Stand up, get organized, fight and win!

CW’s Note: This leaflet was distributed in Boulogne-sur-Mer by the comrades of “La Mouette Enragée” [The Enraged Seagull] on the occasion of the demonstration of October 5^th, 2021 “against the pension and unemployment insurance reforms, against precariousness and for the increase of wages”. This “inter-union day of strike” is obviously only an umpteenth counter-fire aimed at putting out the flames of proletarian revolt…

We have been struggling for months to get rid of this bad dream, this accomplished separation from our fellow human beings under the influence of exceptional laws that have become the rule, all this gives us a glimpse of the purpose of capital for the times ahead. We were already “tested, traced and isolated” before, in the workplace where we are exploited day after day as well as in the maze of job search, at school or in the supermarket. “Social distancing” is the essence of the total and decadent world of the commodity; a universe tormented even to madness by its own contradictions. The yellow vests had sensed it, restoring mutually the links that are needed to launch a class counteroffensive equal to the stakes that stand before us.

The bourgeoisie wages war on us

The Covid epidemic and the political repercussions that followed were by no means inevitable. The commodification of our lives has been accompanied for years by the dismantling of health system over which the workers have never had, by the way, any control. The bourgeoisie is now preparing to finish it off and dismantle it in order to put it on the market soon. As for scientific expertise, the extravagant show performed by the bourgeoisie (with the argument of authority over the shoulder) has completed to shed light on the particular interests it supports in reality.

Accused of negligence in health care, the power at the top of the State seized the chaos that it alone had unleashed as an opportunity to replay the only card left in its sleeve, that of National Unity. Under the label of the Council of Defense and National Security, a political-military coterie gave itself the power to juggle fear and guilt, infantilizing the population under a deluge of measures all more liberticidal than the others. As usual, it was the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods who were the first to be stigmatized. From the repression of solidarity practices in deprived areas to the permanent state of emergency; from the curfew to the Global Security Law or the one on Separatism; from the strengthening of the repressive arsenal making France the country in Europe where the police is the strongest, to the so-called Sanitary Pass, the epidemic offered the State a territory-wide field of experimentation in terms of social control.

All over the planet, the dreams of capital announce our nightmare

However, it would be simplistic to denounce this policy as the exclusive creation of Macron and his government. It is part of a broader and international context; it strikes down de facto any search for a sovereigntist, “patriotic” or nationalist solution.

We bet that the economic recovery touted by the official communication will only be a short-lived catch-up phenomenon. It is coupled with increased productivity in the conditions of exploitation, which are even worse than before the epidemic. The latter gave a new boost to the now uninterrupted restructuring of capital. Incipient or partially developed tendencies have found in home confinement and generalized control a fertile ground in which to thrive, exacerbating imbalances, competition and instability on a global scale. The American company Amazon has announced a tripling of its net profits in the first quarter of 2021. In France, during this period, the situation has worsened for at least one worker out of ten, as the Ministry of Labor itself acknowledges; the psychological health has seriously deteriorated for many of us, particularly under the impact of teleworking, for which, ironically, great relocation waves are soon to be announced…

The brutality of labor leads to radical but still isolated reactions among workers, which nonetheless carry within them its critique in action. In the United States, in England and even in France, the phenomenon of the resignations from jobs is spreading, affecting tens of thousands of workers, if not several million as it occurs on the other side of the Atlantic. Although ambivalent and individual, these reactions nevertheless affirm that an existence worth of living will never become used to the daily abuses of management, as well as to performing servile and repetitive tasks for the production of services or goods as useless as they are harmful to our personal and collective equilibrium.

Stand up, get organized, fight and win!

It will soon be two years since the blackout on social mobilizations was imposed, while in the meantime poverty has continued to spread. How can this be explained, when nearly 30% of the population of this country can no longer afford healthy food and eat three meals a day? In just one year, the number of applications for social assistance [RSA] has increased by 14% and almost 10 million people live on less than one thousand euros a month. Since October 1^st, the government has reduced the amount of benefits paid to the unemployed under the pretext of “motivating” them to look for a job, and the clerks of the employers’ union are only waiting for a window of opportunity to finish off the pay-as-you-go pension scheme.

In the meantime, the presidential election circus has taken over from the health soap opera which, in the long run, is struggling to attract substantial audiences. Only the mobilization in the summer against the Pass managed to disturb somewhat the authorities, fearing the replay of a mobilization whose ins-and-outs would be out of control. In the end, this was not the case, because however aberrant and disturbing they might be, the protest against social control and the occupation of the street were too often left to the control of reactionary groups and other lunatics of all kinds, except in a few rare places. However, it is in this context, where factions of the petty bourgeoisie are giving voice – while naively hoping to escape the whirlwind of capitalist contradictions – that we must fight. It is up to us that a clear class discourse of international solidarity echoes in their ears. Not on “social networks”, but in the streets, at work, in the neighborhoods and wherever it is still physically possible!

Here as well as elsewhere, the bourgeoisie and its State only intend to negotiate our surrender and submission to the capitalist chaos into which they are rushing us. And something in the air leads us to believe that, decked out in their misleading “democratic legitimacy”, they will not hesitate to use any means, without exception, to achieve this… The need for a new horizon for humanity is therefore acute, but this hope will not come from the ballot box, neither here nor anywhere else, neither tomorrow, nor ever.

