyond the terms used by the
power to promote it, and allows him to encourage, within his union, the re-appropriation
of a subversive vocabulary that has disappeared totally dominant political discourses and,
unfortunately, sometimes also militant circles, polluted against their sandstone by the "
neoliberal newspeak ".
More than just a critical dictionary, this book contains rigorous sociological analyzes
that help to explain the history of the crises of capitalism (" Crises "), as well as
their link with the indebtedness of the states (" Public debt ") and the ecological
crisis (" Green Capitalism ") while returning to strong concepts of political
liberalism (" Freedom ", " Equality ", " Flexibility ", " Civil Society "
...) as well as media buzz-concepts serving the soup to the right and far right ("
Insecurity ").
Ending with a " little dictionary of the ideas of neo-liberalism ", the book also
allows us to learn with humor about the use of newspeak by learning to use the meaning and
tone of the language of power to better deride it. .
In short, a very stimulating book that can be consulted as a dictionary and that will be
very useful in our unions !
Bernard Gougeon (AL Tarn)
Alain Bihr, The neoliberal Novelanguage, Paris, Syllepse, 2017, 344 pages, 18 €
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Essai-La-Novlangue-neoliberale
------------------------------
Message: 3
"Bloodstained, One Hundred Years of Lenninist Counterrevolution" is a newly released book
by AK Press compiling together both current and historical critical writings on the
Russian Revolution which "forces us to reckon with the past[and]demands we think more
carefully about freedom[and]social change." You can purchase your copy along with many
other recommended titles here. This posting is part of our series of articles and social
media postings relating to the 100 year anniversary of the Russian Revolution
#RussianRev100Years. ---- History may not have ended, but it certainly has gotten strange.
The social contract neoliberalism once imposed-a patchwork of economic shell games and the
political rituals needed to foist them on people-has shredded with surprising speed in
recent years. The result has been a rapid universalization of precarity. Unpredictability
and groundlessness are ubiquitous parts of our lives, which unfold in a supposedly
"post-truth" world where the basic prerequisites for understanding almost anything seem
lacking-or at least seem to change with each news cycle.
This new reality was both cause and effect of Donald Trump's election as forty-fifth
president of the United States. His campaign successfully harnessed the fear and
desperation of our social unraveling, and he rose to power with promises to end it. He
would, he said, stop the erosion of our dwindling sense of security and restore the
certainty of clear borders (national and racial) and steady jobs. The trains would run on
time.
Trump's success-from-the-fringe took US liberals by surprise. Anything other than the
staid electoral ping-pong between managerial representatives of this or that political
party had been unthinkable to them. Further along the left spectrum, there was surprise
among many radicals, but perhaps less shock: they at least had the theoretical arsenal
with which to explain the situation- after the fact.
The left is no less subject to historical uncertainty, nor really any more prepared to
meet it or predict what's next. Lately, many radicals have been engaged in the same
grasping at straws that motivated Trump voters. When the way forward is unclear, they seem
to think, it's safest to go backward, into the past. They search for answers in the tried
and true-even when that truth is one of massive historical failure. Thus we've seen a
return to social democratic strategies, first with the tepid "socialism" of Bernie
Sanders, more recently with the resuscitation of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Voters in Europe figured out long ago the pointlessness of electing so-called socialists
to over see a capitalist economy. The US, as usual, has failed to learn from others'
mistakes.
The hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the occasion for this book, has put
an even more bizarre spin on these developments. Many see the centennial as an opportunity
to rehabilitate, even celebrate, outdated forms of authoritarian state socialism. It's a
tricky celebration, though, one that must either carefully ignore the human devastation
that the Bolsheviks set in motion in 1917 or push it past an imaginary border beyond
which, the story goes, communist possibility was hijacked by evil men, and marched off to
a land of gulags and forced collectivization. Judging from their lists of recent and
forthcoming titles, leftist publishers around the world will repeat these elisions and
fairy tales in scores of books that praise Lenin, reframe the Bolsheviks, and attempt to
rescue the Marxist jewel buried beneath a mountain of corpses.
