"our France is that of sans-culottes, communards, insurgents slaves" Anasse Kazib

Anasse Kazib spoke at the big meeting to launch his candidacy for the 2022 elections. The opportunity to come back to the main programmatic elements he intends to carry in a presidential campaign particularly marked by xenophobic ideas and reactionaries.

Speech given at the meeting of March 20, 2021

Dear friends, dear comrades, before starting this speech I would like to thank all the participants in this meeting, those who spoke before me, but also the comrades of the Support Committee and you who are present in this room. I also take this opportunity to thank all the activists who made this meeting possible, and who struggle on the roads to seek sponsorship and the rest of the time to keep this campaign alive.

Because participating in such an undemocratic event as the presidential election is a huge challenge for a brand new organization like ours. It is with humility, but nevertheless with great determination, that we will take up this daunting challenge. We are determined to carry the voice of our struggles, the voice of those who have no voice in the chapter, the voice of our camp, that of the youth and the workers, the voice of the exploited and the oppressed of this society .

In a presidential election that promises to be particularly marked by racist and xenophobic discourse, the fact of presenting a young racialized proletarian like me as a presidential candidate may seem a little too subversive. But it is consistent with our deepest convictions that we workers have common interests beyond our origins, our skin color, our beliefs. Our France is not that of kings and great men idealized by Zemmour, but the France of the Sans-culottes, the Communards, the insurgent slaves of Saint-Domingue, the great strikes of 1936 or the general strike of 68, processes of struggle that Sarkozy or Zemmour would like to erase from history.

60 years after the massacre of Algerians drowned in the Seine by the police, our own France is also internationalist, anti-imperialist and in solidarity with the struggles of all peoples against the oppression of the great powers. They would have us believe that internationalism is outdated. Even in this institutional left that has betrayed so many times, we are told that we should fight for the homeland, economic protectionism and against immigration. Montebourg explained for example that the French have the right to a country, Jadot and Roussel demonstrated with Zemmour and the police unions, while Mélenchon wondered about the presence of the Chechen community on French soil after the terrible assassination of Samuel Paty and sometimes evokes the greatness of a France whose territories extend over the five oceans.

But the reality is that the whole sequence we are going through highlights the exact opposite: the way out of the main problems we face cannot be found on the national ground. What are their borders and their protectionism for, in the face of the Covid health crisis? What good was the G20 when artificial respirators or masks were needed all over the world? Their system is that of the strongest against the weakest. While the peoples were dying with their mouths open, they reinforced all the authoritarian arsenal, closing the borders, buying up all the stocks of masks or available oxygen, to the detriment of the poorest peoples. We only have to see how they proceeded in the same way with the vaccine, which allowed the emergence of new variants in the countries of the South and it may still not be over.

The violence with which the Covid has suddenly struck and paralyzed all of humanity forces us to reflect on the system in which we live. A system where it is always the same people who suffer disasters and crises, when those at the top always get away with it, like the boss of Amazon whose wealth increased by 80 billion during the crisis, allowing him now to travel to space, or even to France with the 500 richest families in the country whose wealth increased by 30% during the crisis, making their wealth the equivalent of half of the GDP in France.

While we have seen members of our families and friends in intensive care and sometimes die, while we and our colleagues have continued to work to hold humanity together, often with a knot in their stomachs, for fear of getting caught -even the Covid or even pass it on to our loved ones, they hid and amassed wealth without moving a finger. I remember how the first days of March with my colleagues we raised the collar of our sweaters for fear of contaminating each other at work. At the time, remember, there was no test and Olivier Véran explained to us that the masks were useless.

But the health crisis is not the only one to be in our lives, here is also the climate crisis. This summer we have seen serious climatic episodes: droughts in Madagascar, fires in Algeria and Canada, earthquakes in Haiti, heat waves in Siberia, rains and floods in Turkey and Belgium. Each year the climatic phenomena multiply with ever more alarming levels. What are their borders for when storm Alex hits the Var or when water reserves are dwindling due to drought? What good are their borders when golf ball sized hailstorms destroy entire crops of our farmers, pushing some to end their lives caught between the climate crisis and pressure from the banks? What is the use of nationalism in the face of the climate crisis, when, as Adrien explained, the same Total that is greenwashing on the backs of refiners in France, destroying villages and biodiversity in Africa?

