2022 New Year declaration of the Communist Youth of Bouches-du-Rhônes

Dear Friends, Dear Comrades,

The Communist Youth of Bouches-du-Rhônes wishes you a happy new year 2022.

We are happy to welcome you here this year, despite the current sanitary conditions, in a place open to members and friends of the communist youth, open also to every worker and young people that want to organize their anger and struggle against capitalist power, or simply break isolation.

But we are also in a closed place: closed from police control, closed from growing reaction, closed from “every man for himself” mentality permanently broadcasted by propagandists serving the capital.

In a context of intense offensive by the capitalists against the working class over the whole world, to gather today is an important step to save our militant spirit and our class stance, that constitute together the only political compass we can rely on to keep on the struggle.

At the time when new pics are reached in Covid-19 epidemic, capitalism has once again demonstrated that it is uncapable to fulfill even the most basic social needs. Rather than doing everything possible to safeguard collective health, the bourgeoisie looked after every possible way to benefit from the sanitary crisis to generate even more profits.

Everywhere in the world, billions add up on the peoples back, whereas more than 5 million people already died because of the epidemic. The more fragile people in our society, rather than being protected, are often left on their own devices while the capitalists use the time to challenge our rights, our jobs, our wages.

They say we are on the same ship so that their lies can pass, but the people, the workers are the one supporting the heaviest burden! It’s the predatory reality of the capitalist system that is unfolded, which demonstrates once more that there cannot exist a “capitalism with a human face” and that the only future for the peoples lies in the resolute struggle for the definitive destruction of this system.

Their ”national union” which parodies the last century’s military speeches, recreates a situations where workers endures the dangers on the frontlines for the benefit of the imperialists profits.  How to forget indeed about medical beds that kept being suppressed through 2020 and 2021, about the private laboratories and patent system stranglehold over vaccines that prevent them to be distributed on an open and free basis over the world?

The responsibility of the imperialist is huge in the current crisis and must be measured at the time when the health system is potentially on the verge of collapse. The division that is being orchestrated within the people will not pass, because we will remember that the first responsible are the bourgeois that kept the machine running, that send people working without any protection regardless of their health, that it is their government which hid that it knew about the epidemy since January 2020, to the sanitary gestion organized only to preserve profits and restrain social anger.

This politic lead to the expected results: the bourgeois class multiplied profits thanks to the epidemy and took advantage of this exceptional situation to pass it’s antisocial projects, to restructure work organization, to throw hundreds of workers on unemployment, to bring more than 10 millions of workers under poverty line just in France, and so forth…

All the absurdity that is being manufactured lately mustn’t mask the seriousness of the situation, which is only getting worse. Because to the sanitary crises that is not ready to stop yet, we must add the economic and political crisis of the world capitalist system, which is sinking down even more every week. Restructuration in big companies, raw material crisis, loans massively accorded to little companies repayment now approach their due dates, the so called “workforce shortage” caused by economic disorganization linked to the economic crisis and low wages, … all of this can only act as a time bomb!

The only real solution the imperialists point toward is a generalized conflict between imperialists powers such as the US, China, Russia and of course France, Germany and the rest of EU and NATO.

EU and NATO keep on with their warmongering maneuvers in eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine. US and their Asian allies keep on pressuring China, giving way to an escalation that is more and more dangerous for the peoples.

But such a solution will only aggravate contradictions between imperialists countries, as well as contradictions inside every of these countries.

In that atmosphere of rearmament and war preparation, facilitated by arbitrary and exceptional measures and by the shock provoked by the ongoing crisis, our only marker is the class criterion.

Whatever the justification made up by the imperialists, their media and their politicians, military conflicts will be the prolongation of social and economic conflicts: both a way to shuffle cards between the biggest bourgeois of the planet and a tool to intensify even more the offensive against rights of the working class on the interior scale.

Let’s not be fools: imperialists will try every way they can to enroll us in their war, to have us choose one side or the other, whether it is painted “blue” or “red” !

The deepness of the ongoing crisis doesn’t authorize stillness: if we don’t find the way of a general counteroffensive, an unprecedented phase of reaction can unfold!

To us, the youth, capitalism offers only war, misery, exploitation, and manifold reaction as a future. This, we do not accept, and we propose every young people to take their destiny in their hands and to struggle side by side with the rest of the workers for the only viable alternative, socialism-communism.