If it was just the old guard and zealous party officials spinning these fictions, this
book would be unnecessary. Their influence has steadily declined and they will eventually
all die off. In these strange, unsettled times, though, a number of young people have
become enamored with the ghosts of dictatorships past, sharing "Hot Young Joseph Stalin"
memes on social media and sporting hammer-and-sickle baseball caps and jeweled necklaces.
There's often an ironic edge to the new Bolshevik bling, like the punks of a previous
generation wearing Nazi symbols. But the punks at least had a raw nihilistic honesty: they
were referencing the horror behind their regalia to make a point. Today's new, young
communists are either much more oblivious to the history behind their gestures or are
slyly hedging their bets by pretending there's no substance to their style, and thus no
accountability. All this suggests a more pressing need for this book.
***
"Of all the revolts of the working class," writes Cornelius Castoriadas, "the Russian
Revolution was the only victorious one. And of all the working class's failures it was the
most thoroughgoing and the most revealing."[1]We might quibble about the word "only," but
Castoriadas's point remains: there is something important to learn from the possibilities
that the Russian Revolution both opened and demolished. The catastrophe in Russia obliges
us, he says, to reflect "not only on the conditions for a proletarian victory, but also on
the content and possible fate of such a victory, on its consolidation and development"
and, most importantly, on the "seeds of failure" inherent in certain approaches to
revolutionary strategy. According to Marxist-Leninists, when it comes to the Russian
Revolution, those seeds were entirely external and "objective": the defeat of subsequent
revolutions in Europe, foreign intervention, and a bloody civil war. The historical
importance of these factors is incontestable, and largely besides the point. The real
question, as Castoriadas notes, is "why the Revolution overcame its external enemies only
to collapse from within."
To answer that, we need what Maurice Brinton calls, in his preface to Ida Mett's history
of the Kronstadt commune, a new, genuinely socialist history. "What passes as socialist
history," according to Brinton, "is often only a mirror image of bourgeois historiography,
a percolation into the ranks of the working class movement of typically bourgeois methods
of thinking." State-socialist hagiography, in all its Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, and
Stalinist varieties, is simply a thinly veiled "great man" vision of the past, with kings
and queens and presidents replaced by revolutionary "leaders of genius," brilliant
strategists who supposedly led the masses to victory-or who would have if "objective
factors" hadn't intervened, which, strangely, they always seem to do.
This anthology is an attempt to contribute to that new history. It is, again following
Brinton, a history of the masses themselves, written, as far as possible, from their
perspective, not from that of their self-declared representatives. We've collected works
spanning the last century, from 1922 to 2017, that serve two purposes.
The first is to uncover the living revolution beneath the myths that the Bolsheviks and
their state-socialist heirs have piled up to legitimize their otherwise indefensible
actions. The living revolution is the potential inherent in any mobilized populace. It is
made, not decreed, bestowed, or legislated into existence. And it is a powerful force. The
initial stage of the Russian Revolution, stretching from February through October, was
famous for its lack of blood shed. When the masses rise up as one, there is no power that
can oppose them. They create new revolutionary forms, agreed-upon practices that may or
may not take institutional form. These practices, which cohered in Russia into the
soviets, factory committees, and cooperatives, are the embryonic structures through which
a new society might be organized.
A socialist or anarchist history must also seek to locate the seeds of failure in any
revolution. These also belong to the masses. The blame for the "degeneration" of the
Russian Revolution can be, and has been, spread liberally. However, making simple
boogeymen of the Revolution's betrayers-Stalin being the most familiar, especially for
Leninists and Trotskyists seeking their own absolution-avoids the fact that the masses
could be betrayed in the first place. They fell for pretty lies and stirring speeches.