Unfortunately that's not all, I have tackled the health crisis, the climate crisis and today it is already back - even if I doubt that it will ever be gone - that's of course economic crisis. The health crisis has only accelerated this economic crisis that was watching us before. We have seen the layoffs accumulate, the destructuring and the social plans of companies. I am thinking in particular of our comrades from Bridgestone, TUI, Raffinerie de Grandpuits, Alinea and Orchestra. I am also going to tell you the little story of Pierre Mestre, boss of Orchestra, a children's clothing store. I will call him Pierre the Humanist.

He declared on the microphone of France Bleu: "I like to travel, I like art yes, we bought a few paintings, but nothing significant, I have two or three nice cars, but nothing extraordinary . No, I like to build, I want to have fun on the way”. On the way to pleasure Pierre Mestre encountered a law during the Covid crisis in May 2020, a law that economists called a “windfall effect” for companies. This Macron government law allowed companies to liquidate their indebted companies and acquire them, erasing all debts in the process. So Pierre the humanist, who likes to build with his two or three nice cars, had Orchestra liquidated with 650 million euros in debt and he went to court, the only buyer of Orchestra, having reduced himself with the passage of a few coins of 650 million euros and almost 300 employees. The story of Pierre Mestre is also that of Alexis Mulliez of the Mulliez Family, Auchan group, who liquidated Alinéa, before the court parting with 300 million euros in debt and who dismissed 960 people, to act like Pierre Mestre, the sole buyer of Alinéa. That's their system, the shenanigans and stimulus devices the bosses stuff themselves with. But in the end it is always those at the bottom that we want to make pay for the crisis.

We were on the front line for many like Wynessa and the comrades of Transdev who were promised salary increases and bonuses and who today are being attacked on the few social gains they had . While Transdev machinists forbid themselves to drink water because they don't have a pee break, the capitalists hide the billions they have made on our backs as this Pandora Papers scandal demonstrates. This system only produces social and racial inequalities and repeated crises, to the point that it is now endangering the planet and all of humanity.

Often we are told that it is the revolutionaries who are utopian, that they dream of the big night and that their project is not realistic. The big night we do not need to dream about it, we are convinced that it will happen and we prepare for it with our daily struggles. Because what is not realistic is to think that it is still possible to live for years in a system in which 26 billionaires hold half of the wealth of humanity. Faced with the economic crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis, the revolution and the overthrow of capitalism are on the contrary the only realistic project!

Fortunately, the seriousness of the situation did not leave our class indifferent. Crises bring with them their share of revolts and mobilizations. As Marx said: “the history of any society up to the present day is the history of the class struggle”. For several years now, we have seen this wind of class struggle returning with incredible force. Already after the 2008 crisis we noted the emergence of a new cycle of class struggle, the advanced peak of which was undoubtedly the Arab Spring and this uprising of the oppressed peoples of the Maghreb and the Middle East against the dictators. We have seen in the last period major mobilizations taking place on an international scale, in Myanmar against the military junta, in Hong Kong against the Chinese government, in Algeria against Bouteflika, in the United States after the death of George Floyd, and I am also thinking of the major mobilizations in Latin American countries such as Chile, Ecuador and Colombia, in Palestine to defend Sheikh Jarah, in Sudan and Lebanon in the face of the consequences of the health crisis and corruption. To these revolts were added youth mobilizations for the climate emergency, the new wave of feminist struggles and the anti-racist awakening around the Black Lives Matter movement.

And since we are talking about the United States, how can we fail to mention the wave of strikes that is now sweeping through the greatest capitalist power in the world, a country where the death of the unions and the struggle had supposedly been decreed? of classes? Well today there are millions of workers who refuse to return to their trash jobs after the pandemic. This spontaneous process has both encouraged strikes at major corporations like Kellogs or Nabisco, in what some are already describing as the largest wave of strikes since the 1970s. Against all those who had decreed that the working class was dead or had definitely straightened out, there it is raising its head again in the very heart of the capitalist machine!

