How (not) to smash fascism

 


There is a lot of crying out now about ‘fascism’ with the ascension of Trump. Trump may be a crypto-, neo-, semi-, proto-fascist leader, but as yet he is not the head of a fascist movement nor in charge of a fascist regime. In order to fight and defeat fascism it is necessary to know what it is.

Let’s be clear, fascism is the last resort of finance capital fearing its overthrow by a revolutionary working class. It is the last resort because everything else has failed. It is not an option taken lightly because it risks a civil war by unleashing the angry middle class and misguided workers into a paramilitary movement that become shock troops to smash the revolutionary proletariat. And all wars the capitalists unleash risk the working class winning.

So it is only justified when angry workers are rising up against the state that protects capitalist property and power and no longer accept the bullshit that the ruling class are their class mates. At that point the workers become class conscious and a force capable of overthrowing the whole system. Moreover they can rally the angry petty bourgeois to the revolution by proving that they are powerful enough to overthrow capitalism.

The lesson of the successful Soviet revolution proved that the unity of workers and petty bourgeois against the bourgeoisie was necessary and possible. Against that real threat, fascism is all that is left to defeat the revolution. So the ruling class anticipates the danger, and rallies the discontented petty bourgeoisie and unemployed workers to defend the nation from communism by appealing to a rabid racist nationalism to wipe out the communist party.

That is why fascism first arose in 1920 in Germany and Italy, long before the Nazi rise to power. It was the last resort to smash revolutionary uprisings coming out of WW1. In 1919 an armed workers and soldiers revolution was underway in Germany. The ruling class tried to pacify it by deposing the Kaiser and creating the Wiemar Republic in which the Socialist Party was a leading party. But this failed to head off armed uprisings all over Germany. The counter-revolution succeeded only when the Socialists handed over Luxemburg and Liebknecht the leaders of the Communist Party to the fascist gangs who murdered them and dumped them into a canal.

In Italy in 1919/20 workers rose up in the North and the threat of revolution sparked the formation of a fascist movement. That movement then systematically destroyed the communist organisations and saw Mussolini take power. Those who know Bertolucci’s 1900 saw these events graphically recounted.

While these revolutions were smashed by fascism at its birth the proletariat remained a threat to the ruling class, especially with the failure of the imperialist powers to defeat the Russian revolution in the brutal civil war. Fascism was then the necessary resort of finance capital in Europe to remove this threat. That is why the Nazis came for the communists first.

In the US and in Britain there was a fascist fraction of the ruling class ready to step forward if the proletariat was not pacified by emergency economic measures to deal with unemployment such as the New Deal. Had workers refused to submit to appeals to racism and national chauvinism and overcome the divisions in the labor movement, thrown out their rotten labour ‘lieutenants’ in the unions, and united to pose a threat to state power, the bosses would have quickly resorted to mobilising their fascist shock troops.

As it happened, in both Britain and the US, the working class was incapable of rising to the occasion for several reasons. Most important, the Soviet state, now isolated and under siege, was taken over by the Stalinist bureaucracy that neutered the Communist Parties around the world into agents of Stalin’s foreign policy of appeasement. Without a revolutionary party, US and British workers lacked the leadership and program to unite and fight for socialism. So the threat of revolution never arose to justify a a resort to fascism. Such was the power of the appeal to national chauvinism against any ‘communist’ threat that the surviving revolutionaries succumbed to national chauvinism and actively encouraged workers to fight ‘fascism’ as the worst enemy, and let their imperialist ruling classes off the hook.

In the US today, the conditions necessary for the resort to fascism are yet to materialise. The working class is divided, and misled by politicians, media and union bosses into backing rival boss parties. There is no independent Labor party let alone a revolutionary communist party. It is finance capital behind both boss parties, Republicans and Democrats, that is setting the agenda not a militant workers party. That is why Trump’s regime is as yet no more fascist than the Bush or Clinton regimes.

Trump inherits a failing imperialist state that can only survive by making the working class pay for the crisis of falling profits by further job losses and falling living standards. His promises to deliver jobs and restore America to ‘greatness’ are futile as he faces an inevitable world-wide slump and a drive to inter-imperialist war with China and Russia for control of the remaining global resources.

