Balance sheet and perspective of the current proletarian struggles all over the world

This past year we see revolts one after the other all over the world: revolts that lead Macron to visit the bunkers of the Elysée, that make Lenin Moreno move the seat of the government to Guayaquil, that assault the barracks and the headquarters of bourgeois parties in Iraq while reviving the memory of the insurrection of 1991, that topple one after the other prime ministers in Haiti or that plant a black flag in the Hong Kong parliament. The world bourgeoisie is beginning to get afraid.

As Cecilia Morel, the “First Lady” of the Chilean State, said a few days ago when speaking of the ongoing social revolt: “We are absolutely overwhelmed, it’s like a foreign invasion, alien, I don’t know how to say it, and we don’t have the tools to fight them […]. What is coming is very, very, very serious.”

Indeed, what is coming is a new cycle of class struggle that is raging under our eyes. From Iraq to Lebanon, from Iran to Algeria, from Sudan to France, from Haiti to Ecuador, from Hong Kong to Chile. Struggles stemming from the immediate, human needs of our class, and which from there open the historical perspective, still distant, of the social revolution, of communism. In Chile it is because of the increase in the metro fare, in Algeria because of political corruption, in Haiti because of the Petrocaribe Gate and the rise in petrol prices, as is also the case in France and Ecuador. In Hong Kong it began against the repression, in Iraq for the living conditions and water, in Lebanon because of the increase of the taxes on Internet. But these immediate needs tend to generalize and go beyond the reason that caused the initial spark. As one can see, we do not include Catalonia, which is a process totally located on the terrain of national liberation, which results from the defense of some bourgeois politicians who were sentenced and which seeks the creation of an independent Catalan State. The will of those who fight in these uprisings (or what they believe to defend) counts for little in relation to what each national demand prepares: imperialist wars and conflicts. The criterion for determining the nature of a movement is not its violent or non-violent character, which means nothing, but what it denies and challenges: one nation State is not denied by building another. Kurdistan is another good example of this.

We can draw some first lessons about this ongoing social polarization from the “Ten Notes on the Revolutionary Situation” that we had written a few months ago.

1) Most of the world is polarized. We are entering the beginning of an epochal change characterized by the confrontation between the classes, putting an end to the long retreat of the 1990s. In reality, we are experiencing the increasingly intense and strong development of processes of social ascent of our class, from 2001 in Argentina to 2006 in Oaxaca (passing previously through Ecuador or Bolivia), from the hunger riots in 2008 around the world to 2011, the year when our class generalized its struggles from the Arab world to Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States or even Greece.

2) Capitalism has reached a dead end. We are entering a period of social revolution because capitalism is exhausted as a social relation: it generates more and more superfluous humanity, it expels living labor from social production, and it consumes energy and raw materials with increasing voracity to try to address with more commodities what it loses by expelling human labor. Its crises are and will be more and more catastrophic.

3) The waves of struggle that emerge worldwide (2001, 2008, 2011, and 2019) cannot be understood as events in themselves, as snapshots isolated one from each other. It is the same film – in time and space – that has a common protagonist: the old mole of the revolution that strongly claims its needs and interests.

4) Rebellions and revolutions have a physical, material character: one fights for immediate needs. The important thing is to analyze the material facts that get the practices on the move. What the movement says is important, but what the movement does is more important now, as long as the struggle arises from the immediate needs of our class: something very different from the nationalist or political-electoral struggles that move completely on the terrain of bourgeois politics. The revolution starts from a process of ionization in which social molecules tend to be prepared to fight, polarized, regardless of the consciousness they initially have of the goals of the struggle. This is what we are seeing these last months in the different ongoing revolts. Nothing to do with bourgeois illustration.

5) This social slump, this clash of tectonic plates has a common root and therefore tends to become increasingly synchronous. Revolts spread to each other, from Ecuador to Chile, from Sudan to Algeria, from Iran to Iraq or Lebanon. The common root is the human needs that capital attacks from its needs of reproduction.

6) And yet, it must be understood that the opening of a new era characterized by confrontation between classes does not mean the opening of an insurrectionary period. We are still a long way from this, since an insurrectionary period would require a conscious determination, a program, a will recognized by our class: in short, a reversal of the praxis that needs a higher level of organization and that needs a party, as we will explain below. Even so, there is no doubt that the collision of tectonic plates we are witnessing will be increasingly intense and constant, extensive and concentrated, in spite of the ups and downs it will experience in the coming years.

7) What tasks can we as revolutionaries give to ourselves? We are at the beginning of a new historical period in which it is very important that the processes learn by themselves. Our party, as a social force fighting for communism, lives and is already formed on the ground of these revolts. As revolutionary minorities we are part of the proletariat and of these struggles, we are not a party apart [separate and distinct], but we are those who, as Marx said, try to promote and deepen the determinations of the movement, and at the same time try to clarify theoretically our practice around the general objectives of the class. As we have said, the beginning of a new phase of class struggle, a long period of social revolution marked by the terminal crisis of capitalism, does not mean that communism is just around the corner. We are very far from a revolutionary situation: the ability of the proletariat to constitute itself as a class, as a party, is fundamental for this; the convergence between the material processes of the class struggle and the communist historical program that comes from those same struggles is essential. That is why the questions of theoretical and programmatic clarification are so important today. Our struggle does not stand alone in the barricades of the present, but also in the lessons that can be drawn from the barricades of the past.

The road is still long and yet there can be no turning back. We have to live the passion of the struggle but also the struggle for theoretical and programmatic clarity.

Many times, when we debate in “radical” spaces and refer to the need for revolution, we feel like aliens who would have landed from Mars. What! Revolution? Worldwide? Vade retro: that’s totalitarian, reactionary. What do you want? For it is neither a pious desire nor a fact of will. Revolts and revolutions will be a current data of our historical time, more and more synchronous. It is not a question of wanting them to happen, since they do so spontaneously: it is a question of directing them [orientating them] in the perspective of the abolition of classes, of the State and of commodity.

That is why we dedicate these notes to all those who had thrown the revolution into the dustbin of history, to all those who reduced the proletariat to a manipulated and manipulable mass at will, who subjected the immediate needs of the proletariat, of humanity, to the games of the movements of capital. Let’s never forget the strength and power of our class.

Barbaria Group – October 2019

Sources in Spanish: https://panfletossubversivos.blogspot.com/2019/10/este-ultimo-ano-vemos-sucederse.html
https://materialesxlaemancipacion.espivblogs.net/2019/10/23/texto-sobre-la-actualidad-de-nuestra-lucha/
https://proletariosrevolucionarios.blogspot.com/2019/10/balance-y-perspectiva-de-las-luchas.html
https://valladolorinternacionalista.blogspot.com/2019/11/grupo-barbaria-sobre-la-actualidad-de.html

English translation: Los Amigos de la Guerra de Clases