In France too we have experienced an intense period of struggle, which started in 2016 with a whole new generation who fought against the Labor Law, of which I myself am a part. It was my experience in this struggle that made me want to be a political activist. In 2016, I understood the harmful role of social democracy for our class. But I also experienced the passivity and complicity of the union bureaucracy, never to propose strategies other than isolated strike days without prospects.

Despite this, in turn our class came out to face the dominant class during these 5 years. In 2016 with young people on the streets, alongside important private sectors such as refiners and dockers who had made a city like Le Havre the “capital of the struggle”. In the spring of 2018, the railway workers against the scrapping of the public railway, despite the go-slow which was the worst possible strategy. Then on November 17, 2018, when the impoverished working class and the downgraded middle class of this peri-urban France came to overthrow the table of the president of the rich and give birth to an unprecedented movement in the history of the Fifth Republic. To the insults of power, which called them "cigarette smokers who pollute with diesel" to use the words of a Benjamin Griveaux, the yellow vests replied on the contrary, that they were there, even if Macron did not want it " for the honor of the workers and a better world”. And they sowed with their spontaneous movement such panic in power that during act 4, we learned that general intelligence feared an invasion of the Elysée by the sewers, which Brigitte Macron had had the PC cleaned and prepared Jupiter, which is the Elysée bunker, and if that wasn't enough, a helicopter was ready to take off from the Elysée courtyard to exfiltrate the president!

And when we see the situation today, the rise in gasoline, electricity, gas and basic necessities, we all say to ourselves that we need a return of the yellow vests, and that this time they are accompanied by all the sectors which fought in turn, to go towards a real general strike and put an end to this power. This was already what we had tried with railway workers and the Adama committee with the Pôle Saint-Lazare in support of the Yellow Vests, but also during the movement against the pension reform where we fought for transport workers to be masters of their own movement, as well as to expand it to other sectors, like this incredible meeting that we organized on the eve of the first confinement.

You will have understood that our political project does not pass first and foremost through the ballot box, we are deeply convinced that it is through the class struggle, the general strike and the uprising of the popular classes that we will manage to change the system. I'm not here to lie to people and say "vote for me, I'm the providential man". We have been told this serenade too often and it will have escaped no one that this system, which calls for voting for the least worst and being betrayed, convinces fewer and fewer people. They would have us believe that our future should be to accept a Macron/Le Pen or Macron/Zemmour duel. Or that the institutional left should unite behind the best-placed candidate. Nice project therefore for the exploited and the oppressed, those who struggle on a daily basis, that the unity between Jadot the macronist, Hidalgo of the PS, a Montebourg increasingly on the right, Roussel who demonstrates with the police, Zemmour and Philippot and finally Melenchon, who, while being the far left, remains a Mitterrandien, who explains that he is the balance of power in the face of capitalism, and that the Republic is also him.

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— ava 🍊 Sun May 16 07:51:27 +0000 2021

No, that's not our future, we deserve to have a presidential campaign that turns the table, capable of standing up to Macron, Le Pen and Zemmour. A campaign that carries our struggles and dares to confront reactionary, racist and xenophobic discourse. With my comrades, we did not wait for the presidential election to fight for the unity of our class without distinction and the organization of our struggles. We need to reconnect with an offensive and determined discourse. Not a campaign to apologize for being there. We owe them nothing, if the bourgeoisie exists and stuffs itself with profits, it is because it exploits us on a daily basis. As I said the other day on a Trandev picket line in front of employees, men and women of all ages, origins and skin colors, all together facing a common enemy who wants them to work more by paying them less: the bosses don't are nothing without the workers and that when a worker is on strike, the bosses are unable to run a business. They are the ones who need us, not the other way around!

It is to divide the force that we represent that reactionaries like Macron, Le Pen and Zemmour are there. Because they know that the face of the youth and the working class today is made up of white workers but also workers with an immigrant background like me. And it hurts them to think that a woman born in Algeria and named Wynessa fights for the working conditions and wages of all her colleagues. It hurts them to see that Assa Traoré calls to fight with the yellow vests and the railway workers and that she mobilizes the youth to rise up against the system so that there is no more another Adama Traoré. It hurts them when a railway worker named Anasse, who grew up in the pink city in Sarcelles, who is the grandson of a Moroccan tirailleur, son of a Chibani from the SNCF, defends the youth and the proletarians of the whole of France who operated by Emmanuel, Edouard, Marlène or Jean Baptiste.

