Proletarians of all countries, unite!
Documents and Notes on the World Situation and the Tasks (II)1
II
2. The uprising under way of the proletariat and the popular masses in Europe, mainly in France.
In France they are reissuing a chapter of their history. The struggles of the students and of the proletariat are again shaking old Europe, it began with student movements and has extended until encompassing immense proletarian masses and other deep and profound masses.
According to sources of the ministry of the interior itself, there were blockades and spontaneous protests in more than 1,000 educational establishments in all the departments (101). On the other hand, it recognizes the important role of social networks in these blockades at the entrances of institutes. These actions began in Créteil (east of Paris) on September 17, then broke out in Seine-Saint-Denis on the 22nd and became general in a good part of France from the 29th onward.
“The great student revolt, originating among the working-class youth,” which the youth of the popular neighborhoods and subsequently the trade unions and other worker masses have been joining. This great revolt, begun in September and which maintains itself until now, shows how a proletarian struggle is waged responding to the measures of Macron’s government, which represents the interests of the financial oligarchy, which leads the bourgeois dictatorship, the French imperialist State. Violence of the proletarian masses in Paris and other large, medium, and small cities in the entire country.
In the newspaper The Cause of the People (October 16), on this, we read:
French imperialism, in crisis, is crushing the proletariat and the working classes with all its might . . . The forced restructuring of the old bourgeois system is driving a process of reactionary consolidation, the most visible manifestation of which is the suppression of all popular movements through the use of batons, grenades, tear gas, systematic imprisonment, the dissolution of organizations, political trials, maimings, and deaths by the dozens – affecting in particular the most oppressed proletariat and all forms of dissent. A veritable war against the working classes is unfolding –a policy aimed solely at attempting to thwart the development of the class struggle.
On the forms of struggle and their objective for the mobilizations of the following day, the 17th, in their article, which we have been citing, they write:
The strategy for October 17 must be one of saturation: we have numbers, mobility, determination, and history on our side. Block the flow of people and goods in every direction; paralyze the heavy and relatively static police apparatus with the agility of the insurgent groups’ movements; repeat this endlessly, without tiring; this is the path to an October 17 that, even if it is not October 17 itself, will be a new step toward the Socialist Revolution.
But, in their call at the end of the article, the perspective is regrettably lost, they pass from referring to the day of struggle of the 17th as “a new step toward . . . ” to a change of north, in summary, for the change of regime and so that the elections are postponed, thus in the final paragraph of the article, we read:
On October 17, 2026, let us vigorously advance the struggle for dignity led by the high school student movement and its vanguard, the proletarian youth. Let us organize in the countryside, in the cities, in the neighborhoods, in the factories, and everywhere the flame of revolt is smoldering, with a single slogan: LET’S SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN. The time for revolt has come; it is just, and it embodies the dignity of reality. Let’s go all the way to bring down the despicable King Macron, his puppet Lecornu, and postpone the electoral farce.
— Red Herald, France, La Cause du Peuple, Protests
For this reason it is fitting to ask oneself: For which regime? Postpone the coming reactionary elections: for what?
Revolution is the violent overthrow of one class by another
The struggle or uprising against a reactionary government, against its anti-proletarian and anti-popular policy, for economic and political demands, for benefits, rights, and freedoms cannot be called revolution. The problem is not one of a change of government or of regime, the problem is to destroy the old State from its foundations and on its rubble to go on building step by step the new State, the State of dictatorship of the proletariat.
The revolution is the violent overthrow of one class by another. The socialist revolution is the violent overthrow of the bourgeois class by the proletariat led by its Communist Party through revolutionary violence, which today can only be people’s war.
The repressive forces of the State could not contain them. There were tens of thousands on Saturday, October 17, it is calculated that some 800 thousand people mobilized throughout France. In the course of which, the mass overflowed and went beyond, furiously attacking the forces of order, public buildings, banks, businesses of the big monopolies, and the most outstanding signs of the bourgeois dictatorship, the proletariat bourgeoisie contradiction expressing itself as the masses government contradiction.
That is, then, a protest uprising of the workers, begun as a student revolt and which later became general, the masses are for combating, because that is their historical mission.
Those protests of the masses, which have also taken place in other countries of Europe, are contrary to the custom of the stoppages or peaceful strikes called by the revisionist trade-union crusts. Lenin said that the demonstration, the march, the protest make reaction tremble.
It is necessary to learn from the working-class and popular France. Where is the fault? Again it is going to serve the reactionary way out, because although it is not a question of a simple “annoyance,” neither can it be said that reaction has no way out, there are no situations without a way out for reaction unless the victorious revolution is made (see quotation from Lenin, a few lines below). It is necessary to take advantage of this situation of crisis where the ground trembles under the reaction’s feet and the masses combat to advance in the reconstitution of the Communist Party. All the time the same thing in that stupid vicious circle despite all the fury and anger unleashed by the masses against the imperialist oppression and exploitation in their own country.
These great days in which the students and the French proletariat have been playing the leading role move economic and also political demands, must be set on a course toward the revolution as the previously cited note calls for, but they are orphaned of a mature Communist Party, that is, the only party capable of leading the state of rebellion of the overflowing masses to the socialist revolution.