This political requirement puts the necessity of the Social Revolution back on the agenda!

Boulogne-sur-Mer, 03/10/2021

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Source in French: https://lamouetteenragee.noblogs.org/post/2021/10/03/se-relever-sorganiser-lutter-et-vaincre/

PDF in French: https://lamouetteenragee.noblogs.org/files/2021/10/tract-du-5-octobre.pdf

English translation: The Friends of the Class War

Against the health pass… and other attacks against our class!

CW’s Note: This leaflet was originally “written by comrades from Poitou” and handed out among others in Boulogne-sur-Mer at the demonstration of August 14^th, 2021.

The government wants to impose vaccination by means of a compulsory health pass in social and professional life, and to do so it is using health choices, promises, lies, manipulation of the figures, filtering of the information, and financial sanctions.

Some examples:

To justify the urgency of the vaccination, the government emphasized the huge increase in contaminations in July (the number of hospitalizations and deaths remaining minimal compared to those of the first wave). But this increase is partly explained by the explosion in the number of tests that the announcement of a health pass entailed (the other element would be the higher contagiousness of the variant currently in circulation). By testing further, infections were identified that would otherwise go off undetected because they were not accompanied by symptoms of Covid-19. The greatest increase in infections in recent weeks has been among young people, yet “asymptomatic” people are in the majority among those under 30.
While we have been told for a year that a vaccinated person remains infectious, the government has dangled the end of the wearing of masks (as French Health Minister Véran stated on July 13) with the implementation of the health pass. But we can see that it is progressively coming back in city centers, tourist areas, departments, regions…
Above all, the government has decided not only to equate the test and the vaccination (the health pass can be obtained by using one or the other), but also to make the people pay for the tests. Such choices should lead to a decrease in the number of tests. So we will know less who is carrier of the virus, given the large number of “asymptomatic” cases – but if the official number of positive cases drops, the government can attribute the decrease in infections to vaccination alone. However, the emphasis placed by many countries on the double dose vaccine is beginning to be reconsidered by some of them, no longer satisfied with the “European health pass”. Germany, for example, requires both the vaccine and the test at its borders, or even quarantine, and advocates a third dose for vulnerable people.

The virus does not strike similarly the bourgeois and the proles

The truth is that it is not compulsory vaccination – even if combined with other sanitary measures (tests, masks, curfews, etc.) – nor the lifting of patents and the socialization of companies producing vaccines, that can “solve” the problem of this and subsequent pandemics… but a radical change of economic model and society. Because pandemics are favored by both the industrial logic of the capitalist system and by the globalization of exchanges that it implies, and they are therefore to be correlated with the economic exploitation of the planet.

The current pandemic thus has a class dimension that the government obviously refrains from talking about, because it is trying to forge a “national union” against the enemy, the virus: through all media channels, it insists on the need to preserve the health of “our elders” or “the most vulnerable among us”.

It is true that the studies on the victims of Covid-19 […] since the beginning of the pandemic show that this virus has a more or less significant impact according to age, health status or sex […] . However, these studies also take into account the social background and economic development of a country as important criteria. In industrialized countries with ageing populations, the way of living (sedentary lifestyle, industrial food, stress, junk food, etc.) and the various chronic pathologies caused thereby (cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity, cancers, etc.) are partly responsible for the health situation. As a result, the more social inequalities increase, the more chronic diseases explode, and it goes the same for the cases of Covid-19.

In France, the health measures decreed by the government have aggravated inequalities – especially confinements, whether in terms of living, working or educational conditions. It is therefore not surprising that the working class is over-represented among the “antivax” […]. But this part of the population does not go to restaurants, cinemas or theatres any more than it takes the train or the plane. So it is not only the restrictions on freedom that motivate those who do not want to use the health pass, as we tend to think. There is also the enormous indignation caused by Macron’s class contempt for people who were promoted a few months ago to the rank of “heroes” –particularly health care workers – and who now find themselves threatened with serious sanctions if they refuse the injunction to be vaccinated or to turn themselves into police auxiliaries to control the said “health passes”. These sanctions are targeted primarily at those on temporary or fixed-term contracts (mostly women). In addition, the suspension of work contracts contained within the law on the health pass will prevent employees who refuse to be vaccinated from receiving severance payments and from registering with the Job service [Pôle emploi].

What is being fought today is a social war, not a health war

The anger against the government and the media, which already animated the yellow vests, is currently accompanied by distrust to scientists and pharmaceutical labs. And it is reflected in the refusal of the health pass… and in the refusal to go to the polls. This “crisis of confidence in democracy” bothers those in power a little, because the enormous abstention rate at the last regional elections undermines the good image of the institutions defended by the left-wing and the right-wing parties; and it is more difficult for them to play the “anti-fascism” card against the National Rally [formerly National Front], as the presidential election approaches.

In any case, we must not let the health pass further strengthen social control – after the global security law and all the other security measures implemented by Macron or his predecessors. Let’s not be numbed by the fear of the pandemic: let’s fight against the health pass, against the reforms of unemployment insurance and pensions, against the breakage of the public hospital… and more broadly against the established order!

Working-class and internationalist militants for social revolution

Source in French: https://lamouetteenragee.noblogs.org/files/2021/08/tract-anti-pass-version-version-INTER.pdf

English translation: The Friends of the Class War