International solidarity greetings to AWL conference 2009

Each year, the AWL conference receives a variety of solidarity greetings from other socialist organisations around the world. We publish a selection here.

From Solidarity, a revolutionary socialist group in the USA.

Greetings to Alliance for Workers Liberty Conference

Dear comrades of AWL:

The Political Committee of the U.S. socialist-feminist organization SOLIDARITY sends greetings and best wishes for a successful AWL conference. On this very weekend, it is anticipated that the once-giant General Motors will join Chrysler in what U.S. law calls “Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” In recent years, this process has increasingly become the vehicle for imposing savage cuts on wages, conditions, benefits and pensions that workers and their unions fought for decades to achieve – cuts even deeper than the pliant trade union bureaucracies have already given up.

In reality, it’s capitalism that has gone bankrupt with appalling consequences for all of us in the absence of a powerful socialist working class movement. The Obama administration, enjoying a “honeymoon” both from the popular base that elected it and the corporate-financial-media elites who promoted it, are managing the restructuring of the auto industry and the banks through massive public subsidies.

The socialist alternative would mean nationalizing these assets under democratic workers’ control, to begin the construction of a new economy based on sustainable production for human need. We are under no illusions about the gap between the kind of movement that would be needed to fight for this solution and the existing state of working class consciousness and organization. Nonetheless, the desperate situation facing a growing sector of working people opens up all kinds of possibilities, both positive and negative – including protectionism and racism if progressive solutions are not placed on the agenda.

The Obama administration also had to choose whether to break from the Bush international agenda, or to inherit it. In reinstating the detestable military tribunals at Guantanamo and the Bush regime’s doctrine of indefinite detention of “terror suspects” without trial; in escalating imperialism’s hopeless war in Afghanistan which has spread to Pakistan; in repeating Bush’s threats against Iran and his blatant contempt for Palestinian democracy and the Palestinian people’s right to live free of Israeli Occupation –- the Obama administration has made clear its choice to maintain the agenda of U.S. global domination. This is not surprising, but it means that the reactionary and murderous consequences of this imperial agenda will continue.

The barbarism of imperialism produces the counter-barbarism of al-Qaeda and the brutal, misogynist politics of the Taliban. Obviously, in no way do these forces represent a decent future for Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else. The struggle against imperialist Occupation is absolutely essential for opening up possibilities for progressive social struggle, including the objectives of land reform and women’s liberation.

Solidarity looks with hope to the development of new forces of resistance and possible left unity within our country as well as the global anti-capitalist left – an important force whose growth was profoundly set back by 9/11 and the subsequent horrors. Within this broad potential reconstruction of the left and the social movements, we believe that the politics of socialism from below and working class self-emancipation, the heart of classical revolutionary Marxism, will be of critical importance.

From Dalej! (Forward!) magazine, Poland, a publication produced by third-camp socialists within the Revolutionary Left Current, the Polish section of the Fourth International

Dear comrades

On behalf of the Third Camp socialists in Poland we would like to send warm best greetings to the national conference of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. We hope that our cooperation will successfully develop further!

Socialist regards,

August Grabski,
for Dalej! (Forward!) magazine

From the International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran.

To: The Comrades of Workers' Liberty

We write to express our solidarity with your activists and members. [The] International Working Class movement is in a sensitive position at the moment. [The] Capitalist system is intensifying its attacks on working class' rights, in order to preserve the corrupt system. The way to counteract these attacks is for the working class all over the world to stand united.

In this climate of capitalism, battling for survival on all fronts, socialism is the only alternative. In order to prevent the spread of nationalism, fascism and religious fundamentalism amongst workers, the duty of all socialists is further emphasised.

We wish you all the success with the conference.

Long live the international solidarity of working class!

International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran (Branch in England)

From L'Etincelle, a French Trotskyist group formerly within Lutte Ouvrière (Workers' Fight) and now within the New Anti-Capitalist Party

Hello comrades,

Thank you for your invitation at your annual conference. We won't be there for one reason - because we will be at the annual festival of Lutte Ouvrière.

The fraction L'Etincelle will not attend your annual conference as an observer, but we hope you will have good discussions. For my part I would have appreciated to be in London and meet your comrades this week end.

Yours in solidarity,

Wanda,
for L'Etincelle

From "Le Militant", France

Message from the editorial board of MILITANT (France) to the AWL annual conference - 30-31 May 2009

Dear comrades,

Following the habits of the former Liaisons’ editorial board, the editorial board of Militant (France) sends its best wishes to the annual conference of the AWL.

We expect that your deliberations will help you to face the new situation opened by the world economic crisis which will see a sharpening in the class struggles, under the pressure of poverty, redundancies and all the political troubles set by the crisis.

