No adhesion to whatever ‘Sacred Union’!

In face of fear: international class struggle against Capital and its national prisons!

 

The heinous massacre on January 7, 2015, of cartoonists and journalists of the weekly Charlie by a commando of “radical“ Islamists, that of policemen, and the purely racist killing of Jews, have resuscitated a more or less general indignation, to the exception of certain youngsters who stubbornly cling to “their” “Islamic-communitarian” allegiance.

 

Initially there have been countless spontaneous demonstrations, expressing an immense emotion by a post-1968 generation who experienced this massacre as a direct assault on the old protest ideals of its youth. A very strong emotion has surged among the youngsters too, who feel that any act of war on the national territory concerns them directly.

Well, the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie has seized upon the occasion and has called for a huge day of “national mobilization against terrorism”, “for the freedom of expression”, deciding to grant free public transport in order to transform the demonstrations into a “sacred march for the Republic” .

So about four million individual atoms, called upon to rally under the national flag and to the sound of the Marseillaise, have demonstrated in the whole of France, on Sunday January 11, for the “freedom of expression”, against terrorism and for the national unity of all “citizens” – Muslims, Catholics, Jews, workers and bourgeois alike, from left to right. All have replied with an act of presence, including the professional anti-Semites who secretly approved the assault against a Jewish supermarket, but called for more police and more armed forces.

An amorphous mass of “citizens” came running up expressing its profound fear in face of the situation, whose stakes are meticulously hidden by the ruling class. Some cried “long live the police”, going so far as to embrace its representatives armed with batons. Whereas workers on strike, but also demonstrators for divers causes, like the environmentalists, confronted the riot squads and the constabulary and some, like young Rémi Fraisse, [1] lost their lives, the whole of the dominant class and its State called for “concord” and the “sacred union”, for “forgetting” its repression and its adhesion to its belligerent designs.

Never since the “victory” of November 11, 1918, has a so touchingly patriotic union affirmed itself, in which all deputies, from the left to the extreme right, attended the same patriotic mass, with tears in their eyes and to the sound of the bloody chant of the Marseillaise, which has accompanied all wars of Capital: “May an impure blood saturate our lands”. The French State has proclaimed itself “in war against terrorism” , for “civilization” and against “barbarity”, superbly ignoring the 2,000 victims of the Islamic sect at Nigeria. “Blacks”, even Christian ones and potential immigrants, really count less than tricolor nationals.

The campaign “I am Charlie”, which presents itself as a campaign for the “freedom of expression”, cannot make forget that, at the time of the Algerian war, newspapers were forbidden in which certain cartoonists (the same that were assassinated on January 7) denounced the torture so dear to the French army. The same will happen tomorrow, when articles and cartoons will be published against the war and the inevitable exactions by the army, presented as inevitable “collateral damage”.

The French State has spoken by its president: there will certainly be war at “exterior theaters”. The aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle will intervene in the Gulf, officially against the Islamic State Daech. In reality the secret reason for this “presence” is not “the combat against terrorism” but the preservation of Western or local imperialist interests, faced with the instability of the region, in a strategic zone not only for its oil production, but because of its proximity to Asia, to which the center of gravity of capitalism tends to shift. All these military preparations will neither prevent the development of “Islamist” terrorism, which is part of the strategy of the micro-imperialisms of the region, nor the generalization of uncontrollable local wars, that will henceforth knock on our doors, with the conflict between Europe and Russia through the buffer-zone of Ukraine.

The reinforcement of the police, aiming at “radical Islamism”, has yet a different target, the real ‘enemy from within’ of Capital and its national state: the class of the workers, of the proletarians, of those without work, of all those whom the boss of French capital has qualified as the “toothless”, all the damned of the Earth. A massive unemployment of four million workers, an economic crisis without end leaves these “toothless” without an alternative choice: either to capitulate and adhere to the ‘Sacred Union’, in order to finally sink into the most profound despair, or to leap onto the historical stage as a class with a real revolutionary project.

Proletarians! Manual and intellectual workers! For decades the idea is hammered in every day that you are no longer a class, that you no longer exist; that after so many factory closures your class would have disappeared in the torment of globalization. You are called upon to pledge allegiance to your “fatherland”, to be a non-class, to shout on the streets: “I am Charlie” together with the petty bourgeois and the bourgeois who have only one goal on their minds: to muzzle you and, if necessary, to outlaw you if you go too far on the terrain of your class demands.

Proletarians! Manual and intellectual workers! You are before anything else an international class whose struggle exceeds the framework of your capitalist fatherland, whose interests are antagonistic to those of Labor. Your enemies are not the immigrant workers that would “steal your bread” and impose their religion upon you, as all nationalists proclaim who, from Pegida in Germany to the Front National in France, try to mobilize you electorally and on the streets. Your enemies are countless: it is all existing national states, or those in the course of formation [2]; it is all religions, and not only “radical Islamism” – all those who try to convince you that you should struggle for the “fatherland”, for “human rights”, or for “civilization against barbarity”.

In order to put an end to the interminable crisis of capitalism, that inexorably steeps the world into terror and repeated wars, in the Near East and at the gates of Europe alike, you have no other choice that to demonstrate your class belonging by action. There is no other perspective for overcoming the mortal crisis of capitalism than through the formation of a world wide community, whose design is the real satisfaction of the needs of the immense majority, instead of the search for profits for a tiny minority of possessors.

The awakening of your class goes through the formation of politically autonomous organisms of reflection and struggle, which you cannot economize on, in order to effect a radical and irreversible transformation of the world. You are the bearers of this perspective of a global society of equality and liberty, of a unified and pacified society without nations, without terror, without terrorism and wars.

To the chatter of petty bourgeois individualism: “I am Charlie”, or to that of populism: “We are the people” (as is advanced in Germany and Spain) you have to reply in the social struggle: “We are a class” ; “Our only people is the whole of the Earth” ; “We are at our posts” in order to combat and finish off a system that leads the whole of humanity straightforward to annihilation.

 

Karlchen, January 16, 2015

Translated by: Jac. Johanson, February 6, 2015.