A-Infos (en) France, CNT-ait: Anarchosyndicalisme! #181 - Reform or Revolution? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

It has been a long time since a government project has sparked such 
mobilizations. Three, four million demonstrators. It is enormous. The French are 
very angry. More than eighty percent of workers are, according to official 
polling institutes, opposed to the reform of their pensions. Eighty percent means 
that at the very least, forty to fifty million people are absolutely opposed to 
raising the retirement age to 64. But then, where are they? Why don't they join 
the protests? Why don't they make their opposition clearly heard? Why do they 
accept (because to be silent is to accept) without saying a word what they 
consider unfair? Why do they resign?
These are questions of this kind that, already in the sixteenth century, the 
young Étienne de la Boétie asked himself. How is it, he said, that the people who 
produce the wealth and hold the power agree to be governed and martyred by 
tyrants? To answer this, he invented the concept of "voluntary servitude". The 
vast majority of individuals accept his condition as a dominated person and this 
acceptance is their doing.

A precision is essential: it is certainly voluntary, but above all the 
consequence of the indoctrination, the conditioning, the brutalization that 
people undergo. From our earliest childhood, we are taught to obey the 
injunctions of the authorities, never to contest them.

In the eighteenth century, the "philosophers of the Enlightenment", Voltaire, 
Diderot, Rousseau, etc. denounced those responsible for this conditioning: the 
state, religions, traditions. They explained that they had to be fought and that 
only the use of Reason would make it possible to overcome them. A rational 
education, according to them, is what the people need to dissipate the darkness 
of obscurantism and free them from the chains of slavery.

In the nineteenth century, thinkers like Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin and many others, 
accompanying the reflections of the nascent labor movement, dissected the 
functioning of the capitalist system, showed the division of society into 
antagonistic social classes, the fundamental character unfair and criminal of 
this system and explained that only collective action by the exploited could 
overcome it. From the middle of the century, the workers began to organize 
themselves and these efforts resulted in the creation by workers of various 
nationalities of the First International with the unanimously accepted slogan: 
"the emancipation of the workers will be the 'work of the workers themselves'. 
This slogan perfectly sums up the program of the First International: To 
emancipate oneself is of course to destroy the existing economic and social 
system, to abolish the division of society into antagonistic social classes and 
the exploitation of man by the man; but it is also to educate oneself, to 
cultivate oneself, to develop a rational spirit among the workers, to make them 
aware. The initiators of the International believed that a social revolution, the 
abolition of the state and of capitalist exploitation required that the great 
mass of workers be enlightened, lucid and committed accordingly.

Shortly after the creation of the First International, Marx developed the 
absolutely opposite idea that the transformation of society would pass not 
through the destruction of the state, but through its conquest, which required 
the capture of state institutions by a vanguard, a political party, and this, by 
any means (elections, social movement, revolution). Once this objective has been 
achieved, the State placed at the service of the interests of the workers is then 
responsible for preparing society for the transition to a later stage of 
communism. This intermediate stage has been called the dictatorship of the 
proletariat. This method no longer requires the mass of workers to be enlightened 
and lucid, but just a small fraction, the vanguard, to whom the revolutionary 
work is delegated. We therefore move from "the emancipation of the workers will 
be the work of the workers themselves" to "building popular power, embodied by 
the Party". In the minds of employees, the solution proposed by Marx appeared 
infinitely simpler, faster than that requiring the education of the mass of 
workers; and suddenly almost the entire world labor movement has set out to build 
the Party of the working class and for more than 150 years, everywhere in the 
world parties supposed to embody the hopes of the exploited seek to conquer state 
power to exercise it for their benefit. Many of these parties have come to power, 
either as a result of revolutions or through elections, but these experiences 
have always ended in resounding failures, sometimes even in catastrophes.  Each 
time, it is the populations, in particular the workers and the exploited who have 
paid the price.

In 2023 in France, Macron - former minister of a socialist government, elected in 
2022 with the support of the unions - shamelessly goes back on all social 
advances. Many of those who rightly decry its contempt today were extolling its 
merits not long ago.

What is terrible is that history repeats itself: what we are experiencing, we 
have already experienced many times before. Things are however clear, as long as 
populations choose to give up power to one or a few individuals, without control 
to decide what is good for them, it will be so. Macron is a traitor, of course, 
but the system of representative democracy which enabled him to come to power, 
which meant that an entire people confidently handed over control of their 
destiny to him, this representative system is even more infamous .

In view of all the dangers that threaten us, it is urgent to put an end to this 
system and replace it with a real democracy, direct democracy. But for that, it 
is necessary beforehand that a significant proportion of the population is aware, 
thinks that a social revolution is desirable, that it is possible and therefore 
undertakes to prepare for it. This tremendous work of raising awareness is the 
purpose of anarchosyndicalism.

http://cntaittoulouse.lautre.net/spip.php?article1319
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