They failed to resist at crucial moments or, when they did resist, they didn't go far
enough. They surrendered, inch by inch, the power that they had taken, and they let their
enemies build a very different sort of power over them. There is a reason why Lenin could
say that the October coup was "easier than lifting a feather": the way had already been
cleared and the state already smashed. There was nothing to lift. The masses had made the
revolution and the Bolsheviks had only to step over the rubble and into the oppressors'
abandoned palaces. The fact that they could do so is a warning and a lesson that the
authors in this collection drive home in countless ways.
The forms of genuine revolution and the ways they were violently dismantled by Lenin and
his comrades are the main themes of this book. If there is a slight emphasis on the latter
it is because the anarchists, council communists, and anti-state Marxists in the pages
ahead a) have an implicit faith in what Emma Goldman calls "the creative genius of the
people" and b) hesitate to prescribe the details of a future society that remains to be
born, under conditions and meeting challenges we cannot foresee. Real revolutions are
never staged, they don't happen according to any theorist's timetable, and they rarely
need help getting underway. While that fact is made clear throughout this book, there is
also a crucial focus on what happens next, on the traps and pitfalls, on everything that
can go wrong.
Rudolf Rocker traces the genealogy of the factors that led to the Russian Revolution's
failure through the often-prophetic debates in the First International and back to the
late eighteenth century. Marx and Engels, whose ideas Lenin adapted, borrowed their theory
of revolution from the Jacobins and authoritarian secret societies of the French
Revolution. Specifically, says Rocker, they relied upon distorted bourgeois histories of
those figures. The resultant Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the
"dictatorship of a given party which arrogates to itself the right to speak for that
class." It is "no child of the labour movement, but a regrettable inheritance from the
bourgeoisie ... linked with a lust for political power." Rocker contrasts this concept
with the "organic being" and "natural form of organisation ... from the bottom upwards"
that the labor movement itself forges though struggle: councils and committees networked
inflexible, nonhierarchical federations.
Luigi Fabbri also sees bourgeois roots in Leninist ideology, "a frame of mind typical of
bosses." Writing just after the October revolution, Fabbri cuts through the numerous
misrepresentations of anarchism that even the earliest Bolshevik propaganda
promulgated-and that state socialists still push-to reveal the main ideas "separating
authoritarian from libertarian communists." The "fatal mistake" of Lenin and company was
their belief that building a powerful state would somehow eventually lead to that same
state withering away, the precondition for communism according to both Marxists and
anarchists. For Fabbri, as for most contributors to this book, "The state is more than an
outcome of class divisions; it is, at one and the same time, the creator of privilege,
thereby bringing about new class divisions." Moreover, it "will not die away unless it is
deliberately destroyed, just as capitalism will not cease to exist unless it is put to
death through expropriation." Or as Iain McKay puts it in his analysis of one of Lenin's
most famous books: "The Russian Revolution shows that it was not a case of the State and
Revolution but rather the State or Revolution."
Leninist distortions of other revolutionary traditions hasn't changed much in the last
century. Fabbri and others writing at the time of the Russian Revolution, both eye
witnesses and close observers, focus our understanding of what non-Bolshevik militants
were fighting for. They also give us a more clear picture of the possible forms of human
liberation that the Bolsheviks methodically foreclosed. Several essays in the pages ahead
give detailed accounts of the methods that the newly established state used to achieve
this. Maurice Brinton and Ida Mett each focus on the massacre at Kronstadt, one of the
clearest examples of how ordinary people, workers and sailors in this case, sought to push
the revolution beyond the outmoded bourgeois political and economic forms Lenin imposed,
only to face the guns and bayonets of Trotsky's Red Army. Barry Pateman describes the many
dedicated revolutionaries who wound up in "communist" prisons, as well as the networks of
solidarity that tried to get them out. Iain McKay maps the growing (rather than withering)
Soviet state as it absorbed one by one the democratic, federalist institutions the masses
had created in Russia, which posed a threat to the growing dictatorship. Otto Ruhle
describes the disastrous effects of Leninism when it was exported to Europe. Lenin's
influence, says Ruhle, was not merely an impediment to the revolutionary struggles of
European workers, it also provided the model for fascism in Italy and Germany. "All
fundamental characteristics of fascism were in his doctrine, his strategy, his social
‘planning,' and his art with dealing with men ... Authority, leadership, force, exerted on
one side, and organization, cadres, subordination on the other side-such was his line of
reasoning."