This determination that I and my comrades put into all the fights against power and the bosses, I will also put it into this presidential campaign, to put our ideas in the foreground. I also want to convince some of the abstainers, a majority of whom are among the most exploited and oppressed. We have had our lives, our struggles, our voices and our future taken from us. We want this campaign to give hope to people who have lost hope, lost hope in the possibility of militating and fighting for the emancipation of all, without having to put false hope in the ballot box. This is what we come to carry as a project in this presidential election, the project of our class, for the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed.

We have suffered too much from this system and from those who govern us, the professional politicians, right and left. Those who continue to make the working classes dangle the possibility of the unity of the nation, who want to unite Patrick Pouyanné the boss of Total, and the refiners of Grandpuits, Pierre Mestre and the 300 laid-off employees of Orchestra. We are going for our part in this campaign to defend a program irreconcilable with the interests of employers and French imperialism and we are proud of it!

Because it is unacceptable that workers are deprived of employment or condemned to precariousness while others are exhausted by long days and heavy workloads. Dismissals must be prohibited immediately, including for fixed-term and temporary workers who must have access to a permanent contract. To give work to those who are already unemployed, it is necessary to reduce the working hours of those who have a job, without any reduction in wages.

Another simple way to create jobs is to let our elders retire. Life expectancy in good health, that is to say without sequelae related to work or without occupational diseases, is 59 years for a worker, ten years less than for executives. Capitalist exploitation scars the bodies and minds of workers. But none of the bourgeois candidates talk about it. We defend the restoration of full-rate retirement at age 60 with 37.5 years of contribution, and the right to leave at age 55, at full rate, for all difficult jobs, with a retirement pension calculated on the basis of the highest, namely the best 6 months of salary.

All politicians, macronists and opposition alike, engage in electoral demagoguery around issues of purchasing power. This is one of the subjects that worries the population the most, as the Yellow Vests crisis in 2018 showed. But this year again wages should only increase by an average of 0.6%, well below the 'inflation. The health crisis has revealed how the most useful functions for society are also most often the least well paid. We have also seen that very often these functions are performed by women, for wages 17% lower, on average, than those of men. It is urgent to put an end to this situation through a general increase in wages of 300 euros net for all, which would make it possible to unify the demands of the entire world of work. We need an immediate increase in the SMIC to 1800 euros net and equal pay for men and women, in the public and private sectors. To those who will ask how to finance these measures, we answer without ambiguity: by taking from the profits which are constantly increasing and have even broken records during the health crisis, from the great fortunes, as well as from the staggering sums that the rich hide in tax havens! In the neighborhoods, where the vast majority of proletarians are concentrated and in particular those of immigrant origin, the State uses all the justifications, drug trafficking, insecurity and, lately, confinements successively, to reinforce its repressive arsenal. When it suits it, during the election campaign or to engage in cheap security demagoguery, the state concentrates on street crime, on those who, in a situation of social vulnerability, are the last link in the real criminal networks.

Because in France the legislation on cannabis, in particular, is one of the most retrograde in Europe and a pretext for all police violence, and to dismantle the mafias, large and small, it is necessary to legalize, under control of the State and with medical monitoring, when required, all narcotic and addictive substances, starting with cannabis, as is already the case with tobacco, alcohol and certain drugs. Of course, this cannot be done without strengthening prevention and education, on a daily basis, which would also mean putting an end to the damage to the education and health sectors.

From Macron to Zemmour to Le Pen and much of the left, politicians are all in favor of giving more power to the cops to patrol, control and bludgeon, all in the name of the fight against insecurity. For the revolutionary left, the police, justice, the prison system and those who work there are not part of the public services. They belong to the same punitive structure responsible for imposing the violence of the dominant classes and maintaining a capitalist social order, that is to say, intrinsically authoritarian, unequal, racist and patriarchal.

