The following is a translation of the conclusion of “No to Class
Collaboration—Down with the Attack on Pensions!,” an article originally
published in 1917,
édition française, No.5, September 2010.
Millions of workers see the obvious necessity of beating back the government’s
attack on pensions. Many understand that even this modest task is being actively sabotaged
by the trade-union bureaucrats with the more or less open support of their political
counterparts in the reformist workers’ parties, including the NPA and other sizable
“far left” organizations. The labor bureaucracy is not even pretending to
mobilize their ranks for mass struggle to force the withdrawal of the bill. If the workers
are to make any effort to offer serious resistance, they must begin by challenging
bureaucratic control of the struggle. An important step would be to elect strike
committees by workers in workplace general assemblies. Coordinated at the local, regional
and national levels, strike committees could provide a vehicle through which
class-struggle militants could effectively challenge the sabotage of the bureaucrats.
The attack on pensions is the spearhead of a generalized assault on working-class
living standards that deserves a generalized response—a general strike. The
immediate objective around which to mobilize mass support is obviously the necessity to
hand Sarkozy a stinging defeat over the pension reform. Revolutionaries must seek to
intervene in such a struggle with a program addressing other essential issues faced by
working people—including the urgent need to fight unemployment through shorter hours
at no loss in pay and a massive program of public works.
A revolutionary nucleus within the unions that was prepared to initiate a vigorous
response to the bosses’ attacks would inevitably win support from the most militant
sectors of the working class and thereby dramatically change the entire political
equation. If Thibault and company are able to retain control of the mobilizations, the
capitalists will rest easy. The consequences of any further retreats are likely to be
particularly serious in this period, as the global capitalist order teeters on the brink
of a massive meltdown: more layoffs, soaring unemployment and the disintegration of
important sectors of the proletariat.
A fighting leadership for the working class can only be forged through a political
struggle to break with the class collaborationism and reformism pushed by the trade-union
bureaucracy and the parties of the “left” and “far left.” Just as
capitalist attacks on the working class flow from the logic of profit maximization, the
objective interests of working people can only be satisfied by uprooting the entire system
of wage slavery and collectivizing the means of production. This fundamental truth is
denied by various left currents on the grounds that incremental steps and petty reforms
are the most “practical” means of developing “anti-capitalist”
consciousness. More than a century ago Rosa Luxemburg refuted such notions:
“…people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of
legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to
the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more
tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a
different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the
establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification of the old
society. If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same
conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism. Our
program becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the
reform of capitalism: not the suppression of the system of
wage labour but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of
capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.”
—Reform or Revolution?
The revival of an authentically revolutionary pole within the working class requires
the crystallization of a cadre of militants capable of breaking once and for all with the
illusion that the interests of working people can be advanced by an alliance with one or
another wing of the bourgeoisie. The International Bolshevik Tendency seeks collaborators
in the effort to create the nucleus of an authentically Trotskyist organization committed
to fighting inside and outside the unions for a revolutionary, class-struggle program
based on a recognition of the necessity to expropriate the bourgeoisie and uproot the
entire system of production for profit by shattering the capitalist state apparatus and
replacing it with institutions of proletarian power.