Ultimately, though, the differences between the Bolshevik dictatorship and its many
leftwing critics boils down to different ideas about how and why revolutions are made. To
the Russian anarchists, certainly, Lenin's absolute divorce of theoretical, communist ends
from immediate, repressive means was in itself a guarantee of revolutionary failure. The
very word communism-with cognates like communal, commons, community-implies an obvious and
practical set of political guidelines, a militant ethics. Yet as Nestor Makhno, who
organized forces to fight both Red and White armies in the Ukraine, notes, officials at
the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party, which was held only eight years after the
Bolsheviks came to power, agreed that the word "equality" should be avoided in anything
but abstract discussions of distant social relations; it had no place in the Communist
present.
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman emigrated to Russia in 1919. While the immediate reason
for their voyage had been deportation, they returned to their homeland with high hopes and
a commitment to help build a new society. Within two years, those hopes had been dashed.
They left in December 1921, both writing damning books about their experiences soon after
(Berkman's The Russian Tragedy and Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia). Those
experiences, which ranged from the inspiration of seeing revolutionary energies unleashed
on a mass scale to the horror of watching them destroyed, lend a sharp-edged clarity to
the pieces we've included here, a stark contrast between competing visions of social
transformation. "The Bolshevik idea," writes Berkman, was "that the Social Revolution must
be directed by a special staff, vested with dictatorial powers." This not only implied a
deep distrust of the masses but a willingness to use force against them, an unsurprising
observation to those of us on this side of the Russian Revolution, but a shocking idea to
many at the time. Berkman goes on to quote Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin:
"Proletarian compulsion in all its forms ... beginning with summary execution and ending
with compulsory labor, is a method of reworking the human material of the capitalist epoch
into Communist humanity."
Compulsion was necessary because the Bolsheviks claimed to already know the path the
revolution needed to take, even if workers and peasants seemed to be moving in a different
direction. Lenin used a Marxist playbook. His apparent flexibility, his often
contradictory positions, had less to do with open-mindedness than with a single-minded
focus that allowed him to say whatever was necessary to achieve his goal. He was, as Emma
Gold man put it, "a nimble acrobat ... skilled in performing within the narrowest
margin." After meeting him, she was convinced that "Lenin had very little concern in the
Revolution and ... Communism to him was a very remote thing." Instead, the "centralized
political State was Lenin's deity, to which everything else was to be sacrificed." For
Goldman, the revolution depended more on the "social consciousness" and "mass psychology"
of Russian workers and peasants than on any allegedly objective conditions, at least those
that were written in the Marxist playbook. At first, Lenin had no choice but to endure the
popular forces that were "carrying the Revolution into ever-widening channels" that
weren't under Bolshevik control. "But as soon as the Communist Party felt itself
sufficiently strong in the government saddle, it began to limit the scope of popular
activity." It was this desire to keep all power in the hands of the Party, the supposed
advance guard of the proletariat, that explains, says Goldman, "all their following
policies, changes of policies, their compromises and retreats, their methods of
suppression and persecution, their terrorism and extermination of all other political views."
***
As we've mentioned, a stock excuse for the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into one
of modern history's most oppressive regimes is that the Civil War demanded strict
political discipline and severe economic measures. "War communism" was supposedly the
revolution's only hope. Readers will be forgiven if this reminds them of the US military's
claim that it was necessary to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it. As Iain
McKay points out, most features of war communism-one-man management of factories,
centralized economic structures borrowed from capitalism, the destruction of the
soviets-"all these occurred before the Civil War broke out in late May 1918."