The working class is currently divided by ethnicity, nationality and gender, and Trump is feeding these antagonisms to prevent the class uniting as one multi-ethnic and multi-gender force for change. Only if he fails to impose the program of finance capital driving workers into more wars, so that workers overcome their divisions, and form a mass workers party with a program for socialist revolution, will Trump find it necessary to resort to fascism. Only then will he be forced to rally his shock troops to destroy the leadership of the workers’ movement.

That is why it is necessary now to build workers’ unity and reject pacifist appeals to non-violent resistance. History proves it is necessary to organise an armed defence against the rise of fascist gangs. Because if fascism is allowed to grow it is a mortal threat to the existence of a revolutionary class, and hence to the existence to the human race facing climate catastrophe, all attempts to mollify or placate fascism, to pass laws against it, or to rely on the state forces including the police to stop it, are futile.

For workers as a class, democratic rights are subordinated to advancing the struggle for revolution. These and are not abstract ‘rights’ that must be accorded to all and sundry willy nilly. Revolutionaries advocate ‘no platform’ for fascists because they use their ‘right’ to demand the death of militant workers, especially the revolutionary leaders who are always the first to be assassinated. Revolutionaries confront fascism with overwhelming force whenever it raises is filthy head.

Not to do this, to attempt to ‘reason’ with fascism for fear that arming workers would confirm the ruling class bogey of violent revolution, only feeds fascism. The ruling class is armed to the teeth and will use these arms ruthlessly whether workers are armed or not. In every situation where workers were not armed or were not organised into defence militias, fascism has destroyed them.

While it is true that fascism is the last resort to smash proletarian revolution, submitting to pacifism is to die on our knees. Armed resistance is necessary to defeat fascism and to make that revolution possible, freeing humanity from the scourge not only of fascism but of the capitalist sewer that gives it life.

Leon Trotsky summary of key writing s on fascism: What is Fascism and How to Fight It. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

reblogged from  https://situationsvacant.wordpress.com/2017/01/27/how-not-to-smash-fascism/

The Long Depression: A Review

 

Michael Roberts new book The Long Depression (TLD) brings together much of his previous work from his blog and articles. It follows his previous book The Great Recession (TGR) that looked at the causes and effects of the so-called Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. There will be no surprises in the book for those already familiar with his work but for those whose knowledge of Marxism is scanty or distorted by misrepresentation, it is a great read.

Roberts develops his argument that the GFC was not an accident or result of wrong decisions by central banks, or greedy Wall St traders. It was not an aberration of 'financialisation' where financial speculation undermined profits and created massive debt. It was necessary symptom of a crisis-ridden capitalism which since the end of the post-war boom entered a long period of stagnation, despite periodic ups and downs, signifying the increasing stagnation of global capitalism.

According to Roberts (and many others) what the GFC did was prove Marx correct. Long-term declining profits generate a massive surplus of money that loses its value unless capitalists speculate in existing asset markets creating bubbles from housing to commodities to bonds. Not until those bubbles burst and wipe out the fictitious value of inflated asset prices are the conditions for a return to profitable investment possible. The period of falling profits and the stagnation of growth which precedes the GFC and ends only with massive devaluation of trillions of surplus capital to restore profitable investment is the broad definition of what Roberts calls The Long Depression.

In scientific terms, for a theory to work it has to explain not only past and present events better than its rivals but also offer predictions on future outcomes. Marxism does this well because while all change in capitalist society is explained as determined in broad terms by 'economics', society, culture and politics are factored into the analysis to account for variation in possible outcomes.

No other theory can trace changes in ideas and politics back to economics as clearly and convincingly. So in the first chapters of TLD Roberts shows how Marx's theory of falling profits, the Tendency of the Rate of  Profit to Fall, (TRPF) is a law which underpins all the booms and busts from the Long Depression of the 1880s, the Great Depression of the 1930s and now the Long Depression of the 2000s.

Great events such as wars and depression which shape our history and our lives are not only explicable but inform our understanding and our actions. Not the caricature of Marxism which reduces all human activity to 'economism' in which individuals are reduced to ciphers or automatons with no freedom of action. On the contrary Marxism proves that it is class struggle over the share of value that propels humanity (as represented by the proletariat that produces the wealth) to rid itself of the increasingly destructive capitalist system that ultimately threatens climate collapse and human extinction.

