2023-05-28 18:30:52
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This special number of International Mail presents a recent synthesis of the heterogeneous situation in which the European proletariats find themselves, even though they share a context of economic and social crisis in the midst of the Ukrainian War. We place special emphasis on the waves of struggle that have taken place in Great Britain and France in the last year. Both countries are experiencing significant worker mobilizations, while the rest of the continent maintains a climate of “social peace.” In France, the wave of strikes against the pension reform, organized by a broad union front, where the industrial proletariat and transport workers played a key role, have become widespread. In Britain the vanguard of struggles has been public workers, first railway workers and government officials, now followed by health and education personnel.
At the national level, in both countries we see that the union bureaucracies have been a real obstacle to moving towards greater coordination and self-organization among workers and leading to resoundingly victorious general strikes. Macron has managed to impose his reform for now, but he has not managed to convince 90% of the French who reject it even today, nor to completely disarm the social movement. The French president is politically isolated, and sympathy for the French workers’ struggle is spreading across Europe. At the continental level, the heterogeneity of social mobilization and the lack of true international solidarity is due to the actions of European union bureaucracies, aligned with the neoliberal apparatus of the European Union (EU), which seek to quell internal struggles and prevent unified European responses.
The various articles show how the EU’s proclaimed “European values” have become hollow, and the election of Meloni in Italy, who perfectly integrated into the European institutions, is the best expression of this. Another example that we cannot ignore are Macron’s actions against the welfare state and labor rights in France, the brutal repression of protests and the EU’s support for extreme right-wing governments and their racist immigration policies. But the half-gas policies of the Sánchez government in Spain and Costa in Portugal also show that neither the bourgeois governments nor the EU framework can provide a real answer to the growing problems of the working class. In addition, to overcome the current economic crisis, the EU plans to impose new austerity policies, which will especially affect highly indebted peripheral countries, and will mean a brutal reduction in the standard of living of workers.
The Ukrainian war has had important geostrategic implications. It has derailed the German-Russian energy pact, benefiting US energy companies and weakening Germany’s economic dominance in the EU. It has also strengthened NATO and increased US military and political influence in Europe. From the LIT we have supported the Ukrainian resistance from its beginning, placing special emphasis on the role of the workers’ resistance and international solidarity with it. Both Zelensky’s neoliberal counter-reforms and the EU and IMF loans are a threat to the present and future independence and well-being of the Ukrainian people. That is why we affirm today more than ever the need to build an independent leadership of the working class in the resistance and in the reconstruction process, which advocates a resounding victory for the Ukrainian workers in the war and a worker and socialist reconstruction that feels the material bases of true national independence.
The only way out of the war, the galloping inflation and the environmental crisis that threatens the planet is to advance in building an organization that can coordinate the struggles to lead them to question the common origin of these problems: the capitalist system. The resistance in the Ukraine to the Russian invasion is both proof of the necessity of the world socialist revolution and of its possibility.
Faced with growing social polarization and the strengthening of ultra-right movements, we must build socialist, revolutionary, and internationalist parties of the working class that defend class independence, worker democracy, and put themselves at the service of organizing struggles for them to win. and to build the necessary steps to advance towards socialism. With this objective we present this edition of International Mail, as an instrument that serves to bring together those who are willing to fight for the construction of a socialist, revolutionary and internationalist project together with us.
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