The same is true of the Red Terror, the period of political repression and mass killings
the Bolsheviks launched, ostensibly to eradicate enemies of the revolution. "Terror,"
here, is not a word applied by appalled historians after the fact; Lenin and Trotsky
embraced the term to describe their ruthless policies at the time. Lenin died early enough
to avoid having to answer for them. Trotsky, on the other hand, had to spend much of his
time wriggling out of his responsibility for what the revolution became. He almost
singlehandedly invented an entire genre of political apologetics, firmly establishing the
practice of blaming Stalin for pretty much everything. Whatever he couldn't lay at
Stalin's feet, according to Paul Mattick, he blamed on historical necessity, presenting
early Bolshevism as a sort of "reluctant monster, killing and torturing in mere self-defence."
The problem, says Mattick, is that there is almost nothing in Stalinism that didn't also
exist in Leninism or Trotskyism. While there may be differences in the total number of
victims each could claim, this had less to do with any "democratic inclinations" on
Lenin's part than on his relative weakness, his "inability to destroy all non-Bolshevik
organisations at once." And it was all non Bolsheviks who were in the crosshairs, not
just explicitly White reactionaries, and not excluding those who had recently fought
alongside the Bolsheviks, regardless of their political orientation. "Like Stalin, Lenin
catalogued all his victims under the heading ‘counterrevolutionary.'" The main organ
charged with carrying out Lenin's repressive orders, the Cheka (The All-Russian Emergency
Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), was created only weeks after
the Bolsheviks came to power. "The totalitarian features of Lenin's Bolshevism were
accumulating at the same rate at which its control and police power grew." In practical
terms, most of the Russian population-from anarchists and Social Revolutionaries to
striking workers to sailors demanding democratic election of their officers to the entire
peasant class-could qualify as counterrevolutionaries. Nonetheless, as Mattick observes:
If one wants to use the term at all, the "counterrevolution" possible in the Russia of
1917 was that inherent in the Revolution itself, that is, in the opportunity it offered
the Bolsheviks to restore a centrally-directed social order for the perpetuation of the
capitalistic divorce of the workers from the means of production and the consequent
restoration of Russia as a competing imperialist power.
On the centennial of the Russian Revolution, if there is one thing we hope you take from
this book, it is the fact that all the published panegyrics to Lenin and Trotsky, all the
political parties that model themselves on tyrants, all the eulogies to the "leaders of
genius" at the vanguard of the Russian masses-these tributes are honoring the actual
counterrevolutionaries of history, the destroyers of revolutions, people with the hearts
of prison wardens and hangmen.
"The history of how the Russian working class was dispossessed is not, however, a matter
for an esoteric discussion among political cliques," writes Brinton. "An understanding of
what took place is essential for every serious socialist. It is not mere archivism." If it
was, to paraphrase Marx, these dead authoritarians wouldn't still weigh like nightmares on
the brains of the living. Inexplicably, Marxist-Leninist and Trotsyist parties still
exist. And even when not members of such parties, many radicals have matured into
political adulthood in a Marxist milieu that suffers from a split personality that no
amount of dialectical reasoning can cure. Ever since the formation of the Comintern,
thousands have left their countries' Communist Parties in waves, unable to tolerate this
or that new betrayal. Those who remained formed extremely hard shells, but even the ones
who fled had to somehow justify their relationship to a bloodstained legacy.
Unfortunately, all the soft, insulating layers of "Western Marxism" in the world cannot
disguise the Leninist pea beneath the mattress. No number of "returns" to Marx-or, even
better, to early Marx-can escape the inherent flaw at the core of every single instance of
actually existing socialisms. Every time Marxism has been filtered through state-centered
models of social change, the results have ranged from bad to horrific. This is the defect
hidden within all parties, vanguards, cadre, cabals, and bureaucrats: they lead not to
communism but to a new class of oppressors.
