This May the 1st will go down to history not only for being the International Workers’ Day but also for being a celebration day. A celebration in honour of the working class’ value and its capacity as a collective under this outstanding situation that we are living nowadays. A day to celebrate and to hold in our memory the significance of the working class to our world as the drive of history towards a more just society.
We had just crossed a little bridge between the ten years of crisis started in 2008 and a new scene of recovery now seized. Ten years that we don´t forget, that brought to light the meanness of a predatory system incompatible with life. Because this system put all its machinery down to the Capital’s benefits, supporting the worst speculation, usury and fraud practices. Stealing our essential public services, which we need to have a united and strong society. Stepping on our more basic rights, which belong to us for the mere fact of existing, the human rights. Stepping on them to “trade” with our livelihood, our roof and, more evident now, our health.
Trade Union organisations, guild and civic assemblies from the neighbourhood until the state-wide coordinators, work councils, occupational health deputies, popular solidarity networks, feminists commissions, migrant organisations, retiree movements, political organisations and spaces for popular unity coalitions, all of them have filled with fight, strikes, resistance and consciousness our geography and also our feeling of belonging to the working class, to this collective survival.
Ten years in which the workers movement, together with the feminist and the ecological movement, has fought, has carved out for itself, has been able to learn from the mistakes and, above all, has corroborated the biggest lesson: only together we´ll be able to recover our stolen rights and to build a new economic, social and politic model. Only knowing that the consciousness-raising about popular power construction concerns every one of us, the working class as a whole, local or foreigner, women, young and old, we´ll be in a position of to contest the criminal alliance between capital and patriarchy. Alliance that has caused so much avoidable and unfair suffering to our people.
And like this, with the certainty of knowing that no right has ever been gifted but earned through a constant and organised struggle; with the certainty of knowing that no right is ever guaranteed but for its own effective, real and permanent practice; with the certainty of knowing that no pact must be forbidden and no agreement is everlasting; and with the certainty, and learning, of knowing that together we are stronger, the Communist Party of Spain reasserts its commitment for being a useful tool for the working class, for the workers of Spain, for the many.
On this necessary path of putting the rights of the working class first, the creation of a progressive coalition government frames our commitment. During the first days, we ensured decent salaries for a dignified life, and protected the working class from a system that makes us more prone to illnesses and makes us suffer, rather than enjoy, life.
And the COVID-19 crisis arrived –not the economic recession that was predicted and this system cyclically creates as a poisoned gift... A worldwide health crisis that is ferociously hitting our country arrived, and it has brought a huge social, job and economic crisis. There were –and there still are– decisions to be made; we must manage the problems of the working class and our people, activating a "social shield" so that no one is left behind. We need to rebuild our collective goods, but it cannot simply be a turning back: it cannot be a return to the normality where we came from, because we are not going to pay for this crisis. Not this time.
It turns out that a universal public healthcare system was actually essential; the organization and response capacity of the working class in work centers, hospitals and neighborhoods was essential; unity and solidarity are the only tools that have proven to be essential. We are vulnerable as a species, as individuals, and we are invincible when we realize that leaving someone behind is leaving all of us behind.
Therefore, this crisis is not being managed like the previous ones. We will not allow that. Because measures must be promoted to tackle many of the problems that we already had as a society and that have now been laid bare even more crudely: shameful percentages of poverty, of the shadow economy, of undocumented immigrants without rights; an unsupportive and elitist private healthcare system; a public education that shows all its gaps; a structural housing problem that shames this lockdown; a structural gender violence issue that puts all the denied evidences on the table; a Foreigners act constantly denounced and called out… The list could go on and on. But it is time to assume the historical role of the working class and its political, trade union and social organizations.
The future is full of uncertainties, but we must tackle them from our common certainties, the spirit and the strengths that we have thanks to proudly being part of the working class, which is facing, in worse conditions than 12 years ago, this pandemic.
The Communist Party of Spain will put in effort, and it calls on the working class as a whole, women and men, young and old, migrants, and their political, trade union and social organizations, to rebuild the common good, to rebuild a country that must rise to the occasion and be at the service of the class that is ensuring our lives and supporting them, against private interests and the private sector:
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Recovery of economic and industrial sovereignty, with criteria of green and sustainable reindustrialization. Converting the aid given to private financial, service or industrial companies into public shareholding.
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Strengthening of the public sector in order to ensure that nobody is left behind in a crisis, which necessarily hinges on the mechanisms of nationalization and re-municipalization.
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Every wealth is subordinated to the general interest: we need a new fiscal and tributary model to effectively redistribute the wealth.
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Public initiative in the economic activity and in those related to global needs.
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Warrantee of all rights to everybody: those civil and political rights already guaranteed in the constitution, and warrantee enforceability of economic and social rights.
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Transformation and a new social organization of the care system, from its recognition as a right, the necessity of its redistribution, and professionalization, to the design for a national public care system.
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To redesign a model of relations among the people of Europe, based on the solidarity for those more in need, against the current economic and capital model, but also against the national oligarchies of the European Union.
We are also aware of the difficulties; we cannot be under any misapprehension. Facts speak for themselves, telling what we already knew: the capital and the political and societal organizations will not waive easily their privileges and the tools they are using. They will neither waive their vile game, even though, it requires to manipulate, to lie, and to play with the fear and uncertainties of the people. In this country, the conservative and far right wings will continually serve the interests of capital. In the near future, we are certain to be witness to a variety of events, such as the absence of social dialogue by the CEOE despite being in crisis, or the fake news criminal campaigns where it is all too obvious as to who finances and propagates them.
We are aware that freelancers, small to mid-size businesses (the true ones but also the fake ones), farmers, professionals, cleaners, carers, workers of big corporations, union’s sections, men, women, young people, and children are capable of producing ventilators, securing food and hygiene, protecting the most vulnerable, and to confine themselves foregoing their most precious assets for the common good. This is the working class that, when organized and together, is unstoppable. This next May 1st while we may not be able to embrace each other in person nor gather in a common meeting place, what will bring us together is our unity and the building of a shared space in our collective recent memory.
¡Long life worlds working class!
Always fighting, building popular power, with solidarity and unity.