It is this point that is the key to our liberation. Roberts touches on it but does not develop it. Capitalism is an historical society that can last only so long as it can produce to meet human needs efficiently. It came into existence with the rise of the bourgeoisie who harnessed productive labor to reduce the necessary labor time needed to produce commodities. The reduction of necessary labor time was historically 'progressive' yet racked by contradictions. Under capitalism 'progress' is expropriated as rising surplus labor time (exploitation) in the form of profits by the class that owns the means of production. This contradiction causes the TRPF where the drive for profits meets the inevitable resistance of the proletariat over the share of value intensifying the class struggle and threatening to resolve crises by revolution. 

So how do we predict the course of TLD today? While 'economics' accounts for the crisis and its severity, already built into 'economics' is the class struggle complete with class ideas and class actions most notably wars and revolutions. Each historic boom and bust cycle is therefore the product of class struggle. Each bust gets stronger and each boom weaker as we can see by tracking them.

The Long Depression of the 1880s which led to a weak boom until WW1 threw the proletariat into the trenches and stimulated new production in the victors and destroyed the industry of the losing capitalist states. But war brought with it the threat of revolution and there was no guarantee that the crisis would be solved and capitalism 'stabilised'. It was resolved temporarily (outside Russia) by the power of bourgeois ideology and politicians who disarmed and trapped workers in parliaments, and where that failed unleashed fascist counterrevolution.

But the post-war boom was weak and the crisis returned in The Great Depression of the 30's. This led to another World War in which the victors boosted production and developed new techniques while destroying the economies of the defeated states stimulating the renewed capitalist accumulation known as the post-war boom. The potential for revolution in Europe was smothered by the allied troops (including the by now Stalinist Soviet Union) or steered into 'neo-colonisation' in the 'third world'. Once more the boom was short lived and a period stagnation followed.

Again the TRPF munched into profits which slumped from the early 1960s until the equivalent of a new World War, the neo-liberal counter-revolution, rescued capitalism in the 1980s from its impending demise. Neo-liberalism in the name of the 'free market' openly attacked workers resistance to rising exploitation, restored capitalism in the Soviet Union and China, and everywhere destroyed state assets to revive the rate of profit. Yet as Roberts shows, the upturn of the neo-liberal 1980s and 1990s was too weak to restore profit rates to post-war boom levels. The result was 'financialisation' as the surplus capital had no place to go except into speculation in existing assets.

So the historical record shows that each crisis gets stronger and each upturn weaker because the worsening contradiction between the owners of the means of production and those who produce value leads capitalism to an inevitable decline. It cannot use its expropriated wealth to generate new wealth without destroying more wealth. 

 

Here we come to the most interesting final chapters of Roberts book.  He spends some time speculating about Kondratiev Curves (K Curves) which Trotsky rubbished in the 1920s as a blind alley and nothing to do with Marxism and which I don't propose to debate here. Much more relevant is his argument about whether or not the current Long Depression is the 'terminal' crisis.

This is an old argument among Marxists. Always keen to predict the inevitable fall of capitalism, Marxists have tended to see every crisis as the last one before socialism must replace it. The general rule of thumb is that capitalism must decline but it cannot fall unless pushed by the proletariat. As we have seen every crisis is caused by class struggle in which the relative strength of the two classes determines the outcome. Roberts takes this position and argues that if the capitalist ruling class can resolve the current crisis by defeating workers then a new boom of capital accumulation is possible. While this 'possibility' cannot be excluded it is more likely that the destruction of the 'forces of production' required to exit TLD into an historically weak boom will be so extreme that the TLD will become the last, or terminal, crisis, whose outcome must be either human extinction or socialism.

Briefly in summary, in every crisis, capital has to destroy more wealth to create new wealth. As the destruction gets worse, the ability of capitalism to survive is reduced. As more and more workers are thrown out of production, as their lives become more intolerable, they rise up and "blowback". As more and more of the forces of nature are destroyed including the pre-conditions for human life in the biosphere, then a qualitative shift takes place in the resistance of labor. As the current crisis get worse the quality of revolutionary knowledge and action will advance. The class struggle throws up mass experience of struggle that tests the limits of capital and as class consciousness grows validates Marxism as the critique of capital and the promise of socialism. The proletariat adopts Marxism as its revolutionary program and representing humanity becomes the agent of the last revolutionary transformation before capitalism kills us all.

That is the prediction; whether it comes true or not is up to you.

