Solidarity demonstrations across France
daily mass protests
For a victory of the general strike in Guadeloupe!
Immediate satisfaction of the LKP demands ! No repression !
For a common struggle of the workers and the youth … in Metropolitan France and overseas territories against the Sarkozy-Fillon-Jego government and bosses.
The general strike initiated in Guadeloupe, and spreading then to Martinique and quickly to Guyana and Réunion, is the strongest reply to the arrogant policies of the Sarkozy-Fillon government and the bosses.
We address our total support to the workers, the youth, and the whole oppressed people of Guadeloupe. This struggle must be an example and an inspiration for all workers. The Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (LKP) organisation has succeeded in uniting around a programme of fighting demands and a real strategy, the unions, parties and organisations which are in the camp of workers, youth and the people.
Against them, the state and the government only showed colonial contempt and insults. While the just and rightful demands of the LKP are not satisfied, particularly the 200 euros wage rise, in a department where the cost of ling is terrible for wide layers of the population, the government sent … more riot police squadrons. The French government has repeated manoeuvring and lies. The French state and the Sarkozy-Fillon-Jego government are responsible for the violence, particularly after union activists were beaten by the police, hurling racist insults, during a blockade in Pointe-à-Pitre on 16 February.
For the immediate satisfaction of the LKP demands !
For demonstrations and support actions in every town !
All organisations of the workers’ movement – parties and trade unions – must be on the alert: if repression intensifies, demonstrations, support strikes and protests must be organised.
The people of Guadeloupe are showing the way: a strike based on a programme of demands platform and on committees in the different cities and workplaces. In extending it, the Martinique and Réunion workers are also showing the way: to defeat this government, we must be all together. We must not leave struggles isolated. We also need a general strike in metropolitan France on struggle demands: wage increases, no sackings of workers, stop privatisations, no more gifts for bankers and bosses.
Building a political alternative to capitalism
The crisis of capitalism is still deepening, throwing onto the streets tens of thousands of workers. In the Antilles (’French carribean’), this is aggravated by policies inspired by colonialism, conducted for decades, but which have even been intensified during the recent years. The government and the bosses took repeated measures to make tourist paradises of these islands, with no industrial development, forcing them to import a great many goods from Europe.
The government and the bosses cannot find the few hundred million euros needed to satisfy the LKP demands. And yet they found recently more than 6 billion euros for the the car companies… who announced some days afterwards that they would fire thousands more workers. The oil company, Total, through SARA (Société Antillaise de Raffinerie) controls the petrol supply on the island, where it is sold at 150% of the price in metropolitan France. And Total has just announced 14 billion euros of profits!
Capitalism and its local agents will never allow the real development of Guadeloupe, Martinique and the other parts of the Caribbean. This system only works for profit, allowing workers to be exploited, with superexploitation of workers in the Antilles and elsewhere.
The first steps in the struggle initiated by the Guadeloupe workers must open the way to discussion about real control over wealth and production by the people to ensure the real development of Guadeloupe and to show the way to the whole region. Only a socialist economy, democratically planned by workers themselves, linked with the whole people and spreading this way of organising society to the whole of the Caribbean in a free and democratic socialist confederation, would put an end to capitalism and colonialism.
This is why Gauche Révolutionnaire salutes the struggle of the people of Guadeloupe, gives them all possible support, and responds to the LKP’s appeal to workers of the world in its communiqué, by informing its sister organisations in the world of the brave fight of the workers of Guadeloupe, Martinique and beyond.
We are with you in the struggle against the Sarkozy-Fillon-Jego government, against capitalism, for international solidarity of workers, and for socialism !
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