In a discussion inside an international network of various socialist activists who is on the way to crystallize in something more operative, Militant made the following contribution about the present situation in France :

FRANCE

Of all the old imperialist countries, it is perhaps France which seems to be closest to a revolutionary crisis. But one should beware of the theory that France is a “special case", bandied about by so many European journalists and French politicians. They would have you believe that France is the last European country where strikes are still frequent, and even boast in a nationalist manner about France's combative, republican spirit. The current crisis has put an end to any idea of a French 'special case' of class struggle. After all, it's not France but Greece where mass demonstrations turned into riots, and it wasn't France but Iceland where a government was recently overthrown after mass protests on the streets.

Before all of this, France had seen several strike waves, in 1995, 2003 and 2006, which staved off government attacks on earlier social gains, and slightly and temporarily softened the blow of the crisis for the working class. However, since the onset of mass unemployment, it is new global political and economic conditions which are determining the class struggle in France.

The particular character of France, especially in comparison with Britain or the USA, is the way the class struggle takes on a political aspect, and the importance of constitutional questions concerning the state itself. Some pages from Marx's The Class Struggles in France (1849) on bonapartism pack their punches with renewed impact today with the regime of the Fifth Republic – the product of a coup in 1958 – and in particular with Sarkozy. The fact that the power of capital is concentrated in the person of what is effectively a monarch (a characteristic which it shares with the USA, but which differs from it in its much weaker parliamentary and judicial powers and its centralisation of the state apparatus) is at the same time a trap for the working class following every presidential election, and a factor which serves to concentrate the class struggle against the summit of power between elections – especially at the present time.

Conditions are such that if the parties emerging from the movement of the workers, or even any single one of them, were to demand a united struggle to bring down Sarkozy, force immediate elections, and form a democratic government representing the workers, this would open such opportunities for the working class that their struggles would swiftly be brought to a successful conclusion. But the fact is that none of the parties has put forward such a policy: not the traditional parties the Socialist Party, the Left Party (Parti de Gauche) which emerged from it, Communist Party nor the three historic Trotskyist tendencies – the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA – successor to the former LCR), the Independent Workers’ Party (POI successor of the former PT), Workers’ Struggle (LO - Lutte Ouvriere). It is this very question of power that is taboo to all of them, even though the strikers, demonstrators, the youth and many activists pose it every day. At the same time, the TU leaders organise great days of struggle at widely spaced intervals, resisting pressure to come together against the government, and collaborate with Sarkozy’s and the bosses’ plans for lay-offs and attacks on welfare and social services

But there is still a chance right now for revolutionaries to build an organisation both with rank-and-file workers and with the youth, acting together with activists from the left parties. Such an organisation could gradually unite them in this common goal, which is nothing other than a concrete perspective of socialist revolution in the form of preparation for a victorious confrontation with Sarkozy.

In this context two particular points should be emphasised:

French Imperialism is on the retreat and in difficulty, surviving by performing a balancing act between Germany on the one hand and the EU and the UK on the other. But its real presence, especially in Africa, remains extremely risky and potentially murderous, as shown in 1994 by the genocide in Rwanda which it provoked. Every defeat for French Imperialism in these countries, as well as in the Antilles or the popular struggle of the Guadeloupian people – each of them linked to the class struggle in France – brings us back to the question of independence for these last of the French colonies, something which will always benefit the working class. No anti-American demagogy on the part of the government should hold back revolutionaries in France from campaigning for such objectives.

Another point: another aspect of the idea of France as a 'special case' has for a long time been the presence of a mass fascist party with considerable electoral support: the 'Front National'. Its present decline can be explained on the one hand by the absolute hostility to the FN on the part of the majority of the youth and of large sections (but not all) of the working class, and, on the other, by the absorption of the majority of its electorate and political apparatus in Sarkozy's efforts to renew the Fifth Republic through enhanced authoritarianism. But the ruling class and the French state cannot manage without provocations and aggressive actions of a pre-fascist nature, which could lead to real fascist movements. The propaganda of the old FN was anti-Arab, but there are now attempts to bring fascists together around other issues, notably anti-Semitism, hoping thereby to attract disorientated sections of the youth of Arab or African descent (the Dieudonné-Soral-Gouasmi list for the EU elections). These people have already understood the new era which the crisis has brought. Revolutionaries in France are faced with the task of pointing out this danger and explaining that whichever way it is dressed up, there is only one way to nip it in the bud: preparation for a victorious confrontation with Sarkozy: the prospect of revolution.

* * *

MILITANT is a small grouping compared to the big 3 far-left historic groups but the confidence gained by experience in the mass movement, in the left parties, in Trotskyism during three decades – and more for some of our oldest members – is daily confronted with our orientation towards organising the most exploited and unorganised layers of workers in relation with the state of the traditional organisations of the labour movement (parties and unions). On this way, we are going ahead patiently but firmly.

Long live the international solidarity of workers!

MILITANT