Michael Roberts, The Long Depression: How it happened, Why it happened, and what happens next. Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/the-long-depression-an-interview/

The Moral Statistics of Thomas Picketty

 

Picketty’s ideas in their C19th form were demolished by Karl Marx himself. But Picketty couldn’t be bothered reading Marx so he wouldn’t know this. Had he bothered he would have discovered that capitalist inequality is inherent in the fact that the class that owns the means of production forces the other class that is dispossessed of those means of production to produce surplus-value as the basis of profits. The distribution of income that results is a mere symptom of these unequal relations of production. 

We will leave Picketty’s data and the conclusions he draws from this date to the criticism of the bourgeois mice (an in- joke reference to the Young Marx – Picketty could start with Early Writings which are much less ‘boring’ than Capital). Anyone can prove that capitalism creates income inequality. The point is whether inequality is good or bad. The only thing that separates Picketty from Ann Rand is not statistics but morality.

Picketty thinks it is bad because the widening income gap is accompanied by increasing profitability. Those bosses are truly bloody minded bastards. Marx had anticipated this mistake because it was common in his day. Marx refers to a fixation on the symptoms rather than causes of inequality as “The Trinity Formula” as in the father, son and Holy Ghost.

This semi-religious fetishism of appearances has its materialist roots in the alienation of human labour as the value of the commodity which is explained in the first part of Capital Vol 1. This is the best rendition of the adage that we know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Ironically, it was the French translation of Capital that Marx thought the best since he had the chance to edit it and since it was serialised and thus accessible to the ordinary worker (and even the odd bourgeois intellectual). Even so Marx had misgivings that the French reader would be impatient to pass quickly from the difficult analysis to “immediate questions that aroused their passions”.

Picketty has the disadvantage of writing a 600 page book that instead of illuminating the causes of inequality, buries the truth under a false theory. He whips up a moral outrage because the bosses profits rise at the expense of falling wages. 

Marxist economist Michael Roberts shows that Picketty measures profits to include ‘wealth’ as in property and housing values. Such ‘wealth’ is not counted in profits as by and large it does not directly contribute to production. Land is a source of rent (or interest on housing assets) which is deducted from wages or profits. But even using Picketty’s measure of wealth to include land, Roberts argues that this has been declining as land becomes less valuable in relation to financial assets, also increasingly unrelated to the production of profits. Perhaps Picketty should have read Marx on ‘fictitious capital’.

So Picketty’s moral statistics leads to rising profits and a falling share of wages where the political solution that presents itself is a moral condemnation of capitalism, combined with a practical push for the poor to rise up and demand their ‘fair share’ of income, even though their production of profits was never fair.

In Aotearoa/New Zealand a strong advocate for a redistribution of wealth is Gareth Morgan, a maverick entrepreneur capitalist. His method is a Universal Basic Income (UBI) paid for by what is effectively a new 25% flat tax on wealth including assets and income.  See his book TheBig Kahuna. 

However writing an academic text of 600 pages over a number of years means Picketty doesn't have the excuse of passion which leads him to condemn Capitalism or French impatience like the German moral socialists that Marx excoriated in the Critique of the Gotha Program for forgetting that capitalism leads to falling profits and that any equalising of income requires a socialist revolution. His language is bourgeois morality and statistics.

So like all those who think that climate catastrophe can be managed by the ‘adaptation’ of capitalism, Picketty may “throw statistics" at capitalism but doesn’t entertain the idea of overthrowing it.

For a Workers' Revolution in Greece!

• Long live the general revolt of the exploited youth and working class of Greece!

• Greece leads the working class of Europe and the world against the attacks of the capitalists and is in the vanguard of the fight for the socialist revolution!

• Down with the repressive government of Caramanlis and the social imperialists of PASOK!

On December 6 the police deliberately assassinated a 15 year old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos who was protesting with a group of friends in the neighborhood of Exarchia in Athens. This is the working class area where the University of Technology is located and which was the centre of the struggle against the bloody dictatorship of the Colonels in the 1970s.

The brutal killing aroused the just anger of the young rebels that have been for more than six days mounding huge demonstrations in the streets confronting the murderous police raising the battle cries “state killers”, “police killers”, “down with Caramanlis”, and attacked the key institutions of capitalist property and the bourgeois state: more than 370 banks, luxury hotels and police stations, many of which were set alight and burned down by the protestors.

The centre of Athens, the scene of the biggest struggles, has been almost destroyed. The youth rebels have burned shops and supermarkets, occupied schools and the Polytechnic University and the neighborhood of Exarchia where the rebellion began and from which it has spread to more than 10 other cities in Greece including Thessaloniki, Patras, Trikala and the islands of Crete and Corfu.

