It has been a long time since a government project has sparked such
mobilizations. Three, four million demonstrators. It is enormous. The French arevery angry. More than eighty percent of workers are, according to officialpolling institutes, opposed to the reform of their pensions. Eighty percent meansthat at the very least, forty to fifty million people are absolutely opposed toraising the retirement age to 64. But then, where are they? Why don't they jointhe protests? Why don't they make their opposition clearly heard? Why do theyaccept (because to be silent is to accept) without saying a word what theyconsider unfair? Why do they resign?These are questions of this kind that, already in the sixteenth century, theyoung Étienne de la Boétie asked himself. How is it, he said, that the people whoproduce the wealth and hold the power agree to be governed and martyred bytyrants? To answer this, he invented the concept of "voluntary servitude". Thevast majority of individuals accept his condition as a dominated person and thisacceptance is their doing.A precision is essential: it is certainly voluntary, but above all theconsequence of the indoctrination, the conditioning, the brutalization thatpeople undergo. From our earliest childhood, we are taught to obey theinjunctions of the authorities, never to contest them.In the eighteenth century, the "philosophers of the Enlightenment", Voltaire,Diderot, Rousseau, etc. denounced those responsible for this conditioning: thestate, religions, traditions. They explained that they had to be fought and thatonly the use of Reason would make it possible to overcome them. A rationaleducation, according to them, is what the people need to dissipate the darknessof obscurantism and free them from the chains of slavery.In the nineteenth century, thinkers like Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin and many others,accompanying the reflections of the nascent labor movement, dissected thefunctioning of the capitalist system, showed the division of society intoantagonistic social classes, the fundamental character unfair and criminal ofthis system and explained that only collective action by the exploited couldovercome it. From the middle of the century, the workers began to organizethemselves and these efforts resulted in the creation by workers of variousnationalities of the First International with the unanimously accepted slogan:"the emancipation of the workers will be the 'work of the workers themselves'.This slogan perfectly sums up the program of the First International: Toemancipate oneself is of course to destroy the existing economic and socialsystem, to abolish the division of society into antagonistic social classes andthe exploitation of man by the man; but it is also to educate oneself, tocultivate oneself, to develop a rational spirit among the workers, to make themaware. The initiators of the International believed that a social revolution, theabolition of the state and of capitalist exploitation required that the greatmass of workers be enlightened, lucid and committed accordingly.Shortly after the creation of the First International, Marx developed theabsolutely opposite idea that the transformation of society would pass notthrough the destruction of the state, but through its conquest, which requiredthe capture of state institutions by a vanguard, a political party, and this, byany means (elections, social movement, revolution). Once this objective has beenachieved, the State placed at the service of the interests of the workers is thenresponsible for preparing society for the transition to a later stage ofcommunism. This intermediate stage has been called the dictatorship of theproletariat. This method no longer requires the mass of workers to be enlightenedand lucid, but just a small fraction, the vanguard, to whom the revolutionarywork is delegated. We therefore move from "the emancipation of the workers willbe the work of the workers themselves" to "building popular power, embodied bythe Party". In the minds of employees, the solution proposed by Marx appearedinfinitely simpler, faster than that requiring the education of the mass ofworkers; and suddenly almost the entire world labor movement has set out to buildthe Party of the working class and for more than 150 years, everywhere in theworld parties supposed to embody the hopes of the exploited seek to conquer statepower to exercise it for their benefit. Many of these parties have come to power,either as a result of revolutions or through elections, but these experienceshave always ended in resounding failures, sometimes even in catastrophes. Eachtime, it is the populations, in particular the workers and the exploited who havepaid the price.In 2023 in France, Macron - former minister of a socialist government, elected in2022 with the support of the unions - shamelessly goes back on all socialadvances. Many of those who rightly decry its contempt today were extolling itsmerits not long ago.What is terrible is that history repeats itself: what we are experiencing, wehave already experienced many times before. Things are however clear, as long aspopulations choose to give up power to one or a few individuals, without controlto decide what is good for them, it will be so. Macron is a traitor, of course,but the system of representative democracy which enabled him to come to power,which meant that an entire people confidently handed over control of theirdestiny to him, this representative system is even more infamous .In view of all the dangers that threaten us, it is urgent to put an end to thissystem and replace it with a real democracy, direct democracy. But for that, itis necessary beforehand that a significant proportion of the population is aware,thinks that a social revolution is desirable, that it is possible and thereforeundertakes to prepare for it. This tremendous work of raising awareness is thepurpose of anarchosyndicalism.http://cntaittoulouse.lautre.net/spip.php?article1319_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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