TRCI Statement

May 1st: Let's show the power of the working class around the world

In our day all over the world, we workers must raise our voice against imperialist decay and show the power of the working class.

The Pandemic and Imperialist Decline

This May Day finds us workers fighting a virus and a historical parasite, which is capitalism. Coronavirus pandemic laid bare the capitalist system and its forms of domination. It shows the consequences of the advance of capitalism on nature in an anarchic way. The pandemic sharpens and accelerates the trends of 2008 crisis, leading for sure to a world recession. But it’s important to understand that, although it is a continuity of the crisis of the last decade, this continuity is not necessarily linear; there can be quality leaps in the general state of imperialist capitalism, which consequences will be seen in the medium and long term.

The crisis accelerated by the coronavirus further accentuated the decomposition of the institutions created in the post-war period, a great example being the WHO and its action, the breakdown of inter-state balances, with the EU entering a chaotic situation and an exacerbation of competition between the USA and China as the most important. In this scenario, the possibility of a breakdown of class balances in nation states is not discarded, opening up more acute processes of class struggle.

What is particular in this crisis is the deliberate intervention of States in the sphere of production, in the relationship between capital and labour. That is, on the laws of capital, not to violate them, but to partially deny them.

The reply of main imperialist powers to the crisis is greater statism, i.e., an attempt of a directed economy, intervention with a festival of subsidies to capital, nationalizations of companies in crisis such as flag airlines and taxes on wealth, or aggressive fiscal policies. For workers, this is nothing but an attack on all lines, with mass layoffs, suspensions, wage cuts, and the removal of conquests, among others.

State centralisation can only be reactionary. Quarantine as state policy is to save capital. We could say that quarantine is a preventive policy to protect big capitalists and their class, disorganizing our class with the complicity of union bureaucracy, to preserve their decomposing States, strengthening the military-bureaucratic apparatus to discipline masses. On the other hand, if we were the ones to paralyze everything, we would not only be facing the virus, but we would be organized to face the attacks. The methods of the working class, such as the cessation of activities and strikes to go on general strike, are measures that allow us to preserve ourselves in an organized way, through unions, against the centralized attack of bourgeois and the strong destructive tendencies of capitalist economy in crisis. That’s why we cannot be in favour of the quarantine imposed by the State, since it’s not a "sanitary" measure, but an imperialist line of protecting the branches of production by lowering the value of labour force.

This distortion introduced by State intervention in the sphere of production opens up a host of political crises for the various bourgeois fractions and a different relation with workers, since it acts at the very basis of social relations of production. The importance of labour force in the creation of value and the dynamics of capitalism and its relationship with this labour force become very evident. And in face of the capitalists' attack we must counteract the attack on their capital. The workers, faced with this level of crisis, must reinforce the idea of expropriating the expropriators.

We must combat the fiction of a perished bureaucratic-military apparatus, which has control over what happens on its territory. Only the working class can lead internationally coordinated measures. We put forward workers' control of the main branches of economy, in face of the disorganization of economy, and we stand for the destruction of bourgeois State in a revolutionary way, since it’s impossible for a bourgeois State to respond to our demands.

We can say that we are witnessing a reactionary general rehearsal of capitalist system, amid a historical process of decomposition. It's a great rehearsal of class conciliation of chauvinism. Faced with an anarchic leadership such that of capitalist system, which depends on its armed general staffs to guarantee capital’s reproduction, we struggle for a conscious collective leadership, which prepares the stages of the dictatorship of the proletariat, since the current system generates the material conditions and social forms for the economic reconstruction of society.

Only trusting our own strength

Cynically, the scribes of capitalism try to show Marxism is a mistaken theory, fearing that the undeniable crisis in which the system finds itself will spread the idea of social revolution in the face of the irrefutable demonstration of what the anarchy of capital produces. The attack on Marxism amid a crisis is the desperation of a bourgeois class in decomposition in the face of the more acute scenarios of class struggle to come.

We, the workers, can organize the tasks to face the consequences of the pandemic, stop the attacks and disorganize the bourgeoisie in its base, production. We will do it by imposing workers' control on the most important industries of economy, the sliding scales of working hours and wages, the expropriation of banks, the opening of the ledgers of big companies, are some transitional programmatic points that can show to the whole of the masses the domination of the workers in the administration of things. To intervene independently and with our methods in this crisis is the posed task. There are many examples in the world on how to face this crisis accelerated by the coronavirus. Sectors of workers went on strike against the attacks. Perhaps the most important case is the general strike in Italy, where workers have performed strikes against the government's quarantine decree. In the U.S., the main imperialist power, workers are also striking at their workplaces. The semi-insurrectional struggles of the masses in Latin America, such as in Chile or Ecuador, where they have not succeeded in imposing decisive defeats on the working class and youth, predict the possibility of an irruption of the continent's proletariat to defeat the imperialist plans of hunger and misery. In Argentina, the struggles of the workers of Penta meat packing plant, BedTime and the health system are leading the way.

We, the workers, must intervene in this crisis independently, preparing the conditions for the emergence of a revolutionary vanguard to constitute itself in Party as a revolutionary leadership in the need to rebuild the Fourth International.

Cor Chile - LOI Brasil - Cor Argentina