Saturday, October 13, 2018

2- Maoistroad Special PCm Italy speech International meetingMay/june 68 - Paris 24/6/2018


Comrades,

Welcoming all the comrades and organizations here, above all I would say that to hold this meeting is a victory for the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists operating in the imperialist countries, in countries such as France and Italy and, more generally, it is a victory for the MLM movement in the world.

We Marxist-Leninist-Maoists consider the French May/June the concentrated expression of the revolutionary movement of the 70s; a historical page showing the strength of the trend to the revolution within the imperialist countries and the historical importance of the MLM movement, that indicates the path we are taking again and in which we are working.

It is right to rebel”, “the working class must exercise leadership in everything” are two slogans coming from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which were embodied by the students and the revolutionary youth, by the workers, in those months and in the following years.
We take back this piece of history to take up the lessons that come from it, whose validity we are committed to affirm and actualize in the class struggle, in the national and international political situation today.
The students’ and youth rebellion in May 68, attacked and repressed by the government and the imperialist state, triggered a great workers' struggle, with factories occupied, strikes, blockades, opposed by all means, beside the State and the masters, by the revisionist Party, the French Communist Party, and the revisionist-led trade union, the CGT.
The workers’ rebellion brought into the workers' ranks the watchwords of the revolution and struggle for power. The unity between the students who went to factories and the workers who went to universities ignited the explosive mixture of the revolutionary struggle.
A great contribution and keystone of this unity came from the French Maoist communists, many of them young.

The French May/June has shown the conditions and the forms in which the mass movement becomes a revolutionary movement in an imperialist country.
The revolutionary movement is not enough to win, it needs the revolutionary party, it needs the strategy and tactics for the revolution in the imperialist countries, that then as today demands a long-lasting revolutionary war that leads to insurrection as the path for proletarian and socialist revolution.
This path was not established in those May/June and following events, but such historical experience, as that of Gauche Proletarienne, shows that the Maoists were the only ones to point out that path.

The global situation was decisive for the May/June break out. The great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China led by the communists of Mao Tsetung was upsetting the world imperialist order and launching the message that the rebellions in the 68 and the 70s have took up.
The widespread diffusion of Mao Tsetung's thought in the world stimulated the development and increased the level of consciousness of the world revolution of our time. The brilliant victory of the Chinese GPCR gave new vigor to the revolutionary will of the people of all the countries, the will to dare to fight and to dare to win.
A great importance also had the people's war fought until the victory in Vietnam, beating US imperialism.
Finally, analyzing those events, it is absolutely necessary to rely on the evaluation of the Chinese communists led by Mao on the French May. The Chinese communists led by Mao, with numerous writings, exalted the revolutionary movement in the heart of the imperialist countries and put it in the context of the Great Proletarian Cultural revolution and the East wind, within which is the liberation war of Vietnam, prevailing on the West wind. The Chinese communists, led by Mao, were those who exalted the role of the revolutionary youth who shakes and frightens the whole world of imperialism, and they taught us how it has played a role of trigger for the great struggle of workers.

The years that characterized the May/June 68 had an extraordinary influence in all the countries of the world.
In Italy too the class struggle will increase in intensity and extend for a decade, from 68 to 77, as well as in North America and other imperialist countries such as Germany, Belgium, Spain. Even in the Eastern European countries workers will rise up against revisionist regimes, meeting the East wind indirectly from France.
Being forged by the GCPR and that revolutionary movement, a new generation took the road of MLM in many parts of the world.

The joint statement on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya’s murder:
He is one of the best disciple of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He evaluated his own ideas and the TKP/ML, which he founded, as products of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Back when Marxist-Leninist ideas were active globaly, when in the 1960s and 1970s the struggles for revolution and Socialism were developing themselves, the class struggle in Turkey was making incredible progress. Especially under the conditions of the 1968 Movement, which encompassed the whole world, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist revolutionary waves formed between students. This movement has reached its 50th anniversary this year. On this occasion, we salute this movement, which made the world shake and stroke fear among imperialism and the ruling powers. This movement was influenced by Marxism-Leninism and adapted to the revolutionary wave, which developed in the world with the idea of revolution and the assertion of revolution. This period was at the same time a process in which the socialist camp divided Revisionism and Marxist-Leninist foundations”.

Therefore, to hail and discuss about the French May/June is not nostalgia or mere celebration but means to indicating the stages, the heritage on which the workers and revolutionary movement in the imperialist countries will resume the path of revolution, in unity and harmony with the international communist movement.

