During recent months the rising wave of struggles by workers and all the oppressed of capitalist Europe has reached new heights.
In Italy the metalworkers have organized an unprecedented mass mobilization to win new contracts, culminating in a demonstration in Rome of 250,000 workers and the partial occupation of the Fiat factories in Turin.
In Great Britain, after several years of strikes and mounting resistance to reactionary legislation, the trade-union bureaucracy was forced, under the pressure of the growing militancy of the workers, to call for a twenty-four-hour general strike on May 1.
In Spain, the workers of Barcelona have just downed tools by the tens of thousands to protest the police murder of a construction worker.
In France, the revolt of the low-paid, semiskilled workers at Renault, coming after many occupations of smaller factories, coincides with the occupation of the big Peugeot factory.
Denmark and the Netherlands have just experienced their greatest strike waves since the second world war. In Belgium, a whole series of strikes have gone on, one after the other, since the autumn of 1972. Even West Germany, the most prosperous and stable country in capitalist Europe, has experienced several wildcat and official strikes and growing agitation in the factories and the unions.
This rising wave of militancy of the European working class is the toiling masses' answer to the burdens that the growing contradictions of capitalism impose on the wage earners.
Inflation; massive lay-offs; unemployment on a scale unknown since the second world war; speed-up; increasingly fatiguing work; intensified exploitation; attempts at integrating the unions into the bourgeois state apparatus; attacks against the right to strike and the right to form picket lines, against basic democratic rights of the labor movement; growing repression by the state apparatus, sometimes supported by armed gangs of company goons of an increasingly clear-cut fascist character; superexploitation of immigrant workers, national and racial minorities, youth, and working women; mounting degradation of the environment and of the quality of life—these are some of the evils against which growing numbers of European workers are struggling.
Capitalism in Decline
All these evils are tied to the growing crisis of declining capitalism as a system, nationally and internationally, a crisis that expresses itself, among other ways, in the collapse of the world monetary system, the increase in interimperialist competition, the slowdown in economic growth, and the generalized crisis of capitalist relations of production as a whole. This crisis of the capitalist system is intertwined with a general crisis of all bourgeois social relations.
Parallel to the workers' revolt against capitalist exploitation there has developed an ever deepening youth revolt against the alienating and oppressive character of the educational system and against the bourgeois army, as well as a revolt of women against the burdens that bourgeois legislation and patriarchal class society impose on them.
The recent mass movements in Belgium, Denmark, and above all in France, in which hundreds of thousands of high-schoolers and other youth took part, show that bourgeois society is today being rejected by massive numbers of youth.
The militancy and anticapitalist thrust of these mass movements prove that the seeds of May '68, far from having been squelched by the bourgeoisie, are flowering more fully than ever among the new generation of youth, on a higher level of consciousness and especially of organization. In this regard, the mass movement of French high-schoolers, university students, and apprentices has an exemplary character whose importance goes way beyond the French youth and the French borders.
The young high-schoolers, students, and apprentices have elected democratic strike committees throughout the country. Each strike committee sends delegates to local, regional, and national coordinating bodies. General assemblies discuss the decisions of these delegations and recall them whenever they disagree with their decisions. Within these general assemblies, workers democracy is respected to the fullest extent. All political currents are free to defend their respective viewpoints and proposals. And the majority decisions are generally respected and carried out by minorities.
Combining Spontaneity and Organization
This form of organization, missing in May '68, marks an important step forward. It has succeeded in combining spontaneity and organization, freedom of discussion and unity in action. It offers a living foretaste of how the working class and the toiling masses will organize their general struggles to come, how they will organize their revolutionary power and their new state after they have overthrown capitalism, destroyed the capitalist state apparatus, and founded a democratic system of workers councils. It will not fail to deeply influence the forms in which the workers will organize their struggles from now on. Already a growing number of democratic strike committees, elected by general assemblies of strikers, are springing up during the current wave of workers struggles going on in most European countries.
Because the European working class is confronted by a combined onslaught of both the employers and the bourgeois state apparatus, it needs a centralized political thrust in order to overcome the factory, local, or regional fragmentation of struggles. Whatever the immediate forms that express this need in the various countries during the current strike wave, in the final analysis, the key question posed is the conquest of power by the working class. This conquest of power requires a new form of democracy, radically different from and more advanced than bourgeois parliamentary democracy: the democracy of workers councils, which will not reduce but will increase all democratic rights, including the right to form opposition parties, to publish opposition journals, to have access to radio and television, and all the other democratic rights that the toiling masses aspire to enjoy fully.
Against the Europe of the Trusts
Capital's current antilabor offensive shows that the growing structural crisis of capitalism is not limited by national borders. Capital's offensive is carried out by the international capitalist organizations, the so-called multinational corporations, and is backed up by organs like NATO, international financial institutions, and so on. Confronting a capitalist system organized more and more on an international scale, a workers movement organized solely on a national basis becomes weaker and weaker and runs the risk of being outmaneuvered.
Multinational corporations, whether controlled by U.S., European, Japanese, or "national" capital, can open and close factories in many countries at will, can fire thousands of workers, can pressure governments and trade-union bureaucracies to level off wages and working conditions at the lowest point in any country concerned. Reforms enacted by national parliaments, always at best by-products of militant working-class struggles, become less and less feasible in the face of the operations of these giant trusts. There is only one effective answer for the workers: international solidarity and international unity in action.
Let us build a tight network of shop stewards, factory delegates, and factory committees in all plants controlled by the same multinational corporation. Let the committees and delegates consult and inform one another on every change in labor organization, every speed-up, all layoffs, so that they can work out a common international response in each case!
Let us work toward a solid unity in action of all trade unions in Europe, regardless of political or ideological differences among their members or leaders.
Let us organize Europe-wide strikes against the Europe-wide schemes of the capitalists, like the recent simultaneous occupation of the chemical plants of the AKZO trust in the Netherlands and West Germany, which forced the corporation to retract its decision to lay off 5,500 workers in four different countries.
The Socialist United States of Europe
Let us prepare to organize a great Europe-wide Congress of Labor that would unite all unions, workers parties, and workers organizations of West Europe in order to work out a common strategy through which the power of 50 million workers can be brought to bear not only in smashing the capitalist offensive, but also in moving forward to overthrowing capitalism and building the Socialist United States of Europe.
Solidarity must not be limited to common action against a common enemy carrying the same trademark of the same corporation. It must especially protect the weak, the superexploited, the immigrant workers, the unemployed, the workers with the lowest wages, the old, the sick, and the infirm. It must express the central aim of guaranteeing a decent standard of living and basic human rights to all members of society, regardless of economic ups and downs.
It must especially come to the aid of those struggling so courageously under the most difficult conditions of brutal dictatorship and violent repression: our brothers and sisters in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, the heroic fighters of the colonial revolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and above all those of Indochina.
In struggling for these goals; for the sliding scale of wages and hours; for the thirty-five-hour week; for opening up the companies' books and ending secret banking; for imposing workers control over hiring and firing, over the setting of the cost-of-living index, over the pace of work, and over all organization of labor, the toiling masses will find that they can ensure their well-being only by seizing ownership of the factories and the banks from the capitalists, by smashing their state apparatus, by carrying out a socialist revolution.
Along this road, the construction of a revolutionary party, rooted among the masses and based on the revolutionary Marxist theory and program of the Fourth International, will be an indispensible instrument in assimilating the experiences of the mass mobilizations and actions.
Forward to Europe-wide coordination and generalization of the workers strikes and the youth struggles!
Forward to the Socialist United States of Europe!