FRANCE Independent and Democratic Workers’ Party (POID): May Day Manifesto

Comrades, 

On this May 1st, 2021, we salute comrades around the world who commemorate the sacrifice of the Haymarket workers in Chicago on May 1st, 1886. 

We salute you, comrades from India and South Africa, from Brazil and Germany, from Turkey, Algeria, China and all over the world. We salute you, our brothers and sisters who have been hit for fifteen months not only by the Covid-19 virus but also (and above all) by governments whose profit driven policies are turning the health crisis into a devastation that is sacrificing millions of lives. 

We salute you, our comrades, who in recent months, in the face of the pandemic and in spite of it, have taken to the streets by the millions from Bombay to Algiers, from Beirut to Minneapolis. 

We salute you who have been fighting tirelessly for social justice. 

On this 1st of May, the international day of working class struggle, we strongly affirm that workers all over the world form one single class, women and men, whatever their nationality, skin colour, culture or creed, all of them hit by a ruthless capitalist regime, but all of them united in a class-to-class struggle for democracy and rights, for majority rule. 

France is currently experiencing a wave of strikes affecting hundreds of companies. One of these is SAM in Viviez (Aveyron department ), whose workers blocked the factory last week to oppose the dismantling imposed by the company it works for: Renault. On the sign held up by the picket line, the words: « The State, the puppet of Renault« . This is a reality that concerns the entire working population: since Renault was privatised, the shareholders have been dictating their demands to the State. In the last few months, Renault has received 5 billion euros of public money, supposedly in the name of recovery. And Renault is using these billions to lay off thousands of workers, and even tens of thousands if you count the subcontractors. 

Yes, the state is a puppet of Renault. The State is a puppet of all the multinationals to whom it offers gigantic sums of money to allow them to freely deregulate, fire workers and cut wages. 

On 19 March 2020 Macron had the National Assembly (Parliament) unanimously endorse the 343-billion-euro vote for the bosses (which has since become 560 billion euro). The consequence? Fourteen months later, France (like everywhere else in the world) lacks the millions of doses of vaccines needed to protect the population; and the thousands of intensive care beds to provide treatment; and the means to enable schools to continue to work in safe conditions; and teachers and carers; and public services… Meanwhile, hundreds of billions go to the bosses. 

France lacks millions of jobs, lacks a law banning lay-offs… and yet hundreds of billions go to the bosses. 

So yes: under the Fifth Republic, the state is a puppet of the trusts and multinationals… 

At the summit of the state, the President of the Republic is also a puppet of the multinationals. And 

what about the ministers who carry out his orders? And what about the Parliament, reduced to the role of rubber-stamping? 

In France, as in the rest of the world, the workers want democracy and justice. The wave of strikes sweeping the country – for wages and jobs, against job insecurity and the undermining of working conditions – is the bearer of these demands. 

Democracy is the law of the majority. But this so-called Republic – the fifth in the name – imposes, on the contrary, the law of the minority of profiteers, exploiters and speculators. This is true no matter who the president is. This the workers have had the experience of, this they know, since for more than sixty years presidents of the right or of the « left » have succeeded one another at the head of the Fifth Republic, all of whom, whatever their label, act as puppets of the capitalists. 

If democracy means majority rule, then democracy demands a break with this system. 

Democracy demands the abolition of the office of the President of the Republic, a king without a crown. It demands the dismantling of the institutions of the Fifth Republic and the breaking of the straitjacket of the European Union. Democracy demands a sovereign Constituent Assembly, an assembly elected by proportional representation, of delegates of the people, mandated, controllable and revocable by them, and who are not paid more than a qualified worker. 

Let us counter the capitalist Republic – a monarchy without a 

crown in the hands of the banks and a puppet of the multinationals – with the Republic of the majority. 

A supporter of socialism, the POID fights for the workers’ republic, which will not hesitate to: 

• Establish the nationalised pharmaceutical industry for the production of vaccines in numbers allowing to vaccinated all those who wish to be vaccinated; 
• Re-establish the monopolies of the renationalised public services; 
• Ban lay-offs;
• Re-establish freedom to organise and to demonstrate; 
• Guarantee to all young people the real right to study, on equal terms, and access to a real degree, a real job, a real salary; 
• Repeal the counter-reforms of unemployment benefits and pensions; 
• Confiscate and requisition the 560 billion dollars shamelessly distributed to the capitalists, and allocate them to education, heath services and public services. 

This is the programme on which the Independent Democratic Workers’ Party is pronouncing itself on 1 May 2021. 

This is the content it gives to the campaign undertaken with workers and militants of all tendencies to say « Out with Macron and his policies, the sooner the better! « . 

These are the slogans on which it invites workers, activists and young people to gather on 5 June in Paris. 

This is the fight for which the POID calls you to join its ranks! 

The POID Executive Committee