On the 9th of December more than six thousand youth rallied at the funeral of Alex, crying “Avenge the killing of Alex, march on Athens, confront the police killers, release the 150 plus political prisoners.”

• Long live the rebellion of the young workers of Greece who suffer 23% unemployed; who are lucky to find casual contract jobs, with the poverty wage of 650 euros, and are denied access to education by the privatization plans of the bourgeoisie!

• Long live the rebellion of the exploited youth con with their barricades and burning of cars and police stations, stake up the road of the immigrant worker youth struggle of the French Cités of 2006 that rose up to the cry of “Every night we will turn Paris into Baghdad” and the Italian youth, that have risen up on the last months to the cry of “We will not pay for your crisis”!

• Immediate freedom for all the jailed youth and workers!

• Dissolve and disarm the Police!

• For workers and popular courts to judge and punish all those responsible for the killing of Alexandro!

The rebellion of youth which began with barricades, street fights and the burning of police stations and led to general strikes, can erupt into a generalised revolt of the working class and exploited of Greece. The exploited have entered the revolutionary offensive.

But this huge generalized uprising by the exploited youth will not die down quietly. On the contrary it is the spark to alight the uprising of the whole working class and oppressed masses. Thus the strike of 23 October was led by the social democratic union bureaucracy allied to the Stalinist KKE (Communist Party of Greece) under pressure from below to put a lid on the workers opposition to the government’s plans. But the sectoral strikes and the huge general strike of 23 October, shows that the workers of Greece are determined to fight the coalition government of Caramanlis of the ND and the social democratic PASOK. This is because the government has no choice but to make the people pay the cost of the world crisis but cutting their living standards. Greece must do this because it is a minor imperialist power, subordinated to USA and German imperialism, the latter now the dominant imperialist power in Europe.

To pay for their solution to their crisis where the Greek banks have been bailed out by more than 28 billion euros, the bourgeois and its government under Caramanlis have launched ferocious attacks on the working class and the pensioners, with privatizations, cuts in public education and plans to privatize the universities. At the same time the wage basket has been reduced by inflation and more than 20% of the workers and their families now live below the poverty line.

This is the situation that caused the spark of the youth rebellion to light the fire of the working class struggles and the huge general strike of 10 December that paralyzed the country and took to the streets of Athens and many other cities.

The strike of the 10th brought out all the forces of the youth against the attacks on the pensions, and demanded 100% increase in the minimum wage. Facing these facts the Social Democratic and Stalinist bureaucracy of the GSEE (General Confederation of Workers) and ADEDY (main public sector union) raised these demands. Despite this, the strike turned into a generalized revolt of the exploited masses that, united with the youth rebellion took to the streets and barricades and breaking with all agreements between the bureaucracy and the regime, calling for an unlimited general strike against both the ND and PASOK that had taken turns for decades in exploiting, oppressing and repressing the workers.

With this generalized rebellion, the working class and the exploited of Greece have risen up against the crisis, the attacks of capitalism and all the schemes by the bosses and the treacherous workers leaders to divide and rule the workers ranks. We have today in Greece a revolutionary situation, such has not been seen by European imperialism for more than 30 years, when in 1975 the heroic Portuguese revolution erupted.

That is why the major imperialist powers are alarmed: “There is an insurrectionary climate in Athens”; “Greece has no state”, editorialized the leading French imperialist daily, Le Monde; alarmed because the workers suburbs of Paris, London, Madrid, Ro¬me, Berlin etc, contain the same unemployed masses, super-exploited migrant workers, disaffected youth, that is, the same miserable conditions that caused the uprising in Greece. 160 years after it was written in the Communist Manifesto, the Greek working masses are writing in the streets – in the letters of struggle, of fire, of strikes, of blood – the same words: “A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of Communism.”

• End the dictatorship of international finance capital. Stop the attack on the world working class and the slide to barbarism…Forward to the socialist revolution!

In our view, the uprising of the proletariat, the exploited youth and masses of Greece, that mobilized 10s of thousands on 10 December to the cry of “State murderer” and “Down with Caramanlis”, demonstrates that, facing a bankrupt imperialist capitalist system in crisis, that in order to defend the most basic rights and living conditions, it is necessary for the masses to launch a political struggle against the regime to take the power and to put in its place a state of the workers and all exploited people.

