PARIS, October 2 — Today nearly 3,000,000 people across France turned out for union-sponsored demonstrations against the government’s retirement “reform,” the third giant protest in a month. With opinion polls showing 70% of the population opposed to raising the retirement age, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s prediction that the movement “would run out of steam” has been proven wrong.

The government wants to increase the minimum age for retirement on a partial pension from 60 to 62, and the age for retirement on a full pension from 65 to 67. This attack on pensions is part of a general Europe-wide bosses’ assault on past social welfare gains in order to maintain and increase profits, forcing the workers to pay for the bosses’ general financial crisis.

Rank-and-file militancy is on the rise here. Hollow phrases from the government and unions negotiating give-backs are a far cry from what workers want.  Signs and banners call for winning back what was lost in 2003: retirement after 37½ years of paying into a retirement fund, whatever a worker’s age.

Broad Strike Spreading in Marseilles; Port Workers Block Oil Shipments

Since October 1, striking dock workers have blocked the port of Marseilles, strangling oil supplies, with 40 ships, mostly crude oil tankers, sitting in the harbor, unable to move. The port feeds all the oil refineries in eastern France and if the strike continues it will affect the entire country.

Now, walkouts are occurring or planned involving chemical refineries, bus lines, school cafeterias and nurseries. Petrochemical workers were slated to strike before October 12, which could block oil refineries.

Workers in Paris subways, on buses and suburban trains have filed a pre-strike notification for an unlimited strike beginning October 12. Although the union leaders have refused to call unlimited strikes. Rank-and-file workers are pressing for longer walkouts, beginning on a 24-hour strike day.

Also in Marseilles, Monoprix department store workers have been striking for higher wages since September 17. Christine, a young single mother fighting her first strike, declared: “We had to go on strike because we’re sick and tired of being stepped on. Demanding a 50-euro-a-month pay hike was really the minimum!”

Workers in the shipyard town of Saint-Nazaire stoned police during the September 23 demonstration.

Rank-and-file workers’ militancy and organization will win or lose this pension struggle. It began with strikes and protests on March 23, May Day, May 27 and June 24, and resumed after the summer holidays. Another day of strikes and demonstrations is scheduled for October 12.

Today’s protests were broader, with more families with small children, and more private-sector workers who feel vulnerable to retaliation from the boss if they strike. The atmosphere was friendly and laid-back, the kind of protest that suited the leaders of the right-wing unions.

Racist, Anti-Worker ‘Reform’

The retirement “reform” is an anti-working class measure. A business executive who retires today gets an average pension of almost 3,000 euros ($3,750) a month and can expect to live for another 23 years. A factory worker gets an average pension of slightly over half that and can expect to live only another 17 years. Do the math: overall, executives get triple the average worker’s pension from the retirement system. Raising the minimum retirement age two years will worsen this inequality.

The retirement reform is also racist. Workers subjected to the most exhausting jobs — in the construction, retail and hotel-restaurant trades (Observatoire des inégalités, 9/6/10) — are precisely the occupations where black and Arab workers are concentrated. Raising the retirement age means more years of the wear and tear of these jobs for these workers.

The ruling UMP party has been hinting that the calendar for increasing the minimum age for a full retirement pension from 65 to 67 might be pushed back, and that something might be done to raise the pensions of women who stop work to raise children. These crumbs will supposedly allow CGT and CFDT union leaders to cry “victory” and end the movement.

The Socialist Party (PS) is also joining the protest demonstrations. The PS’s goal is to win workers’ votes in the 2012 presidential elections. But no worker should be fooled: on January 17, PS first secretary Martine Aubry declared: “We’ll move to [a minimum retirement age of] 61 or 62” and promised to help the Sarkozy government achieve that goal.

On October 1, Ségolène Royal, the PS’s 2007 presidential candidate, proposed a referendum to “solve” the retirement issue instead of forcing the government to annul the law, threatening a loss via referendum what might be won with strikes and demonstrations.

In late August, President Sarkozy’s special negotiator, Raymond Soubie, told the union misleaders he was “worried about an uncontrollable degeneration of the labor climate that would go far beyond the retirement issue.” On September 23, Sarkozy noted with satisfaction that “the [main] unions have excluded the idea of a general strike or a strike that lasts more than 24 hours. That’s the main thing.” Now, according to the publication “Le Canard enchaîné” (9/29), “the big bosses of the union confederations” are worried about a possible “increase in the number of local hard-fought strikes.”

