Here is a translation of the latest communique from Proletarios Internacionalistas about the recent struggles around the world and the decisive need for them to converge and assume themselves as the global struggle of our class against the State and Capital. One more reminder that only through international proletarian unity, aware of but transcending all localist conditions and perspectives, can we bring an end to the capitalist nightmare that holds our planet in captivity.
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The plaintext version follows:
INTERNATIONAL REVOLT
AGAINST GLOBAL CAPITALISM
The proletarian revolt has exploded throughout the world, converging violently in different corners of it. Chile, Ecuador, Iraq, Haiti, France, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Columbia, Bolivia, Honduras, Algeria, Sudan… are a few of the places where in recent months we have taken to the streets, unleashing all the rage which has accumulated for years. The announcement of an increase in subway fare in Chile, of the tax rate for petrol in France, of the price of bread in Sudan, a tax on social networking and on gasoline in Lebanon, or the withdrawal of subsidies for petrol in Ecuador, were enough cause for us, just like in Iraq or in Haiti, to burst out, desperate and furious in the face of the absolute impossibility of living.
The global bourgeoisie’s insatiable thirst for profit is carrying life on earth to unimaginable limits, the contradiction between the necessities of valorization and human life have been exploding since a few years into revolts that today, with the concentration in time of dozens of revolts, announces a new sharpening of class antagonism at an international level. Every barricade, every protest that rises against the successive increase in our exploitation, every road stoppage, every sacking, is a call from the worldwide proletariat to struggle against the deterioration of our living conditions, to extend and affirm the negation of this world, to once again take up and to raise the banner of the social revolution.
What the revolts that today spread throughout the capitalist world announce is nothing other than the re-emergence of the proletariat, the return of the old mole that never stopped digging. The so-called arab spring, the social revolt in Greece, in Turkey, in the Ukraine, or the recent struggles in Brazil or Venezuela, were the prelude to an international and internationalist movement which today stirs fear in the hearts of all the representatives of global capitalism and which stokes the hopes and the spirits of proletarians throughout the world.
From the government in power that executes the measures which impose the economic necessities and which always suppose an increase in the prices of the bare essentials; from the boss who directly exploits us at work, squeezing the last drop of energy out of us; from the market that casts us into unemployment in a world where if you don’t have bills in your pocket you are dead weight and are sent directly to the slaughterhouse; on to the bank, or better said to the world’s banks that increase the amount of our exploitation with all kinds of spoliation measures that cause those same bills to be worth increasingly less in our hands; from each more “fix” of profit that the global bourgeoisie shoots up at the cost of poisoning the air, the water, the earth, our blood or the things we eat, on to all of those innumerable organizations, unions and parties of the left and the right that represent “alternatives” inside of capital and which serve to keep us in slave conditions perpetually… each and every one of them will be indicated by the fire of the revolt as the culprits for our sufferings, as the representatives of global capitalism.
The power that our class has displayed in these last few months has even managed to disrupt the frameworks which the national bourgeoisie were able to impose in some places in order to absorb our struggle. In Hong Kong, the inter-bourgeois framework recoiled from the force of the international struggle which pushed some of the slogans of our enemy to the corner and caused proletarians to distance themselves from them. Even in Catalonia, where the nationalism seems omnipotent in directing a spectacle that drags the proletariat to deny itself as a revolutionary force, there have appeared slogans and practices of minorities who express that the revolutionary force will only beat its path outside of and against the trap of national flags.
Obviously, having said that, highlighting the historical importance of what we’re experiencing and what tends to affirm itself in practice as an international and internationalist proletarian movement against all the attempts of the bourgeoisie to repress, hide, channel, deform and fracture it… we don’t doubt for a moment that this is just the beginning of a long and complex process. It’s difficult to predict the pulses and developments that it will have, the comings and goings, but it is doubtlessly advancing towards a confrontation which is increasingly more international and widespread, increasingly more violent, increasingly more decisive.
If indeed we are already hunger-stricken, getting sick in all possible ways and suffocating because of everything which gives a boost to the economy at the cost of our life and that of our planet, what is yet to come is still worse. The capitalist catastrophe that is arriving is incomparable with what has been experienced up until now. The insatiable vital needs of the capitalist economy ask to sacrifice the human being and all that lives upon the altar of profit. But the proletarians have retaken the path that opens the door to the future: the fight, the intransigent struggle to impose a radical transformation, the attack on the diverse instances and representatives of capital, the affirmation of the community of struggle against capital in the streets of innumerable corners of the world.
In the face of the power of the international revolt, global capitalism responds in the only possible way, with its whole terrorist arsenal. During these last few weeks of protest the democracy of capital has reminded us that its dictatorship is the most brutal one that humanity has ever known. Police, riot squads and soldiers pour out to fill the streets with blood, to destroy bodies, to enclose us, to murder us, to leave us without supplies and provisions in order to cause us to recoil, in order to instill fear in us so that we abandon the streets, to show itself as invincible. Hundreds of dead, tens of thousands of arrested and imprisoned, men, women, and children mutilated and tortured by the weapons that they use against us, cities and neighborhoods cut-off from provisions in order to make us go home and yearn for a return to the peace of the cemeteries.