This bankrupt capitalist system has exposed itself before the eyes of the masses: the system is rotten and can only survive on the backs of our slavery. Today, against all the reformist lies about capitalism, Greece affirms the revolutionary Marxist program of the 1V International of 1938 that states clearly that: confronting the bankruptcy and decadence of capitalism, and the advance of barbarism, the only salvation for the exploited is in the workers socialist revolution, and that the struggle for this revolution is the most important and urgent task of the proletariat. For the working class, the exploited and the oppressed peoples to live, imperialism must die, and this task, on the whole continent, is concentrated in the struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe.

In this struggle the proletariat and youth of Greece are building on all previous struggles of their class brothers and sisters of Europe. They join with and advance the spontaneous uprising of the Belgian general strike of workers against their leadership. They join with also and learn the lessons of the huge spontaneous uprisings of the Italian masses of the 17 October which paralysed the country taking to the streets in the name of the rank and file of the Cobas, against the treacherous leaderships of the GIL who collaborate with the government of the “Tsar” Berlusconi today, and before that Prodi.

• Long live the spontaneous uprising of the exploited youth and the “kukulofori” (the “hoodies” who fight on the barricades)!

• Long live the fighting spirit of the proletariat and the Greek masses who show they are more conscious and advanced politically than all the “plans” of the treacherous union bureaucracy and the reformists of all colors!

Meanwhile the PASOK and the union bureaucracy calls for “calm”, for Caramanlis’ resignation, and for new elections in order to strangle the fight of the masses. The Stalinists of the KKE (CPG) take a position as in Chile where their “Red Police” openly “condemns the use of violence” by workers – as if the bourgeois state regime is not “violent” when it murders Alex and condemns the youth to a future life of unemployment! – and forms a security guard armed with batons to contain and suppress the heroic youth mobilizations. So, the cry of the Chilean youth “The ‘pacos de rojo’ (red cops) are dangerous” is today given new life on the streets and barricades of Greece.

Today, those who have usurped the name of Trotskyism to rescue the “progressive” or “Bolivarian” bourgeoisie; to call for a vote for Chirac “against Le Pen” in France; who say that the victory of Zapatero in the Spanish election of 2004 was an “expression of the class struggle against the war”, are doing the opposite, expropriating the name of Trotskyism. All have promoted the politics of class collaboration, bowing down before the bourgeois state, trying to reform bankrupt capitalism, instead of joining the campaign to support the magnificent general uprising of the students and workers of Greece who are opening the road to the socialist revolution in that country.

Today the anarchist movement has capitalized enormously from the radicalization of the exploited youth of Greece. This is no accident. The anarchist movement has maintained a tradition of courageous and intransigent struggle against the bourgeois state, while the renegades of Trotskyism have in the recent decades transformed themselves into reformists, providing a left cover and support for the bloody imperialist regimes of the European powers.

So today it is anarchism – that demonstrated its historic bankruptcy in the Spanish revolution in 1936-9 – that is benefiting from this magnificent radicalization of the exploited Greek masses. For this reason we must redouble our fight against those who have usurped Trotskyism and destroyed the 4 International, for an international regroupment, a Zimmerwald and Kienthal of the healthy Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organizations, and open the road to build on the basis of th3e program and legacy of the 4 International of 1938, a world party of socialist revolution.

• Long live the general revolt of the exploited youth, the working class and the Greek masses!

• Down with the repressive and starvation regime of Caramanlis supported by the social imperialist PASOK!

• Forward to the Socialist Revolution!

The task of the moment is the centralization and coordination of the pickets into one national workers and popular militia, the preparation of a general strike to bring down the regime of Caramanlis and the pro-imperialist coalition of ND and PASOK – sustained by the union bureaucracy and the “red police” of the KKE – to open the way to the proletarian revolution that will bring class justice for Alexandros, good work and a living wage for the working class, free education for all the children, and meet all the most basic needs of the masses.

• For a Workers Socialist Greece, for the Socialist United States of Europe from the British Isles to the Russian steppes!

• Our class brothers and sisters of Greece mark the road: against the catastrophe that the capitalists try to download on the proletariat and all the exploited of the world, we must fight to prepare and organize a true international counter-offensive of the working class, to expropriate the expropriators and open the road to the international socialist revolution!

• For the working class and the exploited of the world to live, the capitalist system must die!


Leninist Trotskyist Fraction December 2008
(unofficial translation by CWG)