A leaflet of a rank-and-file initative in Paris during the Autumn 2010 Pension movement, we have participated in
"ADDRESS TO ALL WORKERS"
On the initiative of rail workers at the "Gare de l’est" station and the teachers of the 18th Paris’ district, a hundred workers (rail, education, post, food, information, retired, unemployed, students, workers with or without papers, unions or not, came together on September 28 and October 5 to discuss retirement and more generally the attacks we are suffering and the perspectives for pushing them back.
There’s been millions demonstrating and striking at the last days of action. The government has still not withdrawn the attacks. Only a mass movement will be up to doing so. This idea made its way through discussions around an unlimited general, rolling strike and a blockage of the economy.
The form that this movement takes is our business. It’s up to us to confront this at our place of work through strike committees and where we live through sovereign General Assemblies. The must bring together the largest number of the working population; coordinate at the national level with elected and revocable delegates. It’s for us to decide the means of action and our demands. Nobody else.
Leaving Chereque (CDFT chairman [1]), Thibault (CGT chairman [2]) to decide for us is to prepared the way for new defeats. Chereque is for the 42 years. We can’t have any confidence in Thibault, who is not asking for the withdrawal of the law, as we remember him in 2009, drinking champagne with Sarkozy [3] while thousands were being sacked, leaving us to fight separately. We have no confidence in the so-called “radicals”. The radicalisation of Mailly (FO chairman [4]) is to shake the hand of Aubry (social democrat leader) in demonstrations whereas the Socialist Party votes for 42 years. As to Sud-Solidaires [5], the CNT-Vignoles or the extreme left (LO [6], NPA [7]), they offer us no perspective other than union unity. That’s to say the unity behind which they want to negotiate these reverses.
If today, they are riding the horse of the rolling strike, it’s above all to stop it getting out of control. Their grip on our struggles gives them admission to the tables of negotiation from the CFTC [8] to Solidaire “to spread the point of view of union organisation with the perspective of defining just and efficient measures in order to assure the durability of the system of retirement by sharing it out”. Can one think for a single moment that there can be any agreement with these wreckers of our retirement since 1993, with those that have undertaken the methodical demolition of our conditions of life and work?
The only unity capable of pushing back the government and the ruling class is for public and private to unify, working or unemployed, retired and youth, workers with or without papers, union members or not based on common General Assemblies and controlling the struggle ourselves.
We think that the withdrawal of the law on retirement is the minimum demand. That isn’t sufficient. Hundreds of thousands of older workers are already surviving on less than 700 euros a month while hundreds of thousands of youngsters live from hand to mouth on the RSA when they have no work. For millions of us the crucial problem is being able to afford housing, to look after and feed ourselves. We don’t want this. Yes, the attacks against the retired are the trees that hide the forest. Since the beginning of the crisis the ruling class, with the help of the state, has thrown hundreds of thousands of workers onto the streets and got rid of thousands of jobs in the public sector. And we are only at the beginning. The crisis is continuing and the attacks against us will become more and more violent.
To confront them, above all, we must have no confidence in the parties of the left (CP , Social Democrat party, Left party-PG...), they have always loyally managed the affairs of the bourgeoisie and never called into question industrial and financial private property as well as the great landed properties. Moreover, in Spain as well as Greece, it’s the left in power which is organising the offensive of capital against the workers. For our retirement, health, education, transport and in order to be starved to death, the workers must monopolise the riches of society in order to provide for their needs.
In this struggle, we shouldn’t be seen to be defending sectoral interests but those of all the working population, including small peasants, fishermen, artisans, small merchants who are thrown into misery with the crisis of capitalism. We must get them behind us and put ourselves at the head of the struggles to better take on Capital.
Whether working, unemployed, precarious, without papers, whatever our nationality, it’s the whole working class that is in the same boat.
Meet up to discuss in the GA Tuesday October 12 at 1800 and Wednesday 13 at 1700 bourse de travail, Metro Republican
From workers and precarious workers of the AG interpro of the Gare de l’Est,
[1] social democrat union
[2] communist union
[3] french president
[4] corporatist union
[5] corporatist and "radical reformist" union, lead by NPA trotskysts
[6] UCI, trotskysist
[7] SWP equivalent, trotskyst
[8] christians’ union
www,cnt-ait.info
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