We are sure that the communists in formation in that country, propelled by the explosion of the class struggle of the proletariat, with the wind in their favor, will advance with drums beating and will reconstitute their Communist Party as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party to make the socialist revolution through people’s war, as part of and at the service of the world proletarian revolution.
What is happening in France, in Italy, in Belgium, Spain, etc., expresses that there is a revolutionary situation in uneven development, what there is not is a revolutionary crisis.
Lenin, regarding the revolutionary crisis existing at the end of World War I, said:
In such circumstances, the workers’ mounting resentment, the growth of a revolutionary temper and ideas, and the increase in spontaneous mass strikes are obviously inevitable, since the position of the workers is becoming intolerable. The workers’ own experience is convincing them . . . If, on the one hand, the economic position of the masses has become intolerable, and, on the other hand, the disintegration described by Keynes has set in and is growing among the negligible minority of all-powerful victor countries, then we are in the presence of the maturing of the two conditions for the world revolution. . . .
Comrades, we have now come to the question of the revolutionary crisis as the basis of our revolutionary action. And here we must first of all note two widespread errors. On the one hand, bourgeois economists depict this crisis simply as “unrest”, to use the elegant expression of the British. On the other hand, revolutionaries sometimes try to prove that the crisis is absolutely insoluble.
This is a mistake. There is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation. The bourgeoisie are behaving like barefaced plunderers who have lost their heads; they are committing folly after folly, thus aggravating the situation and hastening their doom. All that is true. But nobody can “prove” that it is absolutely impossible for them to pacify a minority of the exploited with some petty concessions, and suppress some movement or uprising of some section of the oppressed and exploited. To try to “prove” in advance that there is “absolutely” no way out of the situation would be sheer pedantry, or playing with concepts and catchwords. Practice alone can serve as real “proof” in this and similar questions. All over the world, the bourgeois system is experiencing a tremendous revolutionary crisis. The revolutionary parties must now “prove” in practice that they have sufficient understanding and organisation, contact with the exploited masses, and determination and skill to utilise this crisis for a successful, a victorious revolution.
It is mainly to prepare this “proof” that we have gathered at this Congress of the Communist International.
To illustrate to what extent opportunism still prevails among parties that wish to affiliate to the Third International, and how far the work of some parties is removed from preparing the revolutionary class to utilise the revolutionary crisis, I shall quote the leader of the British Independent Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald.
— V. I. Lenin, Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International, July 19, 19202
FINALLY:
Only with such a party, with the class united, organized in its Party, will no decrepit power of the reaction be able to prevail. Our Party, the army of the class, the organized masses led by the Communist Party through the People’s War can conquer Power, the reaction is not going to prevail, we will overthrow the old State and will destroy bureaucrat-capitalism, imperialist subjection, semi-feudalism. Internationally we, the communists, will also put an end to world imperialism, revisionism, and reaction, not even capitalism will subsist, communism will impose itself however many zigzags the revolution experiences today, the proletariat will close its ranks, will strengthen itself despite all imperialism, all the revisionist rot, despite all that anarchism proper to the anarchist intellectuals who always oppose the Party and burst into tinsel and uproar, as their unfounded attacks reveal. Thus, then, the proletariat united in a powerful Communist Party will conquer Power in the country and will continue its socialist course until communism; and in the world it will sweep away world imperialism, revisionism, and reaction. Let us reiterate, the basis of all that is the organization of the class. Marx said the class has the power of numbers; the organized class, then, is powerful.
— Chairman Gonzalo
NOTE:
Besides the previous report, we must keep very much in mind the report that we cite below: V. I. Lenin, Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions, July 26, 1920, where it is written once and forever:
First, what is the cardinal idea underlying our theses? It is the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations. Unlike the Second International and bourgeois democracy, we emphasise this distinction. In this age of imperialism, it is particularly important for the proletariat and the Communist International to establish the concrete economic facts and to proceed from concrete realities, not from abstract postulates, in all colonial and national problems.
The characteristic feature of imperialism consists in the whole world, as we now see, being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces. The vast majority of the world’s population, over a thousand million, perhaps even 1,250 million people, if we take the total population of the world as 1,750 million, in other words, about 70 per cent of the world’s population, belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in a state of direct colonial dependence or are semi-colonies, as, for example, Persia, Turkey and China, or else, conquered by some big imperialist power, have become greatly dependent on that power by virtue of peace treaties. This idea of distinction, of dividing the nations into oppressor and oppressed, runs through the theses, not only the first theses published earlier over my signature, but also those submitted by Comrade Roy. The latter were framed chiefly from the standpoint of the situation in India and other big Asian countries oppressed by Britain. Herein lies their great importance to us.3
To be continued
Red Library: https://vnd-peru.blogspot.com/2026/10/mpp-documentos-y-notas-sobre-la_01216954243.html.↩︎
Red Library: V. I. Lenin, “Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International” (July 19, 1920), in Collected Works, vol. 31, 2nd printing (Progress Publishers, 1974), 221, 225–27.↩︎
Red Library: V. I. Lenin, “Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions” (July 26, 1920), in Collected Works, vol. 31, 2nd printing (Progress Publishers, 1974), 240–41.↩︎