We have considered it more than opportune to republish here the evaluations and comments from early 2009 devoted by our Party to the battle that had broken out then in those very months (Operation Cast Lead) as a new chapter in the interminable war that the State of Israel is waging with the complicity and direct responsibility of all the “Arab” states in the region - a complicity which, up until the “Yom Kippur war” and then the Lebanese attack, took place with an apparent military confrontation and then through diplomatic dialogue, ending up with political and economic agreements.  From “Operation Cast Lead” to the one now going on, called “Operation Iron Swords”, nothing has basically changed, if not the exponential increase in the military power unleashed in the Gaza Strip onto a defenceless population, in a bloodbath that now verges on genocide.

Strangled by the State of Israel, tortured daily by constant harassment and killings, stuck in a blind alley of vain nationalist promises from all the Arab bourgeoisies in the region (including the Palestinian), sacrificial victims of all the more or less subterranean wheelings and dealings of western and Middle-Eastern States, the Palestinian proletarians, both men and women, in the Gaza Strip are about to suffer the umpteenth wave of slaughter after the previous ones - perhaps long past but never forgotten with anger and horror - of  Tell Al-Zataar (Lebanon, August 1976) and Sabra and Chatila (again Lebanon, September 1982), as well as the many more which followed.  More hundreds and thousands of Palestinian deaths (men, women, children, old people) will thus add to the daily martyrdom suffered ever since that unlucky day in 1948, when the victorious powers in the second world bloodbath made the newborn State of Israel into the armed police of an area that was too “sensitive” (to use a term dear to today’s geopolitics) for their respective economic interests and political-strategic balances. 

The sequence of events that has marked the first half of 2023 should be considered and understood as a whole for what it has to tell us, without isolating individual components.

After the great flare of rebellion from Iran’s young proletarians in autumn 2022, which showed just how hard it is for the State – the armed extension of the ruling class – to contain the anger of the exploited, in the opening months of the new year a wave of unrest swept Great Britain, affecting many sectors in the world of work.  After only a short time, in France widely supported demonstrations against pension reform spread for several weeks.  In the meantime, strong protests shook the world of work in Germany.  And for the moment we can pause here.

Events around the outbreak of rebellions in the  French banlieues between the end of June and start of July this year, after the cops’ cold-blooded murder of a young proletarian on the streets of Nanterre, are well known enough to warrant returning to the narration:  in fact, it is not sufficient to add up figures, breaking news, names and episodes, to understand what was going on.   For a political evaluation of use for the future, it seems far more useful to us to dwell on a few points we consider to be significant.

First of all, it should be pointed out that the rebellions that have broken out in the past few years have not affected the “suburbs of the empire” alone, where there is less possibility of control, prevention and social repression, but the ancient metropolises right at the centre:  just let’s think of what happened in the USA in 2020.  So we write ‘Nanterre’ but we might read Minneapolis, and vice-versa…

As young proletarians from the banlieues angrily faced up to the cream of the French Republic’s repressive regime during recent riots, an aging and green-behind-the ears protester held up a banner featuring the slogan: “Disarm the Police”.

A metaphysically absurd demand.

The State isn’t some kind of body appointed to oversee the “collective good”. It is the “collective capitalist” that exercises the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and underwrites its monopoly of violence.

Necessity of the Struggle for Economic Defence

From a communist perspective, the historical aim of conquering political power by means of a party-guided revolutionary insurrection, in order to establish THE dictatorship of the proletariat – the only possible way to obtain a classless society – must always be at one with the necessity that the proletariat fights here and now to defend its living and working conditions against the ever present pressures exercised by capital. The Communist Party cannot afford to ignore this defensive battle: it has to intervene to give it some direction and, possibly, direct it. Reformist enemies and capital would have the battle restrained in a purely economic terrain; employing its characteristic everyday guerrilla tactics, the Party using it instead as an opportunity to provide training and a school for the class war.

In the metropolises of the States of older capitalism as well as in those of younger capitalism and in the peripheries of the whole capitalist world, the economic, living and working conditions of wage workers (and, subordinately, of the declining half classes and the proletarianized masses) continue to worsen, with generalized and constant increases in the cost of basic necessities, including housing, gas and electricity.

Everywhere, the restructuring of economic enterprises (multinationals, individually- or family-owned, cooperatives, state-owned, nationalized or of any other "business name"), induced by the irrepressible crisis of overproduction, generates more and more unemployment and precarious workers, and increasingly forces women back into the home, in underpaid work for the family, together with a more and more unsustainable increase in working hours and pace of work – the first and only cause of the growing number of homicides, serious traumatic injuries and illnesses in the workplace.

Comrades and proletarian sisters!

One year on from the return to normal of the health emergency grafted onto the economic crisis which is so far from being solved (and impossible to solve!), the fanfares of bourgeois ideology and practice no longer have the courage to blather that nothing will ever be the same as before! At home, at work, in local neighbourhoods, your (our) living conditions are merely getting worse. Although in the world of work you are made use of mostly in the lower paid and socially less acknowledged jobs, you continue to suffer mass lay-offs, only to be imprisoned in the underpaid or even unpaid work of domestic care and health assistance, suffering further reductions in income with the excuse of part-time (none other than a cut in salary for the same work concentrated into fewer hours) or smart work (an updated and technically modernised form of self exploitation in home working) as well as reductions in hours. And you continue to be the last to be employed.