Flyers distributed by the ICT during the recent public sector strike in France and demonstrations on the third anniversary of 7 October in Italy.

A few days of protest will not stop the capitalist steamroller! The only response to the degradation of our living conditions is the autonomous and organised struggle of the proletariat!

We have been warned. The bourgeoisie is desperately searching for 54 billion euros in savings for its 2027 budget. This is what the Lecornu government announced with great fanfare on the 17th of September. Watch what you say: it’s not an ‘austerity’ budget but a ‘rigour’ and ‘justice’ budget, according to the minister!

The bourgeoisie’s newspeak does little to hide the harsh reality the working class is faced with, stuck between the increase of the cost of living and the decrease in wages. The aim is clear: to make the working class pay not only for the reduction of the state’s deficit to satisfy financial markets and credit rating agencies, in order to limit the increase of the debt’s interest rate, but mostly to push workers to accept these sacrifices in the name of national interest, that is to say the interest of the bourgeoisie, which is to march towards rearmament and remilitarisation. It’s in this context that the budget predicts an increase of more than six billion euros in military spending. The bourgeoisie seeks to transform the French economy into a war economy, with the support of all political parties, from the far right to the far left, in order to prepare itself for the coming inter-imperialist conflicts between the Atlantic and Russo-Chinese blocs. We see the first signs with the conflicts in Ukraine or Iran, dangerous manifestations of the march to war that all imperialist bourgeoisies are rushing into, with the goal of redistributing the spoils to their benefit.

Faced with these crises, the bourgeoisie wishes to intensify its austerity attacks against workers: freezing the wages of state employees, freezing aid for housing and several other benefits, deindexation of pensions, reduction of sick leave and mutually agreed terminations, delaying access to certain benefits for immigrant populations. Capital has contributed too much to collective solidarity according to these sirs: it’s our turn to pay now.

And here the unions, as usual, seek to contain the movement. By proposing symbolic days of strike, and only for civil service, and a few sleepy protests with no tomorrow, isolated from the rest of the working class because of purely corporatist slogans, these organisations divide and weaken the class. The struggle must be carried out outside of these reactionary institutions, by organising ourselves in General Assemblies and in strike committees, by seeking to generalise and extend the struggle to all sectors around unitary slogans, including the whole of the working class, public as well as private sector workers.

We must not only defend ourselves against the bourgeoisie’s attacks on pensions, healthcare, unemployment benefits, we must above all take our struggles into our own hands to impose a new power dynamic, obtain a reduction of working time and an increase in wages.

All around the world, the class war is carried out by the bourgeoisie against the working class is intensifying. In Germany, Finland, the United States, Argentina, Canada or Belgium, all governments, whether left wing or right wing, seek to revive the economy by over-exploiting the proletariat to the bone, the drive to restore the profitability of capital being their only compass.

But we will not let them walk all over us. Faced with the degradation of our living and working conditions, intrinsically linked to the structural crisis of capital, we must resist these assaults. In Spain, the Airbus workers show us the path by clashing with capital as well as collaborationist unions, just like workers in Bolivia and India a few months prior. Even if this revival of working-class activity is stammering and is not without its limits, it nonetheless shows that the working class, as a revolutionary class, is the only one capable of resisting the decadence of capitalism and its fall into barbarism.

To prepare ourselves for the future decisive class conflicts, we must organise ourselves today and take part in the construction of the international party of tomorrow, the class party needed by the proletariat for its victory. It’s this task we are setting out to accomplish, despite the difficulties, conscious of the urgency of the situation.

War against war, war against the bourgeoisie!

Against All Imperialist Wars: Class Struggle!

We have now had three years of slaughter and bloody violence in Gaza and the West Bank while the world looks on. Or rather, the international bourgeoisie – its states and imperialist blocs – is deeply implicated in the carnage unleashed by Israel following the horrific massacre perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Israel’s fascist-fundamentalist government knew what was coming but let it happen, seeking a pretext to occupy the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – effectively taking over both – with the ultimate aim of wiping out the Palestinians.

Hamas – a fascist-Islamist force – has consistently used funding from Middle Eastern bourgeoisies not for the people of Gaza, but to advance its own political-military strategy. 7 October was yet another confirmation – and the deadliest of all – since Hamas could not have been unaware that the attack would unleash Israel’s genocidal fury.

The unspeakable suffering of the Palestinians has rightly sparked outrage among many against the criminal gang led by Netanyahu and his Washington boss; yet the alternative is not the creation of a Palestinian state. Such a state would merely serve as an arm of the rival imperialist bloc – China, Russia, and Iran – which is no less oppressive. It would embody the class rule of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, eager to exploit "its own" proletariat without sharing the spoils – or sharing as little as possible – with other bourgeoisies.

Yet only a wider war could actually bring about the "two peoples, two states" scenario. It would be a war in which, as always, the working class and the dispossessed would foot the bill, while the bourgeoisie reaps the profits.

The prospect of an expanded – or even generalised – war is more real than that of a Palestinian state. The structural crisis of capitalism is driving events in this direction, and conflicts – from Sudan to Ukraine, and across the Middle East – stem precisely from the difficulties the bourgeoisie faces in revitalising its economy, despite the intensified exploitation, precariousness, and impoverishment to which it subjects the global working class. And despite the accelerating plunder and devastation of the ecosystem.

No, the end of barbarism in Palestine and everywhere else lies not in the creation of a new bourgeois state, but in the struggle against the root causes of this savagery: against capital and all states.

Only the wage-earning class has the power to do this, for bourgeois society rests upon its exploitation.

A struggle against exploitation and oppression in all their forms – outside and against the bourgeois "Left," and outside and against trade unionism, whether integrated into the state or so-called "grassroots" unions, which are inevitably forced to bow to the dictates of capital.

Class struggle has to come from below, waged through bodies of struggle that emerge directly from the fight itself. Alongside a revolutionary party, fueled by these struggles and acting as their political guide.

This has to be our way; the alternative is a headlong rush toward the abyss.

NO to imperialist war, YES to class war!