A century has been long enough. It is time for a clean break. We must remove Leninism from
our revolutionary formulas and critique whatever aspects of Marxism lent themselves to the
Bolshevik disaster. We must learn from the history contained in the following pages, and
then make our own.
-The Friends of Aron Baron-
1. All quotations in this introduction are taken from the authors' essays in this anthology.
http://blackrosefed.org/intro-bloodstained/
------------------------------
Message: 4
The government has been multiplying since May the attacks against the popular classes. On
our side, the response is organized, but remains scattered. The urgency is to unify the
struggle and build the strike in as many sectors as possible. ---- Unsurprisingly,
Emmanuel Macron began, as soon as elected, a strategy of total war to workers, workers and
more generally to the most fragile people. It is also its strategic compass: a reduction
in housing subsidies perceived by the most precarious, restoration of the day of
deficiency in the public service which amounts to taxing sick leave by systematically
taking a day's pay - whereas the point index is again frozen - or the suppression of
150,000 assisted contracts. This is a massive social plan at the national level that is
expected to worsen again next year. While Macron had mimed compassion for Whirlpool
employees whose jobs were threatened during the inter-turn,
Fighting the Breakdown of Labor Law
Tackling the most fragile is still the best way to sum up the new reform of the Labor
Code, which provides for further weakening of employees' rights while strengthening the
power of the employers. While today, trade unionists receive wage-earners in their offices
who are not already able to enforce their rights, this new reform will introduce
bargaining in companies with fewer than 50 employees. by the trade unions. Suffice to say
that the boss will have all the cards in his hands to impose less-said agreements
including by playing on the proximity of the work collective or by blackmailing the job.
Especially since the redundancies will still be facilitated.
Moreover, Macron will no longer have to travel in the car park of Whirlpool, Goodyear or
any other factory since the " job safeguard plans ", the name of the layoff plans,
will be rendered obsolete by the conventional collective break.
Finally, Macron apply the program and strategy Fillon pursue a policy at the service of
the richest and implement leading a Blitzkrieg or " lightning war ." This is what the
former candidate Les Républicains promised to do in November 2016 before a bunch of
patrons. Their initial champion caught up with his tricks, the latter quickly found by
whom to replace him.
A scattered response
Faced with this, it is clear that resistance is struggling to build. The CGT has called
unilaterally from the start of consultations on an ordinance in a day of action on 12
September in which are attached to the Union syndicale Solidaires and lip, FSU and several
federations departmental unions of FO. This successful day resulted in a second day of
mobilization on 21 September, prepared on the same basis and called by the federations of
Unsa and the trade unions CFDT and CFTC. Prepared in a week and suffering from competition
from the " March against the Social Coup "Organized two days later by insubordinate
France (see box), this day marked a foreseeable ebb. It also suffered from the
announcement of the strike in the public service on 10 October called by a very
wide-ranging inter-union of nine organizations, whose FSU began to promote before 21
September.
What strategy for the sequel ?
On these dates was added a renewable strike in the transport sector - notably among road
drivers - from 25 September onwards. This mobilization was met with a strong repression by
the government. Other initiatives of professional mobilization should follow and Philippe
Martinez proposed at a meeting of the secretaries general of the federations of the CGT on
September 15 to make the week of October 9 to 13 a week of professional actions and place
the next " highlight " interpro the previous week but without necessarily making a day
of strike and demonstrations.
If the CGT is the organization best placed to stimulate the response, mobilization would
benefit from inter-union calls being made at the national level. They exist in the
departments, but the management of the CGT seems to want to avoid too restricted cadres
and prefers to appear as sole initiator of the strike days that it makes the choice to
announce unilaterally while other union organizations are available to build them in the
unit. These unit calls are more mobilizing with the employees and allow to be used as
support to organize for example joint tours among activists of different unions.
