As readers look over the coverage and pictures of the yellow vest protests in France on the front page of this week’s Militant, we think you’ll see yourself. Workers, farmers, small shop owners, young and old, native-born and immigrant, demanding “dignity for all.” In short, the French equivalent of those the capitalist bosses and their meritocratic servants in the U.S. call the “deplorables.”
We’re asking readers to join in taking the Militant’ s coverage of the protests to workers and young people in cities, towns and rural areas across the country. The inspiring reports on their actions, and their refusal to be bought off by “president of the rich” Emmanuel Macron, will be welcome news.
The French rulers had no idea this was bubbling beneath the surface in the suburbs and small towns across the country. They viewed the “people from nowhere” as incapable of such a rebellion. Now they fear them.
The same thing is bubbling elsewhere, wherever workers and farmers face the carnage from the decline of the capitalist system today, its economic, political and moral crisis. You can see it in the United Kingdom, where workers say the country should break out of the European Union, or in distorted forms in elections in Italy and elsewhere as workers try to find a way to register hatred for all the rulers’ parties and their disdain for our problems. It’s the same in the U.S.
Like the yellow vests, we refuse to accept the trampling of our rights, the decline of our living conditions, their wars abroad that leave our youth broken, their blows at our humanity.
In fact it’s working people in the small towns and the countryside in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana who have been the hardest hit as the bosses and their government try to place the capitalist crisis of production, trade and declining rates of profit on our backs.
We live under the dictatorship of capital. To maintain their rule, the capitalists try to convince us they are rich because they’re smart. They try to divide us by nationality, religion, sex, unemployed vs. employed. And urban dwellers from those in rural areas.
But the road to overturn their dictatorship is to unite the working classes in city and countryside. The revolt of the yellow vests gives a glimpse of what’s possible.
Join us knocking on doors in small towns and rural areas to build that alliance. Introduce working people there to the Militant and to books by leaders of the Socialist Workers Party — Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?; The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record; Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible?; Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. Also included is the book of interviews with five Cuban revolutionaries, “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System.”
These books are worth reading and studying. Contact the Socialist Workers Party and Communist League branch nearest you to get them — at a discount if you’re a new subscriber. Join a team today.