Organizing the kind of unified militancy displayed in Marseilles and in the mass demonstrations, workers here could move to dump the union misleaders and organize a general strike. This could lead beyond defeating the government attack on pensions. It could be a step toward developing the communist leadership needed to win the war against capitalist exploitation through communist revolution. J

Mexico: Seeds of Emerging Struggle Fertile Ground for Revolution

PLP must go where the workers are, get our newspaper around and motivate the class struggle. Reforms are not the workers´ way to victory but can be used as a way of learning to fight, since what we really need is to destroy this murderous system. The workers of the Mexican electricity company have been on strike since March, and they need solidarity as much from the outside as the inside. We need to make our presence known there. We will also motivate the workers from Volkswagen with our solidarity.

Our class ties will grow as well as our feelings of brotherhood. We will grow and learn from the class struggle there. That´s what we communists do. We learn a lot from strikes such as the one from Stella d’ Oro in New York, and they elevate our level, encourage our revolutionary spirit and our commitment to fight until we accomplish our objective. We contribute collectively and win new comrades to communism in the struggle, and we expand the distribution of our newspaper.

While we learn and teach, we prepare for the destruction of the capitalist system and building a new society in the service of workers, where everyone will have what they need and where collectivism, not individualism, will determine our actions.         

There are 10 billionaires in Mexico, includng Carlos Slim, the second biggest billionaire in the world. Meanwhile, 70% of the population is poor, the tenth part of the poorest population earns 1.1% in income, 53% are malnourished, 24% are extremely poor and 18% of indigenous children don´t attend school. The capitalist system is unable to meet the most basic needs of workers, but if we build the PLP, we can make our own communist history which will solve these problems.  

Mexico is the second largest oil provider for the United States, with oil reserves of 47 trillion barrels which cost about $102 trillion. Oil represents about 40% of Mexico’s internal production, with 4 million barrels a day. Mexico is the world´s 5th largest oil producer; 75% of this oil ends up in the United States. The petrochemical industry provides Mexico with a profit of more than $45 million, but 140,000 of its workers get dirt-poor wages as a result of the deals made by the union to serve the greed of the oil bosses.

Places such as Chiapas and Tabasco are towns in misery, with killings and drug trafficking everyday happenings, and the workers don’t understand where the profit they create as part of the industry goes to the bosses’ pockets. The supposed achievement of the union, putting five of its representatives on the board of directors of the company, hasn´t benefited the workers. It has helped the oil companies to exploit and oppress the working class even more.

There are more than 5,000 assembly plants along the border of the United States, the second most important area in the economy, employing about two million workers. Because of the NAFTA treaty, the bosses can get the most work out of them and maintain their profit even in a crisis. The NAFTA agreement has generated more poverty and allowed international companies to exploit Mexican workers even more, as the profits of these companies show earnings of thousands of dollars even in the time of crisis.  

Drug-trafficking generates about $40 billion dollars annually and is the third generator of profits in Mexico according to Seminario. The bourgeoisie profits, even if they hypocritically say they are fighting drugs. They need the violence, killings and kidnappings to intimidate the workers and keep them passive.

The supposed fight against drug-trafficking also works as a screen to disappear and kill union leaders, human rights activists, reporters and politicians that step out of line. Curfews have been imposed like those that were used in dictatorships like Pinochet’s Chile. The police raid homes for supposed drug traffickers, when they really know their names and where they are hiding. There are cases such as the 72 immigrants to the United States who were killed in August and found after some of the workers that escaped filed a report. They still don’t want to say in whose house the others were killed and are scared to tell the truth, because they know the the power of the owner. In reality the ruling class is knee-deep in this, and that is why the investigators have never found an answer.          

Neither the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), nor the PAN (National Action Party), PDR (Party of the Democratic Revolution) can solve the problems of the workers, because they all represent the billionaires and drug traffickers. All the things they represent are products of the capitalist system: poverty, exploitation, oppression and corruption.  

The union leaders aren´t happy because the workers haven´t been passive. According to the informative bulletin from IMMEX this year, there have been 918 strikes and demonstrations approved, but only five have been carried out. Volkswagen preferred to set up in Guanajuato and not Puebla, because the average wage in Puebla is higher. Also, in Puebla there is an old tradition of struggle, and the bosses don´t want to deal with it.

 But now the Volkswagen workers approved a strike for Wednesday the 29th, mainly fighting for a wage increase. We will be with the workers, just as we were with them in the teachers’ strike in Oaxaca and the strike from UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and will bring our communist ideas, because wage movements alone do not fix the lives of workers.  

The history of the working class is full of triumphs against the bosses. These are the real stories that capitalists fear and these are the struggles that today continue to inspire workers around the world. The strike of thousands of French workers against their bosses for their pensions, the demonstration of thousands in India against unemployment and for their pensions; these tell the capitalists that we have potential.

A spark lights a flame, but we need to improve the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. We can´t look only at the immediate demands, because we limit our real possibilities.  However, the struggles that are happening in the world help us learn that the working class can become class conscious and break away from these imaginary limits, erasing all capitalists with an international communist revolution. J