ON TUESDAY over three million French workers took to the streets with massive demonstrations in Paris and Marseilles to make sure that Sarkozy got the message, that if he insists on proceeding with his plans to increase the retirement age to 62, he will have a revolution to deal with.
The French working class has a short revolutionary fuse and although it is not as trade union conscious as the British working class, it has a much more openly revolutionary political tradition, dating back to the 1789 bourgeois revolution, and to the 1871 Paris Commune, of righting the wrongs done to it.
The essence of the French situation is that Sarkozy is not only not going to retreat from his assault on the working class and the middle class, he is going to step it up, as the world crisis of the capitalist system deepens.
He will be met head on by the French workers, leading the mass of the rural population, and since no major retreats are possible, the movement will explode from where it left off in May and June 1968.
Then the betrayal of the revolutionary students by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CGT saw the strength of the trade unions used to defuse the revolutionary situation, not explode it.
This time the working class is in the lead and will take the students and the working-class youth and the middle class forward to overthrow the Sarkozy regime.
In the UK, on the same day, last Tuesday, 10,000 railworkers stopped work on the London tube for the day and rocked the Tory-LibDem coalition with their strength and determination.
The RMT has called another 24-hour strike on the London tube from 9 pm on October 3, and this may well be answered by many more workers than just the railworkers, and become a one-day general strike.
The British workers have a different revolutionary tradition than their French brothers. Here the struggle is much more a social one, with the trade unions taking the lead, and the job of what used to be its political representative, the Labour Party being to legislate the gains that workers make, as part of the struggle to get to a socialist society.
This is the theory. The practice is that the trade unions founded the Labour Party as their political expression, and the total collapse of that party and its fabian outlook has put all of the gains of the working class in danger, and has also put revolution on the agenda.
The Welfare State, won by the working class, is being destroyed because of the betrayals of the Labour party.
As far as workers are concerned the 13 years of the Brown-Blair governments were spent in undermining the Welfare state and opening the way for a massive Tory comeback.
What the British working class built up through its social struggle, carried out by its trade unions can now only be defended through revolutionary means!
The explosion on this side of the Channel will therefore match, or even go much further than what is about to happen over the water.
The British working class will overthrow the bourgeois order to defend and maintain its welfare state.
The European socialist revolution which began in Greece has now spread into France and into the UK, and will explode further into Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal and Ireland.
The question of the hour therefore is the building of the revolutionary leadership of the working class to lead this European socialist revolution to its victory.
This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in all of the main European states.
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