By Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS)
January 28, 2009
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) actively supports the general strike to be mounted in France starting January 29 by private and public sector workers, including those from schools, hospitals, national TV and radio, and the postal services; train-drivers, supermarket employees, teachers, university lecturers, researchers, high school students, psychiatrists, health workers, judges, lawyers, magistrates, journalists, helicopter pilots, air traffic controllers, staff from the French stock exchange, bank staff, ski-lift operators, the unemployed and pensioners. We commend the major French unions CGT, CFDT, FOR, FSU, CFE-CGC, CFTC, UNSA and SOLIDARY for coming together and calling for this strike.
We are in solidarity with the striking French people in condemning the neoconservative Sarkozy government for enforcing job cuts, prioritizing protection of company executives’ pay, and other measures of “neoliberal” globalization disastrous to their lives and which only worsen the global economic supercrisis. We join them in calling for job security, wage hikes, reduction of inequalities, and better working conditions.
The breadth of the French people’s strike highlights the severe isolation of the Sarkozy regime from the French people for taking actions that worsen the exploitation and oppression of the broad masses of France.
The French mass strike energizes the current hightide of global resistance against the U.S.-led imperialist counterrevolution whose general policies of neoliberal globalization and war of terror have precisely engendered the current global economic depression, now the worst in history. From the United States, Canada, U.K., Iceland, Greece, Palestine, Iraq, India, the Philippines and now France, and alongside governments in Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Iran, and Nepal assertive of their national rights, peoples across the globe are taking to the streets and fighting imperialism and its reactionary allies and programs. In rising crescendo, the peoples of the world are crying out for a new world of true social progress, justice, peace and equality. The ILPS is foursquare with the oppressed peoples of the earth in raising anti-imperialist consciousness, organizing themselves and taking direct concerted action towards this most-cherished aspiration of mankind.
We urge all our members, their organizations and their friends to organize solidarity actions with the mass strike in France, and work to resist as well the ravages of neoliberal globalization and the war of terror in their own countries.
Long live the working people of France!
Junk “neoliberal” globalization and the global war of terror!
Condemn imperialist rule as the root cause of the worst economic crisis in history!