It is extraordinarily important that this celebration of the 50th of the French May/June and the rebellions in many other countries of the world on 68 coincides with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Marx and the 170th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto.
The science of revolution worked out by Marx, and then developed on a theoretical and practical level by Lenin and Mao, was very much present among the revolutionary students and the workers of May/June 68 in France, as well as in all the uprising broken out since then.
The Manifesto spoke about a specter haunting around Europe, the specter of communism that scared the ruling classes. Well, 50 years ago that specter reappeared through the 68 of workers and students. And that specter is still imprinted in the minds of the ruling classes -that is why the bourgeoisie in France as in the world does everything to delete, exorcise and distort it.
But it is an attempt tried several times and doomed to fail. An attempt that actually shows how this specter is real and present and the dream of revolution of those months, of those years, is still a nightmare for capitalism, imperialism and the ruling classes in the imperialist countries and in the world.
The Chinese comrades wrote on June 6, 68: "The great storm of the mass revolutionary movement that shakes the whole France shows that the French proletarians, which Marx exalted for their historic initiative and defined as ready to assault heaven, have written a new and glorious chapter in the annals of the history of France. They are the worthy heirs of the Paris Commune ".
Mao said: "Despite the efforts of the reactionaries to stop the wheel of history, sooner or later the revolution will break out and will inevitably be victorious".

The celebration of this meeting, the commitment made by the French and Italian communists and in other imperialist countries to affirm and embody the path of revolution and the construction of genuine revolutionary parties shows that even in difficult times for the proletariat, the masses, the Communists and the revolutionaries, while they target of criminalization, repression and attacks of all kinds by today's reformists and false communists, the Communists are able to take again in their hands, also through the lessons of May/June 68, the weapons of the revolutionary struggle and the struggle for power.
And our meeting represents an act of pride and trust in the struggle, in the rebellion, and a new hope that the future is ours, not theirs.

If we want to draw the main lesson from those years, from the point of view of the revolution, from the point of view of the working class, which, as Marx taught us, is the only revolutionary class to the end, we must recognize that the main lesson of those events it is the unmasking and the role of betrayal ignominiously and openly carried out by the French Revisionist Communist Party and the CGT.
Lenin had said: "Opportunism, that is our main enemy. The opportunism of the upper strata of the workers movement is a non-proletarian but bourgeois socialism. Proof of this is the fact that the militants of the workers movement belonging to the opportunist tendency are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves. If they did not have the leadership of the workers in their hands, the bourgeoisie would not survive ".

Those months have shown that the revisionism infiltrated in the workers' movement was once again the most serious impediment for the advance of the revolutionary ideas and practice in the world.

At that time this made it difficult to consistently develop those events towards the seizure of power and even today these issues are the key to resume the lessons of those years and bring through to the end. In May/June 68 the main contradiction was between those who wanted to fight bourgeois power and those who wanted to maintain and serve it. Among the revolutionary workers and students, the organized forces, between the Maoists and the currents of the petty bourgeoisie, it was fought a struggle which saw the bourgeoisie and revisionists on the one side and the revolutionary workers and students om the other.

Therefore, to come back to the dynamics of those events is useful to grasp the substance.

The break out of students agitation on 3 May is triggered on a whole series of further workers' struggles that had developed in the previous months and culminated on April with the strike of the Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes, led by young workers of the CGT in struggle against the revisionist leadership of the union. On the other hand, the students rose up against the discriminatory university reform.
From the 3rd to the 10th of May the agitation took place mainly in the universities, challenging the police with violent clashes and there were the first arrests (596 people only on May 3), while the injured are hundreds. From 10th to 13th of May the student rebellion exacerbates and appears a first spontaneous aggregation of young workers at the students demonstration. The 13th the trade unions are forced to call for a 24-hour general strike and a large demonstration in which a million protesters participated.
The students played a vanguard role in this revolutionary struggle. At the beginning of May, Paris students were the first to leave school and challenge the school system and the decadent social system of capitalism. Taking over the student movement's impulse more than 10 million workers organized economic and political strikes, occupied half of the French factories and companies. The flames of the struggle spread to more than 90 departments and the revolutionary red flags rose on a large number of factories, universities, mines. Regardless of the law and the bourgeois order, they declared resolutely: "we will oppose revolutionary violence to bourgeois violence". On several occasions they erected barricades in the streets and fought the reactionary police and the CRS, turning Paris and many other cities into battlefields. Students and workers supported and encouraged each other in the struggle. "Workers and students united" became the emblematic cry of this revolutionary storm.

Chairman Mao wrote: "All the intellectual and student youth of the country must join the broad masses of workers and peasants, forming one thing with them. That is the only way to build a powerful force. This also applies to the student movement of the capitalist countries, that is an important component of the people’s movement as a whole ".

When the movement spreads like wildfire and extends to the workers, the revisionists also make a 180° turn to gain ground. They support the general strike whose huge participation prevents revisionists from stopping the unity among workers and students and the participation of the Marxist-Leninists.
When the workers' strike turns into an indefinite strike, one factory after another is occupied, bosses and managers are abducted, action committees and strike committees are born, at that point the revisionists do everything to stop the strikes and the movement. The CGT call to remain within the vindictive limits and to immunize workers from interventions from outside the working class, by which they mean revolutionary students and Maoists.

While the government hints at a tactical surrender to the demands of the students, indefinite strikes and factories occupation spread in Paris and throughout France. The number of strikers reaches 10 million; the strikes extend to railways, air traffic and distribution; while the agitations also invest the countryside. On May 20, 3000 students cross the Latin Quarter to reach the occupied Renault factory in Billancourt.
The CGT appeals to repression and legality, tells the workers to keep locked up in factories, while makes an infamous deal with the masters and the government.