Anger exists among the exploited and the desire to resist is present in large sections of
the society. But transforming this feeling of rejection of Macron's policy into resistance
through strikes, demonstrations and economic blockages is not simple. Fighting freshly
elected governments is never easy and the deputies The Republic of the Marches are
constantly repeating that it is out of the question to back down, Macron only applying his
program. Although the attacks are far from surprising, there are few and many who remember
having heard a specific program at the time of the campaign, let alone the announcement of
the measures contained in the ordinances, or the massive suppression of assisted jobs.
Mostly, republican front ". Lastly, it constituted its presidential majority by
collecting 15% of the votes of the persons registered in the legislative elections: far
from a plebiscite.
General strike
But as illegitimate as it is, this government must be fought by establishing a balance of
power. The isolated days will not be enough to make Macron yield, and so we must move
towards a blockage of the economy that only the strike can institute. Of course, in most
sectors, the construction of a renewable strike seems hypothetical. However, this is what
must be discussed with colleagues, including by insisting on sectoral demands and close to
the immediate reality. For other forms of struggle, if they can be useful, are not central
in establishing the balance of power with the bourgeoisie. The manifestations make visible
the struggles and allow to make plebiscites by their number,
Finally, the idea of the " locomotive sector" "Which would come to pull us out of
trouble is also to be fought. Rangers, railwaymen, refiners: their strikes have a more
important and immediate blocking power than a teacher-researcher, that's true. But letting
one or a few sectors lead a struggle that concerns everyone, it is the assurance of going
to failure. Already, because this sector can obtain real advances but which concern only
its branch, which puts an end to the struggle and is understandable. Then, because
insulated, the blocking capacity is considerably restricted. Finally, because they are
bloodless today, these strikes are more exposed to repression, even illegal requisitions
and the various maneuvers aimed at breaking them. The general strike is therefore not a
myth or a whim:
Aurélien (AL Paris South)
September 23: the Insubmis crash on Paris
In July, when the date of September 12 is already publicly announced by the CGT, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon calls for a march against the ordinances on September 23 in Paris. Without
consulting anybody, France, unconquered (FI), is not satisfied with its position as the
most important political opposition movement, it tries to crush other forces and to
marginalize the trade unions.
His hegemonic temptation is dangerous. Of course, the mobilization capacity of IF is real:
it has a media power linked to the exposure of its candidate to the presidential and makes
a very effective use of social networks. Moreover, it occupies a space left vacant by
others and touches people sincerely opposed to the policy of Macron and eager to build
another society. It is therefore counterproductive to oppose from sectarianism to that of
frustrated but useful France to address those who find themselves there.
That said, the demonstration of September 23 showed that the IF could not pretend to
incarnate alone (or almost) the opposition to the ordinances. She failed to mobilize more
than the unions that Melenchon said she wanted to put at the center of the game during his
speech. Too kind.
What is the Social Front ?
Following a demonstration on the eve of the first round of the presidential election, the
Social Front was given a small media exposure by initiating a demonstration in the
aftermath of the second round and then the first round of the presidential election. five
years from the ordinances. However, it lost part of its raison d'être with the union's
calls for several days of strike.
If part of his discourse on strategy and the necessary strike to build is right, this
strange team seems to spend most of its energy in building what is increasingly related to
an organization, group, outsider and trade unions. Undoubtedly, in the current period of
mobilization, the struggle and class syndicalists within the latter would be needed.
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Ordonnances-Tout-bloquer-dans-l-unite-pour-gagner
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Message: 5
Our last big victory was in 1995 after three weeks of massively repeated strike at the
SNCF, RATP, EDF / GDF and among teachers. Isolated and remote days have extinguished the
powerful mobilization in 2010 against the pension reform. The close days did not allow to
start a dynamic in 2016 against El Khomry. In November, we want three consecutive days
with GA activists in the localities to decide local events and real blockages so that the
evening of the third day the GA can decide the continuation.
Read the Note in pdf
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/IMG/pdf/2017_-_10_-_20_-_entreprises_4.pdf
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?3-jours-de-greve-consecutive-plutot-que-3-jours-par-trimestre
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