Although in some places we try to respond to all this terrorism by creating community pots and kitchens, refuges, spaces for caring for our smallest children while others fight in the streets, centers for treating the injured and sheltering comrades, and we also respond with revolutionary violence, taking places that hold provisions by force, attacking capital’s means of communication, obtaining and distributing weapons with which to defend ourselves and attack the terrorism of the State, trying to respond to its terrorism by expressing ourselves as a community of struggle, as a community of solidarity, what’s certain is that we still don’t have the sufficient force to respond as much as it is necessary to the terrorism of the State. Certainly, the military and all their murderous arsenal haven’t made us retreat, and the resistance in the streets fills us with determination and courage. Nevertheless, when the army takes to the streets to unleash all of its terror, in spite of the existence of minorities who maintain the pulse of the struggle and attempt to give direction, we’re still incapable of making a qualitative leap that crystallizes in insurrection. The necessity that presents itself to us in every revolt is how to go about developing and furthering this insurrection.
We have to retake the trail of the past, remember what our class brothers and sisters did then, how they crystallized the insurrections of the past that were able to destabilize the State. We have to remember how the forces of repression were dismantled, how the armies were broken down, how enormous swathes of soldiers refused to fire on the revolt, or even further came with their weapons to the other side. The breakdown of the army always was and will be a fundamental qualitative leap in every proletarian revolt.
We must also retake the creation of structures for supply, for self-defense, we must organize the assault on the stockpiles of arms in order to crystallize the insurrectional necessities of the confrontation. But we also need to know when to retreat in the moments in which the correlation of forces is unfavorable, maintaining the collective force in order to prevent the state from wiping us out. Sometimes retreat, but not cessation, is necessary in order to become structured, to amplify the associationism and the international proletarian structuration. We also need to liberate the prisoners, the arrested, etc. But above all we need for all of this to be materialized as the expression and direction of our community of struggle against capital. All attempts to elude the insurrectional necessity and to develop a war between military apparatus in its place, or to split the organized violence off from the community of struggle itself into a specialized task for a guerrilla group, are paths that liquidate the force which we are generating. Just as well with all the petitions for human rights, or the demands for the resignations of those in charge of the State: forms of democratic integration. Nevertheless, we’re convinced that our community of struggle will learn not only from its own current experience, but that this very experience will cause it to rediscover its own past in order to search for the way to take on these necessities. Like in Iraq, where the proletarians throw around slogans in reference to the insurrection of 1991.
We can’t disregard that the existing social order will not only combat our struggle with bullets and soldiers that are launched against the barricades, but with a conglomerate of ideologies and forces that maneuver to destroy all social contestation. And what’s even more dangerous is that these very forces, taking advantage of our own weaknesses and current limitations, present themselves as a part of our community of struggle, bringing many sectors of our class to identify themselves with them. The national or nationalist “solutions”, the spectacles of constituent assemblies, the requests for democratic purifications or any other reform inside of the State are bullets more dangerous than those which the soldiers fire, since they are aimed at the heart of our movement. The revolutionary perspective, the whip of that heart of the community, depends on our determination to oppose and confront these forces of the counterrevolution.
Neither must we forget that it’s fundamental to take on a whole series of tasks in the places where the social peace hasn’t yet been broken. Obviously these tasks don’t have anything to do with limiting themselves to the anti-repressive issue and/or mobilizations at embassies and consulates, which are the subscribed terrain for reformist discourses and the ones about rights, with complaints and condemnations against the “excesses of the State”. Nor, of course, do they have anything to do with defending the revolt as “the land can’t hold out any longer” and that it is “brutally repressed”. These practices precisely permit the progressive bourgeois fractions to liquidate the true class solidarity, to make of the revolt and its necessity something removed, pertaining to other places, which allows them to deny it upon their own terrain, defending the democratic peace and the calls to vote for the lesser evil. In contrast, class solidarity defends the revolt as an expression of our community of struggle against capital, as one same struggle against one same global enemy. It is clear that the necessities and tasks which can be assumed in the different places arrive conditioned not by militant groups, but by the correlation of local forces. Therefore it is necessary to create instances and committees of solidarity, in order to centralize and spread the distinct informations about the struggle, just as it is done inside of the revolt (the sociability, the sackings, the communitarian organization, the self-defense, the comradely communiques, etc.) in order to stand in opposition to the lies of the mass medias, to the social-democratic channeling; to create networks of aid with the refugees, etc. Definitively, we must propel the structuration of our international community of struggle, seek forms of satisfying the necessities that present themselves to us in the struggle and of overcoming the obstacles that we encounter.
The proletarian revolt that today is turning global capitalism upside-down evinces, in the face of all those who want to make us believe that the revolution is impossible, that the only alternative to capitalism that the human being has is global revolution. The struggle itself, and that which crystallizes it, gives us the certainty that humanity can destroy this form of living based on the community of money, sending it to the dustbin of history, and develop a new society based upon the human community and its inseparable unity with the Earth.
Coming from different countries and distinct scenarios,
one same struggle against capitalism!
Let’s organize our community of struggle internationally!
– Outside of and against the unions and parties –
Let’s further the struggle against capitalist social relations!
Internationalist Proletarians