The Working Class Must Lead Fight Against Capitalist Government

Yellow Vest Protests Rock France

We print below a translation of a December 6 leaflet issued by our comrades of the Ligue trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). It was first distributed two days later in Paris to Yellow Vest protests, so called because protesters wear vests that vehicle owners are required to possess for use in the event of a breakdown.

The increase in fuel taxes imposed by the Macron government has inflamed anger that had been accumulating for a very long time. Introduced in the name of an “energy transition” [away from fossil fuels], these regressive taxes hit all working people. Their sole purpose is to restore the rate of profit of French imperialism, which is in sharp decline relative to its competitors. The struggle of the Yellow Vests against this grossly elitist measure is in the interest of the working class. The government has unleashed its machinery of repression against this movement: Hundreds have been injured and hundreds more arrested. We demand the immediate release and the dropping of all charges against all those arrested! Faced with the popularity of the Yellow Vests, which increased greatly after the crackdown, President Macron tried to defuse the anger by suspending and then canceling the new taxes. This was correctly perceived as offering mere crumbs.

Socially and politically heterogeneous, the Yellow Vests are independent of the trade unions and of working-class parties. They include workers (mostly employees of small companies, where unions don’t exist), a mass of pensioners driven into poverty and many small artisans and self-employed tradespeople. The movement has drawn up a list of demands that has expanded well beyond the issue of fuel. These demands, some of which are supportable and others purely reactionary, reflect the petty-bourgeois leadership of the mobilization. Having no independent class interests, the petty bourgeoisie oscillates between the two fundamental classes of capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and the working class.

The labor movement must seek to take the lead of the protests in order to turn them against the real culprit: capitalism. It is the working class that through its labor produces profits, the raison d’être of capitalism. Only the working class has the power to cut off the flow of profits by stopping work; it alone has the historic interest to overthrow capitalism and replace it with workers power. (read on)