Already in January, struggles have undergone: in Guadeloupe where workers with their union the UGTG are struggling against high costs of living. In India where a historical victory has been won by hundreds of millions of workers and peasants struggling for more than a year with the decisive support from Indian Communist Party (Marxist) and class-oriented trade unions. In Kazakhstan where workers of the oil sector have opened way for a large popular offensive, unfortunately bloody repressed by the bourgeoisie with the benediction of the imperialists.

In France too, our class has been on the offensive.

Workers of the health, medico-social and social action sectors went on a strike called by CGT. They protested destruction of public health system, sneaky privatization they are subjected to with as a result: low wages, poor working conditions, bad service to users which are transformed into customers.

Strikes are being organized in the education sector, against not only the absurd and inefficient “sanitary protocols” of the government, but on the bottom line against the chronic lack of means in a public service abandoned and sabotaged to accelerate privatization.

In the energy sector, workers went on strike on the 25 to defend their wages, their jobs, their working conditions but also the public service that also being shred to pieces.

But also, in a lot of companies such as Eaton, Air Liquide, SAM, groupe Guerbet, of course at Gardanne power plant and in a lot of others, strikes are organized against various plans aimed at closing, restructuring, laying off, worsening working conditions, and so forth…

What we can say is that anger is big within our class, but also we can reaffirm the intrinsically reactionary characteristic of capitalism.

It is absolutely impossible to humanize the capitalist system, which is based on the exploitation of labor, which suppose the existence of unemployment and misery, which develop wars, creates millions of refugees, which destroys the planet and plunge us toward incessant crises and always more reaction.

30 years after the capitalist counter revolution in USSR, provoked both by imperialist maneuvers and by opportunist betrayals from within the communist movement, the “end of history” we were promised did not happen. On the contrary, capitalism, reigning supreme over the world lead to incessant wars, multiple economic, humanitarian, military, sanitary crisis, etc. The only promise we can trust from them is that there will be new, even more devastating crises if we don’t stop them.

We still live in the historical period that is the aftermath of the destruction of the USSR, which struck a huge blow at the communist ideal of millions of workers through the whole world. For the one that preceded us, this ideal was often lost which brang its share of disillusion and renouncement. For us the generation that knew only capitalism, it is often the absence of ideal and the cynism that made our education. But this as well, we refuse it, because the historical necessity will not fail to bring workers to victory again.

Despite a globally negative correlation of forces, the solution cannot be to look after which accumulation of little measure will better or solution, make it less bad, or even just slow it’s degradation. On the contrary, that is because the crisis reveals capitalism in all it’s atrocity that it is more than ever the time to affirm that this system is historically obsolete, doomed to disappear in the flow of it’s own contradictions, that the only alternative is the socialist society, the road to communism, the expropriation of the exploiters, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So, although this time might seem like especially worrying, it is possible to see how this ongoing manifold crisis contain it’s share of revolutionary possibilities. The more than 100 years of experience of the international communist movement is here to show us that it is precisely in that kind of situation that the worse just as the better can happen. The people will make it’s own choices and it’s own experiences, but the role played by militants and especially by organized communists mustn’t be forgotten.

That is armed with this perspective, this ideal that we will be able to rebuild unity in the struggle, class consciousness, better correlation of forces and collective organization.

Because if we keep on the struggle today, despite worsening conditions, that is because we believe in our future and in victory. That is the task that communists have always fulfilled, that is the one we assign ourselves at the time being.

In a country where the successive opportunist turns have ravaged the communist movement, the question of rebuilding is on every lips. Without forgetting that it is the working class itself that will be the driving force of this rebuilding, our organized very much hope to play a part in it.

That is why the Communist Youth of Bouches-du-Rhône will keep on it’s action to go in contact with the youth, to diffuse within it the spirit of struggle and organization, of alliance with the rest of the working class and it’s organizations and more generally to contribute to offer a new generation of communist militants to the French and international working class movement.

Comrades,

All the crises show the violence of the capitalist system, which is the violence of a system at the agony.

They show that if our generation want’s a future, it must destroy forever this system!

Let’s have confidence in the future, for hope lies in the struggles of the people.

Revolution and socialism shall prevail!

Happy 2022 new year to all.