The unions, the masters and the government meet at Rue Grenelle to negotiate, indeed to get united and decide together how to stop the uprising.
And while the agreement is being made, the bourgeois state, led by De Gaulle, calls to the establishment of the Republic's defense committees and civic action committees and meets its generals in Baden Baden. On the one hand, the repression and preparation of an emergency state, on the other hand the Grenelle agreements and the calling for early parliamentary elections.
But the agreement is resoundingly rejected by the workers. It is rejected on its merits, by workers who no longer accept to remain within the limits of the interests and stability of the capitalist system. They say no to non-uniform wage increases, to segment negotiations, and to unite the struggle for demands with the struggle for power; they resist the return to work and on this basis wage a class war, of which a step is marked every day. The strikes continue, the workers-students unity gets stronger and the electoral campaign fails to direct the mass movement towards the path indicated by the revisionists.
Under the lead of the assaults of CRS, which uses illegal weapons and lethal tear gas, two workers, 24-year-old Pierre Beylot and 49-year-old Henri Blanchet, are murdered in Sochaux the 11th of June, and the a Maoist student, Gilles Tautin, member of UJC ML dies in the Seine, in Flins near the Renault.
The bourgeois State bans 11 left-wing organizations, including the Maoist PCml of France, while freeing Salan and other fascist imperialist leaders of the OAS. Revisionists and the bourgeois state put the maximum pressure of all kinds and sorts on workers to push them back to job and impose the elections as a form of consent to the bourgeois dictatorship.

In addition to the revisionist line in support of the state, the petty bourgeois forces contribute to disorganize the revolutionary movement. The Maoists oppose them bringing within the workers' ranks the need for a consistent action and an implacable struggle to construct the Party which the working class needs, against opportunism and sectarianism, against the influence of the petty bourgeoisie.
It is this struggle that leads the line and the practice of the Maoist movement and resulted in the birth of the Gauche Proletarienne.
Throughout this struggle the Maoists combine the participation in the large mass demonstrations and clashes with the propaganda and organization in neighborhoods and factories. Many young people, former students, go to work in the factories.
In those years the strategic break with the revisionism is completed and emerges the novelty and advance of the Maoists.

The birth of the Cause du peuple and the formation of Gauche Proletarienne mark the highest point and limit of the battle of the Maoists in those months and years.
As the comrades of the PCM of France correctly write in their Program: "Gauche Proletarienne has developed as the main anti-revisionist force in the movement that follows the 68. It tried to link the student and youth movements to the working masses, attempted to radicalize the struggles and establish a demarcation line with the revisionists; with the formation of the NRP it laid the foundations of a fighting forces, began to form a front with the mass organizations it had promoted, the struggle committees in the factories, the movement of Arab workers, the Red Relief, etc. A considerable mass work by which we should be inspired. But it failed to build a genuine MLM party, this led to its crisis, impasse and dissolution".
Gauche Proletarienne was the most dynamic force within the 68 movement, even if it did not solve the central problem that emerged in that movement, the question of power and the strategy to seize it and establish the proletarian power.

In the heart of the imperialist countries it is necessary to take those initial attempts as a reference to construct the Marxist Leninist Maoist Communist Party needed for the revolution.
Reaffirming all this, remove the uprisings in France and in the world from the bourgeois campaign has nothing to do with nostalgia, as some new-revisionist groups in France, as Voie Proletarienne, also say. It is part of the story necessary for the advance of the MLMs and their role as command and guide of the new phase of the world proletarian revolution.

This process has already begun for years in countries like France, Italy, forging itself in the class struggle in close relationship with the masses and through some important steps that have contributed to strengthen Maoism in Europe, we refer to the previous meetings organized here in France. To name a few, that on the uprising in the banlieues, on Sarkozy's modern fascism and more recently that on the 10th anniversary of the uprising in the banlieues.
At the same time, Maoism has strengthened in Europe, in countries such as Germany, Austria, Galicia.
This is a dialectical and dynamic process that goes through advanced and setbacks, formation of new organizations and splits, this is good thing if we take up Maoism as a guide for action in the two-lines struggle in order to strengthen and transform the existing organizations and parties to advance together and affirm the path of the people's war in the imperialist countries developing revolutionary mass work.
Today's Maoist organizations goes ahead along the same path carved by the history of the proletarian revolution, of which the French May/June and the rebellions of '68 are parts.
To form and strengthen Maoist communist parties as avant-garde detachments of the working class, as militarized parties of new type, able to organize and lead the rebellion of the whole proletariat, of youth, of proletarian women, to build the United Front of the sectors in struggle and the struggles against the imperialist State and, to build the fighting Force that requires the framing and militarization by the Maoists of proletarian and rebellious youth.
In the wake of internationalism, in support of the ongoing People's Wars in India, the Philippines, Peru, Turkey/North Kurdistan and the national liberation struggles


Long live the red and revolutionary French May/June!

Long live the unity of French students and workers, terror of the imperialist bourgeoisie!

Long live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, inspiring of the wave of revolts and revolution in the 4 quarters of the globe!

Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

Long live the birth, strengthening and development of the Maoist parties in the imperialist countries!

24th of June 2018

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