A SINGLE SPARK CAN START A PRAIRIE FIRE

Unofficial translation of https://www.pcmaoiste.org/actunationale/une-etincelle-peut-embraser-le-pays/

A single spark can start a prairie fire!

Last November 17th was the very first day of national deadlocking “against the rise in taxes”. The reports from our comrades, present on the pickets, blockades and in the assemblies were unanimous: the working-class presence was hegemonic, social revindications burst forth all over, and fury to attain victory mixed together with an explosive enthusiasm. The first leaders of the movement, those most heard, were overwhelmingly workers, came from the ranks of the popular masses, unaffiliated to any of the bourgeois parties. It was the popular masses and the workers who, driven by the will to struggle and to win, organized themselves locally despite all the obstacles (reactionary hegemony, absence of working-class organization, etc).

The following three weeks saw the great convergence and movement of the masses from the roadblocks towards the bourgeois city centres, where the police would become overwhelmed, where the Champs Elysées themselves were looted. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered together each day, right in the middle of winter. Near Bordeaux, in the Médoc region, one of the poorest regions in France, circa 3,000 people held a toll-booth night and day. Just like in many other cases, the eviction didn’t go smoothly, and the toll-booth was partially burnt down. Even in Belgium, the violence of the masses and self-organization responded to the violence of the reforms of the Macron government. In the colony of Reunion, things became practically insurrectional. Within a few weeks, the bourgeoisie would bear witness to the working class becoming audacious once again. We shall attempt to analyse this movement in order to draw conclusions in preparation for December 5th of this year and its aftermath, which looks very likely to be explosive.

Indeed, the main logistical sectors are seeing an increase in calls for an indefinite general strike: SNCF (French National Railway Company), RATP (Autonomous Parisian Transportation Administration), truck hauliers, bus drivers, airport ground crews, etc…

The unions are obliged to play it “tough” in the face of the rage of the masses, but it may well happen that the movement once again slips beyond any control. This December 5th is becoming a prospect that the date of November 16th must make even more obvious. Thus, based on the lessons of the yellow vest movement, we must prepare for a new mass movement.

This indefinite strike is taking place just one year after the great explosion of the 17th of November. The masses, without any experience nor organization, have proven their heroic courage. After decades of defeat, without an organizational culture, without any overall, overarching vision, a significant part of the working class decided to take matters into their own hands, particularly in the rural and suburban zones, where the petit-bourgeois left and its organizations have no presence. The unions themselves were received ambivalently: on the one hand, rejection of the confederations and their numerous betrayals, on the other, most prominently, numerous examples of grassroots involvement of local union worker activists in the mass movements since the beginning. Since the start of November, general assemblies, highway blockages, demonstrations by foot and by car, etc, all multiplied. The matter of the fuel taxes opened the path to the high cost of living and the question: who controls the State? Who benefits from the current setup of society? Why must we work to survive while others live lavishly upon our work, our misery? Why is it that left-wing organizations preach non-violence while it is only violence that works?

The Gilet Jaunes movement posed the same questions that our ideological line, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism poses, and which our Party applies to the concrete politics of the French State. The violence of the unorganized masses against the State greatly surpassed the traditional spectacular demonstrations. The striking images such as the burning of the prefecture of Le Puy-en-Velay, of the Narbonne tollbooths, the looting of the Champs-Elysées or indeed Christophe Dettinger’s hand-to-hand fight against the CRS (Republican Security Companies, riot police) are only a few examples; but all over, we have seen proletarians taking on the police, sometimes armed only with stones, sticks and shields, with their faces uncovered, often even with their bare hands. The proletariat has once again proven the correctness of the theory of Marx, demonstrating that it is the only class which is thoroughly and completely revolutionary.

A huge part of the Left demonstrated their liquidationism, in trying to halt and put an end to a movement which belonged to a class that was not theirs. From the very beginning, the Gilet Jaunes (“Yellow Vests”) were described as fascists or simply not joined up with, even if they were supported with half-hearted words. Because our society finds itself under a reactionary hegemony, no class movement can be pure. Ever since the very beginning of the movement, our Party has made this analysis, choosing to study the movement from within, perceiving the contradictions and potentialities which existed therein. Our young organization has strengthened itself in this struggle, learning decisive lessons from the popular masses, from their ability to raise the question of power from the very first instant, to discuss the State, to discuss violent and even armed struggle.

