May 27, 2024 editorial of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France, translated from French
On May 23, France Télévision [national public TV group] inflicted on us a debate between the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, and the head of the Rassemblement National [far-right National Rally party] slate, Jordan Bardella… as if the political alternative boiled down to a “duel” between [French President] Macron’s friends and [far-right leader] Le Pen’s!
A duel? More like a duo, between these two politicians whose sole concern is to serve the interests of capitalists, to maintain the social order and all its unbearable injustices.
Like all the servants of the bourgeoisie, they are the proponents of a world in which a great power like France can be complicit in the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip by delivering arms to the Israeli army, and can continue to exploit wealth and dominate peoples like the Kanaks [in the French colony New Caledonia]… while at the same time hunting down immigrants and letting those fleeing war and misery drown in the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea.
We don’t want that kind of world!
Those who profit from this world, the owners of big business, are not elected. The results of the ballot box never make it possible to question their power: the power to plunder, to exploit, to stagnate wages by demanding ever more from employees, or to lay off and put thousands of workers out of work.
The left-wing parties claim that by voting for them, it would be possible to change the situation. These are illusions: only our struggles, our strikes and our demonstrations can make employers and the governments that serve them back down. This is the only way to win wage raises, prevent layoffs, keep public services operating, and improve our living and working conditions. Only our struggles can push back the government and employers who attack us day after day, reducing more and more of us to untenable living and working conditions and poverty wages, if not to unemployment and eviction from our homes.
It’s only through our mobilizations that we can challenge the bosses’ ability to decide everything for us, when it’s really us who make society go round: us, the workers, whatever our origins, nationalities, religious and philosophical convictions, genders and sexualities. Exploitation knows no borders, and neither does our class!
Paris, Gaza, Nouméa… urgent revolution!
In the face of war and environmental disaster, in the face of daily hardships here and humanitarian crises around the world, in the face of a minority of the rich who exploit the majority and politicians who compete to serve them, we urgently need to change everything. There is an urgent need to put an end to the law of profits, to respond to the needs of all and not to the demands of a minority of exploiters. We urgently need to put an end to imperialist wars and colonialism. There is an urgent need to say that it is up to those who make society work to decide everything. Revolution is urgently needed!
On June 9, by voting for the NPA-Révolutionnaires slate, led by Selma Labib, a bus driver, and Gaël Quirante, a dismissed postal worker, we will be affirming our determination to rely on our own strength to defend ourselves, and to build a communist society, a world free of exploitation and oppression!