This function also implies the systematic repression of workers' and popular struggles (as we have seen during the Yellow Vests movement or the pension reform), the criminalization of poverty and constant pressure against the popular neighborhoods. It is for all these reasons that we demand the immediate dissolution of its special bodies (BAC, BRAV, CRS, gendarmerie, etc.) as well as the prohibition of all so-called non-lethal weapons used against demonstrators. In the same vein, we demand the total withdrawal of the “global security” and “criminal responsibility” laws which accede to historical demands of the police “unions”: facial recognition, drones, cameras on board with the police, creation of specific offenses regarding the police. These are all tools that reinforce police impunity and the repression of popular movements and neighborhoods. We are convinced that in the last instance security must and can be ensured by the population itself and not by a corporation of armed men, separated from the rest of society, in the service of the capitalist and racist State and of the employers' order.

Then, because we only leave home when we are forced to do so, by the complete absence of a future, by the misery and the war which ravage the poorest countries, we defend the opening of borders , freedom of movement and the right to settle here, for all those who wish to do so. We demand loud and clear the immediate regularization of all undocumented migrants and the closure of detention centers, the establishment of the right to vote in all elections for all immigrants, the defense of the right to family reunification and the immediate cessation evictions.

I couldn't go into our entire program here, but tell you that we will also make strong demands such as the withdrawal of French occupying troops, the closure of all military bases and the end of all military interventions. abroad, the right to self-determination of peoples dominated and colonized by the French bourgeoisie and its state.

We will fight for a real plan against all violence against women. For an anti-capitalist, anti-racist and internationalist feminism! For the self-determination of LGBTI people and sexual freedom. Faced with this system of justice for the rich, we demand, on the contrary, the direct election of judges, the generalization of trials with popular jurors able to render verdicts and that the magistrates or civil servants dependent on the Ministry of Justice receive a salary equivalent to the median salary. We also demand loud and clear, today more than ever, the immediate release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, releasable since 1999 and still imprisoned, while the serious crime that launders, defrauds and makes billions is not worried.

We demand the repeal of all security and freedom-killing laws and measures, starting with the Global Security Law, the state of health emergency which today allows Macron to govern from his Defense Council, the immediate repeal of the health pass, the extension of which the government has announced.

Finally, in the immediate term, we defend alongside all those who no longer support the verticalism of the Fifth Republic, a radical democratic transformation of institutions which involves the liquidation of current institutions and which is inspired by the the most radical democratic experiences of the Convention of 1793 or the Commune of Paris. This would mean, for example, that any MP should be elected for a maximum term of two years, with the possibility of being dismissed at any time and without receiving more than the median salary.

Politics will thus cease to be a profession, or even a source of personal enrichment. Conversely, it will be at the service of collective interests. The vote will be something other than a blank check given to a bourgeois candidate embodying the “lesser evil”. Only workers are able to truly represent the interests of their classmates because, as the Communards said in 1871, they “live their own lives and suffer from the same ills”.

More generally, we want to promote the idea that only an overthrow of this system and its replacement by a government of the workers themselves, based on new institutions resulting from our struggles, which reorganizes all of society in the service of good -being of the majority, without distinction of gender, ethnicity, origin or sexual orientation, and safeguarding the planet and the environment.

I will conclude this meeting by telling you that our goal is that this campaign is not just the campaign of Anasse and Permanent Revolution, but that it is also yours. We are determined to mark this presidential election and participate in giving a political compass to youth and workers other than that of reformism and right-wing and far-right politicians.

But for all of this to happen, we need your strength and support. You know the collection of 500 signatures and a huge dam, even if we are progressing well we will not be able to do it alone. We assume that we are not political professionals, we do not live on any state aid, on the help of any billionaire like Zemmour and Macron. While we spend whole days looking for sponsorship, the big parties only have emails to send to get the signatures of their mayors. All of this relies for the time being on the will and determination of the militants of Révolution Permanente and a few sympathizers who, when they are not at university or at work, criss-cross France on their rest and holidays. All of this is essentially based on small donations from our relatives and activists to put gasoline (which keeps going up) and sometimes rent vehicles or pay for accommodation.

I'm sure we'll get there, but it won't be without you. We warmly invite you to make this campaign a reality, to create a campaign committee where you are, to organize public meetings, to participate in the search for sponsorships, by making a donation, or any other help you think be able to offer. No one expects us to get there, let's surprise them! Thank you again to all, and as our elders said in 68, "this is only the beginning, let's continue the fight! ".