We present here a first self-criticism to the proletariat in stressing that our Party in reconstitution and reconstruction could but insufficiently synthesize the ideas of the masses to a higher level, avoid the tendency for tailism and directly lead the blockages and actions of the shock-troops of our Class. We could have reorganized roadblocks instead of shutting ourselves up in the cities, reorganized the car-based demonstrations which were so popular, could have organized security detachments to fight the cops, organized the violence of the masses against corrupt politicians, against the most hated bosses, against temp agencies or real estate agencies. Our work has been too fragmented and insufficiently proactive, insufficiently meticulous. But, what we have learned and corrected through forging ourselves in this movement; on the necessity of the political leadership of the Party, on revolutionary violence, protracted struggle – these are all lessons of an inestimable value for the reconstruction of the Party for People’s War here, in the French State.

Today, the climate remains very tense due to the anti-masses reforms of the Macron government; the reduction in unemployment (around 50% of the unemployed will lose between 25% and 100% of their allowance), the upcoming pension reform, the announced reform of night work in distribution, or even the introduction of the “one-time allowance”, the devastation of the hospitals and the privatization of State services – increasing the cost for the masses – as well as the increase in the cost of living and of taxes, are causing, and will continue to cause poverty to soar and render daily life unbearable. Attacks against the masses are increasingly violent and direct, with the aim of anesthetizing the masses, to prevent any counter-attacks.

In this context, the Gilet Jaunes movement was a spark against the government of the imperialist bourgeoisie, which was forced to deploy a huge police and judicial arsenal, more repressive than ever before. More than 3,000 yellow vests have been convicted and 1,000 have been imprisoned; the popularity of the police and the judiciary is in free-fall. Repressive laws are in place, demonstrations are systematically attacked. The bosses strongly repressed the most enthusiastic yellow vests in many companies. Several activists are in prison for their militant involvement in the Gilet Jaunes movement, and we must strive to build a great and strong Red Aid, to be ready to support the popular masses in the movements which will surely come.

Meanwhile, the State continues to strike the iron for the fascists, by increasing the power of the repressive arsenal, but also through encouraging media coverage of the most reactionary theorists, by taking up the anti-immigrant discourse of the National Front (with the near-confessed aim of diverting anger from the social question). The State is preparing for contemporary fascism through these transformations which allow the fascist party to strengthen itself, it increasingly embraces corruption, reinforces individualism and continues to destroy the social and community fabric. The reformist and even “”revolutionary”” left is absolutely not up to the task: who, in these days, apart from the Communists, is preparing to take on a fascist regime? Who can claim to be building an organization strong enough to resist repression? For that matter, who is it that is confronted with the ordeal of repression and imprisonment? The present-day left is pathetic and we should not expect our salvation to come from anyone except ourselves.

Therefore, we need to reinforce our organisation. In order to do this, we must first place ourselves at the service of the people, we must learn from the masses. In struggles, as we have seen, it is the masses who educate us, so that we may become educators. Our role, as Maoists, is to construct the Communist Party and its political line by synthesizing the correct ideas and discarding the incorrect ideas. But these do not emerge from our own heads! We must learn them from the masses, then test them, prove them in practice, and then finally, in a dialectical process, turn them into the guiding lines of our organisations, gather the masses around these organizations, organize them, so as to give them the tools of resistance and revolution. Without learning from the masses, without learning methods of struggle, we cannot synthesize whatsoever. We have learned from the Gilet Jaunes, and we must continue to learn.

This learning is not tailism, it is the conscious immersion of the advanced elements of the proletariat within the popular masses and their struggles, in order to grasp all struggles and make itself capable of leading by extending our mass base. At the same time, in a dialectical manner, we must build the United Front, develop our workers’ front, but also our youth, womens’ and LGBTI organizations. It is through taking the initiative and going against the current that we shall forge ourselves as Communists, members of the Party of our class.

Without succeeding in this task which is central to the construction of the Party, we cannot build the three instruments of the revolution. By putting ourselves at the service of the masses, by synthesizing the correct ideas and elevating them to a higher level, through practice and theoretical study (meaning the study of past practice throughout the world), we become the advanced fraction of the working class, we merge the Party and the vanguard of the class, we turn the subjective vanguard of the class (as the most radical working-class section of the Gilet Jaunes was) into an objective vanguard, a vanguard that seeks to make revolution and gives itself the means to do so.

On December 5th, a new detonation will take place. It could possibly set the whole prairie ablaze. Our comrades in the revolutionary organizations and in the Party must study the example of the Gilet Jaunes movement and take the initiative. We must organize pickets, demonstrations, blockages, construct the Party and the Front in the fires of the class struggle. Let us make December 2019 a key date in the